For those who wish they were somewhere or someone else, a surreal California waits like an El Camino made of wildflowers. I will read from "Chicane Boys," my fiction piece born out of conversations with my older relatives as they related their farm working past. In the story, Babe Garza is stuck between two worlds. He lives in a Santa Barbara labor camp, where children toil like adults in the fields, where adults fight like children. After completing only half of a coming-of-age ritual in which he was never supposed to take part, Babe finds himself marked. He is seen as feo, ugly, for having cheated. He is half-man, half-boy, with a hairy chest, big, older hands, and crow’s feet that he tries to hide as laugh lines at the ends of his characteristic smile. Babe walks tormented and hopeful as he strives to learn what ‘halfness’ can bring to the world. He’ll watch his uncle fight like a bird with feather knives. He’ll walk the streets at night with his day-blind, giant great-grandfather who has cantaloupe fists. He’ll learn what it’s like to be a man, or a child, in a world of both and neither.