Each of Us a Desert

by Mark Oshiro

  Exhaustion folded over my body. I was still in the rear, and my legs were heavy, as though weighted down with stones. It was the stories. It had to be. The closer I got to You, the greater my guilt and shame. I kept moving, though, because I knew that as soon as I stopped, I wouldn’t be able to start again.

  I looked toward the summit. Had it gotten farther? I pushed forward and pounded my fists into my thighs, willing them to keep moving.

  Delirium was close.

  I could sense my mind slipping away from me—with the next step forward, I was going to lose it all. I was never going to be the same again. I was changing. My body was becoming something else, gnarled and shriveled, violent and evil. I was drying out. I was desiccated. I was empty.

  I was becoming a desert. Alone, unsheltered, the product of disappointment, hatred, and spite.

  I was You.

  I was exactly what You wanted me to be, what You believed I was. Vacant and isolated. Nothingness.

  And as quickly as this raging panic had gripped me, so did the top of la montaña arrive beneath my feet. The sun was well past halfway to the west when the trail very suddenly flattened out. But if I had not seen the others crumpled on the ground before me, I might have kept walking to maintain my momentum.

  But there was Felipe, sprawled out on his back between Rosalinda and Eliazar, his pack tossed beside them.

  “I’m never walking another step,” he said.

  I put my pack down next to his, ready to allow my body to fall to the ground as well, but the sight beyond the edge of la montaña, in the desolate valle to the north, pulled me forward. A light breeze blew over me, the first of the entire journey, and it raised bumps over my skin.

  “Solís help us,” I said, “what is that?”

  The flatland below us shimmered in the air, like some of the blown glass I had seen in Obregán. There were structures jutting out of that brightness, sprinkled like pimienta y sal over maíz, like las estrellas in the night sky.

  It looked like a city, but broken. Forgotten.

  El olvidado.

  I covered my eyes, trying to block the brightness, but it was unending.

  “I have no idea,” said Emilia. “We didn’t come across this on our journey south.”

  There was a pounding in my chest.

  “Emilia, where are we?”

  “I … I thought we were going the right way,” she said, and it was the first time I had heard it in her voice: uncertainty.

  “But how do you know?” I demanded. “Is Solís in your mind? Your heart? Telling you where to go?”

  “No! It’s not like that!”

  “But we’re supposed to believe that without a map, you just know?”

  “Niña,” said Rosalinda, and she tried comforting me, her hands on my shoulders. “Cálmate. She’s gotten us here, hasn’t she?”

  “You’re not the one with a destination,” I snapped, and I immediately regretted my tone.

  I put my face in my hands. The only reason I had agreed to this journey was so that Emilia could guide me to Simone. What would happen if she couldn’t even do that? What would become of me? Of all these stories?

  They buried themselves deeper.

  “Let’s head down,” I said. “Get as far as we can, and then find somewhere to set up for the night.”

  “Then what?” Rosalinda demanded, pulling Felipe close. “What if we don’t find somewhere to sleep?”

  “Xochitl is good at this,” Emilia offered.

  “At this?” I gestured to the strange ciudad below. “I don’t know what that is! I don’t know what I’m doing!”

  Emilia pursed her lips. “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “Just that you are good at being out in the desert.”

  My exasperation bloomed. “Let’s go,” I said. “I’d like there to be some light left.”

  Our descent was quiet, unnerving. We did not speak to one another, and we should have been overjoyed to finally be walking downhill. Instead, we let the numbness swallow us, tear us apart. No glances at one another, no conversation, nothing but the steady sound of our feet against the ground.

  La ciudad gleamed.

  It seemed impossible.

  Rosalinda got a cramp in her lower back after an hour, and it was only then that we took a break. She stopped to drink, and I caught up to her, helping her to rub out the spasming muscle. “You’re losing water,” I told her. “Sweating it out too quickly. Drink more.”

  “Wait until they start to get cramps,” she said, laughing softly. “They’re not used to them like we are.”

  I chuckled. It was funny, and I welcomed anything other than pain or exhaustion. I had to, because another thought was racing around my head:

  What if I turned back? What if I went back to the life I had been given? I could be a dutiful cuentista, exactly as my parents and Empalme wanted me to be. I could take the stories, and I could return them to the desert, and I could forget them, and I could live my entire life as it had been intended.

  No.

  I looked back at what we had climbed.

  No.

  I had seen too much. Los sabuesos, Obregán, las cuentistas …

  How could I go back without knowing if this was possible? How could I return to that life, now that I knew so much?

  The resolution spread through me:

  I would rather make another terrible decision than live knowing that I hadn’t tried.

  So I kept going. We all did.

  In las bajadas on the north side, lit softly by the setting sun, there was a row of paloverdes that were flourishing. They were a reminder of survival. The grove gave way to what was an endless flatness interrupted only by the ruins of la ciudad in the distance. Even the cactuses petered out as we marched toward those structures.

  Who had lived here? What had caused the fate of this place? I could see some sort of building, half of it collapsed, an ironwood growing out of the center of the rubble. We moved closer, stepped over the remains of a low stone wall that stretched in either direction, crumbled and rotted before us. Structures had come to rest against one another—gray stone, mud, wood, rusted metal, all of it gnarled and twisted, decaying and lifeless. But there were patches of greens and yellows where plant life bloomed, thick stalks of grasses and mesquite bushes competing for the available space.

  I ran my finger along the edge of one of the stone buildings.

  It was covered in a black ash.

  And the answer arrived in me, suddenly, uninvited, terrifying.

  La Quema.

  “Solís burned this place,” I said, not meaning to do so out loud, but once it was out, a silence blanketed us, as if all sound had been smothered by this place.

  There was not much light left shining on la ciudad, but I tried to make out what I could. A large stone pillar lay across the road that seemed to split la ciudad in two, and I don’t know what it used to hold up. A building? Some sort of monument?

  A rustling noise broke the silence.

  I held my breath.

  We all did.

  I made a tentative step toward it, my arm out to protect me in case there was something there.

  There was a scrabbling in the dirt, and then they scurried out from the eastern side of the road, squat creatures with horns on their heads and long, shaggy brown fur covering their bodies. I had no idea how they survived in the heat like that; they had to be creatures of the night. The lead one looked back at us, and their eyes flashed red in the setting sun. We all stood as still as we could as a lip curled up and tiny, needle-like teeth were bared in our direction.

  Then it led the pack away. They scampered over a pile of rubble and vanished.

  An awful sensation passed over my skin, and I had never felt so exposed in my life, as if a million eyes were focused on my body.

  I turned to look behind us.

  They stood there.

  A line of them. A wall of them. From one side to the next, from far in the east stretching to the edge of si
ght in the west.

  The dead.

  Clothing in shambles, limbs missing, skin desiccated and rotting, bodies torn apart, torsos eaten and hollowed.

  Most were burned to a crisp, nothing more than human shapes of coal, and they stood there, staring at us, their eyes glowing white.

  Felipe cried out, but Rosalinda clamped a hand over his mouth.

  “Who are they?” asked Eliazar, his voice shaky.

  “The punished,” one of them answered, and they stepped forward, their skin crackling with each movement. “Those who were eliminated in La Quema. The original inhabitants of esta ciudad.”

  And then, in unison, in one horrific rush of sound, they all took a step forward. Then another. Then another.

  “You must move through,” they said. “You must learn the truth.”

  The truth.

  Oh no.

  Was this what Roberto y Héctor had experienced? Was this what we’d been warned about?

  Felipe screamed, and then he was the first to run. He made it to the pillar and cleared it in no time. We all ran, as Felipe’s reaction woke us from our terror, and my own muscles felt like they were tearing apart as I did so. Still, I pulled myself up and over and I followed after the others, desperate to know if this would all be over if we made it to the other side of la ciudad.

  I looked back.

  They—the dead—were in front of the pillar already, a single line, moving ever forward, making sure we could not leave.

  I ran in the other direction as fast as I could.

  The remains of la ciudad were like the bones jutting out of a carcass that was half buried in the desert, that las bestias had picked clean. We moved through a corpse, dodging piles of basura, pushing through bushes that had sprouted up in all this death. I caught up to Eliazar, who was struggling to keep up with the other three.

  “Go on ahead,” he said, digging his fingers into his side. “Please.”

  “No,” I said, looping his arm over my shoulders. “We go together.”

  The sun set further. The shadows became longer. The shuffling dead pushed behind us, but I would not turn around to gaze at them. Instead, I heard them, a persistent trudging forward.

  We couldn’t run anymore. I heard a whimper next to me. Rosalinda. She clutched Felipe’s hand now.

  Emilia looked from side to side as she urged us to continue, staring into the shadows. She beckoned us forward. “We’re almost there!”

  Had we made it?

  I ducked through the remains of some large stone gate, and on the other side, I could see it.

  The buildings, growing smaller, spreading out.

  More ash, more destruction.

  The debris of the northern gate.

  We were almost there.

  Another whimper, to my left.

  But it wasn’t Rosalinda or Felipe.

  The shadows twisted.

  Then grew.

  Reached out.

  I shouted and fell to the side, scraping my leg on a pile of jagged stones.

  “Xochitl!”

  The dead were still to the south, climbing over debris, moving toward me.

  Emilia grabbed me under the arms, pulled me up, but then it came for her.

  The shape groaned, and Emilia yanked me north and—

  “No.”

  There was a woman there, her body one enormous shadow that took shape, twisted into reality. Wide nose, long black hair, wrinkles jutting from the corner of her eyes.

  She wore a light brown tunic, but there was a stain, slowly growing, overtaking the center of her torso, and it kept spreading.

  Red.

  Blood.

  Emilia sobbed. “It wasn’t my fault,” she insisted. “I couldn’t stop it.”

  The woman said nothing. She stared at Emilia as the stain now covered everything, dripped from the bottom edge of the tunic down onto the dirt.

  “But it wasn’t my fault,” Emilia cried, her hands on her face. “It was Julio. He did this. I couldn’t stop him!”

  I knew then who she was.

  La mujer de La Palmita.

  The first person that Julio had killed.

  Emilia backed into me. “Make her go away,” she said, grappling for my hand, squeezing it tight.

  “Just ignore her!” I said, and I tried to get Emilia to come with me, to get out of this place, but she wouldn’t budge.

  “I can’t,” she said. “What if I could have helped her? Why didn’t I stand up to him before?”

  “You’re being unfair to yourself,” I said. “Trust me. I know. He did this, not you. He was the one who killed all those people in La Palmita!”

  The woman held her hands beneath her stomach, and then she screamed as her entrails fell forth, and then she was pushing her insides back into the gaping hole, and red blood oozed through her fingers.

  It rained down on Emilia: black ash from the sky. La mujer de La Palmita growled, and her mouth opened, impossibly wide, and she pulled a blade out of that chasm, and it was covered in her own blood.

  But Emilia became rage, became rejection. She roared and Emilia shoved through the woman, who now spat ash at Emilia, and then the shadow was gone and Emilia was scowling, saying something over and over—

  “¡No soy mi papi!”

  And he sprang up behind her, stretching terribly from her shadow, and his long arms grasped her from behind, and he was cackling.

  “Did you think you could escape me?” he roared. “I can find you just as well as los sabuesos, mija!”

  She thrashed about, and I dived for her, but my hands went through Julio’s arms, right to Emilia’s skin.

  “Eres una asesina,” he cooed into her ear, and his teeth grew, longer and longer and he sank them into the flesh of her shoulder and tore at it, sinews and blood dripping from his mouth. “¡Una asesina como yo!”

  She cried out.

  She fell back.

  Tears streamed down her face, but she wrenched herself upward and began to pummel him with her fists, her voice raw, vicious. “I am nothing like you!” she shrieked, and each fist pushed him back, until her hands began to sink into his flesh, began to reshape his form, and then his head tipped to the side, plummeted to the earth.

  She crushed it.

  “I am nothing like you,” she wheezed out again, and Julio’s ashes burst up into the air. “I will never be that.”

  Someone screamed behind Emilia. “No, leave us alone!”

  Another shadow had grown.

  There was a man, tall, his arms thick with muscle, on his knees in front of Rosalinda, his hands up, pleading with her. “Mi amor, take me back,” he begged, and he looked so real now, no longer a shadow given form.

  Una pesadilla. Made whole.

  “I miss you. I miss our son. Felipe.”

  “Mami, stop him.” Felipe backed away from the man, right into me, and he latched on to my arm as he did so. “Xochitl, how is he here? Is he going to take us back?”

  “No!” shouted Rosalinda at him, furious and righteous. “We left you behind. We are never going back!”

  He sprang up from the dirt, from the bones of this dead city, and his body grew, twisted, stretched in unimaginable directions, until he towered over the whole group, and he unhinged his jaw, letting forth a bellow that vibrated through all of us. “You’re worthless! I never loved you! I’ll just see Adelina again, and she’ll give me what I want!”

  Felipe howled as the apparition continued to berate his mother. “Why did I ever marry you? Why did I ever have a son?”

  Rosalinda did not flinch. She did not cower before that manifestation. She stretched her body taller, and when she screamed, spit flew from her mouth, her eyes flared with fury. “I will never let you hurt us again.”

  “But you waited so long to leave,” he teased, his words both slimy and sharp. “You couldn’t do it. You wanted him to suffer with you, so that you didn’t have to experience me alone.”

  “Stop talking,” she said, and she threw
her hands over her ears.

  “Mami?” Felipe’s voice sounded so small, so terrified.

  “It’s true, Felipe,” crooned his father. “She’s worthless. She didn’t get you out soon enough.”

  “No!” she shrieked, and she shoved at the man so hard that he stumbled. “I didn’t know how to leave! I never would have married you if I knew what you’d turn out to be.”

  “So you’d give up our son for your own peace?”

  Rosalinda smiled, and it left me awestruck, fearful.

  “I would choose Felipe over you every time.”

  His face twisted up in anger, and at first, I thought he was going to turn on her. But then Felipe balled up his fists and started shaking next to his mother. “This is your fault!” he said. “Why were you always so mean to Mami? Why couldn’t you love her?”

  And then he stood in front of Rosalinda, who watched on with the rest of us.

  “I love her, Papi. You have to get through me to get her.”

  He put up his fists.

  And Rosalinda spat on her husband.

  The shadow shrank, crumbled before Felipe y Rosalinda, and then it was so small—barely larger than a stone. La pesadilla raised its tiny hands, but that was not enough to stop the stone that crushed it, that Rosalinda had hefted up and dropped on that shadowy form.

  No sooner had that terrible image left us than a howling began. It was low at first, then higher in pitch. Was it the dead?

  No.

  I saw them.

  They were motionless.

  Watching.

  Silent witnesses to the truth.

  “Mi amor, mi amor…” He sang it to her, and there she was.

  Gracia.

  Flowing, drifting, in a long white robe.

  And she was so beautiful, Solís, as Eliazar had said.

  He was on his knees, his arms reaching up to her in reverence. “Volviste a mí,” he said.

  She came closer.

  “I knew you would.”

  Closer.

  “I’m still searching, mi amor, I promise.”

  Her fingers grazed his face.

  And then her skin went pale, slowly at first, and blood trickled out from one nostril, and she still wore the same smile as it all sloughed off her, and Eliazar was screaming, and she was dead, the smell wafting through the air. I coughed hard and spat into the dirt, and Eliazar was shaking his head.