Page 14 - GRANADA

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Until he looked at Luz one morning after a night of her dreaming about falling into the crack at the side of her bed and drowning in the ocean. He looked at her nose, one specific freckle right at the tip and opened the window.
Just a crack.
But that was enough to allow the steam from the fresh pot of coffee to mix with the morning air.
Luz stopped breathing when the waves formed. Years later, when she knew each cloud better than the stretch marks across her thighs or the discography of the Beatles, she’d identify them as Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds.
Formed when instability is present. When what one thinks they know and what they come to know slip past one another. When the crest is too much and all one can do is hold on and hope to come out the other side.
And she crested the moment he grabbed a wave by its break, rolled it up, plopped it in a cup of steaming coffee, and slid it across the table toward her.
While Luz brews the coffee for the sad woman at the counter, she thinks about how every day is the same. Her parents put her behind the bar the moment Tío Martin told them she was a cloud caller. She looked at her Tío, waiting for him to stand up to her parents for her, to say she was just a kid, to say she wasn’t ready for the job or the pressure. And when he didn’t, some of the magic died. Her parents decided to commodify the family gift and make it a selling point. Her Tío wasn’t needed to call the
clouds