I swore I heard the sounds of sawing coming from the underbelly of my bathtub. It wouldn’t have been a problem if I weren’t sitting in it, tits flopped over my stomach and Epsom salt turning the water milky gray. The illuminated head of Saint Ramón sat on the corner of the tub, saying imaginary prayers for me while fire burned in his tall, glass belly. I ashed my cigarette inside of him and watched the charred petals writhe as his prayers became more urgent. The memory from mom’s sickness hung dank around today’s date. It had been a year since I had to help hoist her into the mini van and frantically drive to the rural ER while her body was undoing itself from her mind. Saint Ramón joined me in the tub to commemorate the mourning I hadn’t allowed until I lived in an apartment of my own.

“Do you hear them talking down there?” Saint Ramón asked.

“Hear who?”

“The people below you. I can hear them talking. I think their bathroom is leaking.”

All I heard was Ramón’s muttered prayers and the chatter of contract workers from the floor beneath us, talking studs and levels. I pictured the two or three of them, standing in the bathroom on the floor beneath me, wearing matching khaki overalls you could only tell apart from the paint stains. They talked, probably, about how long their last project took them and how their manager’s wife almost definitely wants to fuck one of them. Maybe they’d chuckle at this, laughing like they weren’t picturing what it would be like to wake up next to her before coffee or the sun. Perhaps they’d pretend like they didn’t want to hear about her fears and hold her when she’d cover her eyes during a graphic scene in CSI: SVU. Instead, they would just demonstrate exactly what they would do to her if she dared to wear something just a little bit tighter or lower or shorter or redder to the office again.

“Do you want some of my gin?” I offered Ramón my coffee mug. He took it, reluctantly, holding the mug with both his hands. I couldn’t hear him sip it, but I watched his Adam’s apple bob when he swallowed. He took the mug away from his lips and stared into the tub.

“Tastes like evergreen.”

I nodded and tossed my second butt into Saint Ramón’s glass belly to twirl around in the melted wax with what was left of the first cigarette.

“Can I ask you something?” The cooling water forced goosebumps up my thighs. Saint Ramón nodded. I watched the cherry of my cigarette eat away at its paper, like a straightened ouroboros. “How did you become a Saint?”

Ramon lowered his eyes and smiled in a frowning way. He sighed, pulled his robes up, picked up his feet, and turned his body around to face me. When he spun, the sound of sawing shook the bathroom.

“Do you mind if I place my feet in the tub with you?”

“No, of course not,” I said, moving my legs up so he wouldn’t step on them when his feet disappeared into the white water. When he put his feet in, the water took on the same soft golden glow of his halo.

“I don’t think being born to a woman who died shortly after giving birth is miraculous,” he said, picking up my mug for another drink.

I remembered watching my own mom’s muscles and nerves fail in the ER, becoming nearly paralyzed as her neurons fired on themselves. That time, though, I was not a newborn like Ramón. That time I was two days from 25, knowing I would never forget but thankful to be the only other witness to it. Now here I was, 367 days later, celebrating my 26th birthday by forcing myself to bear witness to my own aftershocks of the sickness.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said instinctually.

“It’s alright. I never met her anyways.”

I tried to open the drain with my toes, but I felt Ramón’s wax slip under the water and seal it shut. I tasted the Epsom salt sweating through my pores and the stink of cigarette trapped on my teeth.

“But I dreamed about her plenty enough,” he started again. “She was tall, like me, with a small mouth whose lips couldn’t hide a smile.” The tub water kept glowing. The same feeling of dread from when I had to race my mom to the hospital grew in my stomach as the sound of sawing filled my tiny tiled bathroom.

“It looks like we figured out where the leak was coming from.”

Ramón stared off the side of the tub, nothing moving but his deepening frown.

“I never met anyone who knew her.” He started painting tiny pictures on the side of the tub with his fingers. “No one wanted to say they knew a woman who gave birth to a son without a father. Not back then.”

I didn’t say anything to Saint Ramón and we both knew I didn’t have to. I had spent hours imagining the prick of my mom’s lumbar puncture while the doctors huddled around her to figure out why her muscles were turning to concrete. I couldn’t watch the massive needle poke into the base of her spine, so I watched muted news channels in the ER waiting room. When I came back to her room—our room, that night—she was lying in the same position I left her in, body turning against itself. 

Ramón hunched his shoulders over and pressed the balls of his hands into his eye sockets. The golden-gray water was dulling and I could smell my cigarette smoke burning away at parts it shouldn’t have. I ashed it outside of the tub and watched new bits of plaster litter my vinyl floor.

“I’m a Saint because someone decided I deserved it. But I don’t think I’ll ever know what I did to deserve it,” he said, imagining rows of rosaries and crucifixes lined up along on the porcelain of the tub. He was finally crying like we knew he was supposed to. His tears came out sparkling, and each one that hit the bathwater grayed it until we were covered in charcoal.

“The church says it was because I sacrificed myself in exchange for another slave I was trying to free with the Mercenaries. Which did happen. But only because I was afraid of coming back empty handed. So I didn’t come back at all.”

Just as he said that, the silver glint of the hook-toothed contractors’ saw peaked out from the floor. I tried to gulp but there was nothing in my throat to swallow. The glint of the saw looked like the arm of the chair in the ER that dug into my side when I tried to sleep as we waited for my mom to be allowed to stay in one of the rooms of the hospital. Ramon was talking through it all, the pieces of him–all wax and tears and robe–falling into my tub to clog the drain.

“But instead of being brave in slavery, I only took men away from their own God to believe in mine.” When he spoke, Ramón’s belly and halo grew brighter and brighter. The wax inside his robes ballooned up and out of him, spilling into my tub and solidifying in the water like congealed blood.

The saw below was tracing the outline of my tub through my floor, cutting through the plaster and vinyl and support beams and ceramic and water. 

“All I know is that I didn’t have a mother so I clung to God instead.”

And on that, his last words before he was all melted away, me and the tub and his empty robes slipped through the floor, through the beams, through the ceiling, through the lights onto the floor–still in the golden-grayed salt bath, still naked, still crying, still smoking–until we hit the lower floor with a thud, eight eyes in total, each pair wondering who had interrupted who.