wildscape. literary journal

Ari is one of our featured writers for Issue 7. Below is her short story, and beneath that, a series of questions and responses between Ari and our Interview & Feature writer, Angela Heiser.

Baby
by Ari Cordovero

My daughter cries like the world belongs to her.

No rehearsal. No apology. The sound arrives whole. I lift her from the crib and she arches into me, furious and certain someone will come. The room doesn’t tighten. Nothing in me braces.

When I was eight, I was a ladybug with red felt wings and two speaking parts. I practiced my lines in the mirror for weeks, projecting like the teacher told me to, holding my chin high so my voice would carry to the back of the cafeteria.

“Sorry I missed your play,” my mother said that night, lighting a cigarette by the open window. She handed me a cold lemon-lime soda from the gas station, condensation slick on the can like it was sweating from being alive.

“That’s okay,” I told her. “I had a solo.”

“That’s nice, baby.”

I kept talking anyway. She nodded, distracted. I held the soda to my chest like proof I had been seen.

I wanted to cry, just a small sting behind the eyes—but crying didn’t change anything in our house. It only made the air shift.

In our kitchen, the Virgin of Guadalupe hung above the stove, her blue mantle fading at the edges from years of grease and heat. She watched everything without blinking. My grandmother moved beneath her like someone who understood her place in the world — banging pots, humming low, kneeling when my grandfather came home from his overnight shift.

He wasn’t a construction worker. He corrected me about that more than once. Foreman, he’d say, tapping his chest. The boss.

When he walked in at dawn, shoulders heavy with dust and authority, my grandmother bent to pull off his boots, steam lifting from the rubber soles into the cold morning air. She tugged at the laces gently, like something holy was happening there. I used to watch from the doorway, barefoot on linoleum, thinking this was what love looked like — women kneeling, men standing.

The Virgin watched too.

Once, I came home with a scraped knee, blood bright and loud against my skin. I pushed the door open, already sobbing. My grandfather snapped upright from the couch.

“Stop.”

Just that. Sharp enough to cut the room in half.

The sound of his voice silenced me faster than the pain did. My grandmother rushed in with a washcloth, murmuring comfort, but my body had already made the decision: don’t cry. Don’t make noise. Don’t take up the kind of space that turns gentle men into something else.

I told her it didn’t hurt anymore.

By middle school, my body arrived before I did.

At thirteen, I lived in Charlotte Russe tank tops, the kind every girl wore—except on us, they became a problem. “Please,” my math teacher begged, her New Jersey accent cutting through the stale hallway heat in a way I still remember, sharp and foreign to the desert girl I was. “I don’t ever want to see something like that again.”

She meant the boy masturbating under his desk. She meant it was our fault. Cover up. Shrink.

So we zipped our sweaters—cheap cotton sticking to our skin in the schoolhouse air, too thick, too close—and pretended it didn’t bother us. We learned the choreography early: shoulders tucked, chin down, a quick scan of the room for where danger might make its entrance. 

At thirteen, I started working at the Burger King off Federal. The kitchen smelled like fryer oil and salt. I stood on a plastic crate to reach the register.

That’s where I met him—the older coworker who called me shorty and slipped me cigarettes on break. He leaned against the wall out back, Marlboro breath drifting toward me.

“You ever smoke before?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

He showed me how to cup my hand around the lighter. I didn’t inhale, but I didn’t need to. It was enough that he was looking at me.

No one asked me who he was. No one asked if I was safe.

On Fridays, my best friend and I turned her bathroom into a chapel.

We locked the door, turned the overhead light off, and let the vanity bulbs do the work—yellow and merciful. The air smelled like vanilla body spray and burnt hair from the curling iron left too long on the counter. Glitter dusted the sink.

We stacked push-up bras one over the other until our chests rose higher than they should have. Mascara clumped into wet black prayers on our lashes. The mirror fogged, and we traced little hearts into the steam before wiping them away.

“Do I look sixteen?” I asked, tugging down the hem of my thrift-store tank top, adjusting the straps so they threatened to slip.

She leaned in close, inspecting me like a stylist, like a sister, like a priest about to bless something reckless.

“Bitch,” she said softly, dragging gloss across her bottom lip. “You look eighteen.”

Outside, Colfax glowed in sodium-orange halos. Neon buzzed over pawn shops and liquor stores. Our bare legs caught the cold and refused to admit it. We walked like we’d practiced: hips loose, shoulders back, eyes half-lidded, as if we’d already survived something worth surviving.

Cars slowed.

Windows rolled down.

Music spilled out in low bass.

We almost always climbed in.

The upholstery was always warm. Someone always passed us something sweet and burning—cherry vodka from a plastic bottle. It slid down my throat and bloomed there, bright and punishing. 

“Baby,” one of them said, reaching back to adjust the rearview mirror so he could see us better. Just baby. Like he could already sense the fracture line in us. 

They asked us to kiss.

For a second, my friend and I locked eyes—our pupils blown wide, mascara smudging at the corners. There was something fragile in that glance. A small animal tremor. 

But fear had always arrived dressed like desire, and we had been taught that the heat of being wanted was something you were supposed to lean into.

So we leaned in.

Her lip gloss tasted like strawberries and sugar alcohol. Our teeth bumped. The men erupted behind us—clapping, howling, triumphant.

Later, barefoot on cold pavement, our heels dangling from our fingers, the asphalt bit at my feet. I stepped in a smear of black gum and dragged it along the curb until it let go.

I didn’t want the men.

I wanted to feel chosen.

I wanted to be holy in the way girls are holy when someone else decides they are worth worshipping.

By the time I got home that night, I had already decided it didn’t matter.

In my family, men left in increments. Not always with slammed doors. Sometimes just with distance—longer shifts, quieter dinners, bodies angled toward the exit.

Women didn’t plan on raising daughters alone. It just kept happening that way.

By the time it’s my turn, I’m twenty-five. My daughter sleeps in the next room, her breath even and unafraid. Her father and I argue over FaceTime — his voice pixelating, arriving a second too late. He says things he doesn’t mean. I say things I do.

I tell myself this is different.

I chose her. I recognized the doorway lean, the future thinning mid-sentence. Knowing the pattern isn’t the same as repeating it.

The women before me endured in silence. I speak. We fight. He is here, even if through a screen.

I tell myself this is progress.

Some days, I believe it.

My daughter cries again, this time from the backseat of my car.

I’m picking up my sixteen-year-old cousin from her fast-food job. Fluorescent lights dye everything green behind her. An older male coworker lingers in the doorway, pretending to wipe down a counter, pretending he isn’t watching her walk away.

“Who’s that?” I ask.

“Some weirdo,” she says, rolling her eyes. “He’s always trying to talk to me on break.”

Relief rises in me, sharp and selfish. Not because he exists. Because she sees him clearly.

My daughter’s cry sharpens—fix it, now. Before I can unbuckle, my cousin climbs into the backseat and gently presses the pacifier into her mouth.

“Shhh,” she whispers, not to silence her—but to soothe.

The gesture is effortless. Tender. Ordinary.

And something in me stutters.

I am twelve again behind Burger King, pretending a cigarette doesn’t burn my throat. I am fourteen zipping my sweater for a boy who can’t control his hands. I am fifteen kissing my best friend in the backseat of a stranger’s car because saying no feels more dangerous than saying yes.

Girls learn early how to interpret male attention—as compliment, as threat, as fate.
In my family, sound had consequences.  

But here, in this car, three generations sit inside the same small space.

My cousin rolls her eyes at the weirdo instead of leaning in.

My daughter wails without apology.

And I am the adult with my hands on the steering wheel.

The script, for a moment, glitches.

My daughter makes a sound without checking who it belongs to. She lets it arrive whole—untrained, untranslated. I reach back and place my palm against her knee.

“It’s okay, baby,” I tell her.

The sound leaves her body and stays in the world.

And nothing breaks– not her, not me.

Interview with Ari

FORTHCOMING

about the author // Ari Cordovero