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SOMOS EN ESCRITO
FICTION
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Honorary Mention Extra Fiction 2022 May We Be Namedby Angela Acosta Humanity’s voyagers always came on ships, back when Sol was the closest star and home stayed within the ecliptic. They came from the places the maps would no longer show as star charts guided them towards lands where Terra would be but a distant memory. With skin colored from equatorial sunbeams and languages forged from centuries of cultural contact and strife, they were ready when the Exodus finally occurred, and generation ships whisked them away across a sea wider than the Atlantic. Marcela tore her eyes from the screen that displayed the full weight of generations of ship born ancestors when a thin stream of light coming from the hallway alerted her of Zamora’s presence. “¿Tienes chisme?” Zamora asked, sauntering into the room like only a little sister could. Marcela relaxed her stiff shoulders and let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding in. She’d tracked enough of the gamma lineage for this wake cycle. With the lights back on, she started reshuffling the notes she printed out on carbon copies that littered her desk. “Yeah, turns out they meant to put you on the Calabaza ship and got the paperwork mixed up,” Marcela smirked, waving one of her notes in the air. “No way! You know I can’t even cook frijoles right; I don’t belong on a restaurant ship. Unless, you know, I got to be the engineer and eat up all those delicacies.” “You wish!” Marcela nudged Zamora with her elbow. “So, made any progress today?” “Five generations of lineage gamma from three centuries ago found in the data sent by laser from the Prerromano ship, no está mal,” Marcela shrugged and looked back at the data in front of her. She continued, “It’s strange, really. There seem to be fewer lineages than active ships. I can’t find us in all the data. You know even Tía Flora gave up ages ago on this project.” “¿A qué te refieres con lo de ‘find us’? I thought this was about the ancestry of the whole fleet. What do we have to do with anything? What does our ship’s history matter?” “It means everything! I know I’m supposed to be collaborating on this project for the good of the fleet, but you know I’ve been doing some research on the side.” “But they’re always telling us that we’re all siblings and that race doesn’t exist anymore, that we’re all homo sapiens. Somos de la raza…” “Cósmica, literalmente. Pues ya lo sé, pero es un mito, uno de esos que vinieron con los primeros cohetes.” Having just finished her own school lessons for the day, including a lecture on how the old ways no longer applied, Zamora was utterly perplexed. She perched herself on a free corner of Marcela’s desk and took a closer look at the branches of the family tree, thinning out as they got closer to the present moment of year 534 of the Exodus. “Mira Zamora, where is our family in this?” Marcela zoomed into a patch only a few years removed from Zamora’s birth in year 523. “It doesn’t matter…” “Humor me.” “¿A quién le importa?” “Pues a nosotras, a todos los del Arbolito. Look, before I crunched in the data for gamma lineage, I already noticed some irregularities from the beginning. They’re telling us we’re doing something meaningful by putting together these lineages, that it’s for the good of the fleet and our history. It’s just busy work, Zamora.” “Fine. I don’t know who all our family is, but Marcela tengo haaaaambrreeee. Can we pleaseeeee go the mess hall now? I heard Tío José is making pupusas and I want one that isn’t spicy.” “Ya vamos, but I still want to learn more about this. Maybe I can bug Tía Flora about the genealogy research after dinner.” Sure enough, Zamora piled her plate high with pupusas and maíz, freshly made from their onboard hydroponics garden. Marcela, ever the apprehensive about her research, took a smaller portion of food and joined the other kids and teenagers huddled around a game of dominos made from scrap cardboard. Zamora enjoyed the camaraderie but couldn’t wait to finally talk to some adults. For some reason they always stayed quiet about what they knew of their families, and though they praised her for her research, they never asked many questions or gave her any good leads. She always had to look elsewhere, like taking chances asking the Prerromano ship with a complicated array of laser networks to reach them five lightyears away. Tía Flora was watching her favorite zero g handball game and knitting. Approach with caution, Marcela thought to herself. She sat herself next to her only biological aunt and engaged in the requisite small talk. By the second half of the game Marcela had steeled herself for the conversation. “Tía, you know I’ve been doing a lot of work on the lineage, and I don’t need to bore you with it, but…” “Mi’ja, I’m glad you’re doing that research project, but it doesn’t interest me anymore. What are you doing, hunting down lineage omega or something?” “I’m working on lineage gamma now actually; I have five more generations worked out. In fact, I’ve already sorted out adopted and biological parents and have some diagrams for the research team I’m going to send by laser tomorrow…” Marcela needed to stop herself before she lost sight of what she came to talk to her aunt about. Tía Flora had already focused back on the game, the clinking of the knitting needles in synch with the pace of the game. “Sorry, force of habit. Tía Flora, I want you to tell me about us. ¿Quiénes somos los del Arbolito? ¿De dónde venimos?” Tía Flora finally perked up and cracked a smile, “It took you seventeen years to ask me that, eh? It took my friend Adriana over twenty and she quickly became disinterested again.” Marcela relaxed in her chair and tucked herself into the story Tía Flora was inevitably going to launch into. Tía Flora switched to Spanish, as she was wont to do when talking about the past, but her tone of voice changed, and it was as if she saw herself somewhere else. The youth proudly tout the fact that the past was light minutes away and wholly unreachable while elders grieve that chasm of memories. “Hace ya treinta años, Adriana me preguntó sobre nuestros antepasados. Y, a pesar de la falta de información que tenía, yo sabía que había que compartirla con cualquier persona que tenía el mismísimo deseo. Me imagino que hasta la Zamorita sabe recitar las historias oficiales de quienes somos, ¿cierto?” Marcela smiled, “Justamente me las estaba contando según lo que va aprendiendo en la escuela.” “Pues, la Adriana me dijo una frase que nunca jamás saldrá de mi mente. Me dijo basta con esas historias del Éxodo con las ramas de los árboles y que ‘I don’t want your tender history, give me the truth’. So I did.” “Tender history, huh? Is it, though? Now that I really think about it, es un cuento de hadas. I’ve always wondered about how the data was received on these family trees and why I couldn’t ever find myself on them. You know, I always thought I was different for asking about my own heritage. Pero, there’s something they’re not telling us and it’s going to be bittersweet.” “Yes, but I have no doubt you are as ready as you’ll ever be to hear it. Éramos muchos durante los primeros cohetes y hemos venido desde zonas muy lejanas de la tierra. Había gente de los ríos, de la selva llamada la selva amazónica, de islas y grandes continentes. Había de todo.” “Pero nos han dicho que han venido todos de la península de Florida y que allí empezó la migración.” “Que no, que la península solo tenía las bases de lanzamiento.” Marcela muttered to herself, “that sure does make more sense…” Tía Flora stared at the screen transfixed in thought, as if recalling the very thread of the ancestors she was to spring forth from her mind like Athena. She continued in English, “I found…a packet of data. I was going through some of the earliest data sent about the different lineages and I found a diary. It was a real book too, scanned of course, but I hope somewhere those pages are still preserved. I had half a mind not to tell anyone about it and keep minding my business, especially since it’s not mentioned anywhere in the ever-expanding literature on Exodus genealogy. It was the diary of someone named Hortensia from the beginning of the exodus. She talked about several ships we still have in the fleet, la Calabaza, el Ateneo, el Dominicano, however there was something greater I learned that day. People who couldn’t afford passage on the Exodus fleet sold the only thing they had left. It confused me, because I know those people were so connected to their plastic items and chucherías.” The clicking of her knitting needles reminded Marcela of the noise of plastic toys her sister played with. “But you figured it out, right?” “Mi’ja, they had nothing left to give, no currency or valuable metals and they could barely even secure a kilo in the bulkhead, so they sold their names.” “¿Qué dices? Ya tenemos todos los nombres. Nos han nombrado a todos nosotros.” “Pero tú y yo solo tenemos un solo nombre, la María Victoria tiene dos, pero así son todas las Marías.” “But we each have a name, tía. I still don’t understand.” Tía Flora put down her knitting needles and beckoned Marcela closer. Parting her wavy dark hair, she began making a large braid. “Nos han dicho que nosotros del Arbolito somos latinos. Somos de distintas regiones del continente de las Américas y todos hablamos español e inglés. There are at least five other ships like us with slightly different accents and facial features, and they make us believe we’re all the same.” “We come from Terra, there’s no difference, is there? The skin color is just from the different melanin produced in sunnier, warmer places compared to colder ones.” “Eres muy inteligente, you know there’s more than that. Yes, these colors used to define us and now we think more logically, but the Exodus took away our names and our culture. We had special foods, and, while I know most aren’t religious anymore, there were special ceremonies and festivals just for us. We gave that up the moment we named ourselves part of the fleet.” Left, right, middle, Tía Flora’s fingers made quick work of Marcela’s hair. Marcela thought the braid felt odd, a bit lopsided, but she didn’t want to criticize her aunt. It’d be easy enough to readjust later. Tía Flora secured the bottom of the braid with an elastic band and Marcela went in search of a mirror and finally saw what her aunt had so lovingly knitted into her hair. Her thick hair had been carefully sectioned into different braids, all coming together to form a larger braid that ran down the right side of her head. “Mira, ¡qué bonita!” Tía Flora exclaimed, admiring her work. “Thank you, tía. It’s your best creation yet. Where’d you learn to do something like this? We almost never wear our hair in braids. We’re supposed to keep it tied neatly away from our face with a ponytail or bun.” “I got the idea from our ancestors. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors, the ones with wavy hair, textured hair, and hair dark as the hulls of our ships wore braids as a source of cultural identity. They wove patterns into braids to chart maps towards the homes they left behind just as we leave drawings as marks of each ship in the fleet.” “That’s really beautiful,” Marcela reflected. She felt a tightness welling up in her chest and a newfound appreciation for the ancestors from Terra bloomed within her. Not even when conducting her research did she ever truly feel the full weight of the bygone generations who attempted to pass their knowledge to her. She was the product of dozens, if not hundreds of generations of sentient homo sapiens who kept humanity moving forward without forgetting their roots. “It suits you well, your ancestors would be proud of you.” “Thank you, tía. I have to ask; did you ever figure out any of the names they gave away?” Marcela was suddenly anxious, knowing she’d remember this moment for years to come. This was to be the moment when everything clicked, when she no longer was one of a multicultural fleet, but the daughter of people from countries she could find on the old globe. Tía Flora harrumphed, ostensibly at the terrible play that had finally ended the handball game, but Marcela knew it was really meant for her. “Pues, ya te lo conté, we gave them up centuries ago. We tucked our braids into our helmets and some of us were smart enough to use the braids to spell our histories in Nahuatl, like the Calabaza ship. They’re the Xolapa from México. But us, we weren’t so lucky.” “But couldn’t we take a DNA test? Contact other ships for information that might’ve been overlooked in the existing lineage. We could…” “It’s too late for that. We’re never going to have their names or the certainty of knowing who our ancestors truly were, but I do have something you might want to see.” Tía Flora turned off the projector and sent her off to find Zamora. She needed to see this, too. The chefs had already gone off duty and the sisters and Tía Flora huddled under the dimmed light of the mess hall. Zamora looked unsure of herself as she shuffled her feet in place, and Marcela wished the photons from the nearest star system could illuminate the dark portholes but they were once again too far in the black. Tía Flora flipped through a few recipe books and finally settled on the one that looked the most battered and full of stains from centuries of moles and salsa. “Pues mira. Ni el dedo de Colón podría apuntar a lo que está escrito aquí. Zamora, can you read for us?” Tía Flora put her hand on her shoulder in encouragement. Zamora twisted her face like she’d just eaten a lime. “It’s in Spanish?” “Claro, mi’ja. Así fueron escritos todos los libros de nuestros antepasados.” “Pero solo hay una lengua escrita, el inglés,” Marcela chimed in. “Pues me parece otra ridiculez de esa escuela…obvio que todos los seres humanos podían escribir con pluma. ¿Creen que los latinos iban a escribir sus historias en el idioma de otro contiente? Sound it out, you’ll figure out what it says pretty quickly.” Zamora began, “Las galletas de Elisa. Se preparan con…con sus ingredientes favoritos. A ella…le gustaba hornearlas para días festivos como…como los cumpleaños y las quinceañeras.” Looking over Zamora’s shoulder, Marcela read the recipe to herself and said, “It’s a cookie recipe, but it’s telling us about someone named Elisa. And the one on the page next to it says ‘Los pasteles de tío Oswaldo’. What is this, tía?” “Girls, when they sold their names and left Terra with the Exodus, they made these recipe books to share their favorite dishes. They turned recipe books into the ancestors they couldn’t take with them. These are their obituaries.” “But there’s hardly anything about Elisa in this…” Marcela protested. “You must read the whole book; each recipe gives you a little more about each person’s story. I’ve been piecing together when people were born and that sort of thing.” “So we can finally put together this lineage?” “No, so we can read about their lives. We can honor them even without the branches on the Arbolito all filled out. Many of these people likely aren’t related to us anyway.” “Marcela, basta con your research. Tía, have you ever made these recipes?” Zamora interrupted. “We still make some of them, but without the animal products they had access to on Terra they probably don’t taste the same.” “Can we still try?” Tía Flora chuckled to herself, “I’d thought I’d never see the day when you’d want to try to bake something. Sure, tomorrow morning you don’t have any lessons so why don’t you bring some of your friends to the kitchen and we’ll whip something up.” The next day, Zamora and a few of her friends were busily churning out cookies under the careful watch of Tía Flora using ingredients rationed for those who weren’t on the team of cooks. Notwithstanding Zamora’s occasional clumsiness and trepidation around the oven, the lunch rush was ecstatic to try something new. A few of the adults even petitioned to add the sugar cookies to the dessert menu, the highest honor for the young bakers. Zamora later tearfully told Marcela that it was all her fault if they ship her off to the Calabaza ship now that she can properly bake. Marcela sometimes wished she were as capricious as her younger sister, but age and her research kept her curious. She wanted to beam to everyone else on the research team that it was just a project to keep people busy. They were fed packets of data and crunched the numbers all day long so the ships with the most resources could continue chasing after habitable planets and building new spaceports. Those very families must have taken her own ancestors’ names hostage centuries ago. Indignant, Marcela clenched her hands and closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, imagining a warmth spreading through her body as if she were spirited away to her ancestors’ hot and humid homelands. She closed out some of the programs she had been running with the ancestry data and set aside a data packet for herself to send to a few trusted friends she had on the Arbolito and other ships. Speaking clearly into the monitor in front of her, she spoke a language she hoped to one day be able to write. “Soy Marcela, del Arbolito. Créeme cuando les explico que nuestros antepasados tenían nombres para sus familias. Mi tía me dice que sus nombres fueron vendidos a los que controlaron el Éxodo y que fueron tirados como basura de plástica. Ya no quiero repetir esa historia, así que quiero que nos nombren. Hasta que tengamos anclados a los linajes todos los nombres, me llamaré Marcela Nombremos. Puede que parezca contra los deseos de la flotilla, pero quiero identificarme como persona con una historia. Cualquier interesado puede usar este nombre. No lo daré a mis hijos si los tenga. Es un nombre a alquiler, un nombre que declara su intención. Espero que les sirva.”  Angela Acosta is a bilingual Mexican American writer and Ph.D. Candidate in Iberian Studies at The Ohio State University. She won the 2015 Rhina P. Espaillat Award from West Chester University, and she was recently nominated for Best of the Net. Her speculative writing has or will appear in On Spec, Eye to the Telescope, Radon Journal, 365tomorrows, and Shoreline of Infinity. Her work has been featured in Latinx magazines like Panochazine, Somos en escrito, and Latinx Audio Lit Mag. She is author of the speculative poetry collection Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Books 2022) and chapbook Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn (Dancing Girl Press 2023). She enjoys rock climbing and biking in her free time.
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Winner 3rd Place |
 | Born and raised in Brooklyn, of parents from Puerto Rico, Richie Narvaez is award-winning author of Roachkiller & Other Stories, Hipster Death Rattle, Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco, and Noiryorican. He lives in the Bronx. |
Photo by Maria Velasco
la guadaña amorosa
by Samir Sirk Morató
I was thirteen years old when Daniel “Ardilla” Peña and Sonia Peña asked us to cure the germinating lovesickness of Martín Green. Ardilla was Martín's lifelong best friend, but he had just produced a colicky baby with Sonia, so he couldn't tend to his friend for longer than a few days. Ardilla was just shy of twenty-three and eons away from good handwriting, but abuela and I could read his note well enough:
Martín was bedridden beneath a love enchantment. Because of his wife and baby, Ardilla could not take care of Martín. He needed us to step in. Could we come right away?
Though the handwriting was Ardilla's, I sensed Sonia's presence in the correct spelling of “enchantment,” the pointed mention of a wife and baby, and the bloody fingerprint on the paper's edge. But her strange one-sided hatred of Martín carried concern now. That stirred my curiosity. If Sonia was worried about Martín, something was very wrong.
Let's go, mija, Abuela said.
It was early summer then, and the brittle outlines of the desert softened beneath evening yucca blooms and fine combs of cholla spines. Abuela bundled me onto her horse with grave urgency. She packed her satchel with a sage bundle, a candle, a novena card, a rosary, and a scarlet Santa Muerte figurine before handing it to me, then leaping onto our horse. We trotted off in a tizzy. A half chewed sunflower seed still stuck in my cheek. I spat its shell into the dusty road as we set off.
Though I longed to step into abuela's boots in every way possible, and I duplicated her twin braids, spells, voluminous shawls, and gruff, tobacco-stained ways of wording, I did not understand the stress that gnarled abuela's time-tanned hands. Some girl had enchanted Martín. So what? That concept seemed sweeter to me than the tin of bonbons abuela had packed in her skirt pockets; the perfume of it bathed my nose and excited my imagination.
A secret sliver of me wished that I had cast the love spell instead. If Martín Green loved me, it would mean endless trinkets, stupid bromas, piggyback rides on a broad back, and pounds of Mexican wedding cookies at our union. I wouldn't need to share him and his nice lashes with the rest of the kids in the pueblo; I wouldn't need to turn in early like a little girl or obey older Señoras. As Mrs. Gata Constanza Green, I'd know my magic was strong and my husband was kind and I'd get to wear an old wedding ring the way abuela did.
But Martín always laughed and ruffled my hair when I sat on his shoulders and I proclaimed that I was grown, and I couldn't do more than purify rooms, beg Santa Muerte for guidance, and bless herbs, so it was some other, older girl who had slipped the snare around Martín's ankle.
As our nag kicked up piñon dust, I toyed with the cracker jack ring hung around my neck. I loathed that we were on our way to vanquish a dusk-soft spell that did not need vanquishing. Any small envies I carried drowned beneath my fondness for Martín. Now that the veil of grief had lifted from his shy face and deft, clay golden hands, he seemed ready for love. But we were about to steal it from him. That was no way to repay the generosity of someone I adored.
Why are we going to ruin this spell? Martín should be happy someone shot one at him. He's got no family. He's lucky a girl wants him this bad. Ardilla acts like he's dying.
Because he is, mija.
Abuela jammed her ancient, crimson cowboy boots into the stirrups. The nag's crooked back swayed, as did the junipers cloaking us. My own red boots, now a size too small, squeezed my feet. I chewed at my lip and vowed to keep telling abuela they fit. No other pair in the zapatería right now looked as similar to hers.
He can't be dying. It's just a love spell.
Abuela shook her head.
You're too young to understand how agonizing love can be, especially in the hands of a lonely bruja. Power in empty hands makes tears the choice from love, which makes it poison. This is not one of your schoolyard crushes, Gata. But you're about to learn.
We rode until the gnarled woods turned to brush, to sunset-streaked sand and the fallen leftovers of barbed wire fence crushed into sagebrush, until the lechusas called from the mountains and the Green's adobe hut came into view. It squatted on the desolate ground, laid low by pain. Even when Señora Green had been alive a year ago, the house had always looked that way. The sagging barbed wire fences and chicken scratch scabs around it caked the house in a lonely sort of leprosy. Nothing but the Greens had grown here. I thanked Niña Dorada that the house abuela and I had radiated hope from its slanted stoop and garden, that our footsteps gave the adobe a heartbeat instead of haunting its walls. More than anything, I felt sad for Martín.
Ardilla waited for us in the yard. He flew to us the instant abuela's toe touched the ground. His twisting hands fluttered around him. Sweat pinned a loose curl to his forehead. It stained all the crevices of his shirt too. Fascinated fear pricked me. I had never seen a man so aged by his own wetness. Whatever spell had Martín in its grips was squeezing his life juice out for the desert to drink.
I'm glad you're here, doña. Martín is doing poorly.
Did you do as I asked? Do you know who cast their eye on him?
Ardilla shook his head. No. I wish I did. But--
But what?
Martín wasn't close to many people. Ardilla swept a wet curl off his forehead. Not besides me.
What a lie! I was close to Ardilla! All of us pueblo brats were. Maybe Ardilla was too out of his mind to realize he was being self-centered. Something about the way he tucked his hair back reminded me of the many ways hands arrowed and looped between Martín and Ardilla when they were drunk on warm beers and talking so close it verged on conspiracy, but I couldn't place what. I just knew that Sonia would have hated it. Tension continued wringing my guts.
Do you know who did it? Ardilla rasped. Do you have any idea, doña?
He continued juddering around her until he saw me watching, then hooked his thumbs into his belt loops and tried to straighten. I almost told him not to puke. The close presence of his friend and the distant beacon of his family stretched him across coals. Abuela hmm'd.
I have an inkling. He's close to Trina Sanchez, isn't he?
Ardilla looked as if she had named a bug. I didn't know why she was mentioning Trina either. Trina Sanchez barely held space in my mind. She was a twiggy loner with a big bust, a sun-stained migrant grape and cherry harvester that cycled through with the seasons, always living in shacks outside of town and tending to a reclusive grandmother who spoke no Spanish. Trina was a clumsy girl with thin, piercing eyes and sandpaper palms. We all knew Martín; none of us knew Trina.
His mother hired her. Sure. He worked near her. That's it. But that kind of woman… can't love.
Ardilla looked like he wanted to spit out a word that he couldn't. Not in my presence. Abuela restrained a flex of her jaw and cast the bonbons from her pocket into my awaiting palms.
So we have nothing then. Come, mija. We must try and work.
Ardilla loped behind us as I loaded Abuela's bags upon my back. He wanted to grasp us in his terrified talons, but we were Martín's sole help and his wife needed him. That made halting us unbearable. Out here, there was only him, Martín, and the hot wind. Martín's cracked doorstep had not felt another tender foot for years beyond his mother's, or maybe Ardilla's. Ardilla licked his lips as Abuela and I strode towards the door.
Are you really going to take your granddaughter in? A child shouldn't see someone like this.
She won't be a child much longer. Abuela swept her skirts around her with finality. Dignity. As a curandera and a woman, she'll have to learn how to deal with these things. With me, she can take it.
Ardilla shuddered. My heart trembled in trepidation as he fell away, leaving us to march into Martín's tiny home.
Take care of him! Ardilla called, small and far away.
The adobe walls funneled us through a paltry living room, then to two closed bedroom doors. I smelled prickly pear, sickly cloying and sweet, outside the first one before we even stopped there. The fragrance turned my stomach. Abuela cast me a look to exorcise my fidgeting.
Whatever you see, no matter what happens, you must behave. Be strong. Be good. Loving skins us all, especially when it's malformed. Don't humiliate Martín while he is in great pain. We have all been fools like this.
Sí, abuela.
I imitated her even tone, but I didn't understand. In her eyes, I saw that she knew I didn't. But I was here today to learn. Abuela knocked on the door. It creaked open. Together, we entered.
Martín Green was gigantic, a teenage farmer meant for wrestling disobedient burros and slinging six-foot ristras over his shoulders without them brushing the sand – a man in my eyes, back then – but when I saw him that day, he was a fallen pillar. A huffing, sweating boy that lay crumpled in sheets. He took up such little space horizontally.
Abuela limped to his bedside, her heels clacking. Martín's hazy pupils followed her. His shirt lay open across his breast. An expanse of bruises littered his collar in bright, swollen knots. Stiff, vertical needles swayed on Martín's chest with every one of his ragged inhales. I couldn't understand. Had he fallen into a cactus patch? Were those chest hairs?
You're in trouble today, Martín. Abuela palmed his forehead. Your father's good looks may be the death of you.
Martín chuckled. The sound emerged wet: the sound of skinned nopal petals squishing together. His breathing seesawed. As I watched, another needle popped through his skin. Again, the smell of sweet, rotten prickly pear clogged the room. My guts twisted. I fumbled to unpack abuela's bags and set up the Niña Roja altar for her on Martín's barren nightstand.
Nothing new there.
Abuela's hand drifted to his trembling wrist. She pinched his pulse between her fingers, frowning. I wished the sage smoke I spread around the room would stop clouding my vision. In another sense, I was grateful. The purified curtain it cast around me kept me from seeing the tall boy who bought me candies and glass bottle sodas laid low the way he was.
Martín, do you know who cast this on you?
Martín closed his eyes. His gurgled breathing continued. I finished my cleansing prayer and hurried to put Niña Roja and candles on the new altar.
Yeah. I do. Lied to Ardilla about that. Didn't want him to get in a fight or nothing. Sonia's stressed enough.
Who bewitched you?
Can't tell you.
This is a serious spell. Abuela pointed to his chest. It's not just taken root in your body, it's blooming. The Peñas should've sent for me a week ago. If you don't tell me who did this, you may die. Is your tongue tied?
Not by magic.
Martín.
As I unpacked the bonbons for Niña Roja, I struggled not to ogle Martín. Agony stifled every heave of his chest. It toyed with the twitching joints of his fingers. How could the boy who did not cry at being spurred by a rooster or turning his ankle in a topo's hole look this way now? His diminished presence was a crime against nature.
Trina did this, Martín confessed. Was partially an accident. She didn't mean to cast something this mean.
I bit on the surprise between my teeth. It tasted of copper. Abuela's expression stayed unchanged.
Don't hurt Trina. Please. We grew up together. She and her grandma always stayed with us during the harvest season. Trinita helped me bury mamá. I helped her feed her grandma. We shared wages and secrets and chicle ever since we were seven. I love her.
His sigh was a rustle of rain-soaked cholla rattling together. Tears glossed his lashes.
I don't want the town to punish Trina. She's got no one now. It'd kill her. Don't hurt her, doña. I'm begging you.
Gata, start praying, Abuela commanded.
I swallowed my fragile trepidation, took the rosary and novena into my hands, then slid to my knees. My overalls did not cushion my bones from the floor. Martín quivered now, sinking deeper into the bed.
Oh Niña Roja, I murmured, my elegant, lovely Sister, you hold the powers of passion and hatred in your heart, and death and deliverance in your hands...
Abuela assessed Martín.
If you succumbed to this spell, it would save your life, she said. All you need to do is confess your love to Trina and have it reciprocated. Obviously, she'd accept your confession. Then your lungs would clear. Why die instead of marrying and producing children with her? Is she married? Is it because she's an immigrant? A migrant? I know how your mamita felt about those.
Prayer and sticky breathing rattled against the adobe walls. I climbed to the next rosary bead. Monsoon season came and went before Martín whispered a reply.
I don't want to say it while Gatita's in here. I don't want her to think of me differently.
I faltered in my second prayer. Tears threatened to ruin my vision. Martín was everyone's gentle, goofy favorite. I owed him all my summer entertainment. He was the pueblo's primo. If he confessed to murder right now, I wouldn't adore him any less. I did not want whatever horrible power I had over him that made him look so small, so scared. Abuela's glare was unneeded.
I won't think differently of you, Martín. I promise. I fumbled with my rosary, pulse whining in my ears, hot and urgent. I promise on the cracker jack ring you gave me last summer.
That ring stuck like a burr between my shirt and overalls. It burned against me. Martín lingered in his silence longer than a drought before he spoke, tender and fragile.
I don't love women the way Trina wants me to love her.
Abruptly, I thought of Ardilla and Martín loading bags of feed into their boss' truck together, both slick with evaporating sweat and laughter, their dark eyes and dark hair brimming with sunlight, only four years between them. Sonia had watched from the soda fountain stairs then, a distant shadow. It had taken years for her to get closer. Abuela took Martín's quavering hand.
She didn't know. What's done is already done. Trina's the only person I have left. I won't hurt her.
You'll hurt her and Daniel alike if you die.
That's a price we'll all need to pay. Martín heaved. They'll bury me before I do what Ardilla did. I'm not marrying someone to hide; I'm not making another Sonia out of anyone. My mamá didn't. I won't either. I'd be worse than dead if I did that.
My gasp broke my third prayer to Niña Roja. The candle extinguished. No one had offended her into abandoning Martín, but there was nothing more she could do. In his last soaking breath, Martín bloomed. A riot of blossoms exploded from his mouth in an incoming tide, then his cleft throat: yellow prickly pear blossoms, tall-stemmed sotols, pink wildfires of cholla, globs of scarlet gilia. They mounted higher than Sierra Blanca then kept climbing.
Martín's breast split across his heart to free the next flood of flowers. Bone-white fleabane, fat-and-bruise-colored feather dalea, enamel-shiny white peppergrass, vein blue penstemon, and tender-flesh globe mallow all burst from his body, all covered in a filmy shroud of birth, cloaked Martín's bed. They swayed in the wind of his final breath, beautiful, fresh, and glimmering with bloody life. Offal stench blended into their perfume.
I could not cry, or shield my eyes, or clean the blood flecks from Niña Roja or my cheeks. I didn't have time to. The desert blossoms when watered – never slowly, never gently, always after a passionate downpour – and it had done the same here, too. My sole blessing was that I couldn't see Martín beneath all he had grown. Love, in its truest form, was fertile soil.
Abuela wiped my face. When my shock came down from the high, high tower of flowers, she held me while I sobbed.
I was thirteen years old when Daniel “Ardilla” Peña and Sonia Peña asked us to cure the germinating lovesickness of Martín Green. Ardilla was Martín's lifelong best friend, but he had just produced a colicky baby with Sonia, so he couldn't tend to his friend for longer than a few days. Ardilla was just shy of twenty-three and eons away from good handwriting, but abuela and I could read his note well enough:
Martín was bedridden beneath a love enchantment. Because of his wife and baby, Ardilla could not take care of Martín. He needed us to step in. Could we come right away?
Though the handwriting was Ardilla's, I sensed Sonia's presence in the correct spelling of “enchantment,” the pointed mention of a wife and baby, and the bloody fingerprint on the paper's edge. But her strange one-sided hatred of Martín carried concern now. That stirred my curiosity. If Sonia was worried about Martín, something was very wrong.
Let's go, mija, Abuela said.
It was early summer then, and the brittle outlines of the desert softened beneath evening yucca blooms and fine combs of cholla spines. Abuela bundled me onto her horse with grave urgency. She packed her satchel with a sage bundle, a candle, a novena card, a rosary, and a scarlet Santa Muerte figurine before handing it to me, then leaping onto our horse. We trotted off in a tizzy. A half chewed sunflower seed still stuck in my cheek. I spat its shell into the dusty road as we set off.
Though I longed to step into abuela's boots in every way possible, and I duplicated her twin braids, spells, voluminous shawls, and gruff, tobacco-stained ways of wording, I did not understand the stress that gnarled abuela's time-tanned hands. Some girl had enchanted Martín. So what? That concept seemed sweeter to me than the tin of bonbons abuela had packed in her skirt pockets; the perfume of it bathed my nose and excited my imagination.
A secret sliver of me wished that I had cast the love spell instead. If Martín Green loved me, it would mean endless trinkets, stupid bromas, piggyback rides on a broad back, and pounds of Mexican wedding cookies at our union. I wouldn't need to share him and his nice lashes with the rest of the kids in the pueblo; I wouldn't need to turn in early like a little girl or obey older Señoras. As Mrs. Gata Constanza Green, I'd know my magic was strong and my husband was kind and I'd get to wear an old wedding ring the way abuela did.
But Martín always laughed and ruffled my hair when I sat on his shoulders and I proclaimed that I was grown, and I couldn't do more than purify rooms, beg Santa Muerte for guidance, and bless herbs, so it was some other, older girl who had slipped the snare around Martín's ankle.
As our nag kicked up piñon dust, I toyed with the cracker jack ring hung around my neck. I loathed that we were on our way to vanquish a dusk-soft spell that did not need vanquishing. Any small envies I carried drowned beneath my fondness for Martín. Now that the veil of grief had lifted from his shy face and deft, clay golden hands, he seemed ready for love. But we were about to steal it from him. That was no way to repay the generosity of someone I adored.
Why are we going to ruin this spell? Martín should be happy someone shot one at him. He's got no family. He's lucky a girl wants him this bad. Ardilla acts like he's dying.
Because he is, mija.
Abuela jammed her ancient, crimson cowboy boots into the stirrups. The nag's crooked back swayed, as did the junipers cloaking us. My own red boots, now a size too small, squeezed my feet. I chewed at my lip and vowed to keep telling abuela they fit. No other pair in the zapatería right now looked as similar to hers.
He can't be dying. It's just a love spell.
Abuela shook her head.
You're too young to understand how agonizing love can be, especially in the hands of a lonely bruja. Power in empty hands makes tears the choice from love, which makes it poison. This is not one of your schoolyard crushes, Gata. But you're about to learn.
We rode until the gnarled woods turned to brush, to sunset-streaked sand and the fallen leftovers of barbed wire fence crushed into sagebrush, until the lechusas called from the mountains and the Green's adobe hut came into view. It squatted on the desolate ground, laid low by pain. Even when Señora Green had been alive a year ago, the house had always looked that way. The sagging barbed wire fences and chicken scratch scabs around it caked the house in a lonely sort of leprosy. Nothing but the Greens had grown here. I thanked Niña Dorada that the house abuela and I had radiated hope from its slanted stoop and garden, that our footsteps gave the adobe a heartbeat instead of haunting its walls. More than anything, I felt sad for Martín.
Ardilla waited for us in the yard. He flew to us the instant abuela's toe touched the ground. His twisting hands fluttered around him. Sweat pinned a loose curl to his forehead. It stained all the crevices of his shirt too. Fascinated fear pricked me. I had never seen a man so aged by his own wetness. Whatever spell had Martín in its grips was squeezing his life juice out for the desert to drink.
I'm glad you're here, doña. Martín is doing poorly.
Did you do as I asked? Do you know who cast their eye on him?
Ardilla shook his head. No. I wish I did. But--
But what?
Martín wasn't close to many people. Ardilla swept a wet curl off his forehead. Not besides me.
What a lie! I was close to Ardilla! All of us pueblo brats were. Maybe Ardilla was too out of his mind to realize he was being self-centered. Something about the way he tucked his hair back reminded me of the many ways hands arrowed and looped between Martín and Ardilla when they were drunk on warm beers and talking so close it verged on conspiracy, but I couldn't place what. I just knew that Sonia would have hated it. Tension continued wringing my guts.
Do you know who did it? Ardilla rasped. Do you have any idea, doña?
He continued juddering around her until he saw me watching, then hooked his thumbs into his belt loops and tried to straighten. I almost told him not to puke. The close presence of his friend and the distant beacon of his family stretched him across coals. Abuela hmm'd.
I have an inkling. He's close to Trina Sanchez, isn't he?
Ardilla looked as if she had named a bug. I didn't know why she was mentioning Trina either. Trina Sanchez barely held space in my mind. She was a twiggy loner with a big bust, a sun-stained migrant grape and cherry harvester that cycled through with the seasons, always living in shacks outside of town and tending to a reclusive grandmother who spoke no Spanish. Trina was a clumsy girl with thin, piercing eyes and sandpaper palms. We all knew Martín; none of us knew Trina.
His mother hired her. Sure. He worked near her. That's it. But that kind of woman… can't love.
Ardilla looked like he wanted to spit out a word that he couldn't. Not in my presence. Abuela restrained a flex of her jaw and cast the bonbons from her pocket into my awaiting palms.
So we have nothing then. Come, mija. We must try and work.
Ardilla loped behind us as I loaded Abuela's bags upon my back. He wanted to grasp us in his terrified talons, but we were Martín's sole help and his wife needed him. That made halting us unbearable. Out here, there was only him, Martín, and the hot wind. Martín's cracked doorstep had not felt another tender foot for years beyond his mother's, or maybe Ardilla's. Ardilla licked his lips as Abuela and I strode towards the door.
Are you really going to take your granddaughter in? A child shouldn't see someone like this.
She won't be a child much longer. Abuela swept her skirts around her with finality. Dignity. As a curandera and a woman, she'll have to learn how to deal with these things. With me, she can take it.
Ardilla shuddered. My heart trembled in trepidation as he fell away, leaving us to march into Martín's tiny home.
Take care of him! Ardilla called, small and far away.
The adobe walls funneled us through a paltry living room, then to two closed bedroom doors. I smelled prickly pear, sickly cloying and sweet, outside the first one before we even stopped there. The fragrance turned my stomach. Abuela cast me a look to exorcise my fidgeting.
Whatever you see, no matter what happens, you must behave. Be strong. Be good. Loving skins us all, especially when it's malformed. Don't humiliate Martín while he is in great pain. We have all been fools like this.
Sí, abuela.
I imitated her even tone, but I didn't understand. In her eyes, I saw that she knew I didn't. But I was here today to learn. Abuela knocked on the door. It creaked open. Together, we entered.
Martín Green was gigantic, a teenage farmer meant for wrestling disobedient burros and slinging six-foot ristras over his shoulders without them brushing the sand – a man in my eyes, back then – but when I saw him that day, he was a fallen pillar. A huffing, sweating boy that lay crumpled in sheets. He took up such little space horizontally.
Abuela limped to his bedside, her heels clacking. Martín's hazy pupils followed her. His shirt lay open across his breast. An expanse of bruises littered his collar in bright, swollen knots. Stiff, vertical needles swayed on Martín's chest with every one of his ragged inhales. I couldn't understand. Had he fallen into a cactus patch? Were those chest hairs?
You're in trouble today, Martín. Abuela palmed his forehead. Your father's good looks may be the death of you.
Martín chuckled. The sound emerged wet: the sound of skinned nopal petals squishing together. His breathing seesawed. As I watched, another needle popped through his skin. Again, the smell of sweet, rotten prickly pear clogged the room. My guts twisted. I fumbled to unpack abuela's bags and set up the Niña Roja altar for her on Martín's barren nightstand.
Nothing new there.
Abuela's hand drifted to his trembling wrist. She pinched his pulse between her fingers, frowning. I wished the sage smoke I spread around the room would stop clouding my vision. In another sense, I was grateful. The purified curtain it cast around me kept me from seeing the tall boy who bought me candies and glass bottle sodas laid low the way he was.
Martín, do you know who cast this on you?
Martín closed his eyes. His gurgled breathing continued. I finished my cleansing prayer and hurried to put Niña Roja and candles on the new altar.
Yeah. I do. Lied to Ardilla about that. Didn't want him to get in a fight or nothing. Sonia's stressed enough.
Who bewitched you?
Can't tell you.
This is a serious spell. Abuela pointed to his chest. It's not just taken root in your body, it's blooming. The Peñas should've sent for me a week ago. If you don't tell me who did this, you may die. Is your tongue tied?
Not by magic.
Martín.
As I unpacked the bonbons for Niña Roja, I struggled not to ogle Martín. Agony stifled every heave of his chest. It toyed with the twitching joints of his fingers. How could the boy who did not cry at being spurred by a rooster or turning his ankle in a topo's hole look this way now? His diminished presence was a crime against nature.
Trina did this, Martín confessed. Was partially an accident. She didn't mean to cast something this mean.
I bit on the surprise between my teeth. It tasted of copper. Abuela's expression stayed unchanged.
Don't hurt Trina. Please. We grew up together. She and her grandma always stayed with us during the harvest season. Trinita helped me bury mamá. I helped her feed her grandma. We shared wages and secrets and chicle ever since we were seven. I love her.
His sigh was a rustle of rain-soaked cholla rattling together. Tears glossed his lashes.
I don't want the town to punish Trina. She's got no one now. It'd kill her. Don't hurt her, doña. I'm begging you.
Gata, start praying, Abuela commanded.
I swallowed my fragile trepidation, took the rosary and novena into my hands, then slid to my knees. My overalls did not cushion my bones from the floor. Martín quivered now, sinking deeper into the bed.
Oh Niña Roja, I murmured, my elegant, lovely Sister, you hold the powers of passion and hatred in your heart, and death and deliverance in your hands...
Abuela assessed Martín.
If you succumbed to this spell, it would save your life, she said. All you need to do is confess your love to Trina and have it reciprocated. Obviously, she'd accept your confession. Then your lungs would clear. Why die instead of marrying and producing children with her? Is she married? Is it because she's an immigrant? A migrant? I know how your mamita felt about those.
Prayer and sticky breathing rattled against the adobe walls. I climbed to the next rosary bead. Monsoon season came and went before Martín whispered a reply.
I don't want to say it while Gatita's in here. I don't want her to think of me differently.
I faltered in my second prayer. Tears threatened to ruin my vision. Martín was everyone's gentle, goofy favorite. I owed him all my summer entertainment. He was the pueblo's primo. If he confessed to murder right now, I wouldn't adore him any less. I did not want whatever horrible power I had over him that made him look so small, so scared. Abuela's glare was unneeded.
I won't think differently of you, Martín. I promise. I fumbled with my rosary, pulse whining in my ears, hot and urgent. I promise on the cracker jack ring you gave me last summer.
That ring stuck like a burr between my shirt and overalls. It burned against me. Martín lingered in his silence longer than a drought before he spoke, tender and fragile.
I don't love women the way Trina wants me to love her.
Abruptly, I thought of Ardilla and Martín loading bags of feed into their boss' truck together, both slick with evaporating sweat and laughter, their dark eyes and dark hair brimming with sunlight, only four years between them. Sonia had watched from the soda fountain stairs then, a distant shadow. It had taken years for her to get closer. Abuela took Martín's quavering hand.
She didn't know. What's done is already done. Trina's the only person I have left. I won't hurt her.
You'll hurt her and Daniel alike if you die.
That's a price we'll all need to pay. Martín heaved. They'll bury me before I do what Ardilla did. I'm not marrying someone to hide; I'm not making another Sonia out of anyone. My mamá didn't. I won't either. I'd be worse than dead if I did that.
My gasp broke my third prayer to Niña Roja. The candle extinguished. No one had offended her into abandoning Martín, but there was nothing more she could do. In his last soaking breath, Martín bloomed. A riot of blossoms exploded from his mouth in an incoming tide, then his cleft throat: yellow prickly pear blossoms, tall-stemmed sotols, pink wildfires of cholla, globs of scarlet gilia. They mounted higher than Sierra Blanca then kept climbing.
Martín's breast split across his heart to free the next flood of flowers. Bone-white fleabane, fat-and-bruise-colored feather dalea, enamel-shiny white peppergrass, vein blue penstemon, and tender-flesh globe mallow all burst from his body, all covered in a filmy shroud of birth, cloaked Martín's bed. They swayed in the wind of his final breath, beautiful, fresh, and glimmering with bloody life. Offal stench blended into their perfume.
I could not cry, or shield my eyes, or clean the blood flecks from Niña Roja or my cheeks. I didn't have time to. The desert blossoms when watered – never slowly, never gently, always after a passionate downpour – and it had done the same here, too. My sole blessing was that I couldn't see Martín beneath all he had grown. Love, in its truest form, was fertile soil.
Abuela wiped my face. When my shock came down from the high, high tower of flowers, she held me while I sobbed.
***
Cherry season had failed to come this year. So had the rain. The land stayed as hard as the shriveled fruits on orchard trees. It bore elk ivory and brown grass at the sky as dry pits peered from slits in desiccated cherry skin. Abuela warned me not to be hasty, but I still crept out of my room at the witch hour and took off for the low skeletons of the orchard.
The loose ends of Martín's death all became candle wicks in my belly, burning from every fray, forcing me to walk. I threaded through coyote song and centipede-laden rocks to reach the cherry trees. All the while, I prayed to the Niña Negra figurine in my pocket for vengeance and counted off prayers on my rosary. The sixth prayer hallowed my lungs as the orchard came into sight. Trina Sanchez would explain her crimes to me even if it killed her.
I found Trina sprawled in a thistle patch on the outskirts of the orchard, her hair tangled around her neck, her torn shirt around her shoulders. When I saw the moonbeam sliding off her stung, sunburned nape, I slowed. My anger curdled into fear. She looked no more alive than the round headstone beneath her hands.
Minutes or hours passed through the thistle murmurs around us. I wasn't sure which. The thistles towered above us at Martín's height. Trina spoke about the time I realized I couldn't.
This is no place for a little cat.
Hearing Martín's nickname for me in Trina's mouth reignited my ire.
I'm not a little cat, or a girl. I'm a woman and a witch. But not like you. I clenched my fists. You murderer.
Trina arched, a snake trying to step from the ground on feet it did not have, before her weight fell on the headstone again. She twisted to face me. I loathed the tear tracks I saw on her cheeks as much as the lacerations on her skin and the purple petals tangled in her hair. I would not feel sorry for her. How could she grieve like this after murdering Martín? She was no self-flagellating saint.
I know that Martín's death is my fault. I'm sorry for it. I'll be sorry for the rest of my life.
Sweat beaded on the rosary in my hand. I was ready to pray my seventh prayer to the Niña Negra in my pocket, ready to chew black licorice for her and beg for Trina's expulsion from the pueblo at the end of a pitchfork or exorcism, but when I looked at crumpled Trina I could not do it. Not for Martín or abuela.
How did you mess up this badly? I thought you loved him!
I do.
Prove it. I bet you know nothing about him.
Sonia's proud voice echoed through my head, describing Ardilla's favorite candies and little gestures to conceal the pathetic emptiness under her collection of baubles. Despite Martín's rambling, I bet that Trina was the same. If she really loved and knew him, she couldn't have done this. I sucked air through my teeth to cool the flush plaguing my face.
Trina studied me from where she lay. As weak as grief kept her, it did not sap the corded muscle from her arms, or vanish the hard pears of her calves. All of Trina's softnesses beyond her breasts stayed tucked away under bars of overworked flesh. She had a body meant for caging itself. If Trina wanted to break me against a trunk of a cherry tree she could. She glared at me. I glared back at her. Inside, I trembled. On the outside, I stood tall. Constanzas were always supposed to stand tall.
Trina's gaze broke. Its shattered halves slid into the thistle and vanished from sight. She wrapped her arms around the headstone in a hollow cradle.
Martín isn't even cool yet, but you're already asking for his innards. Are you vultures ever satisfied?
Before I could explode, Trina began whispering.
Because I love Martín Green, I know that until he was sixteen, he had nightmares unless I slept on the floor next to him and held his hand. I know he worried that his violent conception had tainted him, so he was always kind, even when he didn’t want to be. Martín bandaged my scrapes for years but never mocked me for tripping. He held me behind the cholla while I cried over my grandmother’s worsening mind, or the attention drawn to my horrible, ripening body. He sent me letters when I was traveling. He encouraged my brujería. He taught me how to defend myself.
Trina’s splintered nails combed at her locks. I fought the horrible confusion thrashing in my heart. Now Señora Green’s shape hung heavy in there too, moaning in pain from the invisible wounds in her mind, casting worried, hateful looks at any outsiders who dared to enter her home. Trina’s unseen abuela writhed in her shadow.
Together, Martín and I held our rage deep inside of us so neither of us destroyed our ill, broken old women. We whispered about our guilty longing to let their languages die in revenge for the ways they hurt us. We unearthed each other’s ugliest roots. That’s what love is, Gata Constanza. Love was me nursing Señora Green for Martín while she cursed me. Love was Martín comforting me when he couldn’t bear me. Love is a merciless yoke you choose to carry.
I did not want to look at Trina. She knew what Martín looked like naked, but I hadn’t, and she had undressed Martín in front of me. All of these bleeding secrets shamed me. Trina’s lips curled back, showing her daffodil teeth. Her self-evisceration reeked of victory. The headstone crouched beneath her in silent judgement.
You may be a witch, but you're no woman.
That’s enough!
By now, I gripped Niña Negra in one hand and my plastic ring in the other. I held on for dear life.
This still doesn’t make sense. You were all Martín had and he said he was all you had, the way my abuela is all I have. You don't kill people you love like that by accident! You’re lying about something!
Yelling doesn't change what happened. You're still too young and wrapped in a homeland that cares for parts of you to fully understand how I loved Martín. Trina's voice dropped to a stinging mutter. You haven't felt a thousand embers under your skin when someone's eyes light on you. You know nothing of being the last pine cone under a blighted tree, waiting for wildfire hands to open you, to caress you into a different shape so you can take root. Love like that is desperate. It breaks. It tears. It binds.
Trina tipped her chin up at me and rested it on the headstone, the hunger in her destroying her all the while.
The blooms told me you prayed to Niña Roja. I bet you know little of the things she oversees beyond love in a trinket ring.
My face flushed with tears and humiliation. I didn't know which was hotter. All that Trina alluded to sounded filthy and forbidden. They felt even more so because of my partial understanding. The shame that my ignorance fueled raged above my fury, then far above Trina, who stayed shattered on the earth. Her sorrow kept her so low I couldn't even spit on her. She looked girlish to me – even younger than Martín. But all those sordid words had still sprung from her lips. Confusion wracked me.
You should've told your flowers to stop when Martín mentioned... men. Or were you going to force him to marry you anyway?
Trina's howled laugh made me trip backward. I bristled in terror. Trina smashed a fist into the carpet of thistle heads around her, spiking lacy sprawls of cuts into her hand.
If Martín had confessed that to me, I would have let him go. I would've eaten my heart and let the flowers bind us as siblings. He would have lived. But my flowers need to hear words in my ears to stop, and Martín's mother had him convinced that all other people do is steal. That they could give, but no one else could, so they needed to guard themselves. I was stupid. I believed Martín thought I was different.
Trina pointed a broken finger at me.
Your people instilled that fear in her when they drove her tribe into school tombs and onto broken bits of land. When they took from her even as they planted Martín in her. I bet your abuela didn't tell you that. You do work with death.
My people! All I knew was that "my people" spoke Spanish; that my people made bridges of their bodies. Uncertainty twisted my nerves. Abuela had never mentioned such hereditary intricacies to me. But she would never keep such a thing secret. Would she? My trust in her turned me inside out.
At least my grandmother is here! I cried, frightened of Trina's accusations, frightened of my inability to call her a liar. Where's yours, huh?
Trina cupped the headstone. All at once, her wild gaze sobered. It looked like a dark joke had fallen on her shoulders. The moon bled onto us.
My grandmother is dead. An unwilling smile yanked at Trina's mouth. If she could see me now she would feel vindicated. I worked myself raw at orchards, vineyards, and altars to feed us, but whenever I cursed or consecrated anything, she always said the same thing. 'Oni mo jiu-kachi azami no hana.' Even a devil is pretty at eighteen.
I thought of the rough, leering men that worked the orchards, and how developed Trina Sanchez had been as long as I'd known of her. I thought of Señora Green resentfully supping on out-of-season poppies and yarrow to soothe the unseen sickness in her, and the strength it took to heal a beloved who hated you. In that moment I saw Sonia in Trina's face, and how far away the men they loved stood, even when they were together. Against my will, I convulsed in pity.
When Trina rose from the ground with immense effort, no longer broken onto her belly, I clutched Niña Negra close and hung back. I did not want to learn more about love from Trina. Nor did I want to hurt her. Even if I despised her.
Are you going to die too?
Trina's wretched expression and raw, grief-eaten body scared me. What if she died before Martín's funeral? What if she didn't come at all? I couldn't bear the idea of the Peñas attending Martín's wake while looking seventy miles away. At least Trina's love would keep her on the canyon rim between Martín and us. At least she would stand next to me there.
Trina pushed back a stream of her hair. Her fingers left bloody streaks on her temple. The moon dressed her wounds.
No. I want to die, but I won't. It would be a waste of Martín's memory. He wouldn't have me in death anyway. I must carry him with me. Trina smiled, almost alive. I'll see you when the cholla blooms, little cat. Don't look for me.
Before I could say that I knew Martín would have her, even if it wasn't the way she wanted to have him – because all of the tender desert blooms proved it, because I knew what love looked like, even if I wasn't grown myself – Trina was gone. The dead orchard took her shape and broke it into pieces of lonesome, scattered light. Then there was only me, Niña Negra, and the moon-kissed thistles, whispering the last secrets among themselves that I didn't understand.
I was no longer thirteen.
Samir Sirk Morató is a mestize scientist and artist. Their recent field season in New Mexico made a big impression on them. Some of Samir’s work can be found in The Hellebore Issue #5, Catapult Magazine, and The Sandy River Review 2020 edition. They are on Twitter @bolivibird and on Instagram @spicycloaca.
3rd Place
Sacred Evolution
by Carmen Baca
With roots entrenched in the mountain I called home at the edge of the Sangre de Cristos, I surveyed my surroundings from near the top. My many limbs reached to the skies on sunny days or cold, snowy ones for so long I had no concept of my age. All I knew was that I had evolved from sapling to mature adult over many revolutions of the sun and moon. Seasons mattered not, not for my brethren and me. Our purpose was to grow, to provide shelter to those who needed it, and to give sustenance to all living beings. We were the sentinels, the giants of the forest.
But we, too, felt fear. Nature’s wrath threatened us in the annual spring winds. We bent so far from side to side we feared we would snap in two.
“Hold fast!” I cried to my fellow giants.
“HOLD FAST!” they called, their voices echoing from mountain to valley and each peak beyond.
We held steadfast to the earth, our roots clawing into the dirt and around buried stones to keep our balance. Our size would have broken our smaller brothers, our offspring, and even ended the lives of forest creatures had we fallen. We stood tall.
The droughts that sometimes came after increased our peril during the spring thunderstorms which followed. Dry lightning ignited one of us once on a distant ridge. We watched in horror as one of our brother’s trunks exploded and his limbs caught fire, the flames growing and spreading to his neighbors until a wall of vivid red and brilliant orange spread and covered that mountain top. Black smoke rose high, turning gray as it wafted toward us.
“Oh, no,” the smallest of us, the saplings, cried.
“Remain strong!” my brother beside me called.
“REMAIN STRONG!” each tree in the forest shouted.
The echoes gave support to those of our brethren already covered in fire and to the others who stood until they could no longer. The inferno pulsed with a life of its own, its breaths made stronger by the fuel feeding it. The roar of destruction reached us even though we were in no danger then. We feared fire like we feared nothing else, and we quaked deep inside ourselves because we knew as big as we were, as strong as we stood, we were no match for it.
We watched for so many passings of the days into nights that we worried they would never end. That all-consuming firestorm ate everything in its path. Only one ridge lay between the devastation and our mountain when man came to our rescue. We were safe—for now. We mourned for those of our kind and for the animals who used them for harbor and home. So many had succumbed to the conflagration. The reminder of the tragedy stood before us for many more passings of the sun and the moon. Those dry, dead pillars stood tall until the winds came again to knock them over. The sounds of the cracking, decaying trunks reached us in the silence that came thereafter. We cringed, our boughs shaking in sympathy. And we shut our eyes at the last horror they endured as mankind did: from dust they had emerged and to dust they returned.
Time passed, with more spring winds and fall fires, but our mountain was spared. I never wondered why, but now I speculate perhaps because of what I am now. Springtime returned and with it came the men again. Others followed, bringing loud apparatuses on tracks and large wheels, creating roadways which crossed our mountain. The monstrous machines felled many of us with precise efficiency, and we came to understand our purpose had changed. Some of us were destined for unknown intent because man had determined we could be used to benefit him. We continued to stand tall, and we understood some of us would be cut down. We did not know which among us would be next, but we all clung to the hope that whatever our futures held, our ancient frames would be used for noble causes.
I watched many of my brothers fall into the jaws of those massive machines. Afterward, I stood alone in what was now a glade, and I wondered why I had been spared. Many more times the sun and moon traded places in the sky, until the day my turn came. No large, rumbling devices appeared on that early morning. Instead, two wagons arrived, pulled by draft horses and accompanied by a group of men on horseback. They halted in that clearing and stood looking up at my massive trunk. They spoke among themselves words I could not hear from my height, and they must have determined I was right for their plans, whatever they were.
Two men approached with a long blade I later learned was a two-man crosscut saw. Several more with axes stood by. I felt a vibration close to where my trunk rose from the earth and my limbs trembled with the back-and-forth cutting motion of the men manning the tool. I expected more sensation, something I didn’t know the name for but something dreadful. But the severing of my body from my base, though it took some time due to my width, occurred with no more than an increase of that forceful reverberation deep in my core. Then I fell. I struck the earth with my massive frame, several of my branches breaking with the impact. My trunk shuddered a bit after the fall and then I was still, my view from the ground novel and unexpected.
The men took to their axes and dismembered me from top to bottom, some of my trunk left long while other sections were cut short. The part of me that was capable of understanding was lifted into the wagon along with other pieces. After the two wagons were filled, we traveled down the mountain and reached a small hamlet in a valley I had only seen from high above. A large dwelling, our destination I discovered, provided cover for me for another period of the sun chasing the moon and creating light after dark.
When I was handled again, it was through a machine which trimmed me and turned me into what the men called lumber. My evolution had begun. And though I pondered over the final product that would come from my frame, I harbored the hope that it would be noble, worthy of the sacrifice of my entire physical being to it.
But we, too, felt fear. Nature’s wrath threatened us in the annual spring winds. We bent so far from side to side we feared we would snap in two.
“Hold fast!” I cried to my fellow giants.
“HOLD FAST!” they called, their voices echoing from mountain to valley and each peak beyond.
We held steadfast to the earth, our roots clawing into the dirt and around buried stones to keep our balance. Our size would have broken our smaller brothers, our offspring, and even ended the lives of forest creatures had we fallen. We stood tall.
The droughts that sometimes came after increased our peril during the spring thunderstorms which followed. Dry lightning ignited one of us once on a distant ridge. We watched in horror as one of our brother’s trunks exploded and his limbs caught fire, the flames growing and spreading to his neighbors until a wall of vivid red and brilliant orange spread and covered that mountain top. Black smoke rose high, turning gray as it wafted toward us.
“Oh, no,” the smallest of us, the saplings, cried.
“Remain strong!” my brother beside me called.
“REMAIN STRONG!” each tree in the forest shouted.
The echoes gave support to those of our brethren already covered in fire and to the others who stood until they could no longer. The inferno pulsed with a life of its own, its breaths made stronger by the fuel feeding it. The roar of destruction reached us even though we were in no danger then. We feared fire like we feared nothing else, and we quaked deep inside ourselves because we knew as big as we were, as strong as we stood, we were no match for it.
We watched for so many passings of the days into nights that we worried they would never end. That all-consuming firestorm ate everything in its path. Only one ridge lay between the devastation and our mountain when man came to our rescue. We were safe—for now. We mourned for those of our kind and for the animals who used them for harbor and home. So many had succumbed to the conflagration. The reminder of the tragedy stood before us for many more passings of the sun and the moon. Those dry, dead pillars stood tall until the winds came again to knock them over. The sounds of the cracking, decaying trunks reached us in the silence that came thereafter. We cringed, our boughs shaking in sympathy. And we shut our eyes at the last horror they endured as mankind did: from dust they had emerged and to dust they returned.
Time passed, with more spring winds and fall fires, but our mountain was spared. I never wondered why, but now I speculate perhaps because of what I am now. Springtime returned and with it came the men again. Others followed, bringing loud apparatuses on tracks and large wheels, creating roadways which crossed our mountain. The monstrous machines felled many of us with precise efficiency, and we came to understand our purpose had changed. Some of us were destined for unknown intent because man had determined we could be used to benefit him. We continued to stand tall, and we understood some of us would be cut down. We did not know which among us would be next, but we all clung to the hope that whatever our futures held, our ancient frames would be used for noble causes.
I watched many of my brothers fall into the jaws of those massive machines. Afterward, I stood alone in what was now a glade, and I wondered why I had been spared. Many more times the sun and moon traded places in the sky, until the day my turn came. No large, rumbling devices appeared on that early morning. Instead, two wagons arrived, pulled by draft horses and accompanied by a group of men on horseback. They halted in that clearing and stood looking up at my massive trunk. They spoke among themselves words I could not hear from my height, and they must have determined I was right for their plans, whatever they were.
Two men approached with a long blade I later learned was a two-man crosscut saw. Several more with axes stood by. I felt a vibration close to where my trunk rose from the earth and my limbs trembled with the back-and-forth cutting motion of the men manning the tool. I expected more sensation, something I didn’t know the name for but something dreadful. But the severing of my body from my base, though it took some time due to my width, occurred with no more than an increase of that forceful reverberation deep in my core. Then I fell. I struck the earth with my massive frame, several of my branches breaking with the impact. My trunk shuddered a bit after the fall and then I was still, my view from the ground novel and unexpected.
The men took to their axes and dismembered me from top to bottom, some of my trunk left long while other sections were cut short. The part of me that was capable of understanding was lifted into the wagon along with other pieces. After the two wagons were filled, we traveled down the mountain and reached a small hamlet in a valley I had only seen from high above. A large dwelling, our destination I discovered, provided cover for me for another period of the sun chasing the moon and creating light after dark.
When I was handled again, it was through a machine which trimmed me and turned me into what the men called lumber. My evolution had begun. And though I pondered over the final product that would come from my frame, I harbored the hope that it would be noble, worthy of the sacrifice of my entire physical being to it.
#
Fifteen-year-old Matías José de la Cruz, apprenticing as a carpenter with his uncle, ran his hands over the lumber in the family sawmill, gauging which of the newly created boards would more suit his new project. Selecting those his hands found smooth yet supple, good for carving, he loaded them onto his father’s wagon and deposited them across two sawhorses in the shed he used for his woodworking. As young as he was, his reputation grew with the few items he had made for friends and family: a kitchen table, some chairs, a workbench, simple projects which hadn’t presented any challenges.
This one was not difficult to make either, but it would be his most important, most worthy of expert talent and extraordinary touch. He would transform the lumber into a crucifix, one of the most sacred of symbols of their faith. He had chosen the most majestic, prodigious pine of the forest. He smiled as he ran his hands down the smooth wood and envisioned it evolving from what it was now to what it would become.
The project had been requested by his father, el Hermano Mayor, the highest-ranking brother of the lay confraternity known as los Hermanos Penitentes, the Penitent Brothers. The brotherhood, existing in some Spanish-speaking cultures around the world, was especially active in northern New Mexico in the early nineteen hundreds. Known for their leadership of rural communities in both service and religion, they also piqued public interest because of their spiritual rituals enacted behind the locked doors of their moradas, prayer houses. Because non-members were excluded, sensationalistic rumors spread that they did unspeakable things in the name of self-penance. On Holy Thursday every Lent, one brother played the part of Christ and carried the crucifix from the morada to the cemetery where the road was lined with descansos, small pillars of rock, for each station of the cross. This re-enactment, attended by the community, played into people’s imaginations about what los Hermanos did to themselves on those Lenten nights behind closed doors.
The cross they had carried until now had exhausted its purpose after decades of use, which was why Matías’ father wanted a replacement. Matías knew his creation would be the focal point of everyone’s eyes on that Jueves Santo, and he was determined it would be his best work yet. Nothing could be more sacred, though carving his own cross to carry in processions when his time to be initiated into the brotherhood would be a close second.
Every day after school, Matías retreated to his shed to work on his project, talking to the seven-foot-long and heavy board that would be the pillar the Hermano playing the part of Christ would carry on his back.
“You will be a masterpiece,” Matías told the post. “You will play an important role in the brotherhood’s processions. You will draw the eyes of everyone.”
He didn’t know his words penetrated the very heart that was left intact of the original giant of the forest. The heat his fingers felt coming from the wood as he rubbed it smooth with sandpaper he attributed to the friction. He didn’t know the lumber vibrated inside with the pleasure it retained from knowing it would have a special purpose.
Matías took his time fashioning the cross with his special touch and attention to detail, hand-carving scenes from the stations along the front and back of the cross-sections. No one had asked for these features, but he answered a compelling need inside himself to supply los Hermanos with a crucifix worthy of them. To Matías, los Hermanos deserved his reverence. He felt they were the closest to the apostles any human on earth could hope to reach. His self-doubts about his worthiness to become one of them became the conflict he struggled with internally and most intensely over the past year. He knew his time was close to becoming one of them, but he couldn’t see himself as deserving of the honor, not with his flaws.
Right before Lent, Matías called his father to the shed and showed off the finished product. Señor De la Cruz, tears brimming over, could find no words to express what his heart felt at the sight. The workmanship of his son’s artistry would suit the brotherhood’s needs for many years to come.
“Bien hecho,” el Hermano Mayor said, looking close up at the intricate details of the scenes etched into the wood. “We will have the padre bless it next time he gives mass.”
Matías nodded, but inside his body quaked with the approval in those two curt words:
Well done. A second later, the unspoken question in his father’s eyes turned him cold: Will you be ready to join us this year?
Matías watched his father carrying the crucifix over his shoulder to deposit it in the wagon for the short ride to the chapel midway between the cemetery and the prayer house where it would stand in a corner to await its blessing. The voice in his head echoed the question. Will you? It will symbolize your emergence into manhood from childhood. Are you ready?
This one was not difficult to make either, but it would be his most important, most worthy of expert talent and extraordinary touch. He would transform the lumber into a crucifix, one of the most sacred of symbols of their faith. He had chosen the most majestic, prodigious pine of the forest. He smiled as he ran his hands down the smooth wood and envisioned it evolving from what it was now to what it would become.
The project had been requested by his father, el Hermano Mayor, the highest-ranking brother of the lay confraternity known as los Hermanos Penitentes, the Penitent Brothers. The brotherhood, existing in some Spanish-speaking cultures around the world, was especially active in northern New Mexico in the early nineteen hundreds. Known for their leadership of rural communities in both service and religion, they also piqued public interest because of their spiritual rituals enacted behind the locked doors of their moradas, prayer houses. Because non-members were excluded, sensationalistic rumors spread that they did unspeakable things in the name of self-penance. On Holy Thursday every Lent, one brother played the part of Christ and carried the crucifix from the morada to the cemetery where the road was lined with descansos, small pillars of rock, for each station of the cross. This re-enactment, attended by the community, played into people’s imaginations about what los Hermanos did to themselves on those Lenten nights behind closed doors.
The cross they had carried until now had exhausted its purpose after decades of use, which was why Matías’ father wanted a replacement. Matías knew his creation would be the focal point of everyone’s eyes on that Jueves Santo, and he was determined it would be his best work yet. Nothing could be more sacred, though carving his own cross to carry in processions when his time to be initiated into the brotherhood would be a close second.
Every day after school, Matías retreated to his shed to work on his project, talking to the seven-foot-long and heavy board that would be the pillar the Hermano playing the part of Christ would carry on his back.
“You will be a masterpiece,” Matías told the post. “You will play an important role in the brotherhood’s processions. You will draw the eyes of everyone.”
He didn’t know his words penetrated the very heart that was left intact of the original giant of the forest. The heat his fingers felt coming from the wood as he rubbed it smooth with sandpaper he attributed to the friction. He didn’t know the lumber vibrated inside with the pleasure it retained from knowing it would have a special purpose.
Matías took his time fashioning the cross with his special touch and attention to detail, hand-carving scenes from the stations along the front and back of the cross-sections. No one had asked for these features, but he answered a compelling need inside himself to supply los Hermanos with a crucifix worthy of them. To Matías, los Hermanos deserved his reverence. He felt they were the closest to the apostles any human on earth could hope to reach. His self-doubts about his worthiness to become one of them became the conflict he struggled with internally and most intensely over the past year. He knew his time was close to becoming one of them, but he couldn’t see himself as deserving of the honor, not with his flaws.
Right before Lent, Matías called his father to the shed and showed off the finished product. Señor De la Cruz, tears brimming over, could find no words to express what his heart felt at the sight. The workmanship of his son’s artistry would suit the brotherhood’s needs for many years to come.
“Bien hecho,” el Hermano Mayor said, looking close up at the intricate details of the scenes etched into the wood. “We will have the padre bless it next time he gives mass.”
Matías nodded, but inside his body quaked with the approval in those two curt words:
Well done. A second later, the unspoken question in his father’s eyes turned him cold: Will you be ready to join us this year?
Matías watched his father carrying the crucifix over his shoulder to deposit it in the wagon for the short ride to the chapel midway between the cemetery and the prayer house where it would stand in a corner to await its blessing. The voice in his head echoed the question. Will you? It will symbolize your emergence into manhood from childhood. Are you ready?
#
The double doors of the capilla closed, pulled shut by the hands of el Hermano Mayor, the lock clicking into place before he removed the key. The interior lay in the muted sunlight coming in through hand-made curtains with crocheted hems. I came to awareness there in an atmosphere of silence meant for introspection and devout prayer. I stood to the right of the entry beside a large bin of wood filled and ready to feed the box stove in the center of the space between door and pews. A wide aisle between two columns of wooden pews led to the altar. Saints, crosses, candles, and statues of Mother and Child, Mother holding dying Son, and various other religious relics stood in no particular pattern. The rustic simplicity pleased me. There was a sacredness to the place, a peace I missed from when I towered atop the mountain.
The day I was brought down, I ascertained I was now at the bottom in the valley I had viewed every day. Day after day, the young man laid his hands on me in one way or another, with a small ax and wood carving tools, sandpaper, a soft cloth. His confident touch gave me no apprehension. I knew whatever he did to me would be pleasing to the eye. The young carpenter spoke to me as he worked. I knew from his fastidious attention to detail and his scrutiny of his handiwork I was intended for a special purpose. I tried to make him feel the joy he gave me by exuding a warmth from deep within me.
Day after day, I looked forward to seeing my visage in the reflection of his eyes. Where before I had been a round trunk of great size, then transformed into long blocks of wood, I was changed again into a cross, some symbol the people seemed to associate with their beliefs in the same power as I. The someone, the all-powerful who created us all. That realization gave me gratification deep in my heart, what was left of me. From a giant of a tree, I emerged as a thing of beauty, intricate carvings adorning my exterior, while the inside of me remained unchanged. I had been grateful to be alive in the shell I had been given and in that place where I spent the first century of life. I was now overjoyed to be of service to man as a symbol of hope for them for however much time I had left.
The heart of me which had been carved by the young man’s hands rejoiced for myself. But my keen sense of empathy allowed me to read into his eyes. They revealed an internal conflict I hoped perhaps to influence into giving him the spiritual awakening he so craved. I had to try; we were bound, he and I. There was no putting it off. It was time for his evolution as it had been mine from the moment he had cut me down.
The day I was brought down, I ascertained I was now at the bottom in the valley I had viewed every day. Day after day, the young man laid his hands on me in one way or another, with a small ax and wood carving tools, sandpaper, a soft cloth. His confident touch gave me no apprehension. I knew whatever he did to me would be pleasing to the eye. The young carpenter spoke to me as he worked. I knew from his fastidious attention to detail and his scrutiny of his handiwork I was intended for a special purpose. I tried to make him feel the joy he gave me by exuding a warmth from deep within me.
Day after day, I looked forward to seeing my visage in the reflection of his eyes. Where before I had been a round trunk of great size, then transformed into long blocks of wood, I was changed again into a cross, some symbol the people seemed to associate with their beliefs in the same power as I. The someone, the all-powerful who created us all. That realization gave me gratification deep in my heart, what was left of me. From a giant of a tree, I emerged as a thing of beauty, intricate carvings adorning my exterior, while the inside of me remained unchanged. I had been grateful to be alive in the shell I had been given and in that place where I spent the first century of life. I was now overjoyed to be of service to man as a symbol of hope for them for however much time I had left.
The heart of me which had been carved by the young man’s hands rejoiced for myself. But my keen sense of empathy allowed me to read into his eyes. They revealed an internal conflict I hoped perhaps to influence into giving him the spiritual awakening he so craved. I had to try; we were bound, he and I. There was no putting it off. It was time for his evolution as it had been mine from the moment he had cut me down.
#
#
Matías accepted the congratulatory handshakes of the community, los Hermanos especially, that next Sunday morning when the parish priest came to give mass. The crucifix had been blessed and carried to the altar as a gift to Santo Niño, for which the chapel had been named. Each man looked him in the eyes as they gripped hands after the mass, and Matías knew they all shared the same inquiry as that of his father. The men lined up to take the cross from the capilla to the morada on foot. They walked down the dirt road in a procession of two rows behind Matías’ father carrying the crosspiece in the lead. They took turns moving up behind him, taking up the bottom of the long, heavy crucifix to lighten his load. He watched for a moment, picturing himself at the end of the procession. Then he left for home with a niggling reminder in his heart that before Lent he had to decide if he was ready for his initiation ceremony.
The cold of February gave way to a warm spell on that Ash Wednesday, the day marking the beginning of Lent. The prayers at the morada held a special significance that year. Matías became an Hermano before the night was over. The initiation he had been anticipating with the dread of the unknown passed instead into an internal satisfaction with himself that he had accepted Christ as his Savior with a deep consciousness of what it entailed. Of course, he had been baptized and confirmed, but he had been only months old and ignorant of the significance. Even his catechism and subsequent communion ceremony had been somewhat superficial, a rite of passage he was required to undergo, with a slightly more depth of understanding as a teen. But becoming an Hermano set him apart from his peers. A certain respect and a reverence for what he represented made even his best friends heed their words and govern their behavior lest they disappoint him. Matías finally understood the significance of his emergence from boy to man.
The cold of February gave way to a warm spell on that Ash Wednesday, the day marking the beginning of Lent. The prayers at the morada held a special significance that year. Matías became an Hermano before the night was over. The initiation he had been anticipating with the dread of the unknown passed instead into an internal satisfaction with himself that he had accepted Christ as his Savior with a deep consciousness of what it entailed. Of course, he had been baptized and confirmed, but he had been only months old and ignorant of the significance. Even his catechism and subsequent communion ceremony had been somewhat superficial, a rite of passage he was required to undergo, with a slightly more depth of understanding as a teen. But becoming an Hermano set him apart from his peers. A certain respect and a reverence for what he represented made even his best friends heed their words and govern their behavior lest they disappoint him. Matías finally understood the significance of his emergence from boy to man.
#
Much time passed as I grew old and weathered. The delicate carving of biblical scenes on my crosspiece had faded with the constant touch of los Hermanos’ hands over the many, many trips of the sun and the moon. While I stood against the back wall of the prayer room in the morada for long periods, I was taken out for special ceremonies. I was the centerpiece of the brotherhood’s attention during a time they called la Cuaresma, Lent. I came to understand when the morada’s doors and windows remained open and the fresh spring breeze blew through the three rooms for that duration, and my core throbbed with renewed energy from the excited noise of the men, women, and children of the community.
Each Lent I looked forward to a special day they called Jueves Santo when an Hermano carried me at the front of a procession from the morada to the capilla, the campo santo, and then back again. I was the center of every eye on this day, and I sensed my importance more, but not in a self-aggrandizing way. It was a deep honor to be a part of the community. I knew I symbolized something great, something beyond my ken.
But this afternoon, with Matías now an old man at the edge of passing into the afterlife, carrying the cross despite his brothers’ protests, I sensed this day would end unexpectedly. The old Hermano bore the brunt of my weight on his shoulders and upper back, but it was made more bearable by his brothers. They shuffled along close by, shifting one out for the other after every Station of the Cross when they stopped to kneel in the dirt and pray. In this manner, each brother held the cross, three at a time beside and behind Matías, and all shared the burden of man’s sins as they walked.
A short rest after they returned to the chapel preceded the brothers finishing the procession to the morada where they ate their last supper together and prayed behind the locked doors. I had seen the Verónicas who came when the men rested earlier to leave pots kept warm on the stove and dishes filled with food, the table laid, and the rooms spotless. The women’s society—the wives, mothers, sisters of los Hermanos—served as an auxiliary to the brotherhood with their own leader and rules of conduct. They were freer in their discourse around me than the men when they cleaned the prayer house, and I was privy to their thoughts more than those of los Hermanos.
They and the rest of the community members were invited to attend the final ceremony
marking Christ’s last day on earth. The people walked by lantern from their homes to the morada. I remember seeing this display of bobbing illuminations from the mountain top. Groups and lines of lights traveled winding paths, single shining dots joined them at junctures, and the large body of lights made its way to the morada where I stood at the front of the altar with Santa Muerte to my left. The carved effigy sat perpetually poised in a small picket fence enclosure with an arrow pointed at any who stood before her. She faced me across the room every day since my usual location was against the opposite wall from her.
In the darkest hour of the night, the ceremony began with the lighting of thirteen candles placed along a triangular-shaped candelabra about five feet long standing on a four-foot-high pedestal. The candles, symbolic of Christ and His twelve apostles, illuminated the room with a soft, deceptive peace. We all knew the flames would be extinguished one by one, plunging us into the deepest black both physically and spiritually, evoking a most intense personal penance.
This was the most horrible and holy of nights, Las Tinieblas, the Earthquake Ceremony. It took us all back in time to listen and to participate in our own ways. Each attendee, whether Hermano, a Verónica, or layperson, chose the method best for them to experience with most poignancy the night of Christ’s death. Following each prayer, the mournful chanting of the alabados, like dirges, sent chills up our spines.
“Mother Mary, look at Your Son…see the cross on His shoulders…His body bathed in blood…His head crowned with thorns…His final day has come…”
I felt the human pain as I envisioned the scenes of that day in the flickering of the candles on the walls. As though they cast shadows of those acts so many years before on the night of Christ’s death, those humans felt the pain of culpability which they projected toward me, the physical cause of their Maker’s mortal suffering.
Since my evolution, I had felt revered by the community. Only on the nights in all those years of performing Las Tinieblas was I made to feel abhorrent. I deflected their pain, accepting the reverence they also felt deep inside. I was a symbol of death, but also of the redeeming Passion and resurrection. I stood tall as after each alabado, a candle was extinguished. The act brought more darkness into the room as though it physically and slowly wrapped a shawl over us all or perhaps a death shroud, I ascertained after this night.
By midnight, we would experience His descent into hell when the last candle went out. The complete and utter darkness of the shuttered room, cloying with the scent of wax and incense, stifling with the fifty or sixty people crammed into the rooms—all contributed to the atmosphere of hell. The human wails and swift whooshes of whips, snapping and striking skin, the rapid turning of the multiple and different sized matracas, the noisy clackers, made the ears hurt. The cacophony symbolic of the chaos that is hell lasted only minutes, but always, always penetrated my heart, the heart of the tree I once was.
Our internal pain made worse by the doleful alabados, sung by los Hermanos, sent many of the women into tears. The children cried because their mothers did, and I thought perhaps they too sensed the solemnity of the ritual in their own ways. Then by some unspoken signal I didn’t understand, all quieted. One by one, the candles’ flames brought light and peace into the room, kerosene lanterns were lit, children quieted at mothers’ shushes, and deep breaths restored life to the prayer house. Quiet conversation, some with nervous, shaking voices, commenced.
Usually, no one lingered. The rooms were straightened out, the fires banked, candles and lanterns extinguished for the last time that night. The Hermano Mayor locked the door, and the humans left me alone again in the dark with la Muerte on her stool directly across from me.
This night was an anomaly I hope I never witness again. Bittersweet with great sadness and joyful rejoicing, the end of another beginning had started sometime during our clamorous man-made hell. Matías had evolved for the final time. Santa Muerte had aimed and penetrated the heart of the old man. But it was I who caused his death. Although it pained me greatly to know I played a crucial role in transforming him, I acknowledged our connection had been inevitable.
He had changed me for good, and I had repaid him by transforming him into something better. The wailing and the praying commenced. The fast preparations for the wake of the long night ahead ensued. I observed from my place in back of the prayer room, but I knew only the shell of the man remained. I knew Matías had already emerged from the morada with wings.
Each Lent I looked forward to a special day they called Jueves Santo when an Hermano carried me at the front of a procession from the morada to the capilla, the campo santo, and then back again. I was the center of every eye on this day, and I sensed my importance more, but not in a self-aggrandizing way. It was a deep honor to be a part of the community. I knew I symbolized something great, something beyond my ken.
But this afternoon, with Matías now an old man at the edge of passing into the afterlife, carrying the cross despite his brothers’ protests, I sensed this day would end unexpectedly. The old Hermano bore the brunt of my weight on his shoulders and upper back, but it was made more bearable by his brothers. They shuffled along close by, shifting one out for the other after every Station of the Cross when they stopped to kneel in the dirt and pray. In this manner, each brother held the cross, three at a time beside and behind Matías, and all shared the burden of man’s sins as they walked.
A short rest after they returned to the chapel preceded the brothers finishing the procession to the morada where they ate their last supper together and prayed behind the locked doors. I had seen the Verónicas who came when the men rested earlier to leave pots kept warm on the stove and dishes filled with food, the table laid, and the rooms spotless. The women’s society—the wives, mothers, sisters of los Hermanos—served as an auxiliary to the brotherhood with their own leader and rules of conduct. They were freer in their discourse around me than the men when they cleaned the prayer house, and I was privy to their thoughts more than those of los Hermanos.
They and the rest of the community members were invited to attend the final ceremony
marking Christ’s last day on earth. The people walked by lantern from their homes to the morada. I remember seeing this display of bobbing illuminations from the mountain top. Groups and lines of lights traveled winding paths, single shining dots joined them at junctures, and the large body of lights made its way to the morada where I stood at the front of the altar with Santa Muerte to my left. The carved effigy sat perpetually poised in a small picket fence enclosure with an arrow pointed at any who stood before her. She faced me across the room every day since my usual location was against the opposite wall from her.
In the darkest hour of the night, the ceremony began with the lighting of thirteen candles placed along a triangular-shaped candelabra about five feet long standing on a four-foot-high pedestal. The candles, symbolic of Christ and His twelve apostles, illuminated the room with a soft, deceptive peace. We all knew the flames would be extinguished one by one, plunging us into the deepest black both physically and spiritually, evoking a most intense personal penance.
This was the most horrible and holy of nights, Las Tinieblas, the Earthquake Ceremony. It took us all back in time to listen and to participate in our own ways. Each attendee, whether Hermano, a Verónica, or layperson, chose the method best for them to experience with most poignancy the night of Christ’s death. Following each prayer, the mournful chanting of the alabados, like dirges, sent chills up our spines.
“Mother Mary, look at Your Son…see the cross on His shoulders…His body bathed in blood…His head crowned with thorns…His final day has come…”
I felt the human pain as I envisioned the scenes of that day in the flickering of the candles on the walls. As though they cast shadows of those acts so many years before on the night of Christ’s death, those humans felt the pain of culpability which they projected toward me, the physical cause of their Maker’s mortal suffering.
Since my evolution, I had felt revered by the community. Only on the nights in all those years of performing Las Tinieblas was I made to feel abhorrent. I deflected their pain, accepting the reverence they also felt deep inside. I was a symbol of death, but also of the redeeming Passion and resurrection. I stood tall as after each alabado, a candle was extinguished. The act brought more darkness into the room as though it physically and slowly wrapped a shawl over us all or perhaps a death shroud, I ascertained after this night.
By midnight, we would experience His descent into hell when the last candle went out. The complete and utter darkness of the shuttered room, cloying with the scent of wax and incense, stifling with the fifty or sixty people crammed into the rooms—all contributed to the atmosphere of hell. The human wails and swift whooshes of whips, snapping and striking skin, the rapid turning of the multiple and different sized matracas, the noisy clackers, made the ears hurt. The cacophony symbolic of the chaos that is hell lasted only minutes, but always, always penetrated my heart, the heart of the tree I once was.
Our internal pain made worse by the doleful alabados, sung by los Hermanos, sent many of the women into tears. The children cried because their mothers did, and I thought perhaps they too sensed the solemnity of the ritual in their own ways. Then by some unspoken signal I didn’t understand, all quieted. One by one, the candles’ flames brought light and peace into the room, kerosene lanterns were lit, children quieted at mothers’ shushes, and deep breaths restored life to the prayer house. Quiet conversation, some with nervous, shaking voices, commenced.
Usually, no one lingered. The rooms were straightened out, the fires banked, candles and lanterns extinguished for the last time that night. The Hermano Mayor locked the door, and the humans left me alone again in the dark with la Muerte on her stool directly across from me.
This night was an anomaly I hope I never witness again. Bittersweet with great sadness and joyful rejoicing, the end of another beginning had started sometime during our clamorous man-made hell. Matías had evolved for the final time. Santa Muerte had aimed and penetrated the heart of the old man. But it was I who caused his death. Although it pained me greatly to know I played a crucial role in transforming him, I acknowledged our connection had been inevitable.
He had changed me for good, and I had repaid him by transforming him into something better. The wailing and the praying commenced. The fast preparations for the wake of the long night ahead ensued. I observed from my place in back of the prayer room, but I knew only the shell of the man remained. I knew Matías had already emerged from the morada with wings.
Carmen Baca retired in 2014 from teaching high school and college English for thirty-six years. Her command of English and use of her regional Spanish dialect contribute to her story-telling style. Her debut novel El Hermano published in April of 2017 and became a finalist in the NM-AZ book awards program in 2018. Her third book, Cuentos del Cañón, received first place for short story fiction anthology in 2020 from the same program. To date, she has published 5 books and close to 50 short works in literary journals, ezines, and anthologies. She and her husband live a quiet life in the country caring for their animals and any stray cat that happens to come by.
2nd place
"Beast of Cabo Rojo"
by Arnaldo Lopez Jr.
"The Beat of Cabo Rojo" appeared earlier this year in Somos en escrito. We enter any Extra Fiction regularly published into that year's contest.
Read:
Part One.
Part Two.
Part Three.
"The Beat of Cabo Rojo" appeared earlier this year in Somos en escrito. We enter any Extra Fiction regularly published into that year's contest.
Read:
Part One.
Part Two.
Part Three.
1st Place Extra Fiction Contest
Attack of Las Quetas
by Toni Margarita Plummer
The dermatologist lifts the gown as she needs to, checking my limbs, my stomach, my back. Her hands are pleasantly cool, and she speaks intermittently of the various marks and spots on my body.
“This is fine.”
“I’m not worried about this.”
When she is finished, I sit up on the crinkly tissue paper and pull the gown closed over my chest. Dr. Baer is attractive, with blond hair, fair skin, and a wide face that needs no makeup. I detect a very slight accent. Maybe Eastern European. She hardly smiles, and I wonder if she thinks Americans like me smile too much.
I first met her two years ago, when I felt something buried in my right palm. She numbed my hand, dug out the mass while I looked away, and stitched me up. When I returned later to have the stitches removed, the nurse praised the perfectly even sutures. Now Dr. Baer has opened up her own office.
“If you come back this month, we’re giving facials half off with all skin cancer screenings.”
I am used to getting my facials done at a salon under the 7 train where a woman threads my eyebrows in quick, heated licks and squeezes the pores on my nose until I want to curse, all for $20 and a tip. Rather than ask the price of the discounted facial, I say, “That’s okay.”
“Just call if you change your mind.” Dr. Baer zeroes in on my face. “I see some extractions I could make.”
I nod politely, sure I will not call. The word “extraction” takes me back to geology class, where we learned about removing things from the ground, usually valuable things.
“What about these?” She catches me off-guard, her hand moving to my neck. “Have you thought of removing them?”
My hand follows hers, finding the familiar nubs. It had not occurred to me to ever ask a doctor about my longtime skin malady.
“Insurance wouldn’t cover it because it’s cosmetic, but I could remove them for $100. I’d freeze them off. You have a lot so we could do it over two visits.”
I have not been keeping up with my neck situation, and the idea of having someone else take care of it is appealing. I agree, and she finally smiles.
***
I don’t remember when they first appeared. But one day I must have noticed them. Then I noticed the necks of my great aunts, which were spotted with dark pouches of skin, some quite plump and shiny like rubber. Las tías were sedentary women, keeping to the shade during family parties, sometimes erupting into cackles over a joke in Spanish I did not understand. I spoke little to them, my mother serving as the link between generations by handing me clothes they had crocheted for my dolls and telling me to say gracias.
Mamá’s neck was also afflicted, but I learned she had a way of dealing with it. She began sitting me down at the kitchen table every several months. She would pull out a long, dark hair from her hairbrush and make a slipknot. I’d tip my head back, exposing my neck like a supplicant of Dracula, and she would slip the hair-lasso over one of the little sacs and pull until it stung. I was always happy to feel that sting. It meant she’d caught one. She’d pull more hairs from the brush and tie up the rest, whichever ones were not too small and close to the skin. And then she’d take the scissors and snip the ends of the hairs so they wouldn’t hang so long. Out in public, I would cover my neck, and over a few days the strangled sacs would harden, go dark. It was easy then to pinch them off. Sometimes I would drive my nail through their centers and feel them come apart like earth.
Some might call them skin tags. A date I had in college called them growths. You could even call them tumors, technically. But I always preferred my mother’s word for them—las quetas. Short for etiquetas de la piel. I led a mostly English life, but that was one of the words I did not translate.
I accepted las quetas as my inheritance, like my dark, straight hair and long eyelashes. They were passed down through generations of women. Women of Mexican extraction.
***
Mamá did not want me to move out. She thought I should live with her until I got married, whenever that might be, like my engaged brother was. But I was eager to be out on my own. In my new apartment, I tried to do what my mother did and tend to my quetas like weeds in a garden. But I did not know how to do a slipknot. Foolishly, I double-knotted my ties, an inferior method. The hairs came undone before I even got in the shower. Most of las quetas were impossible for me to grab hold of in the first place, because of the incompatible angle of my hands and neck. I’d stand in front of the mirror, frustrated at another failed attempt, longing for Mamá’s hands at the same time I cursed this trait. I was reluctant to ask her for help. The ritual tying of las quetas was never scheduled. It was just something that happened when we were both home at night. She would gather her supplies and beckon me, “Míramos tus quetas.” And the reason I was not home at night anymore was because I had chosen to leave, against her wishes.
The proliferation of las quetas weighed on me. I would find myself tugging on them. They itched. I considered simply cutting them with scissors. But when I raised the blades to my skin, I imagined a fount of blood pouring out my neck, saw myself passed out on the floor, my unsympathetic landlord standing over my body and telling himself he would keep my deposit.
My brother’s wedding was in a few months, and he had cruelly informed me that las quetas could not count as my anonymous plus one. So Dr. Baer’s offer was well-timed. That is what I thought at first.
***
For the first round of cryotherapy, Dr. Baer approaches me with a pressurized metal can. She aims the little straw pointing out of it like a gun. “Ready?”
She said we were freezing them, but it burns. It burns like hell. I am grateful I won’t have to endure the scorching of them all in one visit. My neck on fire, my mind turns to thrift. There doesn’t seem to be much technique involved. I try to sneak glances at the lettering on the can. Is this something I can buy myself and enlist a twisted friend to wield?
“All right. You’re all set. You can make the next appointment a few weeks from today.”
“Will there be scaring?” It’s a silly question coming after the fact, but I can’t help myself.
“There shouldn’t be. But if there is, I can take care of that too.”
Back in the waiting room, I see myself in the mirror. The red-hot riot of my neck. Mamá’s tying was a gentle smothering by comparison. This is something different. It is chemical warfare. It is cigarette burns. My neck is inflamed, but the result is the same. Over a few days, las quetas harden and fall off. A smooth neck is within reach.
***
The second visit begins like the first. It is no less painful, and I find it hard to believe there are still so many left.
Finally Dr. Baer steps back. “One more to go.” She hands me a mirror and points at the brown spot just below my collarbone.
“Is that one of them?” I ask, feeling the familiar bump. The skin is slightly raised there, the spot shaped like a cameo. It is nothing like the ones on my neck. There is no stalk, nothing to pull.
Dr. Baer nods, her blue eyes boring into mine.
I imagine how the burn will feel there, on my chest, but I also think of that mark missing. It’s the mark I see in the mirror every day, in pictures of myself. For it to disappear… “No thank you, I need to keep that one.”
She watches me, and I instinctively finger my remaining queta, protective.
At last she sighs, as though she is the one who has been getting her neck singed the past fifteen minutes, and sets the can back on the counter. “You’re all done.”
***
I know my future sister-in-law’s favorite color is red, but a red bridesmaid dress strikes me as tacky. Make it red tulle on red satin, and you have something unholy.
The dresses are sleeveless, so we wear tulle shawls to cover our bare shoulders during the church ceremony. In the church restroom, I remove the itchy fabric, glad to be free of it. But my relief vanishes when I see my neck has broken out in some kind of rash. It must be the cheap fabric of the shawl. We’re about to take group photos, so I have but little choice to redon the offensive garment. A rashy neck would not be tolerated.
We arrive at the reception hall for cocktail hour, and my neck is flaming. I don’t want to remove the shawl though. I don’t want to draw attention to myself. I flee to the restroom, certain I am breaking out in hives. There I see it’s worse than I feared. I am bright red, and not just that, but I see something small, something brown on my neck. It can’t be, I think. They were all gone. But it’s there, and as I watch it, it grows.
I think I must be seeing things. But la queta is there, and it is becoming too big to be imagined. Panicked, I run into a stall and sit on the toilet seat. Someone knocks on the door.
“Estás bien?” My eardrums are pounding with blood, and I can’t even make out the voice.
“Sí! I’m fine!” I am not fine, but what can I say? I nuked my quetas and now they are returning to exact revenge?
La queta continues to balloon. I can feel it. I will die here, I know. I will die a virgin sitting on a toilet in an unbecoming dress. La queta will grow until it absorbs me, the lesser lifeform.
But the stall door bursts open. There stand las tías, and by their faces I can tell they mean business. Without hesitation, one punctures the giant queta with her crochet needle while another ropes it with a loop of yarn and the rest of the women yank. I think I am going to pass out from terror when there is a deafening pop and blood splatters us all. Grasping my neck, I look down to see the severed queta lying on the floor.
My mother steps out from behind las tías and looks at it on the tile. “There is more than one way to skin a cat.”
“How did you know?” I ask, gasping, incredulous.
Tia Meche, the eldest, scoffs. “Mi’ja, tú eres una de nosotras. No necesitas decir nada.”
Mamá pulls me out of the stall and holds my hands out to the sides. “At least the blood blends in with your dress.” Las tías start to cackle.
The dermatologist lifts the gown as she needs to, checking my limbs, my stomach, my back. Her hands are pleasantly cool, and she speaks intermittently of the various marks and spots on my body.
“This is fine.”
“I’m not worried about this.”
When she is finished, I sit up on the crinkly tissue paper and pull the gown closed over my chest. Dr. Baer is attractive, with blond hair, fair skin, and a wide face that needs no makeup. I detect a very slight accent. Maybe Eastern European. She hardly smiles, and I wonder if she thinks Americans like me smile too much.
I first met her two years ago, when I felt something buried in my right palm. She numbed my hand, dug out the mass while I looked away, and stitched me up. When I returned later to have the stitches removed, the nurse praised the perfectly even sutures. Now Dr. Baer has opened up her own office.
“If you come back this month, we’re giving facials half off with all skin cancer screenings.”
I am used to getting my facials done at a salon under the 7 train where a woman threads my eyebrows in quick, heated licks and squeezes the pores on my nose until I want to curse, all for $20 and a tip. Rather than ask the price of the discounted facial, I say, “That’s okay.”
“Just call if you change your mind.” Dr. Baer zeroes in on my face. “I see some extractions I could make.”
I nod politely, sure I will not call. The word “extraction” takes me back to geology class, where we learned about removing things from the ground, usually valuable things.
“What about these?” She catches me off-guard, her hand moving to my neck. “Have you thought of removing them?”
My hand follows hers, finding the familiar nubs. It had not occurred to me to ever ask a doctor about my longtime skin malady.
“Insurance wouldn’t cover it because it’s cosmetic, but I could remove them for $100. I’d freeze them off. You have a lot so we could do it over two visits.”
I have not been keeping up with my neck situation, and the idea of having someone else take care of it is appealing. I agree, and she finally smiles.
***
I don’t remember when they first appeared. But one day I must have noticed them. Then I noticed the necks of my great aunts, which were spotted with dark pouches of skin, some quite plump and shiny like rubber. Las tías were sedentary women, keeping to the shade during family parties, sometimes erupting into cackles over a joke in Spanish I did not understand. I spoke little to them, my mother serving as the link between generations by handing me clothes they had crocheted for my dolls and telling me to say gracias.
Mamá’s neck was also afflicted, but I learned she had a way of dealing with it. She began sitting me down at the kitchen table every several months. She would pull out a long, dark hair from her hairbrush and make a slipknot. I’d tip my head back, exposing my neck like a supplicant of Dracula, and she would slip the hair-lasso over one of the little sacs and pull until it stung. I was always happy to feel that sting. It meant she’d caught one. She’d pull more hairs from the brush and tie up the rest, whichever ones were not too small and close to the skin. And then she’d take the scissors and snip the ends of the hairs so they wouldn’t hang so long. Out in public, I would cover my neck, and over a few days the strangled sacs would harden, go dark. It was easy then to pinch them off. Sometimes I would drive my nail through their centers and feel them come apart like earth.
Some might call them skin tags. A date I had in college called them growths. You could even call them tumors, technically. But I always preferred my mother’s word for them—las quetas. Short for etiquetas de la piel. I led a mostly English life, but that was one of the words I did not translate.
I accepted las quetas as my inheritance, like my dark, straight hair and long eyelashes. They were passed down through generations of women. Women of Mexican extraction.
***
Mamá did not want me to move out. She thought I should live with her until I got married, whenever that might be, like my engaged brother was. But I was eager to be out on my own. In my new apartment, I tried to do what my mother did and tend to my quetas like weeds in a garden. But I did not know how to do a slipknot. Foolishly, I double-knotted my ties, an inferior method. The hairs came undone before I even got in the shower. Most of las quetas were impossible for me to grab hold of in the first place, because of the incompatible angle of my hands and neck. I’d stand in front of the mirror, frustrated at another failed attempt, longing for Mamá’s hands at the same time I cursed this trait. I was reluctant to ask her for help. The ritual tying of las quetas was never scheduled. It was just something that happened when we were both home at night. She would gather her supplies and beckon me, “Míramos tus quetas.” And the reason I was not home at night anymore was because I had chosen to leave, against her wishes.
The proliferation of las quetas weighed on me. I would find myself tugging on them. They itched. I considered simply cutting them with scissors. But when I raised the blades to my skin, I imagined a fount of blood pouring out my neck, saw myself passed out on the floor, my unsympathetic landlord standing over my body and telling himself he would keep my deposit.
My brother’s wedding was in a few months, and he had cruelly informed me that las quetas could not count as my anonymous plus one. So Dr. Baer’s offer was well-timed. That is what I thought at first.
***
For the first round of cryotherapy, Dr. Baer approaches me with a pressurized metal can. She aims the little straw pointing out of it like a gun. “Ready?”
She said we were freezing them, but it burns. It burns like hell. I am grateful I won’t have to endure the scorching of them all in one visit. My neck on fire, my mind turns to thrift. There doesn’t seem to be much technique involved. I try to sneak glances at the lettering on the can. Is this something I can buy myself and enlist a twisted friend to wield?
“All right. You’re all set. You can make the next appointment a few weeks from today.”
“Will there be scaring?” It’s a silly question coming after the fact, but I can’t help myself.
“There shouldn’t be. But if there is, I can take care of that too.”
Back in the waiting room, I see myself in the mirror. The red-hot riot of my neck. Mamá’s tying was a gentle smothering by comparison. This is something different. It is chemical warfare. It is cigarette burns. My neck is inflamed, but the result is the same. Over a few days, las quetas harden and fall off. A smooth neck is within reach.
***
The second visit begins like the first. It is no less painful, and I find it hard to believe there are still so many left.
Finally Dr. Baer steps back. “One more to go.” She hands me a mirror and points at the brown spot just below my collarbone.
“Is that one of them?” I ask, feeling the familiar bump. The skin is slightly raised there, the spot shaped like a cameo. It is nothing like the ones on my neck. There is no stalk, nothing to pull.
Dr. Baer nods, her blue eyes boring into mine.
I imagine how the burn will feel there, on my chest, but I also think of that mark missing. It’s the mark I see in the mirror every day, in pictures of myself. For it to disappear… “No thank you, I need to keep that one.”
She watches me, and I instinctively finger my remaining queta, protective.
At last she sighs, as though she is the one who has been getting her neck singed the past fifteen minutes, and sets the can back on the counter. “You’re all done.”
***
I know my future sister-in-law’s favorite color is red, but a red bridesmaid dress strikes me as tacky. Make it red tulle on red satin, and you have something unholy.
The dresses are sleeveless, so we wear tulle shawls to cover our bare shoulders during the church ceremony. In the church restroom, I remove the itchy fabric, glad to be free of it. But my relief vanishes when I see my neck has broken out in some kind of rash. It must be the cheap fabric of the shawl. We’re about to take group photos, so I have but little choice to redon the offensive garment. A rashy neck would not be tolerated.
We arrive at the reception hall for cocktail hour, and my neck is flaming. I don’t want to remove the shawl though. I don’t want to draw attention to myself. I flee to the restroom, certain I am breaking out in hives. There I see it’s worse than I feared. I am bright red, and not just that, but I see something small, something brown on my neck. It can’t be, I think. They were all gone. But it’s there, and as I watch it, it grows.
I think I must be seeing things. But la queta is there, and it is becoming too big to be imagined. Panicked, I run into a stall and sit on the toilet seat. Someone knocks on the door.
“Estás bien?” My eardrums are pounding with blood, and I can’t even make out the voice.
“Sí! I’m fine!” I am not fine, but what can I say? I nuked my quetas and now they are returning to exact revenge?
La queta continues to balloon. I can feel it. I will die here, I know. I will die a virgin sitting on a toilet in an unbecoming dress. La queta will grow until it absorbs me, the lesser lifeform.
But the stall door bursts open. There stand las tías, and by their faces I can tell they mean business. Without hesitation, one punctures the giant queta with her crochet needle while another ropes it with a loop of yarn and the rest of the women yank. I think I am going to pass out from terror when there is a deafening pop and blood splatters us all. Grasping my neck, I look down to see the severed queta lying on the floor.
My mother steps out from behind las tías and looks at it on the tile. “There is more than one way to skin a cat.”
“How did you know?” I ask, gasping, incredulous.
Tia Meche, the eldest, scoffs. “Mi’ja, tú eres una de nosotras. No necesitas decir nada.”
Mamá pulls me out of the stall and holds my hands out to the sides. “At least the blood blends in with your dress.” Las tías start to cackle.
Toni Margarita Plummer was born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles, the daughter of a Mexican immigrant mother and white father. She is the author of the story collection The Bolero of Andi Rowe, won Honorable Mention for the 2019 Reynolds Price Prize in Fiction given by the Center for Women Writers, and was a finalist for the inaugural Tomas Rivera Book Prize. A Macondo Fellow and graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC, she is a contributor to the anthologies East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte and Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity. Plummer lives in the Hudson Valley.
Extra Extra Fiction!
Of the 2019 contest's two honorary mentions, the judge Ernest Hogan said:
"My Many Faces by Venetia Sjogren provides a snapshot of a Latinx identity crisis, and Nous Somme Dans Une Texte by David Vela presents a Latinx in Paris, a fish out of water, as are we all. The both deserve their honorable mentions."
Check out the rest of the judges thoughts on the contest at La Bloga at Hogan's column Chicanonautica, for all things Latinoid and Science Fiction.
"My Many Faces by Venetia Sjogren provides a snapshot of a Latinx identity crisis, and Nous Somme Dans Une Texte by David Vela presents a Latinx in Paris, a fish out of water, as are we all. The both deserve their honorable mentions."
Check out the rest of the judges thoughts on the contest at La Bloga at Hogan's column Chicanonautica, for all things Latinoid and Science Fiction.
My Many Faces
by Venetia Sjogren
I have many faces. Some I hide and keep stuffed way, way down. Sometimes, I remove the civilized veneer and let them all hang-out, when I have stopped caring. At times they stage a revolution, hijack my keyboard, and type god-awful crap.
Varda Chaya- she is the Jewish apostate who mocks all religions, all belief systems, indeed all tribal affiliations. Descended from Swedish berserkers, African slaves, native American savages, and the conquistadores, she is fatigued by all of the global tribal violence that has been part and parcel, of human history. She wishes that people would just "get over it". She wants the Palestinians to "get over it". The Israelis to "get over it". The Africans to "get over it". Native Americans to "get over it". Whatever people are claiming "it" is that prevents them from moving past their tribal loyalties, Varda Chaya wants them to "get over it". She would like the world to focus instead on preserving the species before humans end up extinct, like the dinosaurs. She would like to prevent the rats, roaches and paramecium from inheriting the world and their future scientist from digging through midden heaps to reconstruct humans past and discover how we fucked up. Varda Chaya wants the world to focus on global warming, health care, education, and non-violence. She wants the world to get their shit together. Varda Chaya wants a better world for all.
Vic - he is the eternal rocker. The one who invested mucho dinero on sound equipment, speakers, microphones and Fender Strats. The one who found peace and a slice of heaven in power chords, Carlos Santana and ganja. He was the one who was so laid-back-mellow that his heart beat was barely measurable. He viewed the world through rock and roll and playing elusive, death defying chords. Vic had a "live and let live" kinda attitude. He felt that if everyone lit up a doobie, they would stop wasting their time, trying to kill folks that were different. His main goal in life was seeking that elusive combination of chords that would lift a song from mediocre to the sublime. Too bad that a 9 - 5er was required in order to provide his kids with such mundane things as food, clothing and shelter. After-all, children can survive without such things. Right? Vic now sits in the back of Vee's head, a cheapo Bic lighter eternally lit, nodding off to Bon Jovi, Metallica and Heart, while smoking a little mary-jane. Incidentally, Vic discovered that mary-jane is good for Vee's multiple sclerosis pain. Too bad the drug companies managed to strong-arm the feds into keeping it away, from folks suffering chronic pain. Imagine not having to spend hundreds of dollars on vicodin, fentanyl, other addictive opiates and growing what you need, on your window sill...
Venice - is Vic's twin. Like Vic, she found her peace in music, dressing the part in Stevie Nicks-like lacy blouses and maxi skirts, with long flowing tresses. She strummed her lute, acoustic and rhythm guitars, while relocating from one-to-city to another, with Vic. But unlike Vic, who loved Fenders, she had a fondness for Gibson guitars. She wrote sonnets, composed lovey-dovey songs similar to "We are the World" and "Blowin in the Wind', painted beautiful sunsets and bowls of fruit, while dreaming dreamy thoughts while high on Quaaludes and other mood enhancing drugs. Venice never gave up her artistic endeavors as she aged and when multiple sclerosis crippled Vee's fingers, voice and eyes, she switched to writing poetry and blogging. Our Venice is always optimistic. There is always a silver lining in the clouds. Of course, to her, tornado, earthquakes and hurricanes are beautiful also.
Victoria - she is the good child, the obedient child, eternally trapped prepubescent girl; at times quiet and withdrawn. Victoria is the face of a bourgeoisie, indulged and beloved child. Ostensibly living and reaping the benefits of the “good life”. She is the recipient of private schools, and epicurean cuisine. She has the "right" kind of friends, the "right" stylish clothes, parrots the "right" conserative, vanilla politics and listens only to the “right” kind music such as opera, classical and religious compositions. Victoria is amused (in a bleak sort of way) that her friends envy her life. They are unaware that she had been abandoned by family and friends to reside in a world, where daddy snuck in her room at night. Where Step-Mommy pounded her body and psyche (for being the other woman when she caught her husband molesting Victoria). She has earned to hate her body and her beauty. She has learned how to temporarily, disassociate herself from pain. She has learned how people can murder, without spilling a drop of blood. And finally, she has learned that love is just another word and an excuse to justify the evil things, one inflicts on a child. Vee built a room around Victoria and threw away the key but Victoria's silent screaming always unlocks the enclosure. This silence is LOUD. It is explosive. It is filled with murderous rage. Frequently, Victoria and Venice collaborate and write poetry but Victoria in her quiet, unassuming manner is too powerful. Her voiceless screams always grasps control of all their endeavors. The resultant poetry ends up being bleak and black, and Venice is left in a corner, wringing her ineffectual hands, while whining that she wanted to write about beauty and flowers, not pain and suffering. Victoria always ends up telling Venice to be quiet and "get real". Politely, of course.
Venom - is the bitch. She wishes everyone would just shut the fuck up. Or get the fuck outa her face. What she really want is for everyone to leave her the fuck alone. She loves the "F" word. She finds that it is the best all-around word to describe every situation. Unlike Varda Chaya (who she regards as being a confused mongrel) and Vic and Venice (who she regards as being totally useless) Venom considers human beings to be a blight on Mother Terra. She knows that the world is fucked up and would be a better place sans man. Victoria, at times, agrees with her. Vic, Venice and Varda Chaya are appalled so they keep her sedated. In fact, Venom is suicidal and has almost succeeded in killing herself but for some fucked up reason, doctors have managed to save her life, each time. Vic, Victoria and Venice secretly wish that she had succeeded.
Cassandra Rodriguez - likes to be called Cha Cha and is quite frankly rather free with her body. She has sex with anyone. Nubile boys and very attractive women. Old rich men. Anyone. She enjoys thinking that she is a genius and is always trying to create get rich schemes. Cha Cha believes immediately a man desires her if he simply says “hello” and has convinced herself that she is irresistible. She is morbidly obese, dresses in clothes that are both too tight and meant for teenage girls. She has a Marilyn Monroe, fake-like manner of speaking (she think that she sounds sexy and provocative) and has bleached her hair white, wears blue contacts and teeter-totters on four inch high heels. Even to go to the market. The neighbors enjoy talking about her and frequently mock Cha Cha. Even to her face. However, she believes that she is well-liked. She leaves her children at home to get by as best as they can but considers herself a “good and loving mommy”. Her eldest daughter, has been raising the three younger children, since she was 14 years-old. Cha Cha goes out clubbing and drinking every night, buys clothes for herself, while her children are dressed in clothing from second-hand stores or donated to her by neighbors. Her ex-husband sends child support faithfully, but Cha Cha spends the money foolishly.
Vincenzo Miquel de la Cruz - for the sake of brevity, let's call him Vinnie. He is the ultimate Western patriot. The epitome of cultured conservatism.The gentleman warrior. He was raised to believe in god, country and flag. He was raised to believe in freedom, democracy and bringing these values to the little brown, yellow and red peoples of the world as they labor on concentration camps also known as plantations, factories and warehouses, while manufacturing televisions, computers, radios and other assorted goodies. Vinnie also believes in preserving and protecting the borders of his country, by building walls. Building very big walls. Patrolled by gringo men, with big guns to keep out all the dirty little campesinos. Vinnie however, does not understand why these little brown, yellow and red men do not love and embrace him and his values. Varda Chaya, Venice and Vic despise him but are also frightened by him. Victoria understands him, since she understands hate, very well. Venom hates him, but then again, she hates everyone. Vee has succeeded him subduing him (most of the time). But like a badly tarnished penny, he returns when one least expects him, when issues like illegal immigration and slave reparations are discussed. Vincenzo really does not give a shit what Vee, Vic, Victoria, Venice and Varda Chaya thinks of him. In fact, he would like to stick them on one of his cocoa plantations or sneaker manufacturing plants. Venom amuses him.
Vee - then we have Vee. Abuelita, mother, human, poet, musician, artist and former Catholic, and apostate Jew. She says her favorite religion/fable is Judaism. Sick and in constant pain. Life has been kicking her in the ass, for a long damn time. She feels tired and old. Tired of pain. Tired of medicines. Tired of tests and needles. Tired of doctors. Just plain ole tired.
when dreams die a sordid death
darkness banishes all light
Orpheus can be heard snickering
softly stage left
as Thanatos crooks his fingers and
beckons
she lays defeated in Elysium fields
fields salted by white coated
stalwart soldiers and their caduceus weaponry
it is an ignoble death by millimeters
of thinly, sharpened swords
and measured drops of blood
These many faces are all aspects of Vee although the doctors tell her that they are just a figment of her imagination. She always responds, “tell that to Varda Chaya, Venom, Venice, Victoria, Cha Cha and Vinnie, as a written prescription for citalopram with a diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) is handed to her.
Varda Chaya- she is the Jewish apostate who mocks all religions, all belief systems, indeed all tribal affiliations. Descended from Swedish berserkers, African slaves, native American savages, and the conquistadores, she is fatigued by all of the global tribal violence that has been part and parcel, of human history. She wishes that people would just "get over it". She wants the Palestinians to "get over it". The Israelis to "get over it". The Africans to "get over it". Native Americans to "get over it". Whatever people are claiming "it" is that prevents them from moving past their tribal loyalties, Varda Chaya wants them to "get over it". She would like the world to focus instead on preserving the species before humans end up extinct, like the dinosaurs. She would like to prevent the rats, roaches and paramecium from inheriting the world and their future scientist from digging through midden heaps to reconstruct humans past and discover how we fucked up. Varda Chaya wants the world to focus on global warming, health care, education, and non-violence. She wants the world to get their shit together. Varda Chaya wants a better world for all.
Vic - he is the eternal rocker. The one who invested mucho dinero on sound equipment, speakers, microphones and Fender Strats. The one who found peace and a slice of heaven in power chords, Carlos Santana and ganja. He was the one who was so laid-back-mellow that his heart beat was barely measurable. He viewed the world through rock and roll and playing elusive, death defying chords. Vic had a "live and let live" kinda attitude. He felt that if everyone lit up a doobie, they would stop wasting their time, trying to kill folks that were different. His main goal in life was seeking that elusive combination of chords that would lift a song from mediocre to the sublime. Too bad that a 9 - 5er was required in order to provide his kids with such mundane things as food, clothing and shelter. After-all, children can survive without such things. Right? Vic now sits in the back of Vee's head, a cheapo Bic lighter eternally lit, nodding off to Bon Jovi, Metallica and Heart, while smoking a little mary-jane. Incidentally, Vic discovered that mary-jane is good for Vee's multiple sclerosis pain. Too bad the drug companies managed to strong-arm the feds into keeping it away, from folks suffering chronic pain. Imagine not having to spend hundreds of dollars on vicodin, fentanyl, other addictive opiates and growing what you need, on your window sill...
Venice - is Vic's twin. Like Vic, she found her peace in music, dressing the part in Stevie Nicks-like lacy blouses and maxi skirts, with long flowing tresses. She strummed her lute, acoustic and rhythm guitars, while relocating from one-to-city to another, with Vic. But unlike Vic, who loved Fenders, she had a fondness for Gibson guitars. She wrote sonnets, composed lovey-dovey songs similar to "We are the World" and "Blowin in the Wind', painted beautiful sunsets and bowls of fruit, while dreaming dreamy thoughts while high on Quaaludes and other mood enhancing drugs. Venice never gave up her artistic endeavors as she aged and when multiple sclerosis crippled Vee's fingers, voice and eyes, she switched to writing poetry and blogging. Our Venice is always optimistic. There is always a silver lining in the clouds. Of course, to her, tornado, earthquakes and hurricanes are beautiful also.
Victoria - she is the good child, the obedient child, eternally trapped prepubescent girl; at times quiet and withdrawn. Victoria is the face of a bourgeoisie, indulged and beloved child. Ostensibly living and reaping the benefits of the “good life”. She is the recipient of private schools, and epicurean cuisine. She has the "right" kind of friends, the "right" stylish clothes, parrots the "right" conserative, vanilla politics and listens only to the “right” kind music such as opera, classical and religious compositions. Victoria is amused (in a bleak sort of way) that her friends envy her life. They are unaware that she had been abandoned by family and friends to reside in a world, where daddy snuck in her room at night. Where Step-Mommy pounded her body and psyche (for being the other woman when she caught her husband molesting Victoria). She has earned to hate her body and her beauty. She has learned how to temporarily, disassociate herself from pain. She has learned how people can murder, without spilling a drop of blood. And finally, she has learned that love is just another word and an excuse to justify the evil things, one inflicts on a child. Vee built a room around Victoria and threw away the key but Victoria's silent screaming always unlocks the enclosure. This silence is LOUD. It is explosive. It is filled with murderous rage. Frequently, Victoria and Venice collaborate and write poetry but Victoria in her quiet, unassuming manner is too powerful. Her voiceless screams always grasps control of all their endeavors. The resultant poetry ends up being bleak and black, and Venice is left in a corner, wringing her ineffectual hands, while whining that she wanted to write about beauty and flowers, not pain and suffering. Victoria always ends up telling Venice to be quiet and "get real". Politely, of course.
Venom - is the bitch. She wishes everyone would just shut the fuck up. Or get the fuck outa her face. What she really want is for everyone to leave her the fuck alone. She loves the "F" word. She finds that it is the best all-around word to describe every situation. Unlike Varda Chaya (who she regards as being a confused mongrel) and Vic and Venice (who she regards as being totally useless) Venom considers human beings to be a blight on Mother Terra. She knows that the world is fucked up and would be a better place sans man. Victoria, at times, agrees with her. Vic, Venice and Varda Chaya are appalled so they keep her sedated. In fact, Venom is suicidal and has almost succeeded in killing herself but for some fucked up reason, doctors have managed to save her life, each time. Vic, Victoria and Venice secretly wish that she had succeeded.
Cassandra Rodriguez - likes to be called Cha Cha and is quite frankly rather free with her body. She has sex with anyone. Nubile boys and very attractive women. Old rich men. Anyone. She enjoys thinking that she is a genius and is always trying to create get rich schemes. Cha Cha believes immediately a man desires her if he simply says “hello” and has convinced herself that she is irresistible. She is morbidly obese, dresses in clothes that are both too tight and meant for teenage girls. She has a Marilyn Monroe, fake-like manner of speaking (she think that she sounds sexy and provocative) and has bleached her hair white, wears blue contacts and teeter-totters on four inch high heels. Even to go to the market. The neighbors enjoy talking about her and frequently mock Cha Cha. Even to her face. However, she believes that she is well-liked. She leaves her children at home to get by as best as they can but considers herself a “good and loving mommy”. Her eldest daughter, has been raising the three younger children, since she was 14 years-old. Cha Cha goes out clubbing and drinking every night, buys clothes for herself, while her children are dressed in clothing from second-hand stores or donated to her by neighbors. Her ex-husband sends child support faithfully, but Cha Cha spends the money foolishly.
Vincenzo Miquel de la Cruz - for the sake of brevity, let's call him Vinnie. He is the ultimate Western patriot. The epitome of cultured conservatism.The gentleman warrior. He was raised to believe in god, country and flag. He was raised to believe in freedom, democracy and bringing these values to the little brown, yellow and red peoples of the world as they labor on concentration camps also known as plantations, factories and warehouses, while manufacturing televisions, computers, radios and other assorted goodies. Vinnie also believes in preserving and protecting the borders of his country, by building walls. Building very big walls. Patrolled by gringo men, with big guns to keep out all the dirty little campesinos. Vinnie however, does not understand why these little brown, yellow and red men do not love and embrace him and his values. Varda Chaya, Venice and Vic despise him but are also frightened by him. Victoria understands him, since she understands hate, very well. Venom hates him, but then again, she hates everyone. Vee has succeeded him subduing him (most of the time). But like a badly tarnished penny, he returns when one least expects him, when issues like illegal immigration and slave reparations are discussed. Vincenzo really does not give a shit what Vee, Vic, Victoria, Venice and Varda Chaya thinks of him. In fact, he would like to stick them on one of his cocoa plantations or sneaker manufacturing plants. Venom amuses him.
Vee - then we have Vee. Abuelita, mother, human, poet, musician, artist and former Catholic, and apostate Jew. She says her favorite religion/fable is Judaism. Sick and in constant pain. Life has been kicking her in the ass, for a long damn time. She feels tired and old. Tired of pain. Tired of medicines. Tired of tests and needles. Tired of doctors. Just plain ole tired.
when dreams die a sordid death
darkness banishes all light
Orpheus can be heard snickering
softly stage left
as Thanatos crooks his fingers and
beckons
she lays defeated in Elysium fields
fields salted by white coated
stalwart soldiers and their caduceus weaponry
it is an ignoble death by millimeters
of thinly, sharpened swords
and measured drops of blood
These many faces are all aspects of Vee although the doctors tell her that they are just a figment of her imagination. She always responds, “tell that to Varda Chaya, Venom, Venice, Victoria, Cha Cha and Vinnie, as a written prescription for citalopram with a diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) is handed to her.
Nous sommes dans une tête, Sam
I understand now. Yes, I understand. But what is it to understand? Is it to comprehend? Does that come after apprehension? At what point is knowledge apprehended, and when is one responsible for it?
That is my question to you.
Faustino walked through the belly of Paris. From the metro station at the top of the stairs, behind the kiosk where the wide surly smelly man in suspenders sells newspapers, down the stairs and passing through the path that bisects the planters of fragrant pink and white roses on the left, the green glass and steel apartments on the right (don’t mind the competing rotting piss-smell), then past the two cafes at the rue Rambuteau, the lesser one on the left — THE JET LAG, on past the better one on the righthandside, (it has no name) for and with views all the better for watching women arrive and descend, up and down that strip of sitting, moving, laughing, drinking, eating, and kissing life.
Out.
We go.
Onto the street of life, la rue Montorgueil, the Barbapapa store on the right, the Italian icecreamery (cream too rich) on the left, and the bobbles boutique aimed at young women on the left. Further up a few paces, still on the left the store that sells organic bread and pills with whale sperm and spinach and marrow and crushed pumpkin seeds, onward, on the right at the creperie stand where the pretty blonde curlyhaired girl with lovely naked limbs pours chocolate on your waffle, or fills it with sweet cream, that young woman always eye-catching with her tight bright blonde curls, a hawk-like nose such as her mother has, sad brown Phoenician eyes, high cheek bones, broad shoulders, long tan arms, a tapering waist, long thighbones, and long thin ivory calves, most of all, as she turns around, you see a high tight round rump, shapely is she whom I avoid looking at directly because she is flirted with, looked at all day, sniffed at all day . . . Oh then, yes the smell of the food wafting down this street, la rue Montorgueil, lubricating libidos, more smells, the smell of her and her daddy’s and her mother’s waffle crepes, toppings smells, fresh fruit, creams, chocolate. Her smells, yes, and fresh bread smells, and fresh fragrant and pungent cheese scents, and odors of spilled red wine on wood, and burnt sugar smells, cooked poulet, roasted rabbit, lamb and bisteak, the smells of oysters, snails, mussels and farine, sweet smells, womansmells, mensmells –ah, then you go on, past the small restaurant where we ate with Stuart and we met a frecklefaced, polite Scottish girl and a sassy dirtyblonde Londoner and a nutbrownhaired-sweet Northern Irish girl, all of them bright and kind and bubbly and eager to taste Paris; the food mediocre by Paris standards, but cheap; yes, we went onward, on past the righthandside, past the fromagerie Montorgueil, oh, yes the best for fresh savory creamy cheeses, crottin de chevre, picandou frais, creamyness rolled cylindrical de Ayveron, a savage brie and thin slices of ham from Spain— on past that, passing the inscribed Place de la Reine de Hongrie (‘did you notice that,’ asks Ed? Yes, now I do, as well did he notice the curlyblondecheveux girl with the nice calves and the sloe eyes) onward, past her place, thinking of that other her, in front and below the Morroccan grocer’s orange oranges, yellow bananas, green apples, and hanging decorated, tasseled, punched tin lamps, and almonds, and walnuts — look above to that loft I always wanted to ascend — to make love to her in her bed, stroke her black hair, kiss her beautiful almond-shaped eyes, lick her voice, throaty then girlish, womanly then giggling, yes that voice, mature, yes that one, earnest, that woman, British and English and African and Indian, that girl, a shapely, soft, blackhaired beauty whom I never tired of looking at. I never tired of her voice calling, pulling, beckoning me forward, that voice of a woman, something that goes down to the womb of her, that voice, yes, deep into her womb, past the limbs and the lips and the dark hair above them, deep into the soul of her body. . . . Walking onward past the Moroccan grocer’s store, and on the right the Italian sandwiches — past la rue Mauconseil (bad counsel indeed to do that then), past the large golden snail where we had delicious escargots (three kinds, in butter, in white wine and butter, and roasted in rosemary, and you Stewart were so happy that we chose the brass, dark wood and leather appointed, chandeliered eighteenth-century restaurant, after we drank our fruit-smelling white Bordeaux at the Lezard Café), crossing finally rue Etienne Marcel, past the man from the Maghreb who sells newspapers whom I buy from parce qu’il est gentil, et il m’a dit, merci, bonjour, et il a toujours les journals que je cherche, both in English and in French, and in Spanish, no attitude from him, he is just polite.
You have come from the metro Chatelet, springing up on your thick, shapely calves, up at the newsstand and the green Guimard awning. You pass past the postcards stand of posters and cards and pictures of Che in various poses, sitting on a steed, standing on a pile of boxes, sweaty, dirty stinky, and he proud of himself - ‘el chancho’ - he smoking his cigar, his brilliant brown Irish eyes lit up and smiling, the everpresent fatigues and white t-shirt, tightly-muscled Che. You pass past the clothing stores, Kookai, because you know this about you, Je ne suis pas jolie, je suis pire: I am not pretty: I am worse, past the banana café with the rainbow flags and the airbrushed palmtrees, and the oversize phallically erect bananas, swaying in the light wind, first bent, then erect, yellow and happy, the smiling boys in muscleshirts outside smiling at you and me, past the shoe stores, Arcus and others, then walking under the arch where right before it a king was killed in his carriage, stabbed well enough to leave him leaving off this life — off then past the bookstore, another one, Mona Lisait, on your left, and on the right a 16th century fountain, elegant and stately, working most of the time, now marred with red graffiti: Israël: Assassins, and the Africans, North, Central and West, and the youth on bicycles, and girls in short plaid skirts — what lovely legs! — and trim blue police on rollerblades, and a fast-food store selling American food not Hallal right on your right.
Make a left through Les Halles: originally not a French, but a German word (do you hear that, Sam?) — and so therefore not elided. (The word follows the reality, but what if it were man-made? And what of that Cemetery of Innocents, and why did they move them into the 14th Arrondisement, underground? All those bones, heads, shoulders, femurs, wrists, feet, metacarpals, phalanges, sternums, what? Where was our grandmother Delamain, our cousin Bequet, and our cousins Dulanay? Have we come so far to move so close to be so far again, Sam?
What of your Irish people in Paris? In France? And what did you bring that others did not? What in common with the prelates, the theologians, the philosophers, the soldiers and the scribblers?
Ah, yes. The back-and-forth across the water. (Who makes that water recede?) Leave that for another day. — For now we are in a tête, seulement.)
Les Halles: The green awnings and the arches and the metalworks, the allées, and then you pass the area where the merrygoround goes round and round, and the homeless piss and spit and shit and curse and live and dwell and cry and smile. All of that aboveground, above the metro and the Réseau Express Régional that rumbles below above the stores such as the F.N.A.C., where we bought so many of your books, Samuel, above that labyrinth of hairclip, shoe, compact disc, book, suit, dress, underwear, toy and lamp, fixture, television, radio, blender, plastic-hangar and otherwise other stores that are filled with bee and antlike people burrowing, buying, descending and ascending.
Constantly.
Oh yes, and the theatres, and the swimming pool below the trees and the pink, purple, red and white and yellow-flowered plants off the cross of the allé Louis Aragon above, coming from the West; a pyramidal glass ceiling one can look through or up through from below at the end of the underground rapid express train, below Aragon’s walk, and the eateries, and the snack stores and poster-shops and the foot-traffic eternal below; such as such only hell and purgatory would have us in, and walking, all the walking – people walking at us all the time, crossing, smelling, passing and us seeing or not seeing one another. Yes.
A big green awning above an Irish Pub: McGreevey’s. Right off the rue Coquillière, on to the rue du Jour.
It is there that I wanted to kiss you, outside of the entrance to Saint-Eustache; there I wanted to smell your shoulder-length hair; you came dressed in a jumper, and we waited for you, Carlos and John and I, drinking Beamish. McGreevey’s: I waited for you again and again, waiting in the rain, once, and then at night, waited for your light spring step and your dark almond-shaped eyes, your soft black hair. Waited for that voice I both wanted to kiss and to hear.
You, arriving, walking along the area past the Citadines backside, making a right onto the poets’ allées, Saint-John Perse to Federico Garcia Lorca and André Breton together at a nexus, after the water non-potable, and the water one can drink, Saint Eustache looming left, so beautiful and large and majestic, that church, where Mozart’s mother made peace and prayed her rosary, where a bust to Liszt lies, and where Keith Haring’s sculpture sits below a 17th century oil-painting — that church of incense and prayer and song.
In front of the church, children playing, couples kissing, and the sculpture of the headinthehand smiling at all who take it in, a tilted African forehead with Asian eyes, that head, symbol of the people from French colonies, in front of that majestic, Colonial church, a female beggar at the door, while the workmen make white the ornate stone saints, and rose and starfaced façade, all of that, there all at once.
He is now walking toward you, after a day of anticipation, of waiting to meet you, waiting and imagining.
(To brush my lips on your lovely neck, to smell that honeysucklesmell in your inkblack hair; to be lost in that pungent scent your body pushes upward from your womb, emanating from your lips; there at the slope of your shoulder is where I should lay my head, and right behind the ear is where I wish to kiss you, bite you . . .)
Coming from the Jardin du Palais Royal, where he was reading Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, walking under the canopy of trees, onto the gravel and sand, out onto the Pavillons, under the arches and up the stairs, past the magazinerie, crossing over to the Galerie Vivienne sidewalk, rue Radziwil on your right, and on your left, LeGrand Filles et Fils wine from Corsica in the window, the oldest bookstore in Paris still selling, I walk, he walks, you walk down through the open space of the Place des Victoires, saluting the Virgin mother in blue and white tunic, her Basilica on the left, a 17th century blandness outside, gorgeous and golden, blue and silver and ornate, dark, and resplendent and reverent on the inside, on down past the Mexican Consulate’s flag on the left, past the peagreen Art nouveau nouille façade of the only other boulangerie you would buy bread at, Au Panetier, the light peagreen corner building of the breadmaker on your right. Around the corner, Louis Quatorze au cheval, gloriously mounted, his head turned left, surveying the scene, a parallel to the Virgin’s building, a counterweight and complement to Her monument and basilica, you choose to walk down the Rue du Mail, a route you often walked, quietly. There are so many carpet shops and laborers, young people walking and talking, book-publishers snotty and sniffy, who won’t make way for you on the sidewalk – you should push her – that one — with your shoulder, get it square under her chin, and up the head, a chucked elbow to the latissimus of the man who nearly runs you over, (a biography of Leopold Sedar Senghor, I remember is in the window as we pass by that couple). On that street, our preferred grocer where we buy the best Dutch cookies, the better blonde Belgian beers, and the richer, darker, sweeter chocolates, fresh meat and cheese, other than what we bought more freshly caught or what was recently made on the rue Montorgueil. (Yes, of course, you can’t buy better than Stohrer’s and Alaïn Brulé!) — I was just in such a hurry to see you, smell you, kiss you, bury my face in your ink-black hair.
I walk down the rue d’Aboukir. Down to the rue Montmartre at the first corner brasserie where a socialist met his end – not before he finished his pint! — on the right-hand the traffic is coming, on the lefthandside people are walking, then there is a descent to the rue Montorgueil perpendicular to my destination; again, on the righthandside is a pub and an eatery with metro paraphernalia and bobbleheads, and good beer, light, French, Belgian, blonde, crisp, tasty, savory golden liquid, and meals of beans soup with strips of red meat served with spinach and butter and bread. A grumpy, greyhaired wild-eyed bartender in striped pants on his long lean legs is kind enough to ask you if you want to come in. (He turned his grumpiness off.) Further.
I walk down to the transverse rue Bauchamont, past what was once a ballroom, once North African and Arab, then, a Laundromat; then an arcade and green plants and small trees (arbustes) growing upward in a perpetual shade. You see the carved lion’s head, then the plaque in Arabic, then Alain Mikli’s many eyes looking at you.
Waiting for your thirst on the right are the bottles of waters, sodawater, sparkling water, but no one there to serve or buy them from, et puis, l’Arbres á letters on the left, a red sign hung vertically, a white facade, black lettering on the sign, a bookstore, yes, what you love there, books, and a tall thin sad-eyed blonde, lithe and graceful. She’s a delightfully young woman. The smells of both, books and the young woman, the feel of both, the look and weight and promise of both! There where that blondie (dirty brown streaks down the middle of that fallen angel’s head) oh, a vixen she is, dressed in a red springtime dress with white polka dots dotting all over her. It’s a lovely dress on a lovely woman, emphasizing her tapered waist, revealing enough of her thin white legs to admire them, and so much of her back because the dress scoops to the middle of her back. You see her lovely arms as she steps on the ladder to place books on the higher shelves.
Sadeyed. That’s how I’d describe her face. She with the marred left arm, a scar the shape of a benthandled hammer ready to come down upon something (Upon what, my heart?) She attends to her browsing customers. She feigns indifference with just enough of a sideward look to pull me forward. (What cool and sparkling light green eyes I see when she turns around, her body on tiptoe, reaching for a book; I see white arms and hands and fingers, and long thin shapely nails – her bottom up and up and upturned, back on her heels, head turned in a backward leftside glance to me momentarily: those eyes. Oh.)
I have to leave.
You were returning home to visit, to eat with him (with me), to dine at our favorite place: Papa’s, earlier named Julian’s, previously known as La Blondie’s. If you must know its name: the Aux Crus de Bourgogne, where I met the exiled Mexican elites, Bernardo, in particular, (not really his name) in a truth-telling mood, savoring beef Savoyard, tasting burgundy, and beginning and ending with champagne and Beckett, but interrupted by Octavio Paz’s poems – El Amarillo se desliza al rosa, / se insinúa la noche en el violeta — I had no business being there, but there I was.
Bernardo, resident of the Tour Montparnasse told me Tour Montparnasse’s history and how many Mexican exiles – elites – lived there, how many left the country for good after sacking the treasuries. How many worked in administrations that took as much as they could from the humble and the poor and the middle class. Ah, yes, he was in a truthtelling mood, of course, in his 90’s, told me I could find him there every Thursday . . .
Back to you, my dear, back to you. I desired you, pursued you, was on my way to you. So, I walked down the rue Montorgueil past the elongated hanging roasting ducks on a spit, past the browned roasted chicken and tasty seasoned pork, and the darkmeat, dressed dinde (didn’t know they liked that so much; didn’t know dinde would be so savory, but of course they don’t have the same relationship to Indians and to turkeys that we do, do they?), past the celebrated Stohrer’s Patisserie, past the beloved Alain Brulé boulangerie and patisserie on the lefthand side where Nathalie works and the breads are fresh, and smell like your soft warm thighs on a summer night, on, on toward the past, and past the Café Sega and the Centre Ville on the lefthandside still, I am walking, he is walking, in a u-turn now, back then down to the rue Bauchamont where I — he makes a lefthand turn.
It was there that I saw her in all of her sad and serious beauty, the sloe-eyed, green-eyed, stately womangirl, a girl in a floral red and white dress, the scar on her left arm, a depression into the skin, the elegance of her limbs, her long, thin, white calves. Yes. Blonde. Handling the books the way I’d like her to handle mine. Mine what? Wouldn’t you like to feel and know what her long thin shapely fingers know when they touch and trace and pull the strap of her bra tighter at the shoulder, see her turn her head toward you, those sad grey-green eyes, that elegant quash-shaped head, the long blonde tresses falling over her back, ah yes women do have backs here, and fronts, and legs.
Never mind.
She’s a distraction.
I walk over. — He sniffs, smells, looks, waits, browses, then picks them up, each volume, its heft and smoothness all of a weight, like her, as she is when she sits on his lap and crosses her legs, lacing her arms around the back while nuzzling around his neck, French lips parting and kissing, wet smack wet.
After piling book upon book, then placing them under my arm, and being careful not to confuse her that my book, Nouvelles et Textes Pour Rien, was not for nothing under the other arm to demonstrate what was mine was in fact not hers. I did look, was looking at her jolie jupe rouge, the elegance of her long thin, shapely ivorywhite (now I see, freckled) calves. I know French women are used to taking looking, so I make myself discreet, making my way to the bookshelves in the righthand corner diagonal from the entrance after selecting O.V. de L. Milosz’s Poésies II: Les Éléments, Autres Poèmes, Symphonies, Nihumm, Adramandoni, La Confession de Lemuel, and finally Derniers Poèmes; then Balzac’s, Nouvelles; also, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s, Contes Cruels; Voltaire’s, Dictionnaire philosophique; and finally, Corneille’s, La Place Royale.
***
And so we eat; and we eat so well together. Five hours and counting, stuffing our mouths (yours made of perfect lips, a lovely tongue, and straight white teeth) eating, drinking, tasting, first duck paté, our aperitif, un kir, then salad for you and for you and me a kiss of red wine from the Southwest, Auvergne, then thin strips of maigret de canard for me, and for you lamb like your thighs, lamb like your eyes, my Maghrebian Mamasita, then another bottle of red, this one Fitou; next a delicious meatpie slipped in for savoring together, then yes, we have more of the desserts coming, Blondie brings them, a drunk purple, half-pear, whipped cream on the side, yours some dark chocolate (like you, like your bum) cake, sweet, layered, lingering the taste. (Yes. Yes, I want you all of you, you all of you, my dessert.) Then the coffee, small, just right. Finally a spirit to spirit us away, some eau de vie, life-giving, life-taking if you take too much of it, but just enough to make us happy, just enough to make you blush.
If I could then have taken you home to make you mine one night, a night I would have made with you, night I would have forgotten not ever.
But, we did not, we did not, we did.
From the Vaudeville, past the Bourse, down the rue Réamur to the top of Montorgueil. She comes. Brown. Dark-eyed. Arched-eyebrows. Nice plump arms; rounded, you are, my dear. Yes, and that clipped English accent, those thin sensuous magenta lips. You must have drunk all of the best coffee in the world to have those eyes, shaped like almonds, and what pretty white teeth. Yes, your Arab, Indian, English bloodlines are apparent in those eyes, in those deliciously large plump full hips, in your full, shapely cans. Yes, I shall call them that, cans, long, full, pointed, wanting for all of my mouth to suck them, I know. Call it whatever drive you like. I haven’t any restraint in my mind when I see, smell and sense you dear, so close, my dear, so close to me, my dove.
We did not.
We did.
We did not,
...
That is my question to you.
Faustino walked through the belly of Paris. From the metro station at the top of the stairs, behind the kiosk where the wide surly smelly man in suspenders sells newspapers, down the stairs and passing through the path that bisects the planters of fragrant pink and white roses on the left, the green glass and steel apartments on the right (don’t mind the competing rotting piss-smell), then past the two cafes at the rue Rambuteau, the lesser one on the left — THE JET LAG, on past the better one on the righthandside, (it has no name) for and with views all the better for watching women arrive and descend, up and down that strip of sitting, moving, laughing, drinking, eating, and kissing life.
Out.
We go.
Onto the street of life, la rue Montorgueil, the Barbapapa store on the right, the Italian icecreamery (cream too rich) on the left, and the bobbles boutique aimed at young women on the left. Further up a few paces, still on the left the store that sells organic bread and pills with whale sperm and spinach and marrow and crushed pumpkin seeds, onward, on the right at the creperie stand where the pretty blonde curlyhaired girl with lovely naked limbs pours chocolate on your waffle, or fills it with sweet cream, that young woman always eye-catching with her tight bright blonde curls, a hawk-like nose such as her mother has, sad brown Phoenician eyes, high cheek bones, broad shoulders, long tan arms, a tapering waist, long thighbones, and long thin ivory calves, most of all, as she turns around, you see a high tight round rump, shapely is she whom I avoid looking at directly because she is flirted with, looked at all day, sniffed at all day . . . Oh then, yes the smell of the food wafting down this street, la rue Montorgueil, lubricating libidos, more smells, the smell of her and her daddy’s and her mother’s waffle crepes, toppings smells, fresh fruit, creams, chocolate. Her smells, yes, and fresh bread smells, and fresh fragrant and pungent cheese scents, and odors of spilled red wine on wood, and burnt sugar smells, cooked poulet, roasted rabbit, lamb and bisteak, the smells of oysters, snails, mussels and farine, sweet smells, womansmells, mensmells –ah, then you go on, past the small restaurant where we ate with Stuart and we met a frecklefaced, polite Scottish girl and a sassy dirtyblonde Londoner and a nutbrownhaired-sweet Northern Irish girl, all of them bright and kind and bubbly and eager to taste Paris; the food mediocre by Paris standards, but cheap; yes, we went onward, on past the righthandside, past the fromagerie Montorgueil, oh, yes the best for fresh savory creamy cheeses, crottin de chevre, picandou frais, creamyness rolled cylindrical de Ayveron, a savage brie and thin slices of ham from Spain— on past that, passing the inscribed Place de la Reine de Hongrie (‘did you notice that,’ asks Ed? Yes, now I do, as well did he notice the curlyblondecheveux girl with the nice calves and the sloe eyes) onward, past her place, thinking of that other her, in front and below the Morroccan grocer’s orange oranges, yellow bananas, green apples, and hanging decorated, tasseled, punched tin lamps, and almonds, and walnuts — look above to that loft I always wanted to ascend — to make love to her in her bed, stroke her black hair, kiss her beautiful almond-shaped eyes, lick her voice, throaty then girlish, womanly then giggling, yes that voice, mature, yes that one, earnest, that woman, British and English and African and Indian, that girl, a shapely, soft, blackhaired beauty whom I never tired of looking at. I never tired of her voice calling, pulling, beckoning me forward, that voice of a woman, something that goes down to the womb of her, that voice, yes, deep into her womb, past the limbs and the lips and the dark hair above them, deep into the soul of her body. . . . Walking onward past the Moroccan grocer’s store, and on the right the Italian sandwiches — past la rue Mauconseil (bad counsel indeed to do that then), past the large golden snail where we had delicious escargots (three kinds, in butter, in white wine and butter, and roasted in rosemary, and you Stewart were so happy that we chose the brass, dark wood and leather appointed, chandeliered eighteenth-century restaurant, after we drank our fruit-smelling white Bordeaux at the Lezard Café), crossing finally rue Etienne Marcel, past the man from the Maghreb who sells newspapers whom I buy from parce qu’il est gentil, et il m’a dit, merci, bonjour, et il a toujours les journals que je cherche, both in English and in French, and in Spanish, no attitude from him, he is just polite.
You have come from the metro Chatelet, springing up on your thick, shapely calves, up at the newsstand and the green Guimard awning. You pass past the postcards stand of posters and cards and pictures of Che in various poses, sitting on a steed, standing on a pile of boxes, sweaty, dirty stinky, and he proud of himself - ‘el chancho’ - he smoking his cigar, his brilliant brown Irish eyes lit up and smiling, the everpresent fatigues and white t-shirt, tightly-muscled Che. You pass past the clothing stores, Kookai, because you know this about you, Je ne suis pas jolie, je suis pire: I am not pretty: I am worse, past the banana café with the rainbow flags and the airbrushed palmtrees, and the oversize phallically erect bananas, swaying in the light wind, first bent, then erect, yellow and happy, the smiling boys in muscleshirts outside smiling at you and me, past the shoe stores, Arcus and others, then walking under the arch where right before it a king was killed in his carriage, stabbed well enough to leave him leaving off this life — off then past the bookstore, another one, Mona Lisait, on your left, and on the right a 16th century fountain, elegant and stately, working most of the time, now marred with red graffiti: Israël: Assassins, and the Africans, North, Central and West, and the youth on bicycles, and girls in short plaid skirts — what lovely legs! — and trim blue police on rollerblades, and a fast-food store selling American food not Hallal right on your right.
Make a left through Les Halles: originally not a French, but a German word (do you hear that, Sam?) — and so therefore not elided. (The word follows the reality, but what if it were man-made? And what of that Cemetery of Innocents, and why did they move them into the 14th Arrondisement, underground? All those bones, heads, shoulders, femurs, wrists, feet, metacarpals, phalanges, sternums, what? Where was our grandmother Delamain, our cousin Bequet, and our cousins Dulanay? Have we come so far to move so close to be so far again, Sam?
What of your Irish people in Paris? In France? And what did you bring that others did not? What in common with the prelates, the theologians, the philosophers, the soldiers and the scribblers?
Ah, yes. The back-and-forth across the water. (Who makes that water recede?) Leave that for another day. — For now we are in a tête, seulement.)
Les Halles: The green awnings and the arches and the metalworks, the allées, and then you pass the area where the merrygoround goes round and round, and the homeless piss and spit and shit and curse and live and dwell and cry and smile. All of that aboveground, above the metro and the Réseau Express Régional that rumbles below above the stores such as the F.N.A.C., where we bought so many of your books, Samuel, above that labyrinth of hairclip, shoe, compact disc, book, suit, dress, underwear, toy and lamp, fixture, television, radio, blender, plastic-hangar and otherwise other stores that are filled with bee and antlike people burrowing, buying, descending and ascending.
Constantly.
Oh yes, and the theatres, and the swimming pool below the trees and the pink, purple, red and white and yellow-flowered plants off the cross of the allé Louis Aragon above, coming from the West; a pyramidal glass ceiling one can look through or up through from below at the end of the underground rapid express train, below Aragon’s walk, and the eateries, and the snack stores and poster-shops and the foot-traffic eternal below; such as such only hell and purgatory would have us in, and walking, all the walking – people walking at us all the time, crossing, smelling, passing and us seeing or not seeing one another. Yes.
A big green awning above an Irish Pub: McGreevey’s. Right off the rue Coquillière, on to the rue du Jour.
It is there that I wanted to kiss you, outside of the entrance to Saint-Eustache; there I wanted to smell your shoulder-length hair; you came dressed in a jumper, and we waited for you, Carlos and John and I, drinking Beamish. McGreevey’s: I waited for you again and again, waiting in the rain, once, and then at night, waited for your light spring step and your dark almond-shaped eyes, your soft black hair. Waited for that voice I both wanted to kiss and to hear.
You, arriving, walking along the area past the Citadines backside, making a right onto the poets’ allées, Saint-John Perse to Federico Garcia Lorca and André Breton together at a nexus, after the water non-potable, and the water one can drink, Saint Eustache looming left, so beautiful and large and majestic, that church, where Mozart’s mother made peace and prayed her rosary, where a bust to Liszt lies, and where Keith Haring’s sculpture sits below a 17th century oil-painting — that church of incense and prayer and song.
In front of the church, children playing, couples kissing, and the sculpture of the headinthehand smiling at all who take it in, a tilted African forehead with Asian eyes, that head, symbol of the people from French colonies, in front of that majestic, Colonial church, a female beggar at the door, while the workmen make white the ornate stone saints, and rose and starfaced façade, all of that, there all at once.
He is now walking toward you, after a day of anticipation, of waiting to meet you, waiting and imagining.
(To brush my lips on your lovely neck, to smell that honeysucklesmell in your inkblack hair; to be lost in that pungent scent your body pushes upward from your womb, emanating from your lips; there at the slope of your shoulder is where I should lay my head, and right behind the ear is where I wish to kiss you, bite you . . .)
Coming from the Jardin du Palais Royal, where he was reading Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, walking under the canopy of trees, onto the gravel and sand, out onto the Pavillons, under the arches and up the stairs, past the magazinerie, crossing over to the Galerie Vivienne sidewalk, rue Radziwil on your right, and on your left, LeGrand Filles et Fils wine from Corsica in the window, the oldest bookstore in Paris still selling, I walk, he walks, you walk down through the open space of the Place des Victoires, saluting the Virgin mother in blue and white tunic, her Basilica on the left, a 17th century blandness outside, gorgeous and golden, blue and silver and ornate, dark, and resplendent and reverent on the inside, on down past the Mexican Consulate’s flag on the left, past the peagreen Art nouveau nouille façade of the only other boulangerie you would buy bread at, Au Panetier, the light peagreen corner building of the breadmaker on your right. Around the corner, Louis Quatorze au cheval, gloriously mounted, his head turned left, surveying the scene, a parallel to the Virgin’s building, a counterweight and complement to Her monument and basilica, you choose to walk down the Rue du Mail, a route you often walked, quietly. There are so many carpet shops and laborers, young people walking and talking, book-publishers snotty and sniffy, who won’t make way for you on the sidewalk – you should push her – that one — with your shoulder, get it square under her chin, and up the head, a chucked elbow to the latissimus of the man who nearly runs you over, (a biography of Leopold Sedar Senghor, I remember is in the window as we pass by that couple). On that street, our preferred grocer where we buy the best Dutch cookies, the better blonde Belgian beers, and the richer, darker, sweeter chocolates, fresh meat and cheese, other than what we bought more freshly caught or what was recently made on the rue Montorgueil. (Yes, of course, you can’t buy better than Stohrer’s and Alaïn Brulé!) — I was just in such a hurry to see you, smell you, kiss you, bury my face in your ink-black hair.
I walk down the rue d’Aboukir. Down to the rue Montmartre at the first corner brasserie where a socialist met his end – not before he finished his pint! — on the right-hand the traffic is coming, on the lefthandside people are walking, then there is a descent to the rue Montorgueil perpendicular to my destination; again, on the righthandside is a pub and an eatery with metro paraphernalia and bobbleheads, and good beer, light, French, Belgian, blonde, crisp, tasty, savory golden liquid, and meals of beans soup with strips of red meat served with spinach and butter and bread. A grumpy, greyhaired wild-eyed bartender in striped pants on his long lean legs is kind enough to ask you if you want to come in. (He turned his grumpiness off.) Further.
I walk down to the transverse rue Bauchamont, past what was once a ballroom, once North African and Arab, then, a Laundromat; then an arcade and green plants and small trees (arbustes) growing upward in a perpetual shade. You see the carved lion’s head, then the plaque in Arabic, then Alain Mikli’s many eyes looking at you.
Waiting for your thirst on the right are the bottles of waters, sodawater, sparkling water, but no one there to serve or buy them from, et puis, l’Arbres á letters on the left, a red sign hung vertically, a white facade, black lettering on the sign, a bookstore, yes, what you love there, books, and a tall thin sad-eyed blonde, lithe and graceful. She’s a delightfully young woman. The smells of both, books and the young woman, the feel of both, the look and weight and promise of both! There where that blondie (dirty brown streaks down the middle of that fallen angel’s head) oh, a vixen she is, dressed in a red springtime dress with white polka dots dotting all over her. It’s a lovely dress on a lovely woman, emphasizing her tapered waist, revealing enough of her thin white legs to admire them, and so much of her back because the dress scoops to the middle of her back. You see her lovely arms as she steps on the ladder to place books on the higher shelves.
Sadeyed. That’s how I’d describe her face. She with the marred left arm, a scar the shape of a benthandled hammer ready to come down upon something (Upon what, my heart?) She attends to her browsing customers. She feigns indifference with just enough of a sideward look to pull me forward. (What cool and sparkling light green eyes I see when she turns around, her body on tiptoe, reaching for a book; I see white arms and hands and fingers, and long thin shapely nails – her bottom up and up and upturned, back on her heels, head turned in a backward leftside glance to me momentarily: those eyes. Oh.)
I have to leave.
You were returning home to visit, to eat with him (with me), to dine at our favorite place: Papa’s, earlier named Julian’s, previously known as La Blondie’s. If you must know its name: the Aux Crus de Bourgogne, where I met the exiled Mexican elites, Bernardo, in particular, (not really his name) in a truth-telling mood, savoring beef Savoyard, tasting burgundy, and beginning and ending with champagne and Beckett, but interrupted by Octavio Paz’s poems – El Amarillo se desliza al rosa, / se insinúa la noche en el violeta — I had no business being there, but there I was.
Bernardo, resident of the Tour Montparnasse told me Tour Montparnasse’s history and how many Mexican exiles – elites – lived there, how many left the country for good after sacking the treasuries. How many worked in administrations that took as much as they could from the humble and the poor and the middle class. Ah, yes, he was in a truthtelling mood, of course, in his 90’s, told me I could find him there every Thursday . . .
Back to you, my dear, back to you. I desired you, pursued you, was on my way to you. So, I walked down the rue Montorgueil past the elongated hanging roasting ducks on a spit, past the browned roasted chicken and tasty seasoned pork, and the darkmeat, dressed dinde (didn’t know they liked that so much; didn’t know dinde would be so savory, but of course they don’t have the same relationship to Indians and to turkeys that we do, do they?), past the celebrated Stohrer’s Patisserie, past the beloved Alain Brulé boulangerie and patisserie on the lefthand side where Nathalie works and the breads are fresh, and smell like your soft warm thighs on a summer night, on, on toward the past, and past the Café Sega and the Centre Ville on the lefthandside still, I am walking, he is walking, in a u-turn now, back then down to the rue Bauchamont where I — he makes a lefthand turn.
It was there that I saw her in all of her sad and serious beauty, the sloe-eyed, green-eyed, stately womangirl, a girl in a floral red and white dress, the scar on her left arm, a depression into the skin, the elegance of her limbs, her long, thin, white calves. Yes. Blonde. Handling the books the way I’d like her to handle mine. Mine what? Wouldn’t you like to feel and know what her long thin shapely fingers know when they touch and trace and pull the strap of her bra tighter at the shoulder, see her turn her head toward you, those sad grey-green eyes, that elegant quash-shaped head, the long blonde tresses falling over her back, ah yes women do have backs here, and fronts, and legs.
Never mind.
She’s a distraction.
I walk over. — He sniffs, smells, looks, waits, browses, then picks them up, each volume, its heft and smoothness all of a weight, like her, as she is when she sits on his lap and crosses her legs, lacing her arms around the back while nuzzling around his neck, French lips parting and kissing, wet smack wet.
After piling book upon book, then placing them under my arm, and being careful not to confuse her that my book, Nouvelles et Textes Pour Rien, was not for nothing under the other arm to demonstrate what was mine was in fact not hers. I did look, was looking at her jolie jupe rouge, the elegance of her long thin, shapely ivorywhite (now I see, freckled) calves. I know French women are used to taking looking, so I make myself discreet, making my way to the bookshelves in the righthand corner diagonal from the entrance after selecting O.V. de L. Milosz’s Poésies II: Les Éléments, Autres Poèmes, Symphonies, Nihumm, Adramandoni, La Confession de Lemuel, and finally Derniers Poèmes; then Balzac’s, Nouvelles; also, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s, Contes Cruels; Voltaire’s, Dictionnaire philosophique; and finally, Corneille’s, La Place Royale.
***
And so we eat; and we eat so well together. Five hours and counting, stuffing our mouths (yours made of perfect lips, a lovely tongue, and straight white teeth) eating, drinking, tasting, first duck paté, our aperitif, un kir, then salad for you and for you and me a kiss of red wine from the Southwest, Auvergne, then thin strips of maigret de canard for me, and for you lamb like your thighs, lamb like your eyes, my Maghrebian Mamasita, then another bottle of red, this one Fitou; next a delicious meatpie slipped in for savoring together, then yes, we have more of the desserts coming, Blondie brings them, a drunk purple, half-pear, whipped cream on the side, yours some dark chocolate (like you, like your bum) cake, sweet, layered, lingering the taste. (Yes. Yes, I want you all of you, you all of you, my dessert.) Then the coffee, small, just right. Finally a spirit to spirit us away, some eau de vie, life-giving, life-taking if you take too much of it, but just enough to make us happy, just enough to make you blush.
If I could then have taken you home to make you mine one night, a night I would have made with you, night I would have forgotten not ever.
But, we did not, we did not, we did.
From the Vaudeville, past the Bourse, down the rue Réamur to the top of Montorgueil. She comes. Brown. Dark-eyed. Arched-eyebrows. Nice plump arms; rounded, you are, my dear. Yes, and that clipped English accent, those thin sensuous magenta lips. You must have drunk all of the best coffee in the world to have those eyes, shaped like almonds, and what pretty white teeth. Yes, your Arab, Indian, English bloodlines are apparent in those eyes, in those deliciously large plump full hips, in your full, shapely cans. Yes, I shall call them that, cans, long, full, pointed, wanting for all of my mouth to suck them, I know. Call it whatever drive you like. I haven’t any restraint in my mind when I see, smell and sense you dear, so close, my dear, so close to me, my dove.
We did not.
We did.
We did not,
...
Venetia Sjogren is a 61-year-old disabled homo sapien, fem, grandmother, a proud Latina of mixed cultural heritage, a borderline atheist and humanist. Back in 2005, she fled New Jersey, for the gentle mists of Seattle only to return to New Jersey, when her grandson was born. However, she considers herself a Seattle refugee hoping to return there, one day. Some of her publication credits include The Farmhouse Magazine, Jersey Works, and Howard University’s The Amistad, The Cristell Writing Contests - The Book Lovers Haven, and Wordgathering.
David Vela is a professor of English at Diablo Valley College, in Pleasant Hill, California, where he is also an advisor to veterans and an instructor and mentor in the Puente Project.
Extra, Extra!
Tania Romero's "Lazarus Effect" is the third place winner of our 2019 Extra-fiction contest of which the Judge, Ernest Hogan said, "promises to go on to some interesting places. I’d like to read the novel when it’s finished." To read the judge's thoughts on the winning entrees, head over to our friends at La Bloga to Hogan's Chicanonautica, his column on all things Latinoid and unusual (some would say all things extra).
Stay tuned to Somos en escrito for the Honorary Mention stories.
Stay tuned to Somos en escrito for the Honorary Mention stories.
Photo of Rio Grande by Scott Duncan-Fernandez
"Lazarus Effect"
excerpt from
When Corn People Wage War
by Tania Romero
El Paso, Texas
July 20th, 2018
The old man’s hands were crippled, calloused from the ware-and-tear labor in the cornfields. He studied the bridging lines of his muddy open palms, tracing them back to Piedras Negras, Mexico a lifetime ago. He tugged at the metal handcuffs around his wrists, anchoring him to the leg of the wooden chair in the small interrogation room. Inside his mouth, a dry sandstorm was forming. He refused to drink the water in the styrofoam cup on the table, no matter how much the plain white walls around him moved. He focused on syncopating his blinking to the light flashing red from the surveillance camera above him.
With his right index finger and his thumb, he dug the blue-green residue underneath his fingernails on the other hand. He gently rubbed his feet together, scrapping the dry mud nestled between his bare toes. The clusters of mud brought back a distant childhood memory, when Abue Alda would churn the masa between her fingers while making corn tortillas by hand. The clumpy masa naturally sunk back into her skin, and only rinsed off with water from the nearby water well. She was after all, like her Mayan ancestors: made of corn. His clothes were torn, as if he had fought his way out of the underworld Xibalba, the ‘place of fear.’ But only the deep wrinkles on his forehead paved way to his untold story.
Border patrol officer Rodriguez sat across from the old man, watching him tug as his peeling flesh. A slight stench of death was beginning to fill the room; the kind of smell that was all too familiar to her. It reminded her of the time she fainted at the sight of the first cadaver she ever saw during a required training in the morgue. But now, after two years as a border patrol agent on the Texas-Mexico border, death was just an everyday occurrence in her line of work.
She fixated on the man’s shoulders. He barely moved to breathe. Did he have a pulse? Surely he must be breathing if he was sitting in front of her, she thought. But she couldn’t be quite certain with a body so stiff. Other than his hands and feet, he barely moved his body at all. He didn’t struggle with his handcuffs like the recent wave of Central American criminals who tried to sell another asylum story, or U.S. citizens trying to explain contraband items in their cars. She wondered why the styrofoam cup remained untouched. Why didn’t he want to drink? His chapped lips were pealing from enduring a long period of sun exposure in the desert heat. His black hair appeared to have been falling out for years, evidence of long bouts of alopecia. His eye sockets were deep, dark, and the whiteness of his eyeballs had a tint of yellowish-decay.
“How do you know my name?” she broke the silence.
The man traced his sunken eyes past her. She felt his glare pierce every cell in her body. But instead of just holding his look in her direction, he focused on the stern CBP officer behind officer Rodriguez, who eagerly hovered the gun on his holster with his hand. The old man turned toward his own reflection on the two-way mirror to his right, as if he was staring at a twin image.
Taking a deep breath, she pulled out a folded piece of notebook paper with the name “BP Ada Rodriguez” written on it.
“Mi nombre,” she placed the paper on the table and forcefully tapped her index finger on it. “How do you know my name?” she insisted.
The man turned his body slightly to face her again, without a response. Instead, he chuckled at the sight of how her hair-tie barely tamed her unruly curly black hair. She was a light-skin morena and her olive-green uniform was too big for her small frame. It was unnatural for a woman her size to be wearing ‘manly attire,’ he thought. He could tell the stress of her job was getting to her because her weight loss had gone unperceived. She didn’t have a wedding ring on her finger, or evidence of ever wearing one. But he was sure of one thing: She had her father’s light brown eyes.
“Mendez?” she turned to the CBP officer behind her. “Can you translate?”
“I don’t speak fluent Spanish,” Officer Mendez replied.
She bit her tongue for as long as she could. “Why the hell did they send you in with me?”
He shifted his gun and shrugged.
“We’re gonna need a translator. I’ll call the medical examiner again. I want to understand how this DOA illegal came back to life and knows my name.”
Oaxaca, Mexico
July 20th, 1953
Under his lucky weather-stricken torn sombrero, Elpidio de los Santos was still physically strong for a man who had just turned thirty. In his younger days, he was known as el potro de acero among the other boys in town. With his dexterity for carpentry and the ability to move anything around him with pure brute strength, he never worried about finding work. He was also an enthusiastic herbalist, just like his grandmother Abue Alda.
Despite the circumstances growing up, Elpidio was an avid go-getter. His mother, Maria, died during childbirth and his father left long before the first birthing pains. Elpidio always imagined that his father died a patriotic hero during the Mexican revolution, taking his last breath in the Chihuahuan hills while protecting Pancho Villa in the last ambush. He arrived at this conclusion because his birthday also coincided with the assassination of Pancho Villa: July 20th, 1923.
Raised with the iron first from his maternal grandmother, Alda Eloisa de los Santos, Elpidio learned to never ask for anything. Abue Alda was a renown curandera and maintained that Elpidio’s father, un bueno para nada, had run off with a city prostitute who left him dead on the side of the road after stealing his money. She purified Elpidio’s spirit with weekly limpias espirituales to keep away the curse of mal aire that his father left behind, lighting copal smoke and swaying a raw egg in the secret pattern over his body and cracking it over a class of water to reaffirm his strong energy. Occasionally, she would cover his left hand with a small manta during the ritual, an attempt to cure his ambidexterity, which if left untreated, could leave Elpidio with the inability to tell right from wrong. She refused to speak his father’s name in the Mayan tradition of forgetting by silence, and that is how Elpidio eventually deduced that his father had probably lived in the same town. He once suspected that Abue Alda cursed his father for planting a dying seed in her daughter’s womb, but one does not question the reasons behind the mal de ojo from a curandera.
For most of his adolescent life, Elpidio assisted Abue Alda in various rituals and became a knowledgeable healer himself. Every morning he collected the necessary ingredients for various elixirs, gathered the eggs from the chickens, and brewed plant leaves to treat disorders, placing them in their respective receptacles for Abue Alda to use. With his gifted hands, he also built Abue Alda a private makeshift temazcal in the backyard, so she could conduct purification ceremonies without any distractions from onlookers.
It was an unusual cloudy Sunday morning when the town’s store owner Don Arcario Morales brought his ill teenage daughter Casilda to see Abue Alda. Don Arcario was a stern businessman and Casilda was his greatest investment. She was twelve at the time, with delicate hands covered in hives and a quiet smile despite a mysterious malady that began that morning. Casilda’s long braid adorned with ribbons, tamed her wild curly black hair; she had a womanly charm that could entice any potential suitor in the next year or so. Even in her illness, she was the most beautiful thing Elpidio ever saw.
“Doña Alda, mi hija se bebió un vaso de agua esta mañana, y mire como tiene la piel. Puras ronchas. Haga algo,” Don Arcario pleaded.
Abue Alda glanced over Casilda from head to toe. She was covered in red hives and wheezed when she breathed. She directed Don Arcario and Casilda to the backyard, and invited Casilda into the temazcal to do an initial cleansing. Elpidio and Don Arcario waited quietly outside. She asked Casilda to lay face down on the floor, as she lit copal smoke to clear the air. She pulled Casilda’s arms back, lifting her fragile upper body and bending her legs back and forth. She lifted Casilda’s dress and rubbed witch hazel leafs mixed with sabila on her legs to soothe the itch. The young woman still in pain, drank the hot green elixir Abue Alda prepared. After a few minutes, when the hives began to disappear, Abue Alda traced a raw egg in a circular pattern over Casilda’s body, and finally in the shape of an eagle feather over her womb. When she cracked the egg inside a glass of water, the yolk of the egg was surrounded by blood clots. Abue Alda gave Don Arcario the verdict: Casilda, who had began menstruating that morning, was also highly allergic to water.
Despite the grim prognosis, Elpidio was thrilled that Casilda made regular monthly visits to Abue Alda for cleansing rituals in the temazcal. She smiled as she walked past him, but he tamed his lust for her with only a silent nod. A year passed before he gathered the courage to ask Don Arcario for Casilda’s hand. They were both the marrying age: She was thirteen and he was twenty. Elpidio convinced Don Arcario that by marrying Casilda, she would be taken care of living in Abue Alda’s house, where she wouldn’t have to travel, specially during inclement weather days when rain was expected.
Abue Alda warned Elpidio that if he married Casilda, their children would be cursed; a woman allergic to a naturally occurring element was bad luck, she explained. She could not be cleansed by the rain water from the sky, and she could not purify her body by consuming water from the earth. She was a dry Yax Che, a dry ceiba tree that would make everything die in the rainforest. She carried a dead universe in her womb, where nothing sacred could grow. How could she ever truly honor Huracan, creator of great floods?
Elpidio’s growing will and excited heart were stronger than any potion or ritual that Abue Alda could deliver to prevent the wedding. So he went ahead despite the warnings. As a last attempt to impede any offspring between them, on Elpidio and Casilda’s first night together, Abue Alda laid down in the next room on her favorite manta, lit some copal around her, and drank a secret concoction that only she knew the ingredients of. She closed her eyes and never woke up.
It was painful for Elpidio to accept Abue Alda’s passing in the middle of the night. But despite not having her blessing, over their ten years of marriage, Casilda and Elpidio had a total of six children together. The first pregnancy, which occurred a few months after Abue Alda’s death, was stillborn twins. Casilda had difficulty conceiving after that, the result of a stressed womb. Elpidio knew this was a message from Abue Alda to remind him that even the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, asked permission from their grandparents before creating humans. In a desperate attempt to cleanse their spirits of any wrongdoing, Casilda and Elpidio asked for forgiveness in one last ritual in the temazcal before leaving town to start a new life in Piedras Negras.
When Casilda became pregnant for a second time, Elpidio felt Abue Alda’s forgiveness in the expansion of her belly. They named the child Caridad. Soon after, three more pregnancies followed: Teresa, Rosario, and Elpidio Jr. But the three young daughters were plagued with maladies, just like their mother. Caridad, suffered from various illnesses, starting with a terrible case of respiratory diphtheria before the age of eight, which left her borderline asthmatic for the rest of her life. Polio had stripped away Teresa’s ability to walk and speak coherently, and Rosario had persistent bouts of gastritis. The slight presence of any spice in Rosario’s food would make her bed-ridden for days.
Unlike his sisters, Elpidio Jr. was already showing signs of improved health. He had symmetrical big hands and feet like his father, a full head of black curly hair, and his pink cheeks stretched wide when he smiled. His porcelain light skin was even-toned and radiant. His light brown eyes were open to the world, absorbing as much light as they could. Elpidio, who never asked for anything, found himself placing a raw egg wrapped in straw on the windowsill of the house. Every morning, he would crack it open in a clear glass of water, to make sure he prevented the mal de ojo against Elpidio Jr. from his unhealthy older sisters. But unfortunately, Elpidio knew that his son had inherited the same ambidexterity that Abue Alda had attempted to eradicate in him, and it was likely that Elpidio Jr. would pass this trait to his own children one day.
Las Cruces, New Mexico
July 21st, 2018
The white Chevi border patrol van crossed the treacherous dirt path terrain into an area twenty minutes from the outskirts of Las Cruces. Officer Ada Rodriguez swerved back and forth trying to avoid any holes on the road. She could feel the gravel below them. Her window was rolled down and she sensed the earthy smell of the desert heat. Her heightened senses were distracting that morning. Officer Mendez sat on the passenger side, also slightly jolting because of the rough terrain.
“This must be it,” Mendez pointed at an open area straight ahead. He looked at his GPS monitor and signaled Rodriguez to stop.
“Chingao, it’s hotter out here than El Paso,” he looked at the thermometer on the rearview mirror. It read 103 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mendez stepped out of the van first. Rodriguez stayed in the van a little longer. She could still see Mexico in the distance. When she began to walk around the area, she could tell the direct sunlight alone could scorch the skin within a few minutes of exposure, as there were no trees around, only the occasional shade from large boulders. She walked toward a small dirt ravine where the old man had been found. She knelt down and picked up chunks of dry blue-green clay in her hand, foreign to an area like that. She wondered what it was like for that old man, to lay there for hours until he finally died. Or pass out long enough without a pulse for CBP to find him the day before and believe he was dead.
There was a soothing calmness however, and she imagined that if she could ever select a location to die, this would be the spot. Alone, smoking a cigarette in peace. Perhaps in the quiet of the night, laying on her back waiting to be reborn among the stars. She would tame her face into a serene expression so when her body was found, anyone would know she went fearlessly as she faded into darkness.
“I don’t get it,” Mendez interrupted Rodriguez envisioning her own death. “Just look. Mexico is just right there. He was less than an hour away from Las Cruces. He could have easily made it without getting caught.” Exactly, Rodriguez thought.
“It’s way off the path to the border too. It’s like he went in a circle until someone found him.”
“Maybe he wasn’t trying to cross to our side,” Rodriguez replied.
“You mean, he was trying to cross back to Mexico? He could have just crossed the bridge back. Why the hell would an illegal want to do this?”
Rodriguez looked into the clear blue horizon across the distant Mexican lands, lost in thought again.
El Paso, Texas
July 22nd, 2018
In her cubicle, Rodriguez re-examined the contents of the manila folder labeled ‘J. Doe – 10389.’ In a sealed bag designated to hold the old man’s belongings, there were several handcrafted pendants, some with animal bones attached and some with intricate patterns of blue-green jade commonly worn in the shamanist tradition. She studied the coroner’s report, photos of the old man, laying on his back in the exact spot where her and Mendez had stood the day before. His face was pale, and dust had settled on his eyelids and hair. He had obviously been out there for days before the border agents found him. His hands were chalky and stiff. His feet had a blue-green mud between them. He must have been out there alone for days trying to find his way. But his way to where? Why was he headed back to Mexico? She thought.
She wondered why the coyotes didn’t get to him first. In fact, according to the report, he was left undisturbed by any desert animal. His necrobiomes which usually determine the stage of decomposition a body, were inconclusive. To the officers who found him, he was visibly a corpse with no pulse, and that is why they zipped him up into a black body bag. She would have done the same. By any medical report, the old man was dead, and now he was inexplicably alive.
***
The old man briefly sat alone in the interrogation room, handcuff to the leg of the chair this time. He studied the cup of water on the table, just like before. But this time, he wore navy blue scrubs and plastic crocs with socks, as the officers made him take a shower and wash away all the mud on his body. All that sacred mud that protected his skin, se fue con el agua, he thought.
Officer Rodriguez opened the door to the room. Office Mendez and a translator, Officer Blanco followed. Officer Blanco sat across the old man, Mendez and Rodriguez stood behind him.
“Me llamo Omar Blanco” Officer Blanco began. “Soy agente federal de migracion. Ellos tambien, el agente Mendez y agente Rodriguez,” he pointed at each. He placed the piece of paper with the inscription “BP Ada Rodriguez” on the table.
“Queremos saber de donde viene y como se llama.”
The old man’s eyes were fixated on Officer Rodriguez. His eyes weighed heavy on her.
“Elpidio” the old man finally spoke. “I speak English, but I will only talk to her,” he pointed at Officer Rodriguez.
All eyes were on her, and she felt a piercing pain in her stomach. Officer Blanco stood up and let Officer Rodriguez take the chair. She reluctantly sat down, taming her reckless nerves in front of all the men in the room.
“How do you know my name?” she asked the old man.
“I have a message from your father, Elpidio.”
“How do you know my father?”
"You have his eyes. He had a stroke recently and passed, didn’t he?”
Officer Rodriguez sat back in her chair. She had a habit of not sharing her family business in the office. As the only female border patrol on her floor, she didn’t want to seem incapable of ‘hanging tough with the boys,’ and learned to speak only about impersonal topics. No one, including Officer Mendez, knew her father had passed the month prior.
“I haven’t spoken to him in years. I wouldn’t know,” she replied.
“He sent me. I am here to fix that problem you have with your hands.”
"What problem?”
"Since you were a child, you could use both. Just like your father and your sister. But unlike your sister, you never learned how to choose right from wrong.”
“How did you know…”
“And you have chosen wrong without knowing it, even forgetting our language,” he glared at the Border Patrol insignia on her uniform. “You incarcerate our own people.”
“Our people? I detain criminals before they go beyond the border. I maintain the law in this country.”
“Those were your last words before you hung up on your father the last time you spoke. He kept calling but you never answered. It broke his heart.”
“Who the hell are you?” she stood up from the chair. She glanced at the piece of paper on the table with her name. “Who sent you here?”
“Nos perteneces, Ada. You are one of us. His spirit cannot pass until you choose us again.”
“You know how hard it was to get here? This is my path because I worked hard for it. Which one of my aunts put you up to this? Did Alda tell you to come here?”
“Your sister Alda did not send me, but she misses you. You haven’t spoken to your family in years. Ya es hora de subirte en las raices del ceiba, a buscar a tu familia denuevo.”
Officer Rodriguez froze. She felt a cold breeze surround her body and the plain white walls in the room began to shift on their own. She glanced at the styrofoam cup on the table; the yellow yolk of a raw egg had turned white and floated to the top. Her feet could no longer hold her weight and she collapsed on the floor of the interrogation room.
El Paso
Today
You wake up in a hospital bed and your eyelids are heavy as they open. You see a familiar womanly figure approaching from across the room. It is your twin sister Alda, who you haven’t seen or spoken to in two years since you diverted professional paths; she graduated law school to practice immigration law and you applied to become a border patrol officer. Despite the differences in careers, she is your mirror-image.
“Nos distes un gran susto, Ada,” you hear her say as she embraces you.
“Que te pasó?”
“No sé,” you reply as if Spanish is the only language you speak; a language you feel like you tried to forget in a past life. “De repente, me desmallé.”
You see a styrofoam cup near a plastic pitcher full of water. It sits on a portable tray table.
“Le dije a la enfermera que tenemos alergia al algua. Aun asi, nos trajo un pichel.” Despite your allergies to water, you still try to reach for the cup because you realize your left arm is paralyzed. Alda watches you struggle.
“No te desesperes. El neurologo nos dijo que a lo mejor vas a perder sensación en un lado del cuerpo, a causa del derrame.”
“Derrame?” you ask as you try to move your toes under the sheets. They feel heavy as if you were standing knee-deep in mud. You notice Alda has paired her lawyer pantsuit look with a jade pendant around her neck. You recognize it for reasons unknown. You want to speak in English, because you remember speaking it, but you cannot recall a single word. You cannot claim it as your language anymore. The only phrase resonating from the recent past is: Ya es hora de subirte en las raices del ceiba, a buscar a tu familia denuevo. Y por fin entiendes, por que estas en este presente.
July 20th, 2018
The old man’s hands were crippled, calloused from the ware-and-tear labor in the cornfields. He studied the bridging lines of his muddy open palms, tracing them back to Piedras Negras, Mexico a lifetime ago. He tugged at the metal handcuffs around his wrists, anchoring him to the leg of the wooden chair in the small interrogation room. Inside his mouth, a dry sandstorm was forming. He refused to drink the water in the styrofoam cup on the table, no matter how much the plain white walls around him moved. He focused on syncopating his blinking to the light flashing red from the surveillance camera above him.
With his right index finger and his thumb, he dug the blue-green residue underneath his fingernails on the other hand. He gently rubbed his feet together, scrapping the dry mud nestled between his bare toes. The clusters of mud brought back a distant childhood memory, when Abue Alda would churn the masa between her fingers while making corn tortillas by hand. The clumpy masa naturally sunk back into her skin, and only rinsed off with water from the nearby water well. She was after all, like her Mayan ancestors: made of corn. His clothes were torn, as if he had fought his way out of the underworld Xibalba, the ‘place of fear.’ But only the deep wrinkles on his forehead paved way to his untold story.
Border patrol officer Rodriguez sat across from the old man, watching him tug as his peeling flesh. A slight stench of death was beginning to fill the room; the kind of smell that was all too familiar to her. It reminded her of the time she fainted at the sight of the first cadaver she ever saw during a required training in the morgue. But now, after two years as a border patrol agent on the Texas-Mexico border, death was just an everyday occurrence in her line of work.
She fixated on the man’s shoulders. He barely moved to breathe. Did he have a pulse? Surely he must be breathing if he was sitting in front of her, she thought. But she couldn’t be quite certain with a body so stiff. Other than his hands and feet, he barely moved his body at all. He didn’t struggle with his handcuffs like the recent wave of Central American criminals who tried to sell another asylum story, or U.S. citizens trying to explain contraband items in their cars. She wondered why the styrofoam cup remained untouched. Why didn’t he want to drink? His chapped lips were pealing from enduring a long period of sun exposure in the desert heat. His black hair appeared to have been falling out for years, evidence of long bouts of alopecia. His eye sockets were deep, dark, and the whiteness of his eyeballs had a tint of yellowish-decay.
“How do you know my name?” she broke the silence.
The man traced his sunken eyes past her. She felt his glare pierce every cell in her body. But instead of just holding his look in her direction, he focused on the stern CBP officer behind officer Rodriguez, who eagerly hovered the gun on his holster with his hand. The old man turned toward his own reflection on the two-way mirror to his right, as if he was staring at a twin image.
Taking a deep breath, she pulled out a folded piece of notebook paper with the name “BP Ada Rodriguez” written on it.
“Mi nombre,” she placed the paper on the table and forcefully tapped her index finger on it. “How do you know my name?” she insisted.
The man turned his body slightly to face her again, without a response. Instead, he chuckled at the sight of how her hair-tie barely tamed her unruly curly black hair. She was a light-skin morena and her olive-green uniform was too big for her small frame. It was unnatural for a woman her size to be wearing ‘manly attire,’ he thought. He could tell the stress of her job was getting to her because her weight loss had gone unperceived. She didn’t have a wedding ring on her finger, or evidence of ever wearing one. But he was sure of one thing: She had her father’s light brown eyes.
“Mendez?” she turned to the CBP officer behind her. “Can you translate?”
“I don’t speak fluent Spanish,” Officer Mendez replied.
She bit her tongue for as long as she could. “Why the hell did they send you in with me?”
He shifted his gun and shrugged.
“We’re gonna need a translator. I’ll call the medical examiner again. I want to understand how this DOA illegal came back to life and knows my name.”
Oaxaca, Mexico
July 20th, 1953
Under his lucky weather-stricken torn sombrero, Elpidio de los Santos was still physically strong for a man who had just turned thirty. In his younger days, he was known as el potro de acero among the other boys in town. With his dexterity for carpentry and the ability to move anything around him with pure brute strength, he never worried about finding work. He was also an enthusiastic herbalist, just like his grandmother Abue Alda.
Despite the circumstances growing up, Elpidio was an avid go-getter. His mother, Maria, died during childbirth and his father left long before the first birthing pains. Elpidio always imagined that his father died a patriotic hero during the Mexican revolution, taking his last breath in the Chihuahuan hills while protecting Pancho Villa in the last ambush. He arrived at this conclusion because his birthday also coincided with the assassination of Pancho Villa: July 20th, 1923.
Raised with the iron first from his maternal grandmother, Alda Eloisa de los Santos, Elpidio learned to never ask for anything. Abue Alda was a renown curandera and maintained that Elpidio’s father, un bueno para nada, had run off with a city prostitute who left him dead on the side of the road after stealing his money. She purified Elpidio’s spirit with weekly limpias espirituales to keep away the curse of mal aire that his father left behind, lighting copal smoke and swaying a raw egg in the secret pattern over his body and cracking it over a class of water to reaffirm his strong energy. Occasionally, she would cover his left hand with a small manta during the ritual, an attempt to cure his ambidexterity, which if left untreated, could leave Elpidio with the inability to tell right from wrong. She refused to speak his father’s name in the Mayan tradition of forgetting by silence, and that is how Elpidio eventually deduced that his father had probably lived in the same town. He once suspected that Abue Alda cursed his father for planting a dying seed in her daughter’s womb, but one does not question the reasons behind the mal de ojo from a curandera.
For most of his adolescent life, Elpidio assisted Abue Alda in various rituals and became a knowledgeable healer himself. Every morning he collected the necessary ingredients for various elixirs, gathered the eggs from the chickens, and brewed plant leaves to treat disorders, placing them in their respective receptacles for Abue Alda to use. With his gifted hands, he also built Abue Alda a private makeshift temazcal in the backyard, so she could conduct purification ceremonies without any distractions from onlookers.
It was an unusual cloudy Sunday morning when the town’s store owner Don Arcario Morales brought his ill teenage daughter Casilda to see Abue Alda. Don Arcario was a stern businessman and Casilda was his greatest investment. She was twelve at the time, with delicate hands covered in hives and a quiet smile despite a mysterious malady that began that morning. Casilda’s long braid adorned with ribbons, tamed her wild curly black hair; she had a womanly charm that could entice any potential suitor in the next year or so. Even in her illness, she was the most beautiful thing Elpidio ever saw.
“Doña Alda, mi hija se bebió un vaso de agua esta mañana, y mire como tiene la piel. Puras ronchas. Haga algo,” Don Arcario pleaded.
Abue Alda glanced over Casilda from head to toe. She was covered in red hives and wheezed when she breathed. She directed Don Arcario and Casilda to the backyard, and invited Casilda into the temazcal to do an initial cleansing. Elpidio and Don Arcario waited quietly outside. She asked Casilda to lay face down on the floor, as she lit copal smoke to clear the air. She pulled Casilda’s arms back, lifting her fragile upper body and bending her legs back and forth. She lifted Casilda’s dress and rubbed witch hazel leafs mixed with sabila on her legs to soothe the itch. The young woman still in pain, drank the hot green elixir Abue Alda prepared. After a few minutes, when the hives began to disappear, Abue Alda traced a raw egg in a circular pattern over Casilda’s body, and finally in the shape of an eagle feather over her womb. When she cracked the egg inside a glass of water, the yolk of the egg was surrounded by blood clots. Abue Alda gave Don Arcario the verdict: Casilda, who had began menstruating that morning, was also highly allergic to water.
Despite the grim prognosis, Elpidio was thrilled that Casilda made regular monthly visits to Abue Alda for cleansing rituals in the temazcal. She smiled as she walked past him, but he tamed his lust for her with only a silent nod. A year passed before he gathered the courage to ask Don Arcario for Casilda’s hand. They were both the marrying age: She was thirteen and he was twenty. Elpidio convinced Don Arcario that by marrying Casilda, she would be taken care of living in Abue Alda’s house, where she wouldn’t have to travel, specially during inclement weather days when rain was expected.
Abue Alda warned Elpidio that if he married Casilda, their children would be cursed; a woman allergic to a naturally occurring element was bad luck, she explained. She could not be cleansed by the rain water from the sky, and she could not purify her body by consuming water from the earth. She was a dry Yax Che, a dry ceiba tree that would make everything die in the rainforest. She carried a dead universe in her womb, where nothing sacred could grow. How could she ever truly honor Huracan, creator of great floods?
Elpidio’s growing will and excited heart were stronger than any potion or ritual that Abue Alda could deliver to prevent the wedding. So he went ahead despite the warnings. As a last attempt to impede any offspring between them, on Elpidio and Casilda’s first night together, Abue Alda laid down in the next room on her favorite manta, lit some copal around her, and drank a secret concoction that only she knew the ingredients of. She closed her eyes and never woke up.
It was painful for Elpidio to accept Abue Alda’s passing in the middle of the night. But despite not having her blessing, over their ten years of marriage, Casilda and Elpidio had a total of six children together. The first pregnancy, which occurred a few months after Abue Alda’s death, was stillborn twins. Casilda had difficulty conceiving after that, the result of a stressed womb. Elpidio knew this was a message from Abue Alda to remind him that even the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, asked permission from their grandparents before creating humans. In a desperate attempt to cleanse their spirits of any wrongdoing, Casilda and Elpidio asked for forgiveness in one last ritual in the temazcal before leaving town to start a new life in Piedras Negras.
When Casilda became pregnant for a second time, Elpidio felt Abue Alda’s forgiveness in the expansion of her belly. They named the child Caridad. Soon after, three more pregnancies followed: Teresa, Rosario, and Elpidio Jr. But the three young daughters were plagued with maladies, just like their mother. Caridad, suffered from various illnesses, starting with a terrible case of respiratory diphtheria before the age of eight, which left her borderline asthmatic for the rest of her life. Polio had stripped away Teresa’s ability to walk and speak coherently, and Rosario had persistent bouts of gastritis. The slight presence of any spice in Rosario’s food would make her bed-ridden for days.
Unlike his sisters, Elpidio Jr. was already showing signs of improved health. He had symmetrical big hands and feet like his father, a full head of black curly hair, and his pink cheeks stretched wide when he smiled. His porcelain light skin was even-toned and radiant. His light brown eyes were open to the world, absorbing as much light as they could. Elpidio, who never asked for anything, found himself placing a raw egg wrapped in straw on the windowsill of the house. Every morning, he would crack it open in a clear glass of water, to make sure he prevented the mal de ojo against Elpidio Jr. from his unhealthy older sisters. But unfortunately, Elpidio knew that his son had inherited the same ambidexterity that Abue Alda had attempted to eradicate in him, and it was likely that Elpidio Jr. would pass this trait to his own children one day.
Las Cruces, New Mexico
July 21st, 2018
The white Chevi border patrol van crossed the treacherous dirt path terrain into an area twenty minutes from the outskirts of Las Cruces. Officer Ada Rodriguez swerved back and forth trying to avoid any holes on the road. She could feel the gravel below them. Her window was rolled down and she sensed the earthy smell of the desert heat. Her heightened senses were distracting that morning. Officer Mendez sat on the passenger side, also slightly jolting because of the rough terrain.
“This must be it,” Mendez pointed at an open area straight ahead. He looked at his GPS monitor and signaled Rodriguez to stop.
“Chingao, it’s hotter out here than El Paso,” he looked at the thermometer on the rearview mirror. It read 103 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mendez stepped out of the van first. Rodriguez stayed in the van a little longer. She could still see Mexico in the distance. When she began to walk around the area, she could tell the direct sunlight alone could scorch the skin within a few minutes of exposure, as there were no trees around, only the occasional shade from large boulders. She walked toward a small dirt ravine where the old man had been found. She knelt down and picked up chunks of dry blue-green clay in her hand, foreign to an area like that. She wondered what it was like for that old man, to lay there for hours until he finally died. Or pass out long enough without a pulse for CBP to find him the day before and believe he was dead.
There was a soothing calmness however, and she imagined that if she could ever select a location to die, this would be the spot. Alone, smoking a cigarette in peace. Perhaps in the quiet of the night, laying on her back waiting to be reborn among the stars. She would tame her face into a serene expression so when her body was found, anyone would know she went fearlessly as she faded into darkness.
“I don’t get it,” Mendez interrupted Rodriguez envisioning her own death. “Just look. Mexico is just right there. He was less than an hour away from Las Cruces. He could have easily made it without getting caught.” Exactly, Rodriguez thought.
“It’s way off the path to the border too. It’s like he went in a circle until someone found him.”
“Maybe he wasn’t trying to cross to our side,” Rodriguez replied.
“You mean, he was trying to cross back to Mexico? He could have just crossed the bridge back. Why the hell would an illegal want to do this?”
Rodriguez looked into the clear blue horizon across the distant Mexican lands, lost in thought again.
El Paso, Texas
July 22nd, 2018
In her cubicle, Rodriguez re-examined the contents of the manila folder labeled ‘J. Doe – 10389.’ In a sealed bag designated to hold the old man’s belongings, there were several handcrafted pendants, some with animal bones attached and some with intricate patterns of blue-green jade commonly worn in the shamanist tradition. She studied the coroner’s report, photos of the old man, laying on his back in the exact spot where her and Mendez had stood the day before. His face was pale, and dust had settled on his eyelids and hair. He had obviously been out there for days before the border agents found him. His hands were chalky and stiff. His feet had a blue-green mud between them. He must have been out there alone for days trying to find his way. But his way to where? Why was he headed back to Mexico? She thought.
She wondered why the coyotes didn’t get to him first. In fact, according to the report, he was left undisturbed by any desert animal. His necrobiomes which usually determine the stage of decomposition a body, were inconclusive. To the officers who found him, he was visibly a corpse with no pulse, and that is why they zipped him up into a black body bag. She would have done the same. By any medical report, the old man was dead, and now he was inexplicably alive.
***
The old man briefly sat alone in the interrogation room, handcuff to the leg of the chair this time. He studied the cup of water on the table, just like before. But this time, he wore navy blue scrubs and plastic crocs with socks, as the officers made him take a shower and wash away all the mud on his body. All that sacred mud that protected his skin, se fue con el agua, he thought.
Officer Rodriguez opened the door to the room. Office Mendez and a translator, Officer Blanco followed. Officer Blanco sat across the old man, Mendez and Rodriguez stood behind him.
“Me llamo Omar Blanco” Officer Blanco began. “Soy agente federal de migracion. Ellos tambien, el agente Mendez y agente Rodriguez,” he pointed at each. He placed the piece of paper with the inscription “BP Ada Rodriguez” on the table.
“Queremos saber de donde viene y como se llama.”
The old man’s eyes were fixated on Officer Rodriguez. His eyes weighed heavy on her.
“Elpidio” the old man finally spoke. “I speak English, but I will only talk to her,” he pointed at Officer Rodriguez.
All eyes were on her, and she felt a piercing pain in her stomach. Officer Blanco stood up and let Officer Rodriguez take the chair. She reluctantly sat down, taming her reckless nerves in front of all the men in the room.
“How do you know my name?” she asked the old man.
“I have a message from your father, Elpidio.”
“How do you know my father?”
"You have his eyes. He had a stroke recently and passed, didn’t he?”
Officer Rodriguez sat back in her chair. She had a habit of not sharing her family business in the office. As the only female border patrol on her floor, she didn’t want to seem incapable of ‘hanging tough with the boys,’ and learned to speak only about impersonal topics. No one, including Officer Mendez, knew her father had passed the month prior.
“I haven’t spoken to him in years. I wouldn’t know,” she replied.
“He sent me. I am here to fix that problem you have with your hands.”
"What problem?”
"Since you were a child, you could use both. Just like your father and your sister. But unlike your sister, you never learned how to choose right from wrong.”
“How did you know…”
“And you have chosen wrong without knowing it, even forgetting our language,” he glared at the Border Patrol insignia on her uniform. “You incarcerate our own people.”
“Our people? I detain criminals before they go beyond the border. I maintain the law in this country.”
“Those were your last words before you hung up on your father the last time you spoke. He kept calling but you never answered. It broke his heart.”
“Who the hell are you?” she stood up from the chair. She glanced at the piece of paper on the table with her name. “Who sent you here?”
“Nos perteneces, Ada. You are one of us. His spirit cannot pass until you choose us again.”
“You know how hard it was to get here? This is my path because I worked hard for it. Which one of my aunts put you up to this? Did Alda tell you to come here?”
“Your sister Alda did not send me, but she misses you. You haven’t spoken to your family in years. Ya es hora de subirte en las raices del ceiba, a buscar a tu familia denuevo.”
Officer Rodriguez froze. She felt a cold breeze surround her body and the plain white walls in the room began to shift on their own. She glanced at the styrofoam cup on the table; the yellow yolk of a raw egg had turned white and floated to the top. Her feet could no longer hold her weight and she collapsed on the floor of the interrogation room.
El Paso
Today
You wake up in a hospital bed and your eyelids are heavy as they open. You see a familiar womanly figure approaching from across the room. It is your twin sister Alda, who you haven’t seen or spoken to in two years since you diverted professional paths; she graduated law school to practice immigration law and you applied to become a border patrol officer. Despite the differences in careers, she is your mirror-image.
“Nos distes un gran susto, Ada,” you hear her say as she embraces you.
“Que te pasó?”
“No sé,” you reply as if Spanish is the only language you speak; a language you feel like you tried to forget in a past life. “De repente, me desmallé.”
You see a styrofoam cup near a plastic pitcher full of water. It sits on a portable tray table.
“Le dije a la enfermera que tenemos alergia al algua. Aun asi, nos trajo un pichel.” Despite your allergies to water, you still try to reach for the cup because you realize your left arm is paralyzed. Alda watches you struggle.
“No te desesperes. El neurologo nos dijo que a lo mejor vas a perder sensación en un lado del cuerpo, a causa del derrame.”
“Derrame?” you ask as you try to move your toes under the sheets. They feel heavy as if you were standing knee-deep in mud. You notice Alda has paired her lawyer pantsuit look with a jade pendant around her neck. You recognize it for reasons unknown. You want to speak in English, because you remember speaking it, but you cannot recall a single word. You cannot claim it as your language anymore. The only phrase resonating from the recent past is: Ya es hora de subirte en las raices del ceiba, a buscar a tu familia denuevo. Y por fin entiendes, por que estas en este presente.
Tania Romero, born and raised in Nicaragua, is a poet, filmmaker, and digital media instructor who currently resides in Texas. Her award-winning short documentary, “Hasta con las Uñas,” featured interviews with Nicaraguan women filmmakers. Recently she published a free-form poem titled El Paso Pasó Por mi Corazón in the Sin Fronteras journal, and her photography will be featured in an anthology of Latino writers titled, Latina Outsiders (Routledge). Her short story, “Una Cuadra Al Lago de Silencio,” was published in Somos en Escrito and The Rio Grande Review, and her short story, “Mas Doraditos” was published in La Ceiba Journal. She is working toward an MFA in Creative Writing from UT El Paso.
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"Death Eye Dog, Xolotl, cried so much when the last world, the world of the Fourth Sun ended, that his eyes fell out of his sockets."
Death Eye Dog
by Michelle Robles-Wallace
"Death Eye Dog" was a runner up in the 2018 Extra Fiction Contest. See here to read the first, second, and third winning entries and stay tuned for this year's upcoming Extra Fiction Contest.
"Death Eye Dog" was a runner up in the 2018 Extra Fiction Contest. See here to read the first, second, and third winning entries and stay tuned for this year's upcoming Extra Fiction Contest.
Mictlán, barren land of darkness and skeletons, the deepest level of the underworld, rests nine worlds beneath our own. The dead take a full four years to journey there; the living never go. At the first level of the underworld, the Mexica dead, if they are lucky, pick up a dog to guide them through the harrowing dangers of the underworld.
Houses are lonely when they are no longer homes and nightfall makes the emptiness rattle. Raul walks in the night with his dog. He wears too-big, hooded sweatshirts that hide his face in darkness. This part of San Francisco is grey. The fog dampens the cold, streetlights dim the darkness and the smell of urine rises thick from the pavement. The only glitter comes from the glass chips in the sidewalk that shine in the momentary light of passing cars.
Raul walks smooth and towers over most people on the street. His arms are heavy and solid; his eyes are tired and full of unshed tears. He carries arrugas on his face so deep they sometimes appear as folds. He lives alone; even when among friends and family, he resists communion. Solid as his name, stonecold, like a fallen star who has forgotten how to shine. It is as if he wears a cloak, a tangle of scars of loss that hide the glow of his heart.
Passersby slink away from the walking duo.
Death Eye Dog sinks over the horizon with the morning light. Xolotl, the evening star, hangs heavy in the night sky, demands notice as soon as the bright rays of the sun sink beneath the horizon.
Death Eye Dog, Xolotl, cried so much when the last world, the world of the Fourth Sun ended, that his eyes fell out of his sockets.
Blind, Xolotl guided his brother, Morning Star, into the depths of Mictlán after the Fourth Sun ended in flood. The waters washed all the dead to the underworld, returning the people to their spiritual home of darkness. None were left to remake the world of the Fifth Sun anew. Morning Star, Quetzlcoatl, guided by Evening Star, Xolotl, descended to Mictlán, land of darkness and skeletons. Human bones covered the ground. Quetzlcoatl slashed his wrists, anointing the bones with his life-giving blood.
Xolotl, Death Eye Dog, gathered up the bones in his mouth, carried them from the underworld back to the material world to remake mankind in the fifth and final age of the Sun.
Raul knew a different life before this life he lives now. He had a wife, he had a daughter: he had a home. They are as gone now as if the flood of the Fourth Sun had come and washed them away.
Untethered, he never cried, gritted his teeth instead and convinced himself not to feel. Stonecold. Emotion oozes out the cracks though, or explodes in sudden unpredictable bursts. The dog was to take the edge off alone, off loss, off untethered.
His pit bull is rowdy. Rambunctious. They hold the opposite ends of the leash and pull and pull and pull. Neither ever gives in, even when Raul raises his arm up over his head hauling the dog several feet off the ground.
Raul lowers him down, lays his broad hand on the dog’s head. He doesn’t push down but lets its weight be enough to make the dog submit and release the leash.
His submissions are only momentary: he knows who is boss, but only in the practical matters of food and shelter. That pit never stops being his own dog. He mischieves all the time.
The dog too is big, he is lean and narrow, but tall, taller than pit bulls are expected to be. Raul and the dog’s eyes are the same color hazel, only the dog’s are full of joy and love and play.
A gap begs a bridge between the two, a guided path from the terrible cloak of Raul’s to the dog’s incorrigible joy. Raul ought to be blind with tears by now, instead his eyes hang heavy at the edges, as if carrying a great weight. He goes about now in a darkness as bleak as Mictlán, in a darkness as tight as a straitjacket.
From Mictlán it is possible to rise again as butterfly or bird, to resurrect oneself.
From loss it is possible to rebuild your life.
Winter rebirths spring swells into summer sheds into autumn returns to the barrenness of winter.
Wintertime, darktimes, where it appears that all is lost and nothing moves are crucial times. The earth restores during winter. Its faith never flails at the darkest time of night, during that hour before the sun sets a blood red glow on the horizon, knowing that it must arrive at those dark depths before bursting forth into spring.
Too, to rebirth from the underworld, the dead must first arrive at the depths of Mictlán.
Raul got his dog after he returned from family back to one. Something warm and alive to love in the hardest time of unknowing what next, something to care for when the dawn was nothing to set his cap at, a guide for the darkest parts of night. He lacks the morning star, the blood of life that ushers in a new dawn.
Stonecold, Raul forgets to look for the sun rising, for the red glow on the horizon. He spends his days waiting for it to be night and the night to be day, until the time that will pass, does. He tries to form a new family, one of friends, stopgaps living with partying, something to fill the time and space. The gap between he and the dog becomes an abyss, slowly, like water run through a crevice carves out a canyon.
Raul and his dog walk up 21st street, past the crowded-at-night basketball courts, the stoops where people sit, talking, drinking and hollering out to passersby. He had set out for a walk to take the chill off alone, but the darkness presses tight. They turn onto Mission, head over to a bar where a friend bartends. Raul ties his dog up outside and walks in to where a beer and a shot of tequila are sliding across the bar to him as soon as his shadow fills the doorway.
It is Guillermo’s bar, meaning, the bar where Guillermo works, not a bar that Guillermo owns. The lights are dim and throw a reddish cast to the bar, except for the bright white light that highlights the rows of bottles. There they are, working and playing, all his crew, and Miguel shouts, “Eh, man, where’d you crawl out from. You missed a great party last week, ha! Ask Devon ‘bout it,” then starts laughing maniacally, like a machine gun. Raul asks, and Guillermo sets out a row of shot glasses, fills them with tequila and then everyone reaches in and grabs one, throws them back and then gets back to work on their beers.
Devon launches into a story, “So this girl, I see her and she looks amazing and she’s alone so I give her a lil’ tap, just a tap not even on her ass, but on her hip, and then this guy over on the couch starts glaring at me and comes over and pushes me across the table,” and Guillermo starts laughing, “and I came in and—”
“Dude, shut up, I’m telling the story and—,”
And Raul’s eyes are lit up, anointed by the liquor, “Hey Guillermo, how about another round over here,” because that’s what they do, is keep going until Guillermo calls last call and then the crowd spills out onto the street, leaving just him and his boys and they head into the back and do some lines and their speech becomes sharp like knives and their laughter like metal and they leave, finally, and head over to where Miguel knows somebody spinning and it’s going to be good, man, and they go and they stay, inside in the dark cut with bright pulsating lights even while sun rises, bloodred, spilling dawn over the land.
Houses are lonely when they are no longer homes and nightfall makes the emptiness rattle. Raul walks in the night with his dog. He wears too-big, hooded sweatshirts that hide his face in darkness. This part of San Francisco is grey. The fog dampens the cold, streetlights dim the darkness and the smell of urine rises thick from the pavement. The only glitter comes from the glass chips in the sidewalk that shine in the momentary light of passing cars.
Raul walks smooth and towers over most people on the street. His arms are heavy and solid; his eyes are tired and full of unshed tears. He carries arrugas on his face so deep they sometimes appear as folds. He lives alone; even when among friends and family, he resists communion. Solid as his name, stonecold, like a fallen star who has forgotten how to shine. It is as if he wears a cloak, a tangle of scars of loss that hide the glow of his heart.
Passersby slink away from the walking duo.
Death Eye Dog sinks over the horizon with the morning light. Xolotl, the evening star, hangs heavy in the night sky, demands notice as soon as the bright rays of the sun sink beneath the horizon.
Death Eye Dog, Xolotl, cried so much when the last world, the world of the Fourth Sun ended, that his eyes fell out of his sockets.
Blind, Xolotl guided his brother, Morning Star, into the depths of Mictlán after the Fourth Sun ended in flood. The waters washed all the dead to the underworld, returning the people to their spiritual home of darkness. None were left to remake the world of the Fifth Sun anew. Morning Star, Quetzlcoatl, guided by Evening Star, Xolotl, descended to Mictlán, land of darkness and skeletons. Human bones covered the ground. Quetzlcoatl slashed his wrists, anointing the bones with his life-giving blood.
Xolotl, Death Eye Dog, gathered up the bones in his mouth, carried them from the underworld back to the material world to remake mankind in the fifth and final age of the Sun.
Raul knew a different life before this life he lives now. He had a wife, he had a daughter: he had a home. They are as gone now as if the flood of the Fourth Sun had come and washed them away.
Untethered, he never cried, gritted his teeth instead and convinced himself not to feel. Stonecold. Emotion oozes out the cracks though, or explodes in sudden unpredictable bursts. The dog was to take the edge off alone, off loss, off untethered.
His pit bull is rowdy. Rambunctious. They hold the opposite ends of the leash and pull and pull and pull. Neither ever gives in, even when Raul raises his arm up over his head hauling the dog several feet off the ground.
Raul lowers him down, lays his broad hand on the dog’s head. He doesn’t push down but lets its weight be enough to make the dog submit and release the leash.
His submissions are only momentary: he knows who is boss, but only in the practical matters of food and shelter. That pit never stops being his own dog. He mischieves all the time.
The dog too is big, he is lean and narrow, but tall, taller than pit bulls are expected to be. Raul and the dog’s eyes are the same color hazel, only the dog’s are full of joy and love and play.
A gap begs a bridge between the two, a guided path from the terrible cloak of Raul’s to the dog’s incorrigible joy. Raul ought to be blind with tears by now, instead his eyes hang heavy at the edges, as if carrying a great weight. He goes about now in a darkness as bleak as Mictlán, in a darkness as tight as a straitjacket.
From Mictlán it is possible to rise again as butterfly or bird, to resurrect oneself.
From loss it is possible to rebuild your life.
Winter rebirths spring swells into summer sheds into autumn returns to the barrenness of winter.
Wintertime, darktimes, where it appears that all is lost and nothing moves are crucial times. The earth restores during winter. Its faith never flails at the darkest time of night, during that hour before the sun sets a blood red glow on the horizon, knowing that it must arrive at those dark depths before bursting forth into spring.
Too, to rebirth from the underworld, the dead must first arrive at the depths of Mictlán.
Raul got his dog after he returned from family back to one. Something warm and alive to love in the hardest time of unknowing what next, something to care for when the dawn was nothing to set his cap at, a guide for the darkest parts of night. He lacks the morning star, the blood of life that ushers in a new dawn.
Stonecold, Raul forgets to look for the sun rising, for the red glow on the horizon. He spends his days waiting for it to be night and the night to be day, until the time that will pass, does. He tries to form a new family, one of friends, stopgaps living with partying, something to fill the time and space. The gap between he and the dog becomes an abyss, slowly, like water run through a crevice carves out a canyon.
Raul and his dog walk up 21st street, past the crowded-at-night basketball courts, the stoops where people sit, talking, drinking and hollering out to passersby. He had set out for a walk to take the chill off alone, but the darkness presses tight. They turn onto Mission, head over to a bar where a friend bartends. Raul ties his dog up outside and walks in to where a beer and a shot of tequila are sliding across the bar to him as soon as his shadow fills the doorway.
It is Guillermo’s bar, meaning, the bar where Guillermo works, not a bar that Guillermo owns. The lights are dim and throw a reddish cast to the bar, except for the bright white light that highlights the rows of bottles. There they are, working and playing, all his crew, and Miguel shouts, “Eh, man, where’d you crawl out from. You missed a great party last week, ha! Ask Devon ‘bout it,” then starts laughing maniacally, like a machine gun. Raul asks, and Guillermo sets out a row of shot glasses, fills them with tequila and then everyone reaches in and grabs one, throws them back and then gets back to work on their beers.
Devon launches into a story, “So this girl, I see her and she looks amazing and she’s alone so I give her a lil’ tap, just a tap not even on her ass, but on her hip, and then this guy over on the couch starts glaring at me and comes over and pushes me across the table,” and Guillermo starts laughing, “and I came in and—”
“Dude, shut up, I’m telling the story and—,”
And Raul’s eyes are lit up, anointed by the liquor, “Hey Guillermo, how about another round over here,” because that’s what they do, is keep going until Guillermo calls last call and then the crowd spills out onto the street, leaving just him and his boys and they head into the back and do some lines and their speech becomes sharp like knives and their laughter like metal and they leave, finally, and head over to where Miguel knows somebody spinning and it’s going to be good, man, and they go and they stay, inside in the dark cut with bright pulsating lights even while sun rises, bloodred, spilling dawn over the land.
Michelle Marie Robles Wallace is working on a collection of short stories set along the borderlands, a memoir and a YA novel. She has published short fiction, CNF and journalism and is particularly interested in themes of healing and borders. She has an MFA and is the recipient of a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artists Grant, a Writers' Grotto Writing Fellowship, and hosted the Borderlands Lectura.
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