Sonora

by Pastor, Juan

  Celia is asked to join the staff of the Clinic, and she accepts with grateful tears pouring from her eyes that have seen everything.

  V ‐Maria and Rosie spend the night, but sneak out, without saying good‐bye, as sacred spirits often do, before the gold‐orange Sonoran sun rises.

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  Bo and I talk all night but mostly it is me who talks

  because I expect sympathy and hugs and love like he gives Skyler and the other women but he tells me how stupid and selfish and self‐pitying I am and I tell him to take his shit outside because I’m not going to take it and he says alright he’s going to take his shit outside and fertilize the flowers outside with it and I say yeah and stay outside while you’re at it I don’t want you in here with me anymore because you make me very angry and you have no heart and you are incapable of love and you are mean and you will always be alone and you stink like a fish and he says Pequena what the hell were you thinking when you took these women out in the desert and I tell him I’m so tired of people saying they understand when they don’t understand and they will never understand because they can’t understand because they have never had a bullet tear through them and they have never had a best friend in the world forever shot right next to them and not been able to do anything to keep her from dieing their best friend and what was the point in going to the doctor when we didn’t want to me and my best friend before we began our trip to get birth control pills even though we think birth control is a sin but we take it in case we may get raped and our clothes hung in a rape tree and what is the point anyway if one of us is going to be killed and the other of us is going to lie bleeding at some stupid wall and why are people so callous and cruel and brutal and when Jesus and Mary is it ever going to end and Bo looks at me and he says nothing because what can he say he doesn’t have the answer no more than I do and I can see that it pains him that he doesn’t so I ask him if he would like to lay beside me and he takes off his size 18 shoes American size and lays beside me and he is so big I think the bed will break in half because he is so big and I am so small and is this a good idea he is so big and I am so small but he puts his arm around me anyway and his arm is as big as my thigh and I feel safe because he is there and I realize I have never really felt safe before but I do feel safe now so safe that I can finally dream…

  Dust and Ash

  Time heals all wounds, say the complacent, But I think it is not so much time that does it, but determination of spirit.

  ‐ Honor Harris, in Daphne du Maurier’s The King’s General

  All I know is that a long time ago someone created

  an abstraction in his mind called a “line”. In nature there really is no such thing as a line. But this person placed this imaginary thing called a line on the sand. Then he told someone else that the line was not to be crossed. Many people spent many years trying to maintain and defend this abstraction, this idea. Many others insisted they could not see the line; the first person built a wall to make the line much more noticeable, and to prove to the second person that there was, in fact, a line exiting there. Even with the wall, many more people spent years trying to cross the line, insisting that just because there was a wall; it didn’t mean that the line existed. Even if it did exist, it meant nothing. It was no more than the threshold of a doorway, which one made meaningless by stepping over it, or if the door was shut, looking for another door.

  Philosophers were consulted. Politicians were asked. Soldiers and police were paid billions of dollars to identify and maintain the line. Thousands of people crossed the line anyway.

  Now most of those people are gone. The time in which they lived is gone. The line, if it ever really existed, is gone. The wall that demarked the theoretical line is gone, crumbled to dust and ash. The people that imagined the line, and the people who tried to cross it, have turned to dust and ash. The Sonoran wind mixes the dust and ash. The lobos leave their footprints in it. The Saguaro and Cardόn stand as sentinels, their roots firmly anchored in the dust and ash. The sun is setting. The moon is rising. Two stars are visible.

  I, an old woman now, am sitting on the roof of the Clinic, looking at the evening sky. It is the 4th of July, and I watch the fireworks to the north. I watch a giant of a man chase all the children on the grounds below. They pretend at fear and fright, as they shriek and scream, and run from him and hide, but I know it is all fun and frolic because they are chased by the gentlest gran oso (big bear) of them all.

  The Peniocereus, or Queen of the Night, as most people call them, are blooming tonight. They bloom for only one night. The flower is white, waxy and trumpet shaped. The fragrance is seductive and overwhelming, and can be smelled at over a half of a kilometer away. The rest of the year, the Peniocereus is just another almost invisible cactus in the Sonora. The life, the heart, of the Peniocereus is in its turnip shaped root that stores food and water, and can weigh five to fifteen pounds, although a seventy five pound tuber once was found.

  When they flower, the flowers are only open from late afternoon, all night, to early morning. And each flower lives for only one night. So the only way they get pollinated is through night‐flying, nectar‐feeding bats.

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  The old woman pictures the swarming of the

  murcielago in her mind.

  I am descended from the autóctonos, the originales, the

  old woman thinks to herself, although she does not even call herself "old woman" in her mind. She calls herself "Vieja".

  The Clinic stands on that spot in the Sonora where she once shed her blood.

  I was a stupid young girl then, a niña estúpida, the old woman thinks to herself. The world was a cruel place, but a beautiful mystery.

  My hair is white now, the old woman thinks to herself, and I am a long long way from my girlhood home in Guatemala. I am even further from Estúpida.

  The world is still a beautiful mystery, the woman thinks to herself, but it is a less cruel place now.