by Yoon Ha Lee
Ana obliges, though her daughter does not seem to be much hungrier than the natives of the land of the dead. She hasn’t tried to nurse since they arrived. While Sylvie licks honey from her fingertips, she persists: “Tell me the truth. Not even the gods can be unborn.”
“We are all unborn here,” says the coyote. “All forged. All made. I asked to be made a nagual because I, like you, was alive when I followed someone else into death. Five hundred or five thousand years ago, I cannot remember. Either way, I have been unchanged ever since. Time is not the same here, you’ll find. I’ve been starving for a few eternities and getting no thinner.”
“You look,” Ana says, “very thin to me.” And she reaches out, her fingers covered in honey, to nourish one sickly creature as she nourished the other. The coyote regards her suspiciously as he lowers his mouth to her hand. His cactus tongue raises welts on her skin, but she does not feel them.
“Don’t imagine,” says the coyote, “that you can ever flee death.”
“I would never try.”
He aims a caustic look at her and then at Sylvie, who has lost interest in the honey and is blithely tearing the wings off the dead bees. “Everything is an exchange here, you’ll see. I had to kill a nagual to become one. You or her. It’ll come to you or her.”
“It already has,” Ana says. She wrestles the wingless bees from Sylvie’s fists and sets out across the desert. Moving in insubstantial increments towards another river, another dead cactus-studded land. If she didn’t have a daughter, she might have a pistol and a will to live instead.
* * *
In labor with Sylvie, Ana swallowed a sour-tasting draught of morphine and sobbed inconsolably over an old superstition that had been buried many years ago beneath a Spanish baptismal font.
“I won’t belong with you anymore,” she said over and over again, clutching at the tails of her husband’s shirt. “Please, don’t let the child come.”
He was an unsturdy and beautiful man, Arturo, and he didn’t know how to comfort her. “Stop thinking on those other worlds,” he said, speaking under his breath so the midwife across the room wouldn’t hear him. “It’s just heaven and hell and purgatory.”
“Heaven for the warriors, the mothers, and the drowned ones,” she managed, though her tongue felt thick from the morphine, and the pain of labor was deafening. “Purgatory for the rest. Didn’t they preach it that way, once?” It was true, they had. The camp chapel was prone to sacrilege, inducing velvet-clad Catholicism to shake hands with those ancient dust-streaked truths which everyone with even a speck of Aztec heritage knew.
“I’d drown before I’d leave you,” said Arturo, and she knew even then that he was lying but she let him say it, let him tangle his fingers in her sweat-soaked hair and prop her head up on the adobe wall that served as the headboard for their frameless mattress. “And they dabbed a bit of holy water on my forehead, didn’t they?”
“You know that’s not what it means,” she sobbed. “Please–”
She bit down on an iron crucifix while the midwife drew Sylvie from her womb, pushing her screams to the back of her throat and watching Arturo through a rose-colored morphine haze. How heavenly he looked. How impossible. She hoped her child was nothing like him, that Sylvie would instead be branded with the inexorable mark of that savage, ancient heaven where mothers and warriors and the drowned feast upon their enemies.
* * *
The land of the dead does not frighten Ana now that she has learned all its rules. Small gods with stars for faces sometimes try to make good on their reputations as tricksters, but they come away disappointed by her invulnerability to cuts and bruises. Other trespassers attack–longtime wanderers who have lost their guides and resent that she should persist when they have lost all hope—but the coyote kills them and buries their bodies in the sand. “When they rise, they will be aspen trees and their branches will anchor the wind,” he says.
There are many meanings of the word dead, Ana has realized. Many intermediate stages between being and not being alive. She finds she can no longer name the stage where she subsists, nor the one where Sylvie has landed.
The second river in the land of the dead is nothing like the first. The shore is not exposed to the wilds of the desert but hidden in a cave where stalactites protrude from the slick rock and armored starfish writhe in pools. Poised elegantly at the lips of the water, enormous cats with golden skin look out over the horizon. They are the guardians, the coyote says, of the threshold to the other world.
“We’ve crossed the land of the dead, then,” says Ana.
“Not yet,” says the coyote.
“Not yet,” she concedes. Then, kissing Sylvie’s head, “But if we cross, we’ll both be safe? She won’t die?”
“You won’t die,” says the coyote.
“It’s not me that I care about.”
“She belongs here,” says the coyote. “You are marked for another world, and you have known it since before you arrived.”
Ana knows he does not mean the world of labor camps and documentation papers. The warriors, the mothers, and the drowned ones, she mouths through heat-cracked lips. Beneath her, the coyote feels swollen with hunger.
“I can’t leave her,” she says, looking across the vast shining expanse of the river.
“Then make her suitable for the other world,” says the coyote.
She slides off his back, holding Sylvie close to her chest. Atop a creature forged from deathlessness, the thought of drowning her daughter is too awful, too tempting. “Don’t say that. I want her to live. I want her to live with me. I don’t want to spend fifty years in another world while she’s in the land of the dead—I don’t care which land of the dead.”
“You have no other choice,” says the coyote.
How terrible that would be, if she believed him. Is there anything she would not do for Sylvie now? Any boundary she would not cross, any impossibility she would not make possible?
“I want to become a nagual,” she says. “Like you.” At her back, the river beats against the shore. The other side is close, but she wants nothing of it if her daughter is not beside her.
“That, you cannot do,” says the coyote. Beneath his peeling skin and rust-colored fur, she sees, he is only a spindly frame of bone.
“You told me how.” She tears a stalactite from the sand and approaches him. Her hands shake but she is calm with Sylvie tucked up against her heart in a makeshift sling. “You said that everything here is an exchange.”
* * *
Loping across the land of the dead with Sylvie on her back, past the aspen trees, the crow’s skins, the golems, Ana counts up the dead and includes herself among them. There are candles lit in skulls beside the road at night now and sparse stalks of sugarcane sticking out of the barren earth. Sometimes she wonders if the sheer force of Sylvie’s life might resurrect the dead land. Certainly, it is not the force of her own deathlessness.
She has not yet found the boundary between surviving in the land of the dead and becoming one of its inhabitants. With her ridged spine and fangs, she might well have lost her citizenship to the other world already. But she is not the most savage creature here. The monsters would frighten her if she did not see the potential in them. She teaches her daughter how to put on their costumes, to wrap herself in their pelts and imitate the cries they make when hunting. Their power will be Sylvie’s inheritance when she no longer has a monster for a mother. Because Ana knows she has not really secured deathlessness for herself. Someday there will be another desperate woman with a gun to the head and a mule that won’t go on running, another blood-covered hand and knife-pierced eye and, at the riverside, another killing blow.
They are scavengers of death, the nagual. It would be foolish for them to think they will not be picked off by some equally formidable predator.
Copyright © 2015 Kay Chronister
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Kay Chronister’s fiction won the 20
15 Dell Magazine Award and is forthcoming in Ticonderoga Publications’ Hear Me Roar, an anthology of feminist speculative fiction. Originally from Seattle, she currently lives in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in a household of twenty-one children and six dogs.
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COVER ART
“Twisted Mountain Valley,” by Christopher Balaskas
Christopher Balaskas is an instructor at Infinity Visual and Performing Arts and a freelance traditional / digital conceptual artist. He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is currently based in Jamestown, New York. View more of his work at deviantArt and artstation.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
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