Honorary Mention Extra Fiction 2022May 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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