Catalina Ocampo Londoño

Alien Number 

Because my son is six, he’s trying to figure out 

what’s real and what is not, to draw the borderlines 

of fiction. Two days ago, we got into a long discussion 

on the tooth fairy. He wanted to pin down its gender, 

to know if it was small enough to sneak in through 

the wall cracks like a silver fish, or if it knew how 

to pick locks so it could lumber, a giant up the stairs. 

The other day my son asked me, mamá, do ghosts 

really exist? I started to talk about spirit, dappling 

the world, but he wanted to know exactly how 

ghosts moved. He decided spirits had to float 

because, without hands, it was impossible to grip 

a stirring wheel or hold a bicycle’s handlebars. 

Sometimes we need to hear the most obvious thing. 

Today while listening to a recent cover of “Englishman 

in New York” my son did a double take at the chorus. 

Is he really talking about aliens? he wanted to know.

When I told him that I used to have an alien number, 

he widened his eyes and laughed like it was the funniest 

thing I’d ever said. Why not dinosaurs, mamá? I’d rather 

have a dinosaur number, as long as we’re pretending. 

After Watching Into the Spiderverse with My Sons 

My older son is at an age in which all my knowledge 

from now on will be catching up to his, and I like that.  

Here is the mother: clueless about the radioactive spider

and the rest of the origin story, the echoes in the shape 

of a spider web and the license plate reference 

to Law & Order. But my son knows I’ll be the one raving 

about the first nine minutes and the mother of this 

new Spider-man shouting after him, “papi, llámame.” 

I threaten to buy a megaphone so when my son slams off 

into his day I can broadcast to him and the rest 

of his school, “mijo, tienes que decir, I love you back.” 

What I really want, though, is to toast arepas 

for breakfast and hurry my sons off without subtitles, 

for them to understand that when a battle rages 

in our living room, it happens between worlds. 

They know that their thumb-and-index guns 

bend the space for me, that each comic-strip boom 

reels in the memory of sidewalk fears and a dust cloud 

suddenly breaking through Bogotá’s horizon line. 

So they get around the no-weapons rule 

with tinker-sticks that shoot out gauzy things 

like cotton candy, bubble gum, or cobwebs. 

It’s beautiful to see them come into their powers, 

to know when they should go invisible and use 

the other version of their names with the person 

at the ticket counter. I still want them to know 

what it felt like for Spider-girl to get dragged in 

from another world and be hit with some blow 

that leaves her pixelated and disoriented, 

because another dimension is still operative. 

I want them to know I always feel like I’m walking 

upside-down in a world flipped at the equator, 

that at the IHOP everyone is eating pancakes 

off the roof, though I’m the only one who’s noticing. 

I want them to know what it was like to always 

be deciding if to stay and fight the bad guys here

or go back; to have your three-year-old instruct you 

on the right shade of pink to color superheroes’ faces. 

I want to watch and re-watch that final battle scene 

with my sons, so we all understand what it means 

for this young Spider-man to pick up the battle:

I want us to see Miles Morales knock Peter Parker 

off his feet and hold that other version of himself 

above an animated abyss of spray-paint haze and 

wormhole subway cars, and with a smile reassure him

before letting go — “man, you have to go home.”