My reflection in the window told a different story. Fierce, fearless girl, dust sticking to her skin, smoky eyes and too-sharp teeth.
But that’s not right.
A black-haired girl who sat in the dark once, with a very hurt, very sad, used-to-be-small boy, and cried hard mermaid tears into his T-shirt, which was crunchy with dried blood.
Vega
The wind comes sweeping over the asphalt, hot as burning houses. It gusts between casino signs, between the blank-eyed gamblers who roll and roll for a lucky break that never comes.
The girl is alone, counting her chips in a city that never wants you to stop moving long enough to count. Here in the dark, the silence feels like an empty church, an echoing. No one has to be alone, and everyone is.
In her car, she cranes her neck to look at her reflection. Ravenous eyes, a raw red mouth, cherry chapped from biting her lips. There is a girl in the rearview mirror who would burn down everything if she got the chance.
Luck is a kind of magic all its own, a full and blooming promise. But here is a secret: it always runs out.
She leans her cheek against the glass and remembers how she used to dance and play her mother’s CDs.
If she were living someone else’s life, her mother’s maybe, the ending would be different. It would be easy to let go. She’d never feel sad for no reason. She’d make a playlist of all the superhero songs she can think of.
But even in the bright, dishonest history of her mind, the ending is the same. She could be her mother, her alter ego, her own skillfully invented self, someone else. The sadness doesn’t leave. When she turns the knobs in the bathroom, a rattling noise leaks out of the faucet like crying.
She presses her forehead to the steering wheel and tries to see her thoughts. In the darkness behind her eyelids, she can almost picture it. Vega is a sleek and sooty mirage, a gorgeous beast. Vega is her, and those, and them. She wonders if she’s scared to leave because Vega might come with her.
It’s forgivable to love something so much that it becomes you. The transformation happened years ago, and now she and Vega are like a glossy, monstrous pair of sisters, dripping black. She is just another fierce, mythical creature in this land of winners, beauties, criminals.
The part of the story she has never doubted is the house and the garden. Alex. The way they always found each other’s eyes. The way they loved each other more than family. And when she’s waited long enough, she turns the key. In the end, it’s not that hard. For the first time in her life, she knows what happens next, knows what she’s going to do.
Drive west like someone flying away from the devil.
Drive to the edge of the world, all the way to someplace softer, and not look back.
A Hundred Thousand Threads
ALAYA DAWN JOHNSON
December 15, 2078. The first of the V-mails never sent. The mask cracked.
Hello, Jaime.
I just thought you should know, that scarf I gave you isn’t a double brocade. It’s technically a brocatelle. It’s a weave type that tends to stiffness, which is why I used the heirloom cotton that Rosa brought me back from Oaxaca. So it would be soft, but you could still read every stitch with your fingertips. I’m glad you refused to give it to the Colibrí. Even facing a masked vigilante pointing a gun to your head, you wouldn’t let her take what I had freely given. I could have kissed you, cabrón, if you weren’t so busy betraying me.
Right. Deep breath. See—I’m telling you something, Jaime. I don’t always hide myself from you. But you—who you are—who I am—sometimes makes it necessary. Whenever we’re together these days all I can feel is this barrier, like some overgrown cactus with spines that tear apart your hands and chip the machete and grow back thicker than before the next day. Did we ever talk, Jaime? I think we did. I could swear that we did, and yet now all I can do is weave and weave and pray that you’ll understand what I mean when you feel the stitches. I loved your hands from the moment we met—you wouldn’t remember . . . I—
They say that you’re falling for the Colibrí. Berenice told me you spent all of Paco’s party talking about how sexy you find her, how much you admire her. Berenice was surprised because you’d never been particularly interested in politics, let alone the class struggle, and now she was worried that you might leave me for some bandana-masked Zapatista vigilante who’s stealing from our rich parents and giving it away to the poor. Some down-city lady Chucho el Roto. I laughed and told her that you were still firmly in my clutches.
But you’re not, are you? After tonight . . . you met her. Pure dumb luck, when the Colibrí is busy robbing five hundred thousand pesos of rocks from your own aunt’s neck—
Jaime, I’ve been thinking about making something with our story. You and me. Ha, you and me and the Colibrí. A video, a documentary, a collage of lost and hidden histories. If you saw it, you’d know me. And you might just hate me. Here, this is how it would start. Imagine the smoky voice of the narrator, suspiciously similar to the Colibrí’s—but then, according to Berenice, everyone wants to be her these days:
December 2078. An eighteen-year-old girl sits on the balcony of a west-facing tower of the Estratósfera, the elite citadel that rises above the flooded streets of Mexico City. The lights of the towers and the monorails stretch out behind her, reflecting the black water of the canals, and disappear into the cream of the December smog. We pan across the famous towers of the city’s political elite, from here smudgy silhouettes: Cuauhtémoc, Anáhuac, Balderas. The girl is dressed in only a thin white huipil blouse, decorated at the collar with fractals of red and orange diamonds in thick embroidery thread. They are neatly done but faded with age. The girl stitched them herself in another world, with another name, with another mother. Before she was adopted into this strange, glittering mirage.
How is this, Jaime? Mi Jaimecito? Is this honest enough—
Her arms are bare, and even in the ambient light of the Estrato, the bruises are starting to show, purple against brown. A laceration stretches from her collarbone to her chin, shiny with medical sealant. Self-applied. Her hands tremble slightly. Her eyes are red and glassy—a surprise. Aurora never cries.
And cut. You complain about not knowing me, Jaime, but when have you really tried? Aren’t you just afraid, deep down, of who I might be? Not that fresa girl you met at thirteen, a mildly shocking dresser, a better kisser. But someone whose very existence threatens you?
No. No, chinga tu madre, Jaime, how could you—I know you’re blind, but how could you have looked at her like that, how could you have flirted with her like that, how could you even now be trying to get in touch with her again?
December 17, 2078. I found this early, within a few hours of you posting. Even so, your uncle’s spy team managed to scrub it from the net the next day.
My name is Jaime Torres de la Garza, and I’m recording this poem for—for who? It used to be easy, they were all for her, I inhaled free verse and exhaled pentatonic scales and they all traced the contours of her cloth beneath my fingers, and kept the shuttling rhythm of her loom. And now—someone new. A different sort of beat. I don’t know how to reach you, Coli, so I’m posting this publicly. The gossip feeds will fucking eat it up.
Above the Highline direction Borealis,
Which I hate to ride because I still remember the last time I had my eyes,
I felt you a moment before you spoke
Manifested like the spirit they claim you are
In my uncle’s private car
To tell his wife just how much you admired the look
Of the rocks around her neck.
I’ll give you some flowers in exchange, you said, or would you prefer feathers?
And touched your crown, which I imagined buckling and glinting
Like a morning oil slick on lake Xaltocan.
I hear Moctezuma loved them, you said.
And I laughed.
I gave you my jacket and my obsidian ear plugs
Because I wanted m
ore of the deep dry of your voice
When you stole from us.
The outlaw gave a speech, but unlike in the old telenovelas
It was a woman who had come down from the hills
To accuse me of crimes I’d been born to commit.
This will go to the families of the women you disappear, the farmers whose land you’ve stolen or drowned or poisoned past use. Think of it like a tax, Doctora Torres.
You asked me for my scarf, but that, I told you, I would fight for.
Fight for what?
An angry jab of that rough smoke voice, an angry press of one finger against my chest.
I thought:
For that silk sheath of hair always scented with plumeria.
For that laugh like cane liquor, a burning draft.
For that last unmelted iceberg, and all I’ve never seen beneath the surface.
I said:
For double-brocade weaving of blue and gold and jade in heirloom Oaxacan cotton, with a greco motif reminiscent of the crenellations at Monte Albán.
You removed your finger, you left as silently as you came.
I would tattoo my chest there: a teardrop with a fingerprint.
But they say that it hurts
My love
And I’m already burning.
January 3, 2079. Spilling your secrets to the outlaw in the mask.
Tell me how you first met the Colibrí.
Well, I was taking a private rail car with my aunt, the mayor’s wife. And you—she got it to stop on the tracks somehow and held us up. . . . I wrote a poem about it.
How did you feel, that first time?
Like I never wanted her to stop talking. This is weird. Do I have to talk about you in the third person? Who makes a documentary about themselves, anyway?
I want a record.
For what?
In case anything happens. Will you help me or not, Jaime?
I’d do anything for you, Coli. I’m . . . I’m going to leave Aurora for you.
You’re—I thought you loved her.
You and I talk more than Aurora and I ever did, and we only met in person that one time when you were robbing me! I can’t stand it anymore, no matter how much I try, she won’t let me in. Maybe that’s all she is, in the end. A fashion-obsessed Estrato girl.
And you’re really that different? I don’t remember you doing anything when your uncle gassed and shot at those protestors who came to Los Pinos.
That was the president’s call, and anyway what do I have to do with—
And you know the femicides and disappearances they’re protesting are very much a family business—
Oh, not you too! There’s nothing I can do about Beto; he might be my cousin, but he’s unhinged, we all know that. Like I told Aurora, there’s no point in getting disowned by my own family for something I have no control over.
So maybe she’s not only fashion-obsessed after all.
You’re different. You . . . try, at least, to understand me.
Me? A criminal revolutionary with a billion-peso bounty on her head? That your uncle put there? I’ve never taken off my bandana in front of you.
I don’t care. These eyes don’t really see anything, you know, they just recognize patterns. A new face is just noise to me. Your voice, that matters. Your touch . . . would matter.
And yet I recognize that scarf, Jaime.
January 4, 2079. Imagining conversations we could never have.
You said the other week that you loved me but you didn’t know me. That I never let you in. And I—this is hilarious, right?—couldn’t even respond. I was angry. Open up? You have no idea how much you’re asking of me. You couldn’t. Your life hasn’t been easy, I know that, but it has fewer layers. Your uncle is the goddamn mayor. You’ve lived your whole life in the Estrato. You navigate this fresa life without anyone questioning your right to it—your pale güero skin, your perfect accent, your grammar that can slide from high castellano to fresa slang without ever passing through that muddy, indeterminate zone of a poor india who barely speaks Spanish. I spent years in dread of a careless s slipping out in my second-person past tenses, of being too vulgar, of not being vulgar enough. I trained my voice out of rising and dipping with its double entendres, and into that flat nasal twang I needed to survive up here.
That’s why I started weaving again. That’s why I make all my own clothes. I discovered my superpower at thirteen: reinvention. I could be whoever I wanted to be, so long as I dressed the part.
Your friends never understood why you bothered to date me, when you could have whatever lily-skinned supermodel you wanted. But they don’t understand, you wanted me exactly because of how good I am at playing fresa, how good I look on your arm, how neatly I have folded myself to fit into your life. When did you decide to fall in love with me instead of use me?
When did I?
I got messy. I tried to tell you about what mattered to me. I tried to get you to see all the injustice that makes even sweetness taste like poison up here, but you never wanted to hear me. Oh, if the Colibrí talks about redressing systemic wrongs you pause and consider what she’s saying. But when it’s just Aurora, your fresa girlfriend, somehow it doesn’t seem to register—I’m always exaggerating, or getting emotional, or not telling you enough. Do you remember when I finally forced you to talk about Beto? I sat there in the hallway even though I knew that Rosa could hear us and my voice got low, the way it does when I get angry.
You backed against the wall, I remember. And I growled that you knew that your own family was associated with the kidnapping of those girls. You flattened your palms against the marble, one finger at a time. Your voice had as much color as one of those rags Rosa uses to mop the floor.
And you said, because you are a coward: “And what can I do about it?”
But you knew about those parties, the unpaid domestic labor, the sexual slavery, and, yes, the murders. You knew about your cousin—and so did your father and uncle. You were finally hearing me, though. I felt this sick, lurching thrill, because for a few dizzying seconds I wasn’t lying to you at all. You heard me and you didn’t even want to. You saw me and you flinched away. I felt taller than you. I admit it—I felt better than you.
I told you, “Aren’t you an artist? Aren’t you a musician, a poet? Do you know what great poets in this benighted city used to do? They’d die in prison protesting their government’s evil.”
And you froze. You jerked and reached for my hands and brushed my calluses from the loom with your calluses from the guitar. You bent your head and rested your forehead against my collarbone. I breathed the eucalyptus and grapefruit of your shampoo, and I remembered why I was here, and I remembered how you lost your eyes, and I remembered why I could never hate you, even if I didn’t always respect you, and your breath hitched and you said—
“I’m sorry, Aurita. I’m sorry I’m not stronger. But I can’t face down my father. Even the Colibrí can’t.”
“Maybe she can,” I said.
But that was it, you were gone already. “She has better things to do, I hope. Beto isn’t the government, he’s just a fucked-up man-child with too much money—”
And I asked you about your uncle, your brothers, and your father.
Now you pushed me away. You were angry, finally. “My father doesn’t have anything to do with that!”
I laughed. I’m not proud of what I said to that, Jaime. We don’t know what relationship your father has with those women, if he engages in the trade or just tolerates it.
But tolerating it is evil enough. You would understand that if you really believed that those of us struggling down below were every bit as human as you are, as you imagine me to be.
January 5, 2079. Rosa Trujillo Ramirez interviews with a disguised associate of the Colibrí’s. Amazing what she saw when I wasn’t looking.
You mentioned that Aurora has been arguing with Jaime? About what?
I hear a lot, you know, as the housekeeper. Those
Estrato types tend to forget when I’m around. This was back in November, just after Mayor Torres put that billion-peso bounty on the Colibrí’s head. Aurora was telling Jaime that she’d heard rumors that his cousin Beto was planning another of his famous clandestine parties. The kind that go on for three days at a time, attended by senators and bankers and businessmen and narcos. Jaime’s cousin Beto is much older than him, Mayor Torres’s son from his first marriage. He had been in charge of city security until the Highline terrorist attack. I remember because it had been in the news, how it had been his own cousin’s fault that Jaime went blind.
Jaime didn’t want to listen to her, of course. He couldn’t do anything about it, he said.
Aurora laughed. Oh, the way Aurora would laugh when she thought that no one but Jaime could hear her. “A laugh like cane liquor, a burning draft”—I remember that from one of those poems he published yesterday. The ones they say are for the Colibrí. But I know. He wrote that for her.
She said, around that laugh, “You don’t have the first idea where your daddy goes, junior.”
He used the Lord’s name in vain and then said “Aurora” with the exact same tone. And he told her, it was so strange, he told her she was hidden, like a switchblade in wrapping paper.
His face looked at her, so bleak with those special eyes, and I remembered—did you know?—that he couldn’t cry. They had to remove his tear ducts along with what was left of his first pair of eyes.
He can’t really see, you know. Those eyes allow him to sense things, but it isn’t processed visually.
You don’t say? Maybe that explains the scarves. Aurora would spend afternoons on the balcony, reading while she worked on her loom. He would find her after he had finished his music lessons, and they would just sit together. Sometimes he would touch the fabric and admire the pattern, since she tended to weave in brocade. And then she would tell him if it was red or blue or had eagles or jaguars and the sort of skirt or jacket or thigh-high boots she planned to use it in. They were so quiet, and yet every time they spoke it seemed as though there was something else beneath it.
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