Lomita, California

We were living in the projects of LA, on Lomita, and I got up a lot, I used to, in the middle of the night, and sometimes, halfway down the stairs, I’d see ghosts—shadows in our living room, crying. They used to have wakes inside the houses, my mom told me, and in Mexico if the soul died troubled, they would chop down the trees outside the dead one’s house, so it wouldn’t get caught in the branches.