“Tikahki in tlatsotsonalistli itech tlahtoltsin inik amo polihwi ipan ilnalmiki.”

Listen carefully to the rhythms of your tongue so that they don’t get lost in memory.

—Translated into Nahuatl by Gustavo Zapoteco Sideño



PROLOGUE

Thunder claps from above with a violence that could rupture the very heavens. It is like the booming strokes of an immense teponaxtle drum resounding in an endless funerary procession. People say the ancient gods are trampling and crashing against the new celestial firmament above, trying to smash their way back into the world. But their old temples are hardly more than rubble, their displaced priests fighting over crumbs among the wreckage, and the believers—the ones still able to walk—are begging for food with outstretched, soiled hands. Tenochtitlán, like the Aztec empire of which it was the crown jewel, is in ruins. News of the city’s destruction—the subjugation of its people, the massacres, the futility of resistance—reaches the borders of Nahua territory.

When the storm ends, the worst part is the absolute drowning silence; the silence of graves, of the defeated gods, of the broken musical instruments, of the mute poets. The tlatolli and the cuicatl, the poems, stories, and songs that preserved traditions, memory, art, beauty, and magic have all disappeared. A small town by the name of Coicoshan has already been decimated. Many of its citizens died in combat with the invaders, but most of them were killed by disease.

And then, suddenly, noise. A sound so loud it bursts the eardrum. The town has been breached by soldiers, friars, and bureaucrats of the Crown. The air is unbearable. The warriors were captured, most of them executed, and survivors are locked in makeshift jails, bound by shackles on their feet, hands, and necks. This vile wind is decimating the population. Most of its current inhabitants are new arrivals, refugees escaping from famine and the new caciques, both Spanish and native collaborators, in their own territories. Only a few of them actually know the name of this town that, as a last resort, they’ve turned into their home.

The friars—miraculously immune to the contagious diseases killing the locals, as if the divine protection they spoke of is really achievable—are officiating mass in Latin. The locals don’t understand a word, but are forced to attend nonetheless. With most of the material riches already aboard ships back to the Old World—galleons filled with gold, jewels, and artifacts—the only thing left to exploit are the people and the lands themselves. The friars often show up at Nahua homes alongside soldiers without warning, taking children away to be saved through knowledge of a God that hates them.

Several friars force a dozen or so children between five and twelve, still young enough to be indoctrinated, to recite the Ave María again and again. Whenever a child makes a mistake or refuses to sing, they are struck with branches. Welts mark their hands, backs, and necks. The children are shown the Nahua ritual relics of their ancestors—statuettes, masks, weapons—and are told by the holy men that they are the devil’s work.

From a table overflowing with sacred objects looted from temples and homes, Friar Melquiades chose a round clay pot covered in feathers and animal hide. He rotated the object in his hands before tearing open a small opening he found near the bottom of it. He recoiled from the tanned flesh he now held at arm’s length, as a look of disgust contorted his face. It was filled with bits of flesh, cartilage, and dried organs. The origins of the viscera weren’t clear, human or animal both were equally likely to the friar. It seemed to him a work of the Adversary himself—Satan must have had a deep hold on the people of this land, driving them to do such perverse things. The pot had a clay ring on the top, through which he strung a length of rope. He asked one of the solders to tie the other end to a fencepost. He held on to the other end of the rope, raising the object five feet from the ground. Another friar, Simón, handed a stick to a younger child. They had piñatas in Spain just the same as they had in this godless land, but the friars knew that context would make all the difference.

“Tell them to strike it,” Melquiades said to the interpreter, “and whoever breaks it gets a prize.”

The other friars snickered, amused by the child’s realization of what he was being asked to do.

“Tell him it’s a game.”

“Tlapalxoktli,” the boy said anxiously.

The child turned to the clergymen, wide-eyed, then turned back to the rest of the children. Not daring to look at the pot, he grit his teeth as his shoulders heaved and began to cry. Melquiades pushed him toward the pot, trying to make him hold the stick. The interpreter followed suit, yelling and telling him in Nahuatl to strike it. The children shrieked.

“I can’t. I shouldn’t. It’s an offering. It can’t just be spilled,” the boy holding the stick repeated, again and again.

The interpreter translated. The friar slapped the boy’s head and called another child, older than the first, forcing the stick into his hands.

“Hit it, dammit, or I’ll have you beaten dead right here,” Melquiades yelled in his ear.

The boy swung and connected with the pot, immediately dropping the stick, hoping that he had fulfilled the request. But the friar continued to shout, and grabbed the stick from the ground, shoving it back into the boy’s hands, pressing firmly so he wouldn’t drop it again. The boy hit the pot once more, weeping between shallow, shaking breaths. He shut his eyes tight, but Melquiades guided his hand, rendering him unable to stop. Suddenly, with a final strike, the pot, the piñata, cracked and broke. Flesh, entrails, and a deep burgundy syrup of coagulated blood poured from the shattered base of the piñata. The shrieks of the children grew louder, watching and wailing in their hopelessness. Their ancestral ceremonies were very similar, cracking the pot at the feet of the god as an offering to Huitzilopochtli, but even the children knew that their old ways were being perverted by the friars. These conquerors made them waste the offerings, spilling them to the ground in the process of forgetting.

It was the end of the world and the end of the gods. These men would see that the gods died along with the priests.

Melquiades turned back to the group, the interpreter relaying his words to the frantic children, “Soon I’ll make you see the error, the disgusting nature, of your old misguided ways. No god worth any worship would ask for this … filth,” he kicked a piece of flesh around in the dirt. “You’ll find that God doesn’t ask for blood and viscera, none of these barbaric offerings your ancestors gave.”

Melquiades grabbed another offering pot and set it up again using the fencepost, “The Almighty only wants your soul. You, boy, come here. It’s your turn. Destroy this awful piece of idolatry.”

Father Simón pushed the young boy forth, but he refused to break the pot. He wouldn’t even hold the stick, still stained with the blood of the last offering jar. Melquiades, fed up with these heathens refusing the call to repent, hit the child to the ground and kicked him in the ribs. The interpreter tried to intervene, but the friar pushed him away and he fell, rolling across the ground. Melquiades continued kicking, the rest of the missionaries only restraining the shouting children as they all watched. The screams died down as the children became stunned by their inability to stop any of this, rapt in the horror their lives had become. Only the thud of Melquiades’s foot against the boy’s side and his grunt with every kick could be heard until the boy stopped moving entirely. Blood was dripping down his ears and he remained motionless, an example made. A girl freed herself from the friars as they all stood shocked by the brutality on display. She fell to her knees by her dead brother, shaking him and calling his name only for a moment before she was dragged to her feet by the man who’d just beaten him to death.

“Don’t worry, child. The dogs will eat him, so he will finally be of some use. He’ll return to the arms of one of your horrid gods,” said Melquiades.

“Tie her up,” Father Simón instructed.

“Her name is Ketzali, Father. She’s quite the troublemaker,” the interpreter said.

Ketzali leaped away from him as he tried to hold her down. There were more “piñatas” on the table awaiting the same fate as the first. She grabbed a tlapalxoktli and ran, cradling it in her arms. The friars, caught unaware, tried to catch up with her.

“Catch that little bitch! Soldiers, soldiers, she’s getting away!” Melquiades yelled.

Ketzali slipped between the guards, running into what had once been a temple whose sacred stones were now being torn away to construct the halls of an abbey. She darted through the corridors, listening past her heartbeat for the steps of approaching clergymen, searching for an exit or hiding place. Hugging walls and narrowly avoiding being seen, she finally found the entrance to a small open crawl space between two chambers under construction.

Sliding herself and the tlapalxoktli underneath a rudimentary tower of shelves, she lay still in the dirt, panting and waiting. Eventually the sound of footsteps coming from the corridors faded away. They assumed she had already made an escape. Thinking it was the right moment, she left the tlapalxoktli behind in its hiding place and sprinted through the doors of the abbey and into the fields.

“There she is!” a soldier yelled.

He ran after her, followed closely by another soldier, but she was already far across the field and nearly in the tree line. They gave up, exhausted and ill-equipped to chase a small Nahua girl through the forests. Soon, Melquiades caught up with them, equally out of breath.

“What do you think you’re doing? Look for her! If one Indian escapes, it’ll set a precedent for everyone else,” he said. “They’ll start making for the trees just like her!”

The soldiers composed themselves and kept running after Ketzali as Melquiades headed back to the abbey, cursing his luck. He entered his cell-like room and closed the door. Sweating profusely after their fruitless chase and looking to get some air, he began to remove his robe when he felt a slight breeze.

“Would you mind knocking?” he started, assuming someone had opened his door, but when he turned nobody was there.

In fact, where the door had been there was only an impossibly dark shadow. The light of the candles in Melquiades’s room seemed to skip that section of the wall. He now wrapped his robe tightly around himself as the air in the room turned frigid, a kind of cold he had not felt since the oceanic voyage to this land. As he pulled the fabric to his body, his hand involuntarily began to wrap itself around the cross hanging from his neck and he muttered a prayer.

“H-hello? Who is there?” he stammered.

A terribly pale face, skeletal and eyeless, emerged from the shadow. Near skinless, what flesh it maintained hung tattered and decaying from its visage like ribbons. It’s body unrevealed, the face drew nearer to the friar as its neck extended farther and farther.

Melquiades stepped back horrified, his breath catching in his throat as he attempted to appeal to the Lord for protection. Only inches from his own, the face grinned, opening cracks in the diseased flesh and revealing black and jagged teeth. In the flickering candlelight they shone like the obsidian daggers he had seen soldiers take from the native warriors. Its breath smelled like the mass graves the soldiers had piled them in.

Gagging from the stench, Melquiades opened his mouth to scream for help from a guard or an angel, but only blood sputtered forth. Releasing the cross on his neck, he now clutched at his stomach and solar plexus, tearing at the robes as he felt something under the fabric ripping at him. Lifting his frock, the shadow cast by the faint candlelight showed a jagged mass moving under his skin. He was being shred from the inside. Choking Gagging on blood, he sucked in a stuttering, choked breath and tried again to scream for help when pirul branches, just like the ones he used to hit the children, erupted from his mouth tearing apart his lips and esophagus, shredding his trachea before bursting through his heart, lungs, and intestines as his rib cage split open.

The friar fell to his knees, convulsing as a tree grew from within him, gore dripping from its leaves and berries. Only blood spewed from his lips, his last noise not a scream but a desperate gurgle as he beheld what he assumed to be the face of the devil himself sinking back into the darkness from which it came, leaving him to bleed out in the silence of his windowless room.



1

Carmen kept an eye on Luna’s bright orange backpack, almost larger than the eleven-year-old herself, as it bounced between stands in the market. Luna stopped to talk to almost every fruit and vegetable vendor she could find. Asking for samples and counting her pocket change out loud in Spanish, she’d retrace her steps to buy trinkets and produce from this and that vendor after being sure she found a good price. She would come back to her mother, Carmen, and older sister, Izel, and breathlessly report on which vendor had the nicest produce, and what price she’d gotten on a pepper that another vendor wanted to charge her ten pesos more for, and why she chose the papaya in her hands over another, before stuffing the haul into her bag and running ahead. Luna would spare no detail as to who was the kindest vendor, the one with the most reasonable prices, the one with the highest quality products, how to know if a mamey was sweet and tender, and which mangos to choose.

Carmen knew her youngest daughter had been anticipating this trip for months—improving her Spanish and learning about Tulancingo from her room back in New York through Wikipedia pages and Google Street View tours of the town—but was shocked to see her little girl so seemingly acclimated. Looking around, even the vendors of the market were entertained by the excitable little girl attempting to haggle in slightly American-accented Spanish. They didn’t even seem to mind how harsh of a lowballer she was.

Behind them though, Izel dragged her feet, avoiding the eyes of men, children, and women alike, but mostly the men. As a sixteen-year-old, feeling like everyone was staring at her was hard enough, but knowing they actually were was almost hellish. A couple of the men sitting on produce boxes around the market even dared to wink or blow her a kiss when Carmen wasn’t looking.

“Son unos brutos todos,” she said, her Spanish dripping with her American accent, hoping to be heard, thinking it would discourage them. The effect was quite the opposite: the men felt seen, recognized, as if they’d achieved something by eliciting a reaction; they persisted and grew bolder, shouting at her back in Spanish to come over and chat.

“Just ignore them, Izel,” Carmen said, turning her head without taking her eyes off Luna, “You know how men in the cities are. They’re the same here as they are in New York—maybe a little bolder at the markets around here, but the same. You can’t give them a reaction.”

“But they’re so fucking annoying.”

“Hey! Language! Believe me, Izel, I understand how it feels, but don’t let them ruin your time. That’s letting them win, you know?”

“Men are pigs no matter what language they squeal in, huh?”

Carmen laughed a little bit, “Unfortunately, yes. I know you’re in a bad mood, but at least don’t swear like that around Luna too much, alright?”

Luna, young enough and too far from earshot to be a part of the conversation, was simply thrilled to be in charge of the groceries, piling onions, green tomatoes, parsley, cilantro, and serrano peppers into her backpack. That night they were planning on having dinner with Father Verón. He was the caretaker of the abbey Carmen was renovating for an architectural project and had been the one to welcome them at the airport. For a man of the cloth, he was a surprisingly fun guest to have around the house. A competent chef as well, he’d taught Luna how to make Mexican dishes and lent her some books about Mexican culture and history.

Even though Carmen told Izel to ignore the men, she watched everyone around them in her peripheral vision. As much as she wanted her advice to be all a woman needed in the world, Carmen was acutely aware of the humming, imminent danger that lurked in the background for a woman and two girls in a foreign land. She knew Hidalgo was one of the safer states in Mexico, but living in America for so long had unavoidably altered her perception of the country. So often the only headlines to make it across the border were the horror stories: exchange students ransomed, people found beheaded, the police and the army colluding with cartels, unmarked mass graves—stories of a lawless and brutal land. Even when she tried to think of Tulancingo’s relative safety, it reminded her it was only relatively safe.

On their way down to the municipal market they had passed through a busy plaza where Carmen had seen all the flyers. Covering nearly every surface were the same DIY advertisements found anywhere. People were offering English tutoring, rooms and apartments for rent, music lessons. But among them she began to notice the faces. Pictures of women and girls, pulled from their social media pages and family photo albums, stapled or taped among the cacophony of ads. Eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch pleas for help stapled to every telephone pole. Appeals to God glued to electrical boxes; appeals to the authorities were long abandoned. At first, Carmen didn’t give them a second glance, but there were so many: on the streets, inside the market, on the light posts. Finally, she relented to her morbid curiosity and began to read them.

Mariana Saldívar Escobar, sixteen years old, medium skin, black hair, disappeared on July 8 in Progreso district. She was wearing a white blouse and black skirt. She’s a student at Preparatoria Técnica 21. Call if you have any leads.

Esther Ángulo Sáenz, left her home on December 5. She’s fourteen years old and a student at Santa María. She was last seen wearing a yellow dress. Help us find her.

María del Refugio Ramos. Light skin, black, straight, long hair. She has a beauty mark on her right cheek. Last seen wearing a black Adidas sweatshirt and jeans. She works at the fabric shop, Esponda. Reward: 50,000 pesos.

Her eyes began to look straight through the ads and shot from one faded face poking through the clutter to the next. There was a nauseating curiosity that made her unable to keep herself from scanning every post for the same faces. She continually checked ahead of her to make sure her girls hadn’t noticed the posters and that, more important, they were still where she could see them. There were so many—she could tell by the worn paper that several of them had been there for a long time, while others couldn’t be more than a few days old. Carmen wondered whether the yellowed, rain-smeared, sun-bleached ones had been left up because their subjects were found, or the families had finally given up. She almost jumped when she noticed Luna looking at her and tried to feign interest in a traditional dress on the other side of the window a flyer had been taped to.

“Those girls are lost, huh?” Luna asked.

“Um,” she hesitated, unsure of how much a girl Luna’s age should know about the world and its dangers, “I’m not sure, maybe they’re the graduating class from their high school,” she replied. Heat rose in her chest at how stupid a deflection that had been.

“I can read.”

“I know.” Carmen realized there was no question of how much Luna should know. She was clearly old enough to understand, even if not entirely conscious, what it meant for a girl to be missing, the inherent risks of womanhood. The terribly uncomfortable time was dawning when Carmen would have to tell her how to avoid those risks.

Carmen tried to the push it all from her mind—the flyers, Luna’s comment—but now, in the market, she kept a hawk’s eye on her youngest daughter as she walked on ahead of her and Izel. Knowing Luna’s curiosity often led her to rush off on her own, Carmen was greatly comforted by her purchase of the gaudy, safety orange backpack flagging Luna’s presence in the crowds.

Every now and then, as they walked through the stalls, a vendor interrupted and cut them off, showcasing some mamey, apple, or peach.

“Here, try this!”

“No, thank you, no,” Izel replied, recoiling from the offered produce and its seller. Even when they had lived in New York City she’d never experienced such aggressive salesmanship from street vendors. She had difficulty grasping how people in a market dared to invade her personal bubble, wasting her time to offer her products she had no interest in. A smile crept across Carmen’s face as she watched her daughter grapple with the social conventions of a new place. She’d been excited to expose her daughters to the culture she’d grown up in, even if it made them a bit uncomfortable at times.

“Don’t be rude, try it. It doesn’t bite,” Carmen said.

“What? I don’t know what that is! What if I’m allergic or something? Is it even washed properly? The knife looks so dirty.”

“When did you become such a hypochondriac?”

“Okay, I have everything on Father Verón’s list,” said Luna, adjusting her backpack on her shoulder and rejoining her family. “I’m only missing the huitlacoche. I know it has to be around here somewhere.”

“I don’t know. You’re the little expert, Luna,” Izel replied without taking her eyes off the phone in her hands and, within nearly the same breath, asked, “Mom, do you have a portable charger? My phone is dying.”

Carmen gave her a look and said, “You know I don’t. Maybe you can let it die for a whole hour or so, though. I know you miss your friends back home and all, but you could at least try experiencing your first time in Mexico with the rest of us.”

Izel sighed and looked up into the sky, pointing her nose to the sun as she slipped her phone back into her pocket. It dinged and she immediately took it back out and looked at the notification.

“Father Verón comes for dinner all the time. I guess he doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” Izel said quietly.

“That’s not nice. He’s fond of us, he likes having dinner with us and, yes, I imagine he leads a lonely life. That’s the life of a priest,” said Carmen. “At least I think it is.”

“My phone is at seven percent. I need a charger.”

“Let it die. It’ll be for the best, for all of us.”

“There it is!” yelled Luna, running ahead toward another stall.

“What?” answered Carmen, startled. “Luna don’t run off so far ahead!”

“Huitlacoche,” she called back from in front of a stand that had basketfuls of the corn fungus. Carmen pulled Izel along to keep up.

“What are we going to do with that?” asked Izel, grimacing with disgust.

“Tamales! But we can make them into quesadillas, tacos, or stuffing for some chicken breasts. So many possibilities!”

“I’ll eat something else. Not interested in deformed, rotten corn,” and upon seeing a basket full of reddish crickets, Izel stepped back, more fearful than nauseated. “What the fuck is that?”

“Language!” Carmen yelled.

“Mom, look at those things. Are they alive?”

The old vendor standing behind the baskets laughed, “They’re fried chapulines. They’re not alive. They’re snacks to some around here!”

“What? Snacks? For whom? For the toads and lizards?”

While Luna was having an actual fit of laughter, the old lady working the stand pinched a couple of crickets with her bony fingers and offered them to her, so she put on a brave face and crunched into them with little hesitation. Her scrunched-up face soon broke into a big smile and she turned to Carmen and Izel.

“You guys should try them too! They’re tasty!”

The old woman held another pinch of chapulines out to them.

“No thank you, señora,” said Carmen, as Izel pushed her hands forward as to protect herself from the fried creatures while she looked somewhere else.

“I thought you told me to be polite. Try them, Mom, come on,” said Izel with a sly grin.

“Yeah, Mom, try one!”

“No, thank you. Not today,” said Carmen with a nervous smile.

Meanwhile, Luna was still laughing and asking the vendor where the chapulines came from and how to cook them.

“How did I end up with a bug-eating alien for a sister?” Izel asked her mom.

“Sometimes I wonder how the two of you ended up so different from each other too.”

They watched Luna discuss the prices of the chapulines and the huitlacoche with the old woman, holding out bills and coins and stuffing the fungus and bugs into her bag.

“We’ve got everything,” Luna announced, proud.

“Thank God. Can we just leave now?” said Izel.

“Maybe we could buy a portable charger for your beloved phone,” suggested Luna.

“That would make this agony worth it.”

“They have electronics and stuff in that aisle, I think.”

They looked through one of the aisles and reached a stand selling toys and piñatas. The three of them stopped to look at the dizzying variety of piñatas of different shapes and sizes.

“Come on in, come on in. We have Frozen, Spider-Man, and Trump. We also have donkeys and all the classics.”

“Thanks, but we’re just browsing,” said Carmen.

“For your birthday, for your party, for your name day, for any celebration.”

“No, thank you.”

Luna looked at them in wonder, one by one, from the rudimentary reproductions of Disney characters and Pokémon to the classic round colorful piñatas with seven spiky cones.

“Mom, I didn’t know piñatas came in so many different shapes,” said Luna.

“They sure do. These are the traditional Spanish-Catholic ones,” Carmen drew upon the depths of her early Catholic childhood and the memories of her mother, “If I’m remembering correctly, the seven points are supposed to be the seven deadly sins, so it’s like you’re smashing apart your sin or something like that. Some of them are still made with a clay pot inside.”

“Why?” asked Izel. “That sounds dangerous. Shards of ceramic flying everywhere, mixed in with the candy and stuff.”

“That’s just the way it was around here. Nothing more normal than having one or two kids end up slightly concussed when you break a piñata at a party, huh? Barbarous Mexico, right?” she said, deepening her voice and raising her eyebrows.

“It’s still a terrible idea.”

Carmen thought Izel might catch her ironic name-dropping of the John Kenneth Turner classic in this context, but moved right along after her joke flopped. “Well, lucky for you kids, now they’re made almost entirely out of papier-mâché rather than just a thin layer of it on top of hard clay.”

“They’re very pretty,” said Izel, putting her hand inside one to feel the clay pot.

“Take one for the little one, señora,” the shopkeeper said.

Carmen shook her head and waved her hand.

“There’s no way they have the rights to copy Donald Duck,” said Izel, pointing at a fun-house knockoff of the beloved Disney character hanging from the ceiling.

Carmen sneered at her with a look that said, stop it with the stupid questions. “Are you really that invested in Disney’s copyrights?”

“This is so unfair, Mom,” Izel said, as Luna ran back and forth.

“How come?”

“This is heaven for Luna. Everything excites her. I don’t care about this. What I care about is theater and I can’t do that here.”

“You’ll be able to enroll in theater next school year. I know it was important for you to go with Tina, Halley, and everyone else to that camp, but this trip is important too.”

When they eventually went on their way, Luna kept turning around to look at the stand, while the vendor yelled that he’d give them a good price. “Come on, take whichever you like!”

They found a cluster of electronics stands where people sold phones, radios, video game consoles, and every type of accessory, most of them knockoffs of usual American name brands. Here you could get the cheapest charger if you didn’t mind it lasting only a few months, even a few weeks. The vendor didn’t look at them once during the transaction, his eyes were glued to a screen at another stall where someone was playing a violent video game. Izel finally smiled upon seeing the battery icon on her phone turn green.

“Girls, speaking of piñatas. I forgot to tell you that we were invited to a party tomorrow. One of the worker’s little boys is turning ten and I think we should go. We’ll have lots of fun, maybe you’ll even smile and enjoy yourself, Izel.”

“Invited us? What do you mean? They invited you, not us,” answered Izel, the sudden smile now completely wiped from her face.

“No, the three of us have to go. How am I supposed to go to a children’s party by myself?”

“This is for you, for your job, and you want to drag us there.”

“There will be a piñata. The food will probably be delicious, and you’ll get to meet some of the local kids.”

“I don’t care. Take Luna. She would love to eat mushroom cake, and fungus cookies, and slime treats, and insects, and larvae, and whatever else they feed the guests.”

“Izel, stop it. You’re coming, and that’s that.”

“It’ll be my first Mexican party, the first authentic piñata I’ll get to break,” said Luna enthusiastically.

“How lucky,” said Izel, typing faster and faster on her phone.

“Keep this attitude up and by the end of this trip, I’ll use you as a piñata, Izel,” said Carmen.

“Great parenting, Mom,”

They didn’t talk for the rest of the walk back home. Once in the kitchen, Luna took out the groceries from her backpack, asking how to prepare some of the things they bought as Izel shut herself in her room. Carmen was disappointed, but knew Izel was just being a teenager. She wasn’t a kid anymore like Luna, who had yet to exit her tweens. To Izel, the idea of going to a party full of strange kids sounded absolutely abhorrent, mortifying even. In the best-case scenario, they would go unnoticed, but that was unlikely.

Izel was right, Carmen was using the kids a bit. The first weeks at the abbey construction site she was overseeing hadn’t gone entirely without incident. Ever since she’d arrived, the workers looked at her with distrust, like an ignorant foreigner who wanted things done her way and, of course, they were less than thrilled to be taking orders from a woman. From day one, she’d made every kind of effort to create some amiability, but nothing ever seemed to pay off. Her being invited to a family birthday was important. It was a chance to turn her reputation around, to be seen as a person and part of their community and not as some upstart boss, an Americanized hag, here simply to exploit them.

A wave of anxiety turned Carmen’s stomach over as she began to question the decision to take the girls with her. Her mind was stuck in the plaza reading those flyers: the phone numbers and descriptions of girls written by parents begging to see their daughters again. Bringing the girls to Mexico with her felt like a mistake, but there hadn’t been a choice. She couldn’t ask her mother, Alma, to take care of the girls for such a long time, she worked nights at Saint Francis hospital and often ended up having to cover her coworkers’ shifts for extra cash or just to be nice. Her mother was of the traditional mindset that a family should all live under one roof and, while Carmen wasn’t happy that her mother was still working, the cost of living was too high for Carmen to support three people all on her own, even after the move upstate to Newburgh. Leaving the girls behind with Alma would have just been too much, not that she’d have admitted it. Her mother always tried her damnedest to not act her age and would have insisted on it being no bother, making a big unconvincing show of how she actually wanted Carmen to leave the girls with her. I’ll finally get some time to talk with the girls without their mom listening in!

But Carmen knew Alma was tired, too tired to handle Izel and Luna for more than a few days. As seventy grew ever nearer, the deepening lines on Alma’s face marked a body which could simply no longer keep up with the spirit within.

The girls’ father, Fernando, had been a good and attentive dad for the most part when he had been around, but that hadn’t been the case for a while now. Even after the initial breakup, he had at least looked after the girls when Carmen needed him to. Once he found a new girlfriend, though, he decided he wanted a fresh start, to begin another life without any of the baggage of his last. “Baggage” was the term he had used. She knew he hadn’t considered the weight that word carried when he said it, but when Carmen heard it, the final embers of her affections for him were stamped out. She realized he had always been a man with the capacity to close his heart almost at will. It was warm inside and the doors were wide, but she saw firsthand how easily they were slammed shut. Izel and Luna. Baggage. She sometimes wondered if the new woman even knew Fernando already had children. Last she had heard, a mutual friend had mentioned he was on the West Coast now. So, where she went the girls did too.

“Luna, honey, I’m going to lie down for a moment, okay? Can you put away the groceries?”

“Yes, Mommy,” she replied, setting down her pencil. She had been drawing little piñatas in her journal. Carmen glanced at them as she passed the table, all different colors and sizes, some were shaped like animals but others had human faces. Luna hadn’t exactly mastered the art of rendering humans yet. The faces looked to be in pain.

Carmen left the door to her room slightly ajar and fell on the bed listening to Luna open and close the cupboards in the kitchen. Warm air blew through a gap in the windows. She turned on the bed to look out at the vast landscape of empty, undeveloped land—one of the more arid pockets of Tulancingo. Almost nothing can grow here with the sandstorms, she thought as she imagined the wind dragging dust and everything else from one side of the moor to the other. She worried about the mistakes she was making with the girls, unpleasant truths she’d let slip and the accidental lessons she’d taught them too young. Being a mother is about making mistakes, there was no doubt about this, and being a single mother often felt like playing Russian roulette, having to pick the lesser of two evils. On the one hand, she always wanted to look strong and independent, to lead by example and never show her fear of the world, but on the other, she worried they’d become too independent, so headstrong that they wouldn’t consider the outside world’s dangers, imagining life as a walk in the park. Miel sobre hojuelas, as the Spaniards used to say.

Carmen saw a lot of herself in her daughters, recognized her own small gestures and moods. The strong will bordering on insolence her mother, Alma, always chided her for had taken root in Izel while Luna was full of the near-blinding optimism she’d had as a younger woman. How could she not blame herself for passing along those traits? It was inevitable, of course; the lessons imparted on children are often taught subconsciously, in her passing remarks and unconsidered actions. But when she thought of the unnecessary conflicts and the blindsiding disappointments sure to visit her daughters as they had done with her, she wished they could have a slate clean of her own idiosyncrasies. They were already too sheltered in America, not entirely used to keeping their head on a constant swivel. Izel was smart enough and had spent at least some of her teenage years in the city before the move, but even that was pretty safe. Throughout their trip to Mexico, a country sadly infamous for alarming levels of femicide and general crime, she never lost sight of them. How could she not be afraid after seeing the news and what people post on Facebook and Twitter? It wasn’t that bad here—or so she was told. Not too many criminals, only the wind blowing the dust back and forth and maybe ghosts longing for a better time, when this was a fabulous pre-Columbian city or when the region had a booming agriculture economy and the abbey was still an abbey.

Izel was sometimes difficult, but who wasn’t at that age? She never got herself in trouble. With all the drugs readily accessible at her school, she’d never tried anything—well, if she had, nothing had ever happened—and she didn’t get involved with bad boys. She didn’t even have a boyfriend. So, as rude and hurtful as she could be sometimes, Carmen couldn’t be so harsh, strict, or short-tempered with her because, really, she was a good kid. After all, being there with her instead of at the beach or theater camp with her friends must feel like a big sacrifice at Izel’s age. She couldn’t pile more responsibilities on her, at least not during that summer. In a few years, Izel would be headed off to college and Carmen would barely get to see her. She thought about how this was, with any luck, their last or second-to-last trip together and felt immense sadness. It was like losing something very dear to her. Losing that intimacy—conflicts, fights, and tantrums included—would be painful.

Someone knocked on the bedroom door.

“Come in,” she said without getting up.

It was Izel.

“Mom, I’m sorry. I know I was being a little bit mean to you earlier. I don’t want you to think I hate being here with you or anything.”

“It’s all right, sweetheart. Don’t worry. I was your age once too. I know a trip with your mom and little sister isn’t a sixteen-year-old’s idea of a great summer. I’m sorry you couldn’t go to theater camp with your friends, and I know it feels like the end of the world to be missing out, but I promise I’m trying to make this trip fun for you too.

“Thanks, Mom. I love you,” Izel looked at the ceiling and sighed, “And I’ll go to the stupid piñata party.”

Carmen smiled, “Thank you very much.”

Carmen stretched out on the bed as Izel closed the door, returning to her room. Brief moments like this one made her feel she wasn’t doing too bad of a job raising the girls after all. She closed her eyes and fell asleep for a while.



2

The rental house didn’t have a dishwasher. Not that Carmen minded washing a few glasses, plates, and some cutlery by hand. It was simply the absence of the appliance she’d grown so used to in her everyday domestic life that made her feel mildly alien in the space, like there was something slightly off. But perhaps what bothered her the most was what it meant for her to give such unwarranted attention to a machine. Their kitchen at home was modern—nothing too cutting-edge or magazine sleek, but it was efficient and tasteful. It was the first thing she noticed when they arrived, carrying luggage after a longer than expected journey marked by endless delays: two layovers and Mexico City’s unrelenting day and night traffic. The whole rental was perfectly unremarkable, it worked—except there was no damn dishwasher. It was a quotidian disruption, but when she caught herself reaching down to the space next to the sink where the dishwasher handle was at home, it was enough to make her feel she had been thrust back into a simpler time.

And that’s what this was. Coming back to Mexico always meant rediscovering that past that she’d left so long ago, the life she abandoned two decades ago to pursue her master’s at Cornell. She had promised people at the time she’d be back, but she never did return, not really. A handful of visits over the course of twenty years hadn’t been enough to maintain her connections to the place. She’d even moved her mother to the States with her when Fernando left.

The house had three bedrooms. It was spacious and its high ceilings made it feel full of air, fresh and pleasant. The paint could’ve used a touch-up, but honestly it was very well kept. The furniture had an air of old-fashioned elegance. There were plenty of houses nearby, but it was a quiet area, perfect for working in silence and focusing on her project. She’d been told it was supposedly a safe neighborhood with a good enough reputation, but girls and women often disappeared from the larger region, just not from here. The posters from the market were a terrifying chronology of an epidemic of people going missing and, more often than not, found dead.

They were close to the city and to plenty of the attractions she’d want to show the girls, but far enough away to offer a view of the surrounding country as it stretched toward the distant hills. Through the windows, she could see the same volcanic mountains and plains—dry and forlorn—that she’d seen during a childhood country visit, a trip she remembered nothing from save for that image, somehow seared into a part of her subconscious. That was years ago, though. Intensifying droughts over the interceding years had ravaged the countryside, starving the land as the lower tentacle of the Chihuahua Desert seemed to creep farther south into central Mexico. Now, the blanket of greenery that had once covered the mountains had retreated up the slopes like a receding hairline. The country had aged alongside her.

As a kid, it seemed if one wandered into that vast landscape, no matter what any map showed, you could walk forever and never find a road again. Once you lost sight of the path you had diverted from, the landscape would swallow you and shift under your feet with the dust blowing at your ankles. Even as an adult, she sometimes had dreams set out there, nightmares of isolation in which there’s nothing around her but the low shrubs and dry earth moving back and forth in the winds under the moon. Nonetheless, the region still retained a certain magic, a pastoral, primal beauty that moved her deeply.

She didn’t exactly feel at home, but she was comfortable. The house was a sort of reflection, aesthetically, of what a Mexican house should be. It wasn’t suffocated in folkloric excess and its decor wasn’t kitschy or quaint like other rentals, but it still felt staged to meet the visitors’ expectations, most of whom were Americans. It had the traditional wall moldings with a bright blue ceiling; mirrors framed with stained glass; a stone Aztec calendar; and the quintessential heavy, dark furniture and white, woolly cushions. It was all a bit too predictable; Carmen knew this, and even though she was mildly ashamed about having qualified as this category of tourist, she couldn’t deny she was comfortable and charmed.

Doing the dishes, Carmen’s mind bounced between all the problems at the abbey’s construction site: the new issues she had to fix before she could face the old ones, mix-ups with materials, the quantities, the procedures, the contradicting orders she received from the firm and the client. It was chaos worthy of such an ornate abbey, and she sometimes wondered if a job this extensive was a bit over her head. Most irritating of all, though, were the human relations: the actions and inactions of the workers, the suspicious delays on deliveries, the way the bricklayers looked at her and immediately back to the foreman, Joaquín, whenever she gave an order, as if to make sure “the Lady” actually had authority over them. Quite honestly, it was humiliating having to repeat her orders to workers who she knew had understood her the first time but had been directed differently by the foreman. Despite being in charge of what the foreman actually built, she was effectively below him when it came to the construction of something she had designed and engineered.

It had become a daily battle for her dignity.

A wave of humiliation burned her cheeks and Carmen felt a sudden urge to smash a plate against the wall as conversations with Joaquín played in her head on a loop and she wondered what she should’ve said, which tone she could’ve used. She thought about the carpenter, Román, and one of the younger bricklayers, Bernardo. She fantasized about firing them on the spot next time they chose to listen to Joaquín over her with a “You’re leaving this construction right now.” Setting the example with two sacrifices. But in her heart she knew she wasn’t about to put two men out of a job; she believed in reason and dialogue, and she often resented herself for this, feeling an impotent pacifism she thought akin to a substitute teacher. Surely that’s what they thought of her as, someone who was here now with alleged authority, but who would be gone soon enough. There were hardly consequences in their mind of being on her bad side. As if having to hold together a rowdy crowd of workers wasn’t enough, she had to continually argue with Joaquín, who was always on the lookout for a way to undermine her.

It’s a construction site, she said to herself, it’s not exactly the most feminist place around. Not only is a woman on the job site, I’m an American to them. She forced a smile out of herself with that thought and suddenly became aware of how unfair it was for her to be cleaning the kitchen by herself after cooking the girls breakfast. They were so used to having her and their abuela around to take care of everything that they didn’t even show the slightest shame hanging out in the living room playing Animal Crossing or choreographing TikToks or stalking their friends posts on Instagram or any number of things that weren’t helping their mother while she did everything for them.

That wasn’t going to fly while they were here. Carmen was still working a full-time job and now Alma wasn’t around to give her another set of hands. Carmen had always believed in giving the girls plenty of free time. School in America was clearly different than it had been for Carmen in Mexico. Luna wasn’t even in middle school yet and was already coming home with pamphlets about college planning. Without downtime at home to explore their interests, Carmen was paranoid they’d end up without passion for anything but taking standardized tests. Izel had brought a stack of play scripts with her and Luna had been regurgitating facts about the Aztecs she’d found trawling the internet since their arrival, but it was about time the girls learned to pitch in around the house. They were on vacation, but Carmen needed time to herself just as much as they did. She couldn’t always be their mule.

“Luna! Izel!” she yelled. “Girls, can you come and help a little with the dishes from breakfast?” She restrained herself from going on an unnecessary tirade about not needing any extra work to do.

“I can’t now. I’m in the middle of…” Izel’s voice faded into a mumble, too lazy to invent and vocalize an actual excuse.

Carmen stood there silently, picturing Izel flicking her finger across her phone, mildly shocked at her daughter’s indolence. She would’ve never gotten away with doing that to her own mother. It was a different time, a different world—Mexico in the twentieth century. Growing up as a woman during that time had come with heavily domestic implications, more expectations of being. That word, “domesticity,” slithered through her mind. Being physically back in the country had been sending her into continual reverie about those days, old emotional memories seeping back into her skin under the sun. She interrupted her own train of thought.

“As if things were any different now.”

“What’s different now?” asked Luna, suddenly standing next to her mother.

Her eleven years of age had her knowing it all, or trying to. If anything was brought up around her which she didn’t already grasp, she had to learn more about it.

Carmen was startled. She didn’t expect an answer to her mutterings and, lost in thought, hadn’t noticed Luna come into the kitchen.

“What’s wrong?” Luna asked, as if it were an extraordinary thing to be called to help her mother out.

“Nothing’s wrong, I’d just like you to help out a little.”

Luna looked astonished by the strange request; regardless, she smiled and grabbed a kitchen rag and started drying the dishes. She didn’t protest nor did she complain about Izel not helping. The little one looked like her father: her hair was straight, long, and black; her nose was pointy and her eyes brown; and she was wearing a red T-shirt and shorts.

“Mom? How long ’til your work here is over?”

“I’m not sure. We’re just getting started. We’ll be here until the end of summer and then I’ll have to come back in the fall, probably. It’s a pretty ambitious renovation. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.”

“So why would they want to turn an old church into a hotel?”

“We’ve talked about this. I think it’s an interesting idea to revitalize it. I showed you the drawings, right? The church is actually the old St. John the Baptist Cathedral … or it used to be. It was once considered a jewel of colonial architecture here, but now it’s fallen from grace, like a lot of buildings from that period. It’s been abandoned for a very, very long time and a few more decades of neglect would eventually swallow it up. So, well, the church authorities decided to sell it.”

“But can churches even be sold?”

“Of course, it’s still a property. It can be sold like any other place, just with more paperwork and government processes.”

“Which processes?”

“Too many to get into. People go to school just to learn about all the different forms and documents that have to change hands to make a sale like that official. But they’re basically arrangements between the church and government authorities, and the private investors. But that part isn’t my job. I don’t buy the land, I just design what goes on it.”

“Is Father Verón the owner of the church?”

Carmen chuckled. “No, he’s just an administrator from the church. Part of the purchase of the land was that we’d keep certain parts of the church intact so people could still appreciate them.”

Luna remained still for a moment, as if thinking how to formulate her next question or how to say something without it coming across as an insult.

“And do you think it’s okay for them to make a church into a hotel? Aren’t churches holy or something?”

“Well, I think of it as giving new life to a very beautiful building. Think about it, those walls, those columns, those ceilings will be admired by lots of people. Remember how the Huitzala estate looked after I remodeled it? It was in ruins, and I think we gave it back its—how can I put it?—its dignity and beauty. I like doing these types of jobs, more than working on malls or parking lots or supermarkets.”

“I wouldn’t wanna sleep in an old church. I bet it has ghosts.”

The interrogation was over as Luna turned back to the dishes in the sink. On the whole, Carmen was proud of how inquisitive and autodidactic her youngest was, but sometimes forgot how sharp the point on Luna’s curiosity could be until it gave her a slight jab. It could become off-putting at times.

When Luna turned seven, she’d asked for a telescope for her birthday, and not some little tube for bird-watching either—she wanted something that would allow her to do some real stargazing. Fernando, still living with them at the time as a full-time father, tried his best to convince her otherwise offering a litany of alternatives: dolls, Easy-Bakes, video games. Carmen even offered her an iPad, trying to convince Luna she could look at star maps all day and night on an interactive astronomy app whereas the telescope would hardly even work at night anyways as they still lived in the city at the time. Luna hesitated, but then stood firm: She wanted the real deal. Carmen and Fernando thought that she wanted to see UFOs or aliens or who knows what, but as her birthday approached, they finally got an answer from her as to why she wanted it so bad:

“I want to be able to see into the past, and the only way to see it is when it’s really far.”

Somewhere, she’d learned that starlight had been emitted millions of years ago and the light that we could see was older than humans all together. Carmen tried to convince her it was better to have something to play with than looking at ancient lights in the sky.

“I think being able to look at the past is way cooler than any of that other stuff.”

“Why the past?” Fernando chuckled and lifted Luna up into his arms, “I think I’d much rather be able to look into the future, wouldn’t you? Far more useful!”

“I’ll be able to see that when it happens, though!”

Carmen and Fernando worried about their youngest. As much as Carmen hated the New Age terminology that was constantly floating around, she couldn’t think to describe Luna as anything but an old soul. Every now and again, in the midst of a perfectly average day, Luna would say things like that with a calm and surety that couldn’t possibly belong to a girl her age, things that suggested a deeper understanding of being. Carmen would never admit to being a little creeped out by it, but moments like the telescope conversation did send a shiver up her spine.

Izel, by all accounts, had been a perfectly normal little girl and budding teenager, not to say she was boring or unremarkable but, to Carmen, she was at least traveling down a somewhat predictable path. She’d fallen in love with theater at a very young age and dreamed of becoming an actress and going to see all the plays they could. After Fernando left, Carmen had an awful time. The idea of being a single mother to two girls had been impossibly daunting to her. Izel tried to avoid the topic, not wanting to talk about it, and locked herself in the bathroom to cry. Luna, on the other hand, took it calmly. She asked her mother and father separately for an explanation as to what had happened and asked them if there was any space to sort things out like adults. Carmen and Fernando listened to the then seven-year-old without interrupting her, mesmerized.

In the months after the split, when she could manage some free time between work and the girls, all Carmen could do was visit her friend Sofia and cry on her sofa over their future.

“How am I supposed to raise them if I’m just focused on keeping us afloat all the time? At least with that asshole around I could afford to spend time with the girls!”

Luckily, Alma came to end the months of tears. Without her mother around Carmen thought she’d have to open a new line of credit for takeout costs alone. But with another head to keep a roof over, rent in New York became pretty expensive and it seemed like the economical choice to head north. When Carmen moved the girls away from the city to Newburgh to afford a four bedroom for them and Alma, Izel had been furious. She was ripped away from easily accessible playhouses and Broadway musicals and stuck in a town with only one shambling community playhouse.

Carmen pulled her mind back from the past and put aside the plates she was holding. She dried her hands and walked toward the dining table where she’d left the blueprints and digital renderings for the abbey’s remodeling and called Luna over.

“Look, here we’ll put some very pretty fountains, some more over here, and right here is where we’ll have the pool and the Jacuzzi and all that stuff. What do you think?”

Luna smiled, looking her mother in the eye.

“And all that water for the pools and the fountains, where are you bringing it from?”

Through the window, they could see the dirt lifting like a curtain of smoke and dancing among the weeds with every gust of wind.

“That’s a very good question, but that isn’t my job either. Someone else takes care of that.”

“Father Verón?”

“No, I don’t think he needs to handle that either.”

“Remember when we saw those men, who were very angry, shouting and carrying protest signs in front of city hall, asking for water? Will they be able to use the water for their animals and their corn?”

“I’m not sure about that. I could ask. I just do the architecture, remember?”

“But you could help them. You’re, like, the head of the construction.”

“I’m not really the head of the construction. I’m in charge of the project, and that’s more than enough”

“I would love to go to a hotel with goats, and cows, and mules, and hens coming to wash themselves and drink from the pool.”

“I would love that, too, but I think if animals got to this hotel—”

Carmen was about to say that if the goats, cows, and chickens got to the hotel, it would be as dinner, but of course she didn’t. Luna wouldn’t find it funny. She ran to the table and came back clutching her notebook to show Carmen.

“Look, Mom, I made some drawings of how the hotel is going to look.”

Luna showed her the notebook that she carried with her everywhere. Inside she’d drawn an imitation of the plans and mock-ups of the hotel Carmen left around the house. Carmen took the notebook and leafed through it. There were sketches and notes on everything they’d seen since they’d arrived, animals, plants, buildings. There were some that were quite juvenile, crude lines and notes about misremembered events, but others that were honestly pretty good. The pencil sketches reminded her of the ones she made when she was a girl. Her passion for copying buildings and urban landscapes planted the seed for her love of architecture.

“Have you thought about studying architecture?” Carmen was surprised she’d never asked this before.

“Yes, but I think I’d rather work with animals.”

“Of course you would,” Carmen smiled, “You care more about living things than buildings, huh?”

Luna nodded as Carmen continued leafing through the journal and stopped on a drawing of a hummingbird. She was surprised by how well Luna had captured the movement of the bird. On another page, there was a wave of butterflies, flying by the dome of the local church.

“This is amazing. Your drawings have gotten so much better. Did you learn this in school?” Carmen was giddy with pride and excited by her daughter’s talent, but her delight was tinged with guilt at not having noticed Luna’s budding artistry until now. Maybe she didn’t check in on Luna’s day-to-day life as often as she thought.

Luna ignored the comment and kept talking.

“These butterflies we saw seemed very mad.”

“When? How?” Carmen laughed. “When have you seen angry butterflies?”

“I don’t know. They just seemed angry at the buildings. Maybe it used to be a field of flowers or something.”

Carmen felt a familiar chill run up her spine. The drawing had a threatening, ominous feeling to it. While the form was still juvenile, the way the crudely drawn butterflies lifted like a wave over the church, casting a shadow over the dome, struck a chord of impending catastrophe. It looked as if the little butterflies would crash down on the church like a mighty tide. Carmen shut the journal, not ready to interview the artist on her intention behind the composition of the piece, and turned back toward the remaining dishes.

“Izel, what the hell are you doing? I think you can at least help with your own dishes!” she hollered over her shoulder.

“What’s going on? What are you yelling for?” Izel asked, finally reaching the kitchen in her pajamas.

“We’re working and we need your help.”

But the kitchen was already clean, and everything was organized. Carmen’s hands had been moving independent of her thoughts. Only one dish remained in the sink.

“What do you want me to do?” she said, rolling her eyes.

“It’s too late. Luna and I already finished up. All that’s left is your plate from breakfast. You could’ve gotten here sooner.”

“No, I couldn’t. I was busy,” she waved her phone around.

Carmen raised her hand to her forehead in a dramatic, exasperated gesture. “Talking to your friends doesn’t count as ‘busy.’”

“When are we going back home?” asked Izel.

“That’s the only thing you care about. If you weren’t so eager to go back, and enjoyed a bit of Mexico and Tulancingo, and the ruins and everything here, you could have such an amazing time. When we visit Huapalcalco, you’ll see cave paintings from literally twelve thousand years ago. Who do you know back home who can say the same?”

“I don’t even know what Wapalaco is.”

“Izel! It’s a privilege to be here,” Carmen said in exasperation.

“Izzy!” she replied.

Izel didn’t like her name and often insisted on being called Izzy, especially in arguments as a cheap shot to remind Carmen of her disdain. Carmen and Fernando wanted to give her a pre-Columbian name, one that was pretty but would still be easy for Americans to understand and spell, without too many x’s and tl’s. They thought it was the perfect name. Sadly, when she started school, her classmates made her feel like her name was weird and bullied her for it.

She once told them she wanted to change her name, “to something more normal, like Lisa, or Mary, or Veronica!”

They tried to convince Izel her name was the prettiest in the world, but at that age, reason doesn’t particularly work, and being different is dangerous. Teachers spelled it as Essel, Isela, or Azil, or a dozen different ways that were ridiculous for such an easy name. Izel, at sixteen, was now nearly as tall as her mother. Her skin was very light, with a few freckles, and she had green eyes and light brown hair. More than once she’d been asked, quite bluntly, if she was truly Luna’s sister. When Carmen heard that for the first time, she was made apoplectic by the blatant colorism.

“Privilege? Really?” said Izel.

Carmen threw her hands in the air. She knew there was no use in continuing this argument, trying to convince her daughter of her good fortune, and how special it was for someone her age to be able to travel to other countries and interact with other cultures. But during these weeks, she hadn’t even managed to get her to speak Spanish, other than the occasional phrase, and saying gracias and hola. To be fair, there weren’t many people with whom she could engage in riveting conversation, but she certainly didn’t have the slightest interest either.

Izel let out a long sigh, turned around, and headed toward her room. Luna left the rag on the counter, smiled at her mother, and without another word, hurried away to catch up with her sister.

“Izel, want to play Animal Crossing with me?” she yelled, but her sister ignored her and slammed her bedroom door.

Carmen felt guilty again for denying Izel her dream of going to theater camp. Most of her closest friends were going. They were a group of Broadway-obsessed girls who participated in every school play and swore they wanted to be actresses more than anything else in the world. Carmen tried to take the girls out as much as she could, first to the Disney and Broadway blockbusters, but Izel was also interested in off-Broadway plays. One day, while discussing The Lion King and Cats, Izel told her that her favorite author was August Strindberg. Carmen found it unbelievable but didn’t question her. Izel had seen a production of The Father from a small Lower East Side company with her friends, and everyone left the theater utterly impressed. Although Carmen didn’t know much about theater, she recognized that play, and she wasn’t sure how much those girls could’ve truly understood it, but they were shocked by the author’s pessimism and Swedish humor. She was proud that her daughter’s taste in theater wasn’t limited to Wicked and The Phantom of the Opera, but found her fascination with a hopeless, dark author strange. Though if Jorge Luis Borges thought of him as basically a god, who was she to convince her daughter otherwise?

Carmen could hear Luna still begging her sister to open her door and play. She thought about her conversation with Luna, and how conversations like those were the silver lining to not having a dishwasher. She kept organizing the glasses on the dish rack. When she was done, she looked around and said out loud, “Fucking dishwasher.”



3

“Señora Sánchez!” he shouted as he answered the door, as if to make the whole neighborhood aware of her presence. More likely to warn the workers already inside the party that they should silence any trash talk about the architect.

Joaquín, the foreman, opened the laminate door and welcomed her into his home.

“Please just call me Carmen. We’re not on the worksite, Joaquín.”

Carmen had told him at least three different times to just use her first name, or at least to drop the “señora” from her last name. This was apparently impossible for him. She’d even settle for just being called “Architect” or “Boss.”

“Of course! Of course! You’re right, we’re not at work are we,” Joaquín replied as the girls came inside, “and these must be your daughters!”

“Yes, this is Luna and that’s Izel. Thank you again for inviting us,” answered Carmen, handing him the present they’d brought for his son. A Lego set Luna had picked at a toy store in the city shopping center.

“Thank you for coming. How brave of you to dare enter this neighborhood.”

“Brave? Why wouldn’t I come? You invited me, didn’t you?”

“Well, I sure did. Come and have drink with us. The girls can go over there with the rest of the kiddos.”

Izel looked at her mother with slight panic, not ready to be relegated to the “kiddos,” but Luna was already pulling her toward the backyard.

“Come this way, señora. The mezcalito is on me. Father Verón over there has had more than a few already.”

Carmen could feel the guests staring at the new faces in town, intrigued and politely standoffish in the presence of unfamiliar foreigners. She felt the need to win them over, prove herself to be more than just a professional American here to lord over the working men of the area, some gringofied expat. Patience and charisma weren’t traits that Carmen often associated with herself, but she’d need them here. Looking around, Carmen couldn’t help but inspect Joaquín’s home with an architect’s eye. It wasn’t shabby or poor looking by any means, but it was certainly modest. She could see many structural seams, places where she could tell the walls had been demolished and rebuilt to expand the house. Joaquín had clearly been building out his home over many years with his experience as a contractor. From outside she had seen they had a good bit of land on which the house still had only a small footprint.

The vast backyard where the large celebration of Joaquincito’s birthday was being held was teeming with local kids. She had never put together a party like this for the girls, most of their childhood birthdays had happened in public parks in the city. By the time Carmen had moved them upstate and they actually had a backyard for the first time, Luna didn’t want to simply invite every name in the new school directory, she just wanted her friends from her old school to come up and visit. By that time Izel claimed she was too old to throw a birthday party in the backyard like some little kid.

Through the sliding doors Carmen could see Izel staring at her phone off to the side, away from the throngs of younger kids, with her shoulders raised, looking anxious and defensive, her eyes out for Luna who was already mingling. Nineties reggaeton played, crunchy and distorted, through a pair of well-worn PA speakers along with cumbias, rancheras, and a few ballads Carmen swore she hadn’t heard since she was Izel’s age. Luna was being characteristically talkative, having already inserted herself into a group of kids her age, nodding emphatically along with their conversation before contorting her face in a visible attempt to summon her rough Spanish to respond, sliding her backpack from her shoulders and pulling out her sketchbook. A small huddle of older girls stood at an angle to Izel, their conversation clearly revolving around the new girl in town as they glanced over every now and then. Carmen’s eldest, noticing her observers, struck a relaxed pose which just made her look like a statue of a cool person. A mild unease came over Carmen as she remembered those feelings of otherness instilled in young women by their peers, the clear lines of in-group and out-group her daughter was very visibly attempting to navigate in the sun-drenched backyard. The statuesque cool-girl leaning against the peeling fence now took the shape of a frozen rabbit being eyed by foxes. Yes. That’s how it so often felt. Izel peeled herself from the edge of the space and dragged her feet over to the side-eying group of girls and Carmen just barely caught a glimpse of her daughter’s lips mouthing, “Hola. Izel,” before her name was called behind her.

“Carmen, so glad you came!” Verón cried, approaching her as Joaquín wandered off to talk to family.

“Hola! And how are you, Father? I’ve heard they have some really good mezcal here.”

“It is splendid, indeed.” The father’s cheeks were a bit flushed. “I’m so happy you made the effort to be here. It’s good that you’re trying to make friends with Joaquín.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since I got here!”

“Sometimes we must be accommodating,” he said, lowering his voice and whispering in her ear. “Things are different around here. Not like the States, you know?”

“I know, Father. I’m painfully aware that I’m a bit out of my cultural depth. I can’t help but feel it’s not about how I do things more than the fact that I’m the one doing them.”

“Yes, yes, I know. I’m sure he will warm to you though. You are at his son’s birthday after all. Anyways, enough workplace politics. Come over here, the barbecue is great,” Father said, trying to change topics.

Joaquín looked at her from the other side of the backyard. She pretended not to notice. Even if he had reluctantly invited her, being friendly here wouldn’t mean much if nothing changed at work. Then, an indigenous-looking man approached her.

“Afternoon, Arquitecta. How do you do?” Carmen nearly dropped her glass in surprise, shocked that someone at this party both recognized her personally and professionally. And it was the first time she had been referred to by her profession since she had arrived in Tulancingo.

“Good afternoon…” she stumbled over her greeting, realizing that she couldn’t exactly place the man’s face. She looked at the priest and smiled at him, expecting an explanation. Verón simply smiled back motioning his glass to the man and letting him introduce himself.

“I work at the abbey. I restore the carvings on the rocks,” he mimed a little chiseling motion in the air. He was wearing a loose linen shirt, jeans, a blue-and-red woven belt, and sandals.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“Quauhtli,” he extended his hand.

“Carmen Sánchez,” she replied, extending her hand. “Pleased to meet you”

His hand was rough and rugged. He wasn’t squeezing her hand very much, but she could feel it had the weight and strength worthy of a mason. It was a hand made older than its owner by years of work.

“Oh, I know who you are,” he smiled.

She laughed nervously. “La mujer mandona, no?” she said, trying to own one of the nicer names she’d heard tossed around by some of the contractors: the bossy lady.

“No. No. I don’t think you’re too bossy, but there can be very … delicate sensibilities around here,” he said, glancing at the host across the room drinking with a few of his underlings, “At the end of the day all that matters is that the requests are reasonable, though. People talk, but the work gets done regardless.”

“Quauhtli here is a very skilled artisan. And perhaps a little more educated than his workingman facade lets on,” Verón grinned and took a sip from his glass, “Despite our initial differences I’d say we’ve become close friends since he started at the abbey.”

“I’m aware! I’ve seen your work taking shape in the abbey and have been impressed. It’s nice to put a face to the craftsmanship,” Carmen said.

“It’s nice to be introduced. You brought your kids along?”

“Oh! Yes,” Carmen turned and briefly scanned the yard full of children.

Izel was still standing stiffly among the group of older girls, but one next to her seemed to be trying to bridge the language barrier, coaxing her into conversation. Luna was running around with the rest of the young ones closer to her and Joaquincito’s age, she was even getting some time in with the birthday boy himself. Carmen found herself more at ease thinking maybe Verón was right and she wouldn’t remain an outsider here for too long as she turned back to her conversation with the priest and Quauhtli.

* * *

Luna was fascinated by the other kids. Not that they were particularly fascinating themselves, it was simply that kids her age were practically no different here than they were thousands of miles away back home, playing the same games and talking about the same things. For a moment Luna stood still among the currents of running and chattering children in the yard and just watched them move around her, listening to the snippets of Spanish she could catch which sounded so much like the conversations she’d have with her friends back in New York.

She had lost herself in thought and didn’t notice the girl walking through the crowd toward her until she’d already grabbed Luna by the hand, pulling her back into the present moment. The girl’s dark eyes looked intensely into Luna’s as they were momentarily silent. Luna was transfixed by her. Something in her face seemed older than her physicality let on, and despite their apparent similarity in age, this girl had a gray streak running through her jet-black hair. The girl spoke before Luna could say anything.

“I’m Ketzali. You’re the new girl in town, huh? Come on, I’ll show you the house since you’ve never been here before. If we play hide-and-seek later, you’ll wanna know the best hiding spots!”

Luna nodded automatically as the gray-streaked girl pulled her along through the rest of the children and began pointing out all the different parts of the house. She showed Luna the dog, the cats, the cake, and the food, explaining every basic little thing in that proud way children often do, as if nobody else in the world is privy to the things they know. Luna, for her part, gave her personal opinions on everything Ketzali decided to point out and explain.

They meandered through the house, passing through the small rooms of the first floor and the kitchen, where Ketzali pointed to another back door leading out to the somewhat neglected side yard of the house. As the screen door wheezed shut behind them, Luna looked around at the stacks of discarded wood from various construction sites piled into disorganized heaps of varying sizes. Huddles of tools leaned against the wire fence, left out in the open but free of any rust. Sounds of the party floated around the corner, the shrill laughter and shrieks of the other children punctuating the dull murmur of the adults’ conversations and the low thumping of the reggaeton bass coming from the speakers. But out here, there was nobody else. It was only Luna and Ketzali. This was surely where the best hiding spots for hide-and-seek would be. A clatter drew Luna’s attention to the rickety doors of an old shed as they were dragged open by Ketzali.

“Come with me,” she waved Luna over as she disappeared into the shaded darkness of the old wooden structure.

Luna stepped down from the small stairs leading back into the house and felt uneasy. She realized that she was still a stranger to the owners of this house and felt like she might get in trouble for poking around in their shed. In truth, she couldn’t identify the strange feeling coming over her, not its cause anyway. All she felt was a vague sense of trespassing, as if she was entering some area in which she did not belong. She cautiously approached the shed, hesitant to enter.

“What’s in there?”

Despite the brutal sun overhead, the searing brightness landing on the Tulancingo suburbs seemed to shy away from the shed. Perhaps the difference in light played a trick on her eyes, but within the shed seemed to be nothing but inky blackness. Ketzali’s laugh echoed from inside.

“It’s just some old shed! Come on, there’s a really good hiding place under some of the old shelves in here.”

Luna stepped forward and felt a change in temperature. The shed seemed to be emanating cool, damp air that sent a shiver across Luna’s skin as she edged toward the small opening of the shed doors. When Luna placed a hand on the side of the door and slipped in, an unpleasant chill came over her body. It felt as if she’d slid through some unseen membrane at the opening that spread within the shed. Her eyes did not adjust.

Within the limitless dark, she heard Ketzali’s voice utter the words, “We’ve been waiting for you to arrive for so long.”

As she spoke her voice shifted in pitch and tenor. With each word the bright chiming voice of a young girl slid into the low rasp of an old woman.

The air inside the shed was stale and stagnant. Luna’s legs shook in the frigid darkness and, turning her head slightly, she noticed that the bright sun was no longer visible through the gap in the door she had come through. All she could make out was the same darkness she now found herself in. Suddenly, the dim, cold light of the moon illuminated the void. Luna could faintly see her own body in the dark and, in front of her, the frail body of an old woman whose face remained obscured behind a greasy mop of silver hair shining in the mysterious light.

Luna responded in a daze, “For me? Did Joaquincito’s dad say we were coming?”

Suddenly, Luna felt her pulse pounding in her ears, muffling her own words as if she were underwater. Between the rush of blood and dizziness, Luna sensed she was about to faint, her vision narrowing to a pinhole as even the dim outline of her body in the dark began to fade into the pitch blackness. Turning her eyes upward, the roof of the shed had been silently ripped away and above them now shone not the sun, but the starry night sky.

From the penumbra emerged a round, copper-colored object like a blunt ball caved in at the top and bottom. It gleamed under the moon, wet and smooth like bloodied flesh. Luna no longer felt the dirt floor of the shed underneath her feet as she and the strange object seemed to float between the earth and the stars above. From the top of the ball opened a powerful stream, a geyser of thrumming darkness within which Luna could just make out the shimmering forms of insects—the buzzing of flies, grasshoppers, and fluttering wings under the pale light of the moon. They flooded up into the sky above where they spread outward and down on all sides, creating a sphere around Luna and the strange object. The stars flickered out of existence and the moon became obscured by their vibrating crepuscular static.

Among the buzzing of the alluvion of insects, Luna heard the muffled sound of chanting breaking through the sound of her own thundering pulse. The old woman in front of her, slipping back into the blackness, rocked back and forth, heel to toe, mumbling a chant in a language unrecognizable to Luna. The face before her was impossibly wrinkled, as if draped over the vague shape of a human and Luna couldn’t even see the eyes within their sockets, only a small, flashing glint of green as the words rang in her ears:

The time has finally come for time to end.

Luna sank deeper and deeper into the buzzing sea of shadows. She felt hundreds of small wings beating around her as she was swallowed totally by the swarm. Then, all at once, sunshine, silence, and the warm air of Tulancingo summer returned.

Light filled the shed from the open door and Luna could hear the noise coming from outside again. When her eyes adjusted to the bright Mexican sun, she was alone in the dusty old shed with nothing but tools, planks of wood, and shelves of rusted-shut cans of paint. She looked up at the ceiling, where a dry-rotted hole in the wood leaked beams of sunlight through the dusty air. The only other living creature in the shed, a black butterfly, fluttered around in the arid, hot air. Looking over her shoulder to see who had opened the door, she saw no one and stumbled out into the light. She walked back toward the sound of the party, her heart racing, desperate to find her mom and tell her about the terrifying experience. Across the yard she saw Carmen and broke into a run, only making it a few steps before Angel, one of the other kids, grabbed her by the shoulder. Luna yelped, turning to him startled and wide-eyed.

“Hey! Where have you been?” Angel said, “We’re breaking the piñata! Come on, you gotta get in line!”

Luna let out a heavy breath and looked over at her mother, sure she had to talk to her about something. But like a dream that fades immediately after waking, Luna couldn’t remember what about. She shook her head and followed Angel toward the tree where they were stringing the piñata.

“You think I’ll get a turn?”

* * *

“They’re breaking the piñata soon,” said Verón.

“Are your girls around here?” asked Quauhtli. “Tell them to be careful. They sometimes let the kids loose and they get too vicious, and some of them end up getting hurt.”

“Yes, I’ve prepared them for it. I don’t know if I did it well enough, but it’s just a piñata. Do you know my daughters?”

“Around here, everyone knows them.”

All of the children and several adults started singing.

Dale, dale, dale.

No pierdas el tino.

Porque si lo pierdes.

Pierdes el camino.

The birthday boy, wearing a hastily tied blindfold, struck the piñata shaped like a cartoonish pig.

“What do you mean, ‘everyone knows them’?”

Quauhtli shrugged. “Everyone knows each other around here, people talk about the new faces they see around. It’s normal.”

Maybe she had no reason to worry, but she found the idea of everyone in town talking about her girls uncomfortable.

She looked around, trying to find them, but only saw Izel. Realizing she hadn’t actually seen Luna for a while, she started nervously scanning the whole party. Just when her anxiety was about to send her pacing around the property in search of her daughter, she saw Luna running across the yard with Angel toward the piñata. She let out the breath she had been holding and admonished herself for letting her anxiety take hold of her like that. They were at a neighborhood birthday party, of course Luna was going to run around and explore things out of her sight. She wanted to stop feeling like danger lurked everywhere, as if she was just another American tourist who thinks Mexico is nothing but kidnappers and cartel thugs. Carmen tossed back the remaining mezcal Verón had given her and he quickly poured her a second drink as they watched the piñata being pulled up and down by Joaquincito’s laughing father.

“I think what we like the most about the kids hitting the piñata is watching them transform into little monsters, how they enjoy breaking something into pieces. They’re in a fit of laughter but also brimming with violence. The piñata is a cathartic thing for kids,” said Quauhtli next to Carmen.

“Now that you mention it, it’s true. Precisely what makes this tradition a little disturbing is that it’s staging the loss of innocence,” said Carmen, but immediately felt her words were too pretentious. She didn’t want to be condescending, but she was afraid Quauhtli might see her as a crazy old lady.

“I figured you two would make a good fit. You’ve known each other for five minutes and you’re already philosophizing about breaking a piñata,” said Verón

“It’s such a strange thing, even perverse, to make children break something pretty to eat its entrails,” said Quauhtli.

“Well, that’s just how everyone in this country is raised,” replied Carmen.

“The rich and the poor,” said Verón. “Did you know that the tradition of the piñata had its origins in China?”

Quauhtli and Carmen shook their heads.

The guests kept singing:

Ya le diste una,

Ya le diste dos,

Ya le diste tres,

Y tu tiempo se acabó.

“It’s a bit similar to how the Chinese burn fake money, paper houses, clothes, and cars to attract good fortune. Or is it maybe a symbolic way to break a spell?” asked Carmen.

“There you go, exactly like that. It made its way back to Italy with Marco Polo, if you believe that kind of telling of history. Eventually it became part of Spanish Catholicism; breaking a seven-pointed piñata was a catechism for banishing the seven deadly sins,” said the priest.

“The ancient Nahuas had piñatas as well, and would use them for their rituals. When the Spanish came to Mexico, the two traditions found themselves somewhat at odds,” added Quauhtli.

“I didn’t know that,” said Carmen.

“Well, we all know whose piñata tradition survived the conquest, eh, Father?”

Joaquincito was furiously swinging the stick, his frustration increasing more and more the longer it took him to connect with the piñata. A woman, who turned out to be Joaquincito’s mother, Raquel, got closer, risking a whack to the head trying to snatch the broom stick from her tornado of a child as he kept whaling the air around the piñata. She finally disarmed him and he took the barely tied blindfold off by himself. Disappointment was apparent on his face. It was his party and yet he was not the one to break the piñata. The rest of the children didn’t believe that was a privilege he should have, so they broke away from the line they’d been waiting in, nervous and impatient, and lunged at Raquel, trying to snatch the broomstick from her. Luna seemed very entertained. Izel, on the other hand, couldn’t hide her disapproval. Among the pushing, shoving, and occasional elbow, the parents were finally able to pacify the children.

“The little monsters really can’t contain themselves, eh, Quauhtli?” laughed Carmen. “Hungry for blood and candy.”

The kids kept taking turns, some clipping the piñata a few times, but not breaking it, until Luna was up, and she wasn’t going to lose her shot. She hit it a few times, getting an idea of its location, shoving all of her weight into nothingness in search of the piñata hanging from the string, maneuvered now by one of the workers. She looked like an expert; she had no fear, as if she’d been doing this her entire life. When her turn was over, one of the mothers called Izel.

“It’s blondie’s turn!” she yelled, and a chorus followed her.

“Blondie, blondie, blondie!”

Realizing they were talking about her, Izel tried to hide behind a column of the portico, but there was no escape for her. They went after her, even as she explained that she couldn’t and didn’t know how. Within seconds, they’d already blindfolded her and were spinning her in dizzying circles while they started the song from the beginning. Now everyone was looking—the parents, the priest, and the children. Izel tried to find the piñata in the air without daring to strike it. Suddenly, the piñata was lowered too much and grazed her head, making her lose her balance and nearly fall over. Everyone laughed. She bent her knees slightly, took a deep breath, remained still, and with the broomstick high up, she seemed to be listening to the wind. All of a sudden, she unleashed such a precise strike, it left everyone speechless, especially Carmen. The stick hit the pig right in its belly, and it was enough to break the pot and tear through the paper. The kids leaped toward the center to hoard the candy, fruit, and plastic knickknacks, not even caring that Izel was still waving the stick around. Izel took off the blindfold and, upon seeing all the children tossing and turning around her, she smiled. She looked vindicated.

Carmen clapped excitedly, and Luna jumped around her sister with her hands full of fruit and candy.

“Your daughter seems to have channeled her pent-up rage,” laughed Quauhtli.

“So it seems.”

“She’s very spirited,” said Joaquín who joined them for another mezcal.

“Apparently,” Carmen replied with a smile.

They clinked their glasses of mezcal and cheered.

“Just like her mother, eh?” added Joaquín.

“I don’t think of myself as being particularly spirited. But I like things done well, like everybody else. Who built this house?”

“I built it myself,” answered the foreman.

“I figured. The additions are very nice.”

The construction was very bare but solid. It was missing the finishes and stylings, but the balcony on the second floor was looking good. It wasn’t like most of the houses in the area, where people added floors and rooms erratically and used painfully bright colors of paint, which they seemingly ran out of halfway through.

“I can see you also like things to be done well, Joaquín. I think you and I could get along.”

“We’ll see, señora. Your demands can be difficult to manage.”

“But Joaquín, everything I’ve ever asked for is in the blueprints. Also, you can drop the ‘señora,’ we’re not at work and I’m not married.”

“Yes. We’ll see, Carmen. We’ll see.”

There was nothing to see. There were things that had to be done as agreed, as the owners had requested, and as she’d clearly marked. She drank the rest of the mezcal, which left a smoky flavor in her mouth. Arguing was pointless. The guy would never be happy until she acknowledged that he knew best. She headed to the table and poured herself another round. She drank it, smiled at him, and said:

“Excuse me, I’m going to check on my daughters.”

“Go ahead, Carmen.” He emphasized “Carmen” sarcastically.

Either way, she was euphoric, maybe partly because of the mezcal, but also for the girls and her conversation with Quauhtli. The party hadn’t ended her rivalry with the foreman but it had managed to give Izel a new relationship with Mexico and herself. When it started getting dark, Carmen said an affable goodbye to Joaquín, and thanked him for his hospitality. She hugged Father Verón and told him she’d see him at the site on Monday. Then the three of them smiled and headed outside, feeling lively. Izel hardly checked her phone, watching the scenery go by on their way back to the rental.



4

Yoltzi watched Luna as she walked down the street. She looked carefree, excited about the strange novelties sitting on the main street displays—the businesses, hardware stores, textile stores, and school supplies. Yoltzi was drawn to the rhythm of her routine. It was like the young girl was continually discovering the world over and over. She would skip ahead of her mother and sister, stop, look, and point at something holding her attention for only a moment before she ran to the next display that caught her eye, finally jogging back to her mother and sister to tell them about the wonders she’d seen just feet away from them. The girl approached people openly, asking questions, making conversation in her mix of Spanglish, and laughing earnestly as if everything were magical and fun. Again and again. Yoltzi couldn’t take her eyes off her. That girl gave her the chills. She couldn’t help but feel that carefree walk of hers hid something disturbing, that the lightness with which she walked reflected an emptiness within. Not that Luna was an empty person, devoid of emotions or inner life, this emptiness wasn’t something so malicious. Yoltzi just felt that behind the girl’s enthusiastic curiosity and hunger for knowledge of her world hid an empty vessel, an open, innocent box that could hold something—something out there, lurking, looking for an opportunity to make that space its home. An emptiness that could be occupied, a body that could be possessed.

She’d seen it before, but perhaps without as much clarity and intensity. She couldn’t put a finger on it, she could just see it, as clear as she saw the restless eyes and gestures of happiness emanating from the girl. There weren’t any words in Spanish to describe it. She followed the girl for several streets, increasingly tempted to get even closer, to warn the mother of a danger she wasn’t sure the child could even understand.

But maybe it was the other way around. Perhaps it was the mother who’d be incapable of understanding what she was talking about, but the girl would get it before the words even flew from Yoltzi’s mouth. They are few and far between, the people capable of understanding or appreciating a stranger’s warning, someone coming to them and saying, You have a void, right there in your chest, you know? A warm expanse of innocence in your heart. If you don’t protect that, your self, something monstrous can make its nest there and transform you into something you never wished to become. Yoltzi didn’t want to get her hopes up imagining the child would listen to her.

Yoltzi was twenty-four and quite slim—they nicknamed her “Flaca” growing up—and her long hair always flowed freely past her shoulders. Her dresses were knee-length and plain. Foreigners often looked at her like they looked at everyone else with indigenous traits—with curiosity, condescension, or plain disdain. If not disdain, it was that savior-like attitude people adopt when they want to be clear that they’re not prejudiced, softening their faces and voices to make sure anyone can tell they’re empathizing with an indigenous woman, the insistence of their awareness doing nothing except for elevating their prejudices to plain narcissism. Five hundred years of oppression were still at work. It is nearly impossible, sometimes, to communicate across the borders of class, ethnicity, and nationality.

Yoltzi squinted under the punishing sun. The air and color of the city were blanched under the harsh white light of the cloudless sky as its people came and went, continuing to perform the everydayness that had been broken for Yoltzi when she saw Luna. Little Luna shone among the masses of people, luminescent in a way only Yoltzi could see. This is what concerned her enough to prolong her lunch break and follow the family from a distance like a stalker or cheap private eye. Because if she could see the vast innocence of the young soul meandering down the promenade, then something else could too.

It had only been a few months since Yoltzi first noticed it, but there was something slithering just under the surface of the town. The relative peace of Tulancingo had been slowly eroding over the years and the kind of stories one would hear from the state of Guerrero and other places where violence was the norm were beginning to be told more and more in the restaurants and bars of her town. Cartels passing through Hidalgo seemed to be making more frequent pit stops in Tulancingo, bringing with them all the violence their name evokes. Girls went missing; men were found tortured and dead in the roads, makeshift graves, and even behind bars. An atmosphere of fear had been creeping in over the cloudless skies of Hidalgo.

There was, within people, an understandable instinct to deem the heinous acts of brutal men as “inhuman” or “monstrous.” Recently, Yoltzi had begun to understand these words as being bandied about all too lightly, because the people who uttered them didn’t know how right they were. Inhuman. That was the only way to describe the presence she had begun to feel within the city. There was a current running through every shadow, a pulse with no heart, just a rhythmic thrumming. It couldn’t even be said to be living in the darkness because Yoltzi could feel it wasn’t alive. It simply moved.

And Yoltzi knew that, sooner or later, they’d notice Luna shining like a beacon. She had no choice but to keep her distance and wait, even if she didn’t have much time. She had to get back to the office at city hall, where she’d been working as a secretary since college. She didn’t like her job, but considering her options, it was the best one. At least she had benefits, and her boss was respectful, which was sadly uncommon in her experiences with the working world. He’d never tried to fondle her or drag her away to a cheap motel. He hadn’t even asked her for money in order to keep her job, as many others had.

Yoltzi came from one of the oldest families in the area, though the true origins of her ancestors had been lost to the dark abyss of a history trampled by the conquest. When the Spaniards arrived, her people had to concede, pact, negotiate, and withstand. The only possible strategy of resistance was hiding, lying, and pretending. They didn’t have the weapons or the men to face the invaders, thus much of their family history and language had to be concealed, hidden in the deepest reaches of the family home where it slowly collected dust and was forgotten by most. Yoltzi spoke Nahuatl, though, and had gotten a bachelor’s degree in history. Two small victories in reclaiming a past considered by many to be so long forgotten as to be inconsequential. She had always believed the most buried aspects of the past often held the secrets of present issues, though. When one could not understand why the world was as it was, the answer, to Yoltzi, must be in some overlooked part of the path which brought them there.

As a girl, she wanted to become an anthropologist or an interpreter for her mother tongue, or even a lawyer who would defend her people from the cacique’s and the government’s abuse. Her father had been a farmer. He had a little bit of land and had hoped his children would be educated and have a career, but he lost everything during the 1980s crisis. The state subsidies he depended on as a small-scale farmer dried up, and they went bankrupt. Not that they were rich while working the land; they had a humble lifestyle, but their needs were met. After the crisis, though, they had to reinvent themselves and find different ways to make money. Many in the same situation fled, some to Mexico City and others to the United States. Her brother, Martín-Nelli, crossed the border to try to make a living, sending them money every now and then. Her mother found a job as a housekeeper. Her younger siblings stayed home with their abuela, who made a few pesos selling aromatics and various Nahuatl crafts near the market’s entrance.

A gift manifested itself within Yoltzi at a very young age, which she could only describe as an ability to see inside people. Growing up she realized she was able to understand a person, to know exactly what they were like without a word passing between them. For the longest time she had assumed that this shroud she saw around others—which, to her, reflected their soul—was visible to everyone. But as time went on, she realized this sight was unique to her and began to see it as an unfortunate curse. It was almost as if she could see people in their nakedness, in their shameful and beautiful vulnerability. This brought upon her many disappointments in life. In her eyes, love and friendship were built on the slow discovery of all the mysteries and secrets that lie within a person, a building of mutual trust between people as they revealed their souls inch by inch. She would always be pretending to discover others, having seen them in their entirety when they first met. All the mystery and benevolent secrecy of love were revealed to her. How was she supposed to establish a romantic relationship if she could read her partner’s heart before they said a word?

Her gift didn’t stop at the unseen world within others. She could also see … things. Shadows and the shades of spirits not of this world populated the streets Yoltzi walked. These, too, she came to realize, were invisible to others.

One night as a teenager, she had been walking home when she saw a woman walking in the middle of the road. In the dark streets she wouldn’t have even noticed her presence save for her feet scuffing the pavement with every slow, aimless step. The off-kilter gait of the woman and her meandering path made Yoltzi assume there was something wrong with her. As an otherwise generous person, Yoltzi would have normally never hesitated to approach the woman and ask if she needed help. But something had been deeply unsettling to her on that dark road. She couldn’t see the shroud around the woman, she couldn’t see the woman’s soul. Yoltzi had been walking behind her at a distance, watching from the sidewalk, fascinated by the first person she’d ever seen whom she could not read, when she noticed the two small stars of headlights appear at the crest of a hill in the road. The woman did not get off the dark road and Yoltzi stopped moving. As the car approached, Yoltzi simply watched. Only in the final moments did she begin to call out, but the car had already passed. The woman remained on the road, shuffling toward some unknown destination, and Yoltzi ran all the way home.

It wasn’t rare for specters and ghosts to cross her path. Most of them she wasn’t interested in. A lifetime of encounters had accustomed her to their presence, like that of strangers who ignored her and whom she ignored, as they lacked the ability to interact with the living, but every now and then, along came beings who could influence and affect people, even harm them.

The situation in Tulancingo had already been dire, but when the new mayor got elected, he brought a whole new wave of violence with him, and everything went downhill from there. Then came the foreigners, armed to the teeth and fond of humiliating people, demanding payment in exchange of protection and threatening those who dared to oppose them. They put together a small army of young boys, lured by the promise of money and women in exchange for their loyalty, selling drugs, patrolling the streets. Many of them were taught how to kill. Some might have been sixteen or eighteen, but others were literally children, as young as ten or twelve, transformed into brutal hit men by organizations that made them believe they were part of something, part of a family that promised them the world.

But the evil that permeated the air, the one you could feel, smell, and almost touch, went far beyond a few scared children, beyond conceited criminals and arrogant politicians. The evil was everywhere. And the most painful and concerning part of it was the missing women, the murdered girls whose story wasn’t even breaking news anymore. One after the other, women, girls, young and not so young, had been kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered. Across the country, the numbers kept going up, so much that people had lost count, a real epidemic. They would catch some unlucky man from time to time, a scapegoat, and accuse him, torture him, declare him guilty or trick him into confessing, lock him up, and soon after, another woman would disappear—and another, and another. Another number no one was keeping count of. They’d capture some other poor bastard, and the cycle would repeat itself one more time, again and again. Never ending.

The first case was four years ago. Not that women weren’t killed before, but this time was different. Virginia López was her name. She was no older than eighteen. Yoltzi knew her. They weren’t friends exactly, but they would say hi from time to time; they ran in the same circles; they walked down the same streets. Their stories weren’t that different: Virginia worked in a factory; her family had worked the land as well, but ultimately had to go in a different direction. The father scraped together a bit of money and opened a store. One day, Virginia wasn’t back home by bedtime. They found her mutilated body in a ditch seven miles away from her town. They blamed her boyfriend—but she didn’t have a boyfriend or even any suitors for that matter. They blamed her for being out on the street so late at night, for dressing provocatively, for not going to church often enough. They hadn’t captured the perpetrators yet. They probably never would. Virginia was followed by another girl in a nearby town, and then another from San Melquiades and then a neighbor of hers. These crimes remained unpunished. People speculated whether it was a single killer, a serial killer, or a crime of passion, a boyfriend, a family member, or an outsider. But the silence remained deafening. Some thought it was a web of human traffickers, or organ harvesters, or a satanic cult, or who knows. It didn’t matter. No one was doing anything about it. But with this many dead women, someone had to know. With such a high number of crimes, it was simply impossible to have no witnesses, killers regretful of their crimes, or even someone willing to cooperate in exchange for money or getting their own crimes pardoned. These things didn’t happen without context. There must be something that can be pointed at, reported, followed through. But there was nothing, the deaths kept coming and the secret remained protected.

Yoltzi stopped at a newspaper stand from where she could look discreetly at the mother and her two daughters. The eldest sister spent most of her time looking at her phone, evidently sick and tired of a little adventure that didn’t interest her in the least. While the youngest seemed to enjoy every step, the eldest surely saw in her surroundings a lame, dingy town. Yoltzi chuckled, amused by the contrast. It reminded her of her brothers, of a time when something like a trip to the market was a wonderful adventure.

She hid behind the stand, pretending to look at the covers of magazines and the newspapers. Her eyes stopped on the front pages morbidly showcasing mutilated bodies, gunshot and knife-wound victims. It was so common that the grotesque had lost its ability to shock, to move, to anger. Women, so many murdered women, up to ten in one day across the country, people said. It seemed more and more unbelievable, the brutality of their murders. This much hate had to come from somewhere. All that resentment, animosity, and frustration the country and the world had been hoarding for so long, it had to come from somewhere crueler, more sinister, more ancient—a sweeping force that planted the desire to leave everyone motherless, sisterless, daughterless. A homicidal force set on ending women altogether.

Suddenly she felt dizzy. A drop of cold sweat flowed from her hairline down her forehead as her body was gripped by a chill. Goosebumps prickled against her skin as the light of the world dimmed. That inhuman presence she had felt humming beneath the shadows was materializing and swallowing the world around her in the process. The ground vanished beneath her feet in the growing darkness of her vision, and she shot out a hand to grasp the newspaper stand to steady herself—only for her hand to pass through more nothingness. The milling people had all vanished, save for one figure slowly trudging through the sudden night that had fallen on Yoltzi’s world.

It was grotesquely proportioned, a parody of human form. A skirt of seashells jingled around its skeletal legs as it moved toward a small fluttering light where the small girl had been. The skeletal figure had no visible soul, an apparition. Yoltzi’s heart pounded in her chest and, as if it heard its beat, the figure snapped its head around to look at her. A thick froth dripped from its mouth, all teeth. Its tongue was a flashing blade, darting in and out between the bones, and around its neck swung a necklace of beating human hearts. Its eyes seemed about to pop out of their sockets as it stared at Yoltzi. She tried to cover her eyes, but the face remained, growing as it drew nearer.

Yoltzi couldn’t move. She felt the face pulling at her. She was losing herself, sinking. She knew she couldn’t let go. She inhaled that incandescent breath exhaled by whatever was in front of her. In her head, she could hear behind the cacophony of noise, a faint tune—every note forming a familiar song she couldn’t quite place. Her body was filled by an intense heat, nearly solid, like jelly, filling her up from her nose to her limbs. And once she couldn’t hold it any longer, she expelled that substance with all the strength her lungs granted her, throwing it forcefully against the skeletal, twisted body.

The darkness subsided and Yoltzi could once again see the people of the square in the sun. Everything was back to normal. No one had seen anything. As Yoltzi looked around, regaining her bearings, she found herself humming a tune, just loud enough for only her to hear. It was something familiar yet so deeply buried in her memory that she hadn’t the faintest idea where exactly it could be from. Some song she had heard performed on the street, perhaps, or some song she had forgotten from her childhood.

The newspaper vendor looked at her with curiosity. She was hunched over, and when she tried to straighten up, she felt her spine seize and a sharp pain pierce her chest. She rose as an old lady would, pretended to look at her watch, and then glanced in either direction as if she was waiting for someone. It wasn’t her first time experiencing an apparition, but this thing was not a regular benign ghost or the kind of harmless specter she would often see crawling through the shadows, harassing the living. What she’d just witnessed was an ancient entity, older than dust. She could swear it was a tzitzimitl, and if it was, she had to wonder what it was searching for. She wondered if the only reason she was able to confront that thing was due to her memory of that tune, that little song that she couldn’t put together but was showing itself behind the curtains of her memory.

She needed some time to collect herself. She drew in quick, shallow breaths as the air seemed to burn her throat. She caught her reflection on a display: her face was bright crimson, as if she’d spent the day sunbathing or popped her head inside an oven. The ground finally felt solid once more. No one looked at her; everyone kept going along with their day and errands as if nothing had happened. Everyone except for the girl, the girl’s eyes had been following her. She, too, had been paralyzed and looked at Yoltzi intently. She recognized something had happened, something unexpected and disturbing, but Yoltzi had no way to know what or how much she’d seen. The danger was perhaps even greater than she thought if the girl could see what she’d seen. The mother got closer to her daughter. Yoltzi knew she was asking her what was wrong, even if she couldn’t hear the conversation from where she was standing. The girl didn’t answer; she remained fixated on Yoltzi. The mother then tried to follow the girl’s gaze. Yoltzi reacted and tried to hide herself from the maternal eye, moving behind the stand, almost as if she felt guilty.

“Need some help finding what you’re looking for, my friend?” the vendor asked her.

“Yeah, found it. You should really cover up all of those beheadings. Have you no shame?” she said and walked away, following the girl from afar again.

She saw the girl looking for her among the people, but preferred to remain hidden, at least for a while, at least until she came up with a plan to get closer and help somehow. She didn’t have the slightest clue how. She saw them walking farther away. The little one had stopped skipping and running. Now she walked, holding her mother’s hand, with her head hung down. Yoltzi followed them for a couple of blocks and saw them stop to chat with Quauhtli. There was her shot, her opening. She’d known Quauhtli since she was a child. He was her best chance to get closer to the mother and her girls, close enough to warn them of the darkness that threatened to envelop them.



5

Later in the day, Yoltzi found Quauhtli sitting in the square by himself with his elbows on his knees. The broad shoulders of his frame were hunched over the shadow cast by the afternoon sun at his feet. He was mindlessly turning a clay Nahuatl figurine over and over in his hands. His eyes squinted against the bright light reflecting off the plaza’s paving stones. What most people often mistook for a simple grimace, Yoltzi knew to be the face he’d always made when in contemplation. It was like he thought he could put new wrinkles in his brain if he furrowed his brow hard enough. Yoltzi drew closer and stopped a couple of feet away from him, but it wasn’t until she called his name that he jumped from his trance and saw her.

“Hola, Quauhtli. Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

Quauhtli bolted upright as he was pulled from thought. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”

“How was I supposed to know you were so jumpy? What are you doing here?”

“Who knows? I finished early at the abbey today and sat here to let my mind wander. How about you?”

“Looking for you, actually.”

“What for?”

Yoltzi glanced around the plaza to see if anyone else was within earshot, then cast her gaze to her feet, hesitant to tell Quauhtli about her surveillance.

“Well, I saw you talking to that woman. The one with a blond daughter and a younger one. You know them, yeah?”

“Yeah. Carmen is the architect from the States working on the abbey. The girls are Izel and Luna. Why?”

“I need to speak to her. Do you think you know her well enough to introduce us?”

Quauhtli furrowed his brow. “How come?”

Yoltzi sighed deeply and sat by his side on the bench, struggling to find the best way to communicate what she had seen earlier in the day. Her face darkened and she covered her mouth as if afraid of someone reading her lips from afar. “I think the young girl’s in danger.”

“Luna? What kind of danger?”

She knew Quauhtli would understand, that he wouldn’t mock or discount her words as silly superstition, but it was always a little difficult to vocalize what she saw. “Her heart’s exposed.”

The family ties between Yoltzi and Quauhtli ran deep. They descended from the survivors of the colonial invasion and the near destruction of indigenous cultures. Their two Nahua families had weathered the endless storm of it all, passing myth and language down the family tree even as its branches were pruned by the brutal passing of time and the Christianization of the land. These two families were nothing short of a miracle in so many ways, long stories of quiet and heroic resistance. As a result, their families were incredibly close, sharing bonds of blood and lasting friendship over all that time. The two of them were only distantly related, but they were brought close by the intertwining roots of those ancient family trees. They both grew up being taught the myths and the beliefs kept alive by their ancestors, but Quauhtli was admittedly less devout, for lack of a better word, than Yoltzi in his personal acceptance of them. He considered himself more of a secular inheritor of their ancestors’ stories. Nonetheless, he was never one to discount Yoltzi’s spiritual convictions.

“Exposed? How?” he asked.

“Do you know about tzitzimimeh? The goddesses of the dark sky. They’ll supposedly come down to end the world at the end of the fifth sun.”

“I know the tales. You don’t have to explain them to me.”

“They’re tales until they’re not.”

“So you think that a tzitzimitl is going to … what? Eat Luna? What are you proposing to do if you talk to them? I know you see things, Yoltzi, and I trust that they are real in a sense.”

Yolzti pursed her lips and looked away. In a sense.

Quauhtli continued, “I’ve known you a long time, though. These are strangers! Americans! What would you even say?”

“I don’t know, but I have to say something! There’s something happening. You can’t even feel it a little bit?”

The air chilled in an instant as the square was covered in shadows. Gray clouds had blanketed the sun, but the darkness which fell was closer to the dead of night or a total eclipse. Among the shadows Yoltzi could feel something moving, something pushing up against the surface of the plaza’s stones from a realm unseen. Her grip cinched around Quauhtli’s hand like a vice, communicating to him without speaking that they were currently surrounded by the very spirits that she had been talking about. They were being ambushed by murmurs, as if a thousand dark serpents slithered around them in the murky depths beneath, like eels in a lagoon, all while they were surrounded by people completely oblivious and moving on with their days. Seeing her expression and feeling the grip she had on his hand, Quauhtli took Yoltzi’s lead and remained quiet and still.

Waiting for the light to return and the spirits to disperse, Yoltzi, in her fear, receded into herself. Her pulse quickened and her head swam as her vision darkened. She fell into an ephemeral, boundless space that felt warm and familiar, like the thoughts of another were stored within her, someone reminding her to be unafraid of what she saw at the plaza. Her fear dissipated and was replaced by the comfort of an old, matronly presence. While she couldn’t hear anything, Yoltzi was positive that the darkness was speaking to her but only pieces of Nahuatl came through: Yehua … xiquiyehua ipan … pampa ni mitz tlazohtla, pampa ni mitz tlazohtla … noyollo. Yoltzi tried to solidify this presence in her mind, attempting to bring a face or a voice to it, but Quauhtli was shaking her shoulder. Her eyes fluttered open and the light returned to the plaza.

The two of them remained still and silent among the movement and sound of the crowds for a moment before Yolzti spoke softly, “See?”

Quauhtli’s face had softened and it seemed as if he did indeed see what she had been talking about, but responded with a question, “What was that song you were humming?”

“When?”

“Just now, when the shadows surrounded us! You were singing something, muttering under your breath and humming some kind of tune.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t notice myself doing it if I was.”

“It sounded so familiar.”

Quauhtli tried to repeat the refrain he’d heard her humming, but soon lost his train of thought and couldn’t remember much more. Yoltzi said nothing. She hadn’t realized she’d been humming again. Both knew the power of the specters relied on scaring the living. They can’t intervene in the physical world, can’t move anything or materialize. Their strength lies in making people hurt themselves. Yoltzi figured that for whatever reason that tune she hummed unconsciously must bring her some comfort, enough to keep her composure and sanity in the face of the tzitzimitl.

“So when are you introducing me to the architect?” Yoltzi asked.

Quauhtli’s face went back to a grimace. Yoltzi watched the lines form on his forehead and at the edges of his pointed nose while he sat silently contemplating. She knew it was a big request to ask him to approach what was, in fact, his superior at work with something like this.

“I don’t know her well enough for that. We’re friendly, but it’s not like we have the kind of rapport that I can say, ‘My childhood friend was watching you and thinks your daughter is under demonic threat. Would you care to meet her?’”

“Are you trying to make me sound insane?”

“No, but that’s how it will come across. Think about it. I don’t even think they’re religious, they’ll think it sounds like The Exorcist. I have a better idea. You should come to the site whenever you can get away from work under the pretext of your job. Say you have to talk to her about some permit that didn’t get signed or something, paperwork that slipped through the cracks.”

“And then warn her when we start talking.”

“No. You’ll already be a liar then, pretending to show up under false pretense, and on top of that you’ll blindside her. Just introduce yourself, say you’re a friend of mine, and then maybe I can convince her to have coffee with the two of us or something.”

“But this is urgent. What if—”

Quauhtli cut her off, “Then it’s important not to immediately make her wary of you. It’ll only make it harder to talk to her.”

They remained silent for a moment, listening to the sounds of the square, the people speaking, the balloon vendor, the lotería vendor, the children out from school laughing and yelling, the traffic by the avenue. None of it had been interrupted by the appearance of the specters, but only now did Yoltzi become aware again of all the life happening around them. It seemed the world of those shadows was always churning beneath the baked streets of Tulancingo, boiling it from below as the sun scorched it from above. The nightmares of that world were leaching into the world of the waking, the living. Quauhtli stood up and turned to Yoltzi.

“Have you had anything to eat? I’m on my way to the market, to Don Lucas’s pozole. Lunch is on me if you want it.”

“No, I’m not hungry. Thank you, Quauhtli. I must get to work. I was supposed to be back at the office a while ago. I’ll get myself a torta or something like that.”

They hugged goodbye and Yoltzi walked away toward city hall. No one would mind her being a bit late, like she’d said. The boys club that was her work environment, despite her slim figure, apparent frailty, and delicate features, didn’t mess with her. They knew that underneath her face, hid a tenacious strength. As she walked, she wondered if that strength would be enough to confront a threat like this one. Just the thought of the apparition she had seen earlier froze her blood solid in her veins. She had not felt strong or powerful in that moment, but when she imagined the little girl she had seen, Luna, facing something like that, her blood began to move again, determined to stand between them.



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Gracias to the brilliant Lisa Gallagher, the greatest champion of impossible challenges.

Thank you with all my heart to all the incredible people that contributed to this wild ride: Naief Yehya, Kingsley Hopkins, Araceli López Mata, Gustavo Zapoteco Sideño, Matt Warren Bruinooge, James Handel, and especially to the magnificent Tor Nightfire team:

The wonderous Kelly Lonesome and Kristin Temple, my editors and heroes, and Jordan Hanley, Michael Dudding, Saraciea Fennell, Giselle Gonzalez, Esther Kim, Jeff LaSala, Devi Pillai, and Lucille Rettino.

Thanks to the fantastic jacket illustrator, João Ruas, and to the artist, Andres Rios.

Special thanks to my brother and partner, Everardo Gout.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A visual artist, filmmaker, and writer who hails from Mexico City, LEOPOLDO GOUT studied sculpture at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts in London. His work belongs to multiple collections and has been in exhibitions all over the world. After finishing his studies, Gout’s creativity extended into writing, television, and film. He is the author of the book Ghost Radio, the award-winning Genius YA trilogy, and the recently published fable for all ages, Monarca.

Vist him online at www.leopoldogout.net, or sign up for email updates here.

Instagram: @leopoldoleopoldo


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