Toil & Trouble

by Jessica Spotswood

  “Thanks, Gran,” Tatinelly said. “I’m sorry I don’t get to visit more.”

  But Rosa Divina dispelled the apology with a wave of her hand and the blooming rose that withered into dust seconds later.

  When Tatinelly and her husband left to help in the kitchens, Marimar took the seat in front of her grandmother and drank straight from the bottle. They said nothing. They never needed to. Marimar simply reached out and placed a hand on one of the roots jutting out from her grandmother’s foot.

  “Why did you do this?” Marimar asked as glass broke and pans clashed in the kitchens. “How did you do this?”

  “I didn’t. We become what we need.”

  “What does that mean?” Marimar asked.

  But Rosa Divina’s brown eyes were cloudy and graying with sickness. She simply sat back and listened. The stomping feet of children, the drunken laugh of cooks, the sizzle of meat, the rattle of silverware, the buzz of a dozen dragonfly wings. And beneath all of that, a series of heartbeats. Each one with its own unique rhythm of wishes and hopes and dreams. Chuy gasped and dropped the plate in his hand because, now, he could hear them.

  “I knew the stars chose you, too,” Rosa Divina said.

  Chuy took his grandmother’s hand and placed it against his wet cheek. Marimar tried to remember the last time she saw her cousin cry, and remembered sitting at the top of the hill as they both called out to the stars and were answered with silence. Why did they choose him now? And her heart twisted with a selfish desire—why not me?

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Enrique shouted from the stairs. He held a fistful of papers in his hand and waved them in front of his mother’s face. He held a finger to Marimar’s temple like a cocked gun. “Her? She’s a child!”

  “Marimar is eighteen, aren’t you?”

  “I am.” Her heart beat louder than the others, but only Rosa Divina and Chuy could hear the change.

  “This land belongs to me,” Enrique said. The other Montoyas were emerging from every room of the house and gathering in the living room. “Why do you think we all came here? For your lies about some great destiny? For your drunken stories about the past? You’re a damn rose bush, Ma, and everyone is acting like it’s just another day. I’m not leaving without what’s mine, and this land is rightfully mine.”

  “Nothing is yours!” The Grand Rosa Divina shouted. “The world wasn’t made for you. The world was made.

  “I didn’t call you here to give you jewels or to watch you fight over a bit of dirt. I called you here to see which ones of you would show up and why. Come collect what’s left of our magic, our stories, because when I’m gone, what will you have?”

  “I’ll have peace,” Enrique said, angry tears streaming from his hungry eyes.

  “That’s enough of you,” Chuy said, and this time, Enrique remained quiet.

  Rosa Divina sat up as much as her legs would allow and stood. At first, she wavered, her round body attempting to balance on the roots that devoured her legs. When she was steady, she poured the last of her mezcal. Her arms and fingers slow like branches in a summer breeze. She turned to her family and raised her glass.

  “All you have is each other. Listen to the stars. Listen.” The earth rumbled. “Now, go.”

  Half the Montoyas ran back out of the ranch and into the night. Others stayed behind to help, or to gather what they could. Silver, pigs, goblets, books—anything that could be carried. Anything that could be sold.

  “What’s happening to her?” Tatinelly asked.

  “Gran,” Marimar pleaded. “I don’t understand. What are you doing?”

  “I’m not doing this,” Rosa Divina said. “I am becoming what I need.”

  The Grand Rosa Divina Montoya stretched higher and higher. Her legs became the base of a thick tree trunk, roots undulating through the floorboards like rivers carving their way through stone.

  “Go,” Marimar told Tatinelly. “Go!”

  “I’m not leaving you,” Chuy told Marimar, and grabbed her hand. She never doubted.

  Marimar held her grandmother’s fingertips until she was too tall to hold. Rosa Divina’s arms stretched outward, bending into branches. The house shuddered around them, and then the door slammed. Enrique stood there with a candelabra in hand, the blue flames burning fiercely at the wicks.

  “You always were her favorites,” he said. “Now you get to be buried with her.”

  “No!” Chuy shouted as Enrique threw the candelabra onto the couch, and it caught like wildfire. It wasn’t enough. He knocked over every candle on the tables, the fireplace mantel.

  Marimar looked up at her grandmother once more. There were so many things she wanted to ask. Why now? Why this? Why her?

  “Don’t let the magic leave you,” Rosa Divina told her.

  “I won’t.” It was a promise. And in that moment, she felt it. The familiar pull of the night, the whisper of the earth.

  Those times her grandmother had told her to find fairies in the hills, to listen to the stars, Marimar had always come home defeated. But now she knew she hadn’t been listening. Now she knew they had been with her all along. The dragonflies shimmered with light, with the magic of stars and the wild and the mountains. They surrounded Enrique, their tiny arms and legs crawling all over his face as the roots extended over him, around him.

  “We have to go!” Chuy shouted, pulling his shirt over his mouth.

  He grabbed Marimar by her wrist and pulled her. They had always protected each other the way their mothers couldn’t. They climbed over the roots in their path, over their uncle’s still body and toward the open front door. The fire raged behind them, eating through the furniture, the walls, the floor. Burning through everything except the tree.

  Do you think she’s really dying? Marimar had asked.

  The Grand Rosa Divina couldn’t die.

  * * *

  What was left of the Montoyas was a scattered few. They stayed there until the fire died and the sun rose. The stench of rot and decay around the house was replaced with smoke. If they closed their eyes they could imagine themselves sitting around an autumn fire pit, the kind of family that was bonded by blood and roots and magic.

  Bathed in morning light, the house was nothing but a pile of ash around a great tree with branches that reached for the heavens.

  “Look!” one of the Montoyas said, her bloodshot eyes wide. She pointed at Chuy.

  A rose the size of a quarter bloomed bright red between his clavicles. He wasn’t the only one. Tatinelly lifted her shirt, revealing the pearly rivers of stretch marks across her belly. She had a rose growing out of her belly button.

  “I guess we collected more than our lives,” Tatinelly’s husband said, his laugh refreshing in the aftermath.

  “Not me,” Tatinelly said, smiling at her swollen belly. “The little one.”

  They watched as the breeze carried away the ash, leaving nothing but the tree, surrounded by hundreds of dragonflies.

  Marimar repeated her grandmother’s words over and over. This was all hers. She was still barefoot, and she still couldn’t tear herself away. It was the crackle of Chuy’s lighter that brought her back to the present. She hugged the rest of her family as they began their journeys back home. But she and Chuy were already home.

  “Look at that,” he told her, smiling with all his teeth as he pointed to her hand.

  On the inside crook of her hand, at the base of her index and thumb, was a rosebud, small and delicate and not yet bloomed.

  “We become what we need,” Marimar said, and though the stars were hidden, she knew they were listening.

  * * * * *

  DAUGHTERS OF BABA YAGA

  by Brenna Yovanoff

  ONCE, MY DOWNSTAIRS neighbor Maya found this CCCP shirt for five dollars at the thrift store. She wore it under her blue flannel until her grandma L
udy saw.

  We were playing Dachshund Dash on our phones in that dark triangle under the front stairs, and Ludy came in with a little wire shopping cart and some onions in a bag and saw us there, and her face was dry and wrinkly, dotted brown like an apple doll, but right then, she turned the color of cream.

  She stood over us with her bag of onions, yelling for us to stand up, and were we animals? She could still remember the Soviets.

  We were only in the eighth grade and didn’t really know what the letters on the shirt meant. We stood there in the front hall, in the place near the stairs where the carpet was sad and lumpy like there was a mouse under it, while Ludy shouted. She kept stamping down the lumpy place with her foot, pointing at that stupid thrift-store shirt—the hammer and the sickle. It was a flag for a country that wasn’t even a country anymore, just a bunch of bad memories the grown-ups only talked about when they thought we weren’t paying attention.

  Before, I’d always thought the picture on the flag looked like the sky in a little kid’s drawing. Like a moon and a sunset. Like a golden Cheshire smile. I had barely thought about it at all.

  But to Ludy, it was a harvest blade on blood, because symbols mean things.

  Maya hung her head and looked at the floor, but I kept staring at that one yellow star.

  If this were a story, it would be me who wore the shirt. I’d be the main character, and not talking about some girl from my building who called me a pizda on the bus once and moved upstate last year and who I don’t even talk to anymore.

  But the skinny yellow moon on that T-shirt is not about me. Anyway, my grandma lives in Newark.

  I’m not telling you this because I think Maya was supposed to have magically known better, or that I’m better than her, or that I wouldn’t have done the same thing if there was a really good deal on a T-shirt I didn’t understand. I probably would have.

  Just that even in our most-told stories, sometimes the grandmas don’t know how to tell the really bad parts. We grew up not understanding a lot of stuff, and the year before, Maya had started spelling her name with a y instead of a j because otherwise no one knew how to say it.

  This is not about that. This is a story of what happened later, when the Kolbe charter school closed and we all got bused to St. Constantine instead. I’m not saying the thing with the T-shirt was some kind of portent or anything. I’m just telling it so you’ll understand where it is I come from, and where all those other, shinier kids didn’t.

  * * *

  The thing about where I live is that no one is actually from there. Everyone’s family came over at different times and in different ways. We all just ended up in the same place.

  You probably think I’m saying that in a metaphor way or something, but I am literally talking about Chauncey Heights. It’s a pretty good neighborhood, even though it’s not a nice one. We don’t all go to the same churches or know the same language, but we have a lot of the same food and the same stories. We know how to fold the dough for uszka even if we’re not Polish, and we know the words to each other’s jumping rhymes and to stay away from Damian Michnicki the day after Easter because he will hide behind the dumpsters to throw water on you and try to smack you in the legs with a branch. We mostly understand each other’s rules, is what I mean.

  My Easter’s on a different day than Damian’s, but I know how it is to have a church that’s not like on TV. Church of domed roofs, church of bells, of red eggs and backyard chickens and my grandma digging holes in the garden to put a little statue of Saint Joseph facedown in the dirt.

  My dad says the reason the old ladies all wear saints medals and come in to buy their beef tongue from him instead of at the ShopRite is because they miss home. Also, it is sometimes hard to find beef tongue at the ShopRite. He says that red eggs on Easter are only pious gestures, and holy water to bless the house is purely superstition. There are no witches, no magic, just a way of trying to touch a place they can’t go back to.

  It doesn’t matter.

  I was still raised to bury saints in the yard.

  * * *

  The problem with whether or not boys like you is, you can’t always tell.

  I think about that whenever Tyler Strauss leans his elbow on the science table and stares at me. I think about boys a lot. About how hard I worked to make myself pretty. How sometimes now I wish I didn’t.

  “Stony, you have got legs like a starving-ass chicken,” Gina diSario said in the locker room in seventh grade. That was a long time ago, before the whole lower floor at Kolbe got flooded and they canceled PE. “The way you look is like some kind of walking-around ladder.”

  And I made sure to laugh, because the thing you do in moments like that is, you laugh. I was even proud of myself right then for knowing how, but now it makes me think of something my grandma told me once. Americans smile too much, she said. They smile all the time, for no reason. Stojonovskis are better at knowing the geography of our own faces. We only smile when something makes us happy.

  But like I said, that was back in seventh grade, before my chicken legs got unchickeny and my butt got noteworthy. And now we go to St. Constantine instead, and I have hips for days. I smile like a toothpaste commercial. Just like everybody else.

  “I am American,” I told my grandma.

  It was true, too—I could say the names of the presidents and knew about Pokémon and all the words to “Livin’ on a Prayer” and the Star Spangled Banner. I knew that when you colored a Halloween picture for the Fall carnival, you colored the devil red.

  Just like I know that sometimes it’s easier to let the girls at school call me Stony, instead of butchering my name. I know that sometimes boys look at you because you have hips, and not because they care what you think about anaphase and metaphase. That even though you can say all the bosses and underbosses and consliglieres on The Sopranos in order of episode and importance, they really just want to see you naked.

  And so that’s how I knew that Tyler Strauss could be looking because my legs do not look like a ladder anymore. Or he could be looking because he heard from Dave Kapowski that I let him feel my chest at the Washington game, which is only like 70 percent true. (I did, but I was wearing my puffy vest, so I’m not sure how much it counts). Or he could be looking because I look like the kind of person who knows the periodic table and all the bosses on The Sopranos.

  But that last part, probably not.

  The boys at St. Constantine are a kind of bad I’d never met before. Noisy, grabby assholes who pull out their halos when the teachers walk by. I smile at Tyler anyway, because I made a wish on my fourteenth birthday and then the wish came true. I got a butt and I got pretty and learned to straighten my hair, and now everyone calls me Stony, and sometimes, I just want to bite a hole in the world. I wish I could stop smiling at things I hate. Sometimes I wish I never learned.

  The me that smiles is the good one. The one who does the dishes and works the register at the shop and makes my mother happy. Smiling-me is never any trouble, but I like it better in the kitchen with my father.

  He doesn’t believe in magic, but we both like How the Universe Works on the Science Channel. We put together catering trays and talk about our favorite parts like we’re making a list of new saints. Saint Newton, Saint Copernicus, Saint Nikola Tesla. Saint the Hubble Telescope.

  I pretend they’re a prayer to bless me, a charm for luck. The sacred mysteries didn’t stop being mysterious just because the world changed and got fast internet, and there’s magic in the little things, even if my dad doesn’t see it. It’s there in the secret lives of girls, most of all. The way we smile and straighten our hair. We do magic every single day. We have to.

  Paint your nails silver and your heart sort of turns silver, too. Your claws and bones and teeth are steel. And so, when Maya called me a pizda on the bus that time, I cursed her. Later, I was sorry. That big, unruly kind of magic only really
happens when I get mad.

  I drew nine circles nesting inside each other, took a drink of my dad’s Luksusowa, and spit it on her school picture. Bit a piece of butcher’s twine until I broke it.

  Later that same week, I heard from Darcy in 3F that Maya was washing her hair after swim practice and it all fell out. Everybody said it was something bad about her skin, or else some kind of gland, but I knew better.

  With silver nails and the right kind of smile, you can bite through anything.

  * * *

  Harmony Jessup is really weird.

  She always looks comfortable and messy, like she just woke up, and when she sat down at my table in the cafeteria my first week at St. Constantine, I was surprised, but not completely. The thing with Harmony is, she kind of just does what she wants.

  “Are you a witch?” she said, peeling the lid off a little cup of pudding.

  I figured that she meant the green, warty kind from cartoons, with pointy hats and brooms. My kind was nothing like that. The stories I knew were all about what’s right and fair. Baba Yaga and her chicken-footed house. Her punishments for the wicked. I was just a girl with rainbow-snake leggings and silver glitter nail polish.

  “What? No.” And I rolled my eyes just in case. “What are you even talking about?”

  Harmony leaned on her elbows, shrugging this cool little shrug. “Katya S. says you got a ninety-eight on the trig test last week. The only ones good at trig are suck-ups and witches, so you gotta to be a witch.”

  That made me laugh, slumping in my chair. “Yeah, well. I’m not.”

  “Okay,” she said. Then she looked up. She had that kind of face that looks a million years old and like a little girl at the same time. “I am.”

  I was eating cold shashlyk, leftover from our pre-season Jets party, biting it straight off the skewer. The meat felt just the right amount of tough between my teeth.

  Harmony didn’t seem to care about me eating leftovers with my hands, which was nice. Anyway, what she was doing was weirder.

  She took the top off her sandwich and started pulling it apart into separate layers on the plastic bag. Then she got out a Coke and a thing of Cheetos. “You know that superhero test?”