Third Place 2019 Extra Fiction Contest

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.

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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.

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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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