Santa Fe Noir

Táchii’nii: Red Running into the Water by Byron F. Aspaas

Pacheco Street

In my dream, I hear coyotes heckling from the darkened arroyo near my old apartment. Shadow puppets dance on the wall, illuminated by car headlights passing east and west on St. Francis Drive. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains loom over Santa Fe.

He lies next to me, snuggled in the pit of my arm, his left hand on my chest. Who is this man? The weight of his arm on my chest entraps me. The stranger opens his eyes and stares into me, delirious.

I woke to the howls of an oncoming train. I slouched on the wooden bench, my legs splayed, my leather bag anchored around my shoulder.

The person next to me smiled.

I wiped my mouth.

“Is this your train?” The blue in the stranger’s eyes was daunting, the color of turquoise — like his, the stranger in my dream. His blond hair wasn’t completely blond but held bits of gray around the temples.

I nodded.

“I figured the squeals of the train would wake you up,” he said. “I wasn’t staring, just so you know. Is this your normal train?”

I nodded again, silent.

It had been close to a year since I moved to Brooklyn from the Harlem projects. Before Brooklyn, I lived with a family of three, in a two-bedroom apartment, near my job — just over a year. Now, I took the R train each morning to meet the 2/3 train that transported me back into the neighborhood, where I was employed as a social worker.

“I’ve seen you before,” the stranger said.

I smiled.

“You don’t say much, do you?”

I pulled my bag closer to my side. The howl of the train came closer. I tilted my head to the left — no pop. I tilted my head to the right — two pops. I tilted my head to the left once more, rubbing the sore muscle between my neck and right shoulder. I winced.

“I’m guessing you didn’t sleep well either?”

The R train squealed to a stop.

“Well, that’s us,” he said.

I stood, noticing the ache in my knees, and groaned. I stepped into the train and the door closed behind me. I took the first available seat.

My bench neighbor smiled from across the car, then surveyed the other passengers curiously.

Weekday trains were always stuffed with passengers heading into Manhattan from Brooklyn. For two years, I’d been erroring my way around this city, hoping to one day be able to navigate without the fear of getting lost. That day hadn’t come. I still lost myself in the strangeness of New York. Sometimes I pondered why I left the desert — the harshness of the Southwest had nothing on the harshness of New York City. And the desert was my home. The desert knew me better than anyone else. I missed the desert now. I missed my home.

Here, I’d trained myself to keep my eyes down, to move steadily. I kept my cell phone fully charged and my earphones in my bag, so I’d have a soundtrack for my ride to Harlem. Sometimes I listened to music, sometimes to podcasts about finding true love or refocusing on the laws of attraction to center myself and gain a better understanding of the universe. Sometimes, too, I sat quietly and just watched the characters enter and leave the stage until the next intermission, which came every few blocks, but too often the voices began to speak inside me.

Alone in the throng of bodies, it felt as if I were the star of my own show. I was cast as the main character of this episode of The New York City Subway, baggage sponsored by Coach, who also supported the cast, which included the man with the blue eyes, the man with his hat out begging for money, the woman who talked to the empty seat beside her, and a car filled with extras.

I closed my eyes to the sounds of FKA Twigs. The voice of the woman soothed me. I loved this song — “Two Weeks.”

The stranger’s blue eyes hardened on me.

My last clinical placement before graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts was Santa Fe. That desert town had been my second choice, but I couldn’t complain. Santa Fe was a reminder of my childhood — when my mom and dad packed us all up for family trips and we headed to Albuquerque, then Santa Fe, then Taos — that odd triangular circle through the northwestern part of New Mexico. I grew up in the Four Corners region, so this was home to me, but not quite home. Just close enough to feel at home.

From my apartment, I heard the occupants of the Arroyo de los Chamisos howl. After work, my ritual became a bottle of wine and a pack of American Spirits — the blue box. On my third-floor balcony, I faced west and took in the summer sunset. As darkness became tipped with orange, the wind nipped softly on my skin. Yes, I was home.

I hid my sexuality from my friends and family.

But, feeling frisky after the second glass of wine, I crept into the kitchen and read Craigslist ads on my laptop. At first, it was missed connections that I loved reading, but then my curiosity led me to casual encounters, then to men seeking men. I scrolled through the ads and only clicked posts that promised photos. In my darkened kitchen, I scanned dick pics from all sorts of men: cut, uncut, hairy, smooth, hung, bottoms. It was all there, online, and I was intrigued. I was horny. I was alone.

The train jumped and squealed to a halt, scraping metal against metal, forcing me to open my eyes to the new set of characters that filled the car while the old characters scurried off. The music vibrated thirst into my ears during this brief intermission. I was lonely in this city, and scared. I thought of those who might want me, but also might want to hurt me.

I was no one to this city. I was nothing to anyone near me.

Across the carriage, my bench neighbor squinted a smile with his turquoise eyes. The blondish stubble on his chin glimmered with age. He winked in my direction.

A part of me wanted to smile back, but I didn’t. Instead, I shut my eyes and avoided a response. I fell into the music, and the darkness of the tunnel consumed me — “Child I Will Hurt You.”

Down-to-Earth Guy — m4m 28 (Rodeo Road). Sane white guy here. Great smile, short black hair, moderately hairy, blue eyes, athletic, looking for more than just a hookup. Love to hike, run, bike, and soak in the New Mexico hot springs. New to the area. Would like to explore the city different as well as the desert. Get back at me. Versatile, if it goes there.

With an alias and fake e-mail account, I e-mailed Down-to-Earth Guy. He responded quickly. His name was Jordan and it was past twelve when we began exchanging e-mails. With words, I flirted the best I could. He replied handsomely, in full sentences. It was well past one before I noticed the time and responded with one last e-mail. He sent a phone number. Without thinking, I texted him good night as my high wore down to a faint hum of sleepiness. I wasn’t even sure if I was texting a landline or a cell phone, but my phone lit and rang. I was startled by the loudness, the brightness of Jordan’s number flashing on the screen. The phone rang for a moment before I accepted the call — silence. Moments passed as I listened to the breathing on the other end, until finally, a raspy voice broke the awkwardness: “Hello?”

I lay in bed listening to Jordan talk. It took a few moments before I felt comfortable enough to speak. The night breeze brushed the curtains and swept across me.

“What are you doing?” his deep voice asked.

I replied shyly, describing the motion of my hand. Each finger surveyed the landscape of my body. His breath hardened on the phone as he exhaled deeper. My thumb pressed into the waistband of my boxers, exposing the hardness of my dick that throbbed with precum. His voice deepened as he continued to talk and described his own movements. I inched my way out of my boxers, kicking them to the edge of the bed, exposing my body wholly to the night. I lay upon the ghost sheets of his hands and wrapped myself within him. Satin licked my skin — my fingers crept down, touching the hairs of my thigh and pubic area. I let a gasp of excitement escape me.

“I want to fuck you,” he said.

We talked in whispers, as if we were next to each other, our bodies melded harmoniously. I imagined his tongue deep in my mouth, pressed against my tongue, deep inside his mouth. The coyotes sang in the arroyo below. The hum of tires filled my room with light and the wind touched me.

I listened to his breaths. The excitement forced itself into his receiver — deeper, deeper, he moaned into the phone, into my earlobe, into my mind — until he groaned, and his voice quivered to a pause. “Oh. My. God.”

For an hour, I lay naked with my cell phone pressed against the pillow, then the phone beeped. Now silence occurred in death — the death of my phone that needed charging. In my quiet room, I watched the shadows pass. The hum of St. Francis Drive and the laughter of the arroyo proceeded, and the Sangre de Cristos crested with white.

I had been up the whole night talking with Jordan. I thought about his silky body pressed against mine.

I held my breath as the train barreled under the East River. I often thought of the river swallowing the subway. It’s been a fear of mine since childhood — the water — Tééhoołtsódii lived inside.

The water is not for the Dine’é, I was told, we escaped it once.

As a child, Tééhoołtsódii grabbed my legs and pulled me under Morgan Lake, the cooling pond for the power plant. It was my dad who saved me. He grabbed me from what held me under. I never knew what held onto my legs, but water filled my mouth and my throat and my chest. My mom was mad at my dad for taking me there. She yelled at him for allowing me to swim in that dirty water known for death. She reminded my dad of Tééhoołtsódii, the water monster who grabbed those who swam to his world and took them below.

I never swam again.

“Many of our ancestors died during the Long Walk,” my mom said. “The Rio Grande is what swallowed them because the Diné were too cold and too tired, from walking, and could not swim in the winter’s bitter cold water. The US soldiers didn’t care. They proceeded forth to Santa Fe, on their horses, and left those to the water’s hunger.”

Hwéeldi is a haunted memory for the Dine’é.

A loud gasp for air escaped my chest when we reached the first station in Manhattan. The neighboring cast members in the car looked in my direction, as if I were one of the crazies. I closed me eyes again as the music submerged me back into its trance — “Ghost Lights” played.

Jordan showed up on my doorstep. We’d been talking for a few nights before I decided to give him my address. He stood at the opened door with a toothy grin, the same grin he displayed in the photos he texted. He wore that Western blue shirt I liked from his selfies, the one with the pearl-snapped buttons. His shirt was unbuttoned at the top and exposed the thick hairs of his chest. His eyes reflected the desert sky.

I hid behind the door, just a little, because I didn’t want the sun to expose too much of me too soon.

“Oh my,” he said. He leaned in for a hug and threw his arms around me. He smelled of musk, cologne, and coffee. The thickness of his arms wrapped around my back like a boa, bringing me into him. “You’re fucking more beautiful in person than you were in photos,” he said. “Jesus!”

We sat for hours, in the kitchen, chatting. We moved to the chaise longue and relaxed further. Jordan leaned against the armrest and used his hand as a headrest. Two darkened bands wrapped parallel around his forearm. He saw my eyes move in the direction of his headrest. “Youthful tattoo,” he smiled. “For a minute, I was told I was part Indian.”

I smiled.

“I know, I know,” he said, “you’re probably thinking Cherokee princess, right?”

I chuckled like the coyotes of the arroyo.

The sun through the window painted his body with evening light — brushstroked hairs thickened on his arms and the tuft of his chest was exposed. “Shall we move outside?” he asked.

I watched his silhouette darken against the dripping sun.

He opened the patio doors, where my pack of American Spirits rested on the small table. His arms rested on the low stucco wall. I rested mine next to his and we surveyed the land together. He was more beautiful than I could have imagined. He was the white knight we Indians yearned for. He was a trophy — a first-place trophy with blue eyes, blue ribbons. Jordan could be my winner, my prize to take home to my family. His eyes defined the desert sky.

He lit a cigarette from the box. “It’s been years since I’ve smoked,” he said. He closed his eyes as he took the first drag and the tobacco curled in embers. He tilted his head back, extending his throat. Smoke escaped his mouth and crept into his nostrils. “Oh god, I’ve missed this,” he said. He opened his eyes and looked toward the fading sun, emptying his lungs.

Together, we blew clouds into the evening sky. The wind licked the dark hairs of his arms as the ash fluttered into the east, toward the arroyo, toward the ground, away from us.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Jordan whispered.

We walked the edge of Santa Fe High School, and along the Arroyo de los Chamisos Trail — a trail I knew from running daily.

My knees ached with memory.

“Do you know the story of this arroyo?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“La Llorona walks along this bed, they say, each night.” Jordan placed his hands in mine. “They say she cries each night, howling with the guilt of drowning her own children. They say she caught her white husband with another woman; he had another family.”

The sun sank farther behind the Jemez Mountains, and the night sky tipped itself with fire.

The story ran through my head as we walked through the arroyo. It reminded me of a story my dad shared with me once. The woman in my dad’s story had no name, although she committed the same acts as the woman Jordan mentioned: she silenced her babies when she learned of her lover’s betrayal — the Bilagáana, the Naakaii, the foreigner with bluish-green eyes who broke her heart, who walked eternally when she, too, was silenced by Tééhoołtsódii — the water monster.

Jordan laughed.

As we walked through the dim arroyo, Jordan nestled his head against my shoulder and the trees darkened around us. We turned around when finally the orange glow slipped into darkness. The wind sang softly around us, and leaves shuddered, as the ghost dance of night began.

At Times Square, I jumped off the R train to wait for the oncoming 2/3 train.

A voice teased from the crowd: “Are you following me?” It was the blond, who stood behind a woman, who stood next to me. “The 2/3 train,” he said, “maybe we’ll see each other again.”

I shrugged.

The woman rolled her eyes.

The 2/3 train squealed and came to a halt. The doors hissed open. I squeezed into the subway car where passengers stood face-to-face, front-to-back, crotch-to-face, ass-to-ass, and my arms slunk into one of the straps dangling from above, while the blond disappeared into the jungle of bags and scarves and gloves — “Guilty Party.”

I chose Northern Arizona University because it was within our Four Sacred Mountains of Diné Bíkeya. At the base of Dook’o’oosłííd, the sacred mountain of the West, I finished a bachelor’s program and obtained a psychology degree. My parents were happy because I was the first in the family to get a college education. I was older than the other students, but I was glad I’d waited and decided on a career in mental health. My parents threw a big party when I returned to the northwestern part of the reservation.

For months, I looked for a job in my field, but nothing came up in Farmington. I waited tables at the local Applebee’s until finally I got a call about a job at the recovery center. They hired me as a counselor’s aide and I began to learn the stories of Shidine’é who’d succumb to their weaknesses for alcohol. I watched as Shidine’é admitted themselves or were forced to submit to mandatory recovery — many of those, my former customers at Applebee’s, didn’t look me in the eye. For months, I listened to the white practitioners talk among themselves about the abuse and neglect of the Diné Nation and their lack of support to help those walking the streets of Farmington. It was embarrassing to hear them squabble and complain about people like me. Shidine’é were judged and mistreated by the educated white men of the recovery center. The ghosts of the addicted followed me home at night when I listened to their pain speak through my sleep. In secret, I cried with an ache of their trauma — it spoke to me. I felt them. I heard them.

I worked at the treatment center for a year before I had the gall to apply to grad school. My acceptance was to Smith, a private school in Massachusetts. I was nervous to leave the Southwest. I was nervous to be so far away from my family, so far from the land I knew as home. I was scared.

I mentioned the voices to my dad.

He suggested I needed a ceremony before leaving the Four Sacred Mountains. “It’s something we do,” he said, “especially if we leave our lands.”

I laughed.

“Son,” he said, “those voices will follow you if you don’t take care of yourself.”

I shrugged.

“You laugh now, son, but what you don’t realize is that the pain of others will become a part of you. You need to see a medicine man.”

I neglected my dad’s advice and left for Massachusetts.

The voices followed.

I could hear them through my headphones even now. I could feel the pressure against my chest as the subway car began to sway. The woman next to me thought about her baby at home with the nanny. Was the nanny the right choice? she thought. Was the iron left on? I sensed the fear in her. She gripped the railing tighter. She closed her eyes in thought. The man asking for change was ex-military. He was discharged dishonorably because of misconduct with an officer who lied for his own self-promotion. The ex-military man was relieved of his duties before he could rescind his story. I felt his embarrassment. I felt the blond, somewhere. He was thinking about me — “Anyone’s Ghost” played.

Jordan and I spent the rest of the monsoon season together, most nights at my apartment even though he lived just four miles away — off Governor Miles Road. On occasion, after one of my long runs, I’d find myself at his doorstep, dripping with sweat. I was a monsoon who trapped Jordan in my arms. We curled into his living room — sometimes near his bed, or in the hallway — never in the same place, and never in his bed because sweat dripped where it dripped, and we puddled upon one another and melted into our happiness.

As summer came to an end, our evenings began with Jordan and his bottle of wine. He knew I loved the reds — the dry ones because they echoed down my throat when I drank that dryness. We crumpled onto the floor before our evening light show. Each night, we awaited the Male Rain’s arrival. With the apartment darkened, we watched the evening light muffled by clouds. Sipping our wine on the floor, we watched the Male Rain begin his dance with a crash of the drum. Silver-lined clouds sparked, and the scent of dirt loomed at the balcony door, whispering to be let in.

The Male Rain performed for an hour or so before the clouds cleared and the roads glimmered. The arroyo roared with rainwater, creating a chocolate river that ran from the Sangre de Cristos. We sipped wine and spent the night stretched out on my apartment floor, drenched in our own wetness, drenched in wine, drenched in each other.

Two months went by before Jordan and I had our first fight. I accused him of cheating, and he pulled a knife from the kitchen drawer and held it to his own neck. Maybe it was the red wine accusing Jordan, but I cried for him to stop and he got more wild when I called him crazy — ayóó diigis — and he pressed the knife deeper. It dimpled his pale skin just below his beard line.

“I would die for you!” he screamed.

I screamed louder, and the neighbor banged on the wall in annoyance.

When Jordan removed the knife, his neck was dotted red.

I cried quietly.

“How can you blame me for something so stupid?” he said. The phone vibrated, again. “He’s only visiting,” he explained. “He’s my ex; he’s still my friend.”

The snow came early in November. We watched the night flutter with white butterflies as Jordan held me in his arms. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry I grabbed the knife,” he whispered. “I don’t know what came over me.”

I nodded, but I knew what had come over him.

His phone vibrated. The message box appeared: Are you home? The ex’s name popped up and Jordan grabbed his phone quickly. A dialogue of voices began speaking in my head. It was in a language I could not understand. I tried to make sense of the language — but the sight of the message kept reappearing in my head: Are you home? Are you home? Are you home?

Three weeks later, I went home to visit my family. I woke to texts from Jordan and went to bed with texts from Jordan. I’d planned to be gone for a week, and we spoke sparingly. In between family functions and trips to Farmington, I got texts with random time stamps. The voices spoke louder.

My phone jingled.

“Is that your girlfriend?” my mom whispered.

I smiled.

She seemed to understand my distance. My mind was elsewhere.

“Maybe you should leave early, son,” she said. “Maybe you need to go home sooner than you thought. You should go before the snow hits — surprise her.”

I left the next morning.

The snow was piled high in Cuba, but I pushed through and made it to San Ysidro. I could see the Sandias in the late-afternoon light — they were white and so was the land all around. The blanket thickened as the snow kept falling. The traffic snaked through the winding roads and what was supposed to be an hour’s drive turned into the longest journey — from Farmington, from Dinétah, my homeland.

It was the worst storm to hit New Mexico that winter, and the traffic inched forward as darkness fell. I pressed on.

The City Different was muffled with snow. Mounds of adobe homes were covered in white and glimmered with evening piñon.

I pulled off the interstate at the Cerrillos exit, turned onto Governor Miles Road. I drove slowly through Jordan’s neighborhood because the snow hid the roads. The houses gleamed with orange from the lampposts. The car parked in Jordan’s driveway was not his and I slid to a stop when I noticed a stranger in his kitchen. Jordan appeared from behind, arms wrapped around the smiling stranger. He perched his head on the guy’s shoulder and I drove away, crawling my way to my apartment.

I texted Jordan later that evening: I’m home.

The subway car veered right. I could feel its intense pull as it crawled uptown. I was used to the feeling of being tugged and knew pressing my body weight to the side would prevent me from faltering. I stumbled once, maybe twice, when I first made this trek up the island. I’ve watched many people stumble. I’ve watched it happen time and time again when people were jostled and pushed left, then right, by a ghost of the train who picked on those inexperienced.

The train neared my stopping point, 125th Street, where I would escape the jungle of bodies draped with scarves and gloves and the voices — “Everybody Gets High.”

It was nearly ten in the evening when I heard the knock at my door. Jordan stood wrapped in the scarf I’d given him before I left to visit my family. He smiled his wide grin. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming home early?” He held a bottle of red wine and I smiled at the sight of it — the dryness in my throat needed to be quenched. We sat near the chaise longue and talked about my trip. We talked about the snowstorm, about my family.

“I would love to meet them one day,” he said.

The looming memory of Jordan’s face on the stranger’s shoulder irked me. The voices spoke in that language I couldn’t decipher. Bits and pieces were in English but remained blurred. The voices made no sense. There had been no shame in Jordan’s movements when I saw him with the stranger. The moment reeled on repeat in my head — Jordan’s smile planted on the stranger. Tears formed at the edge of my eyes.

“Baby, are you okay?” he asked.

I walked into the bathroom and ran the water in the tub. Water steamed hot. I added bath salts to soothe the stiff muscles of my back and thought about the ache in my knee from pressing the pedals on my drive from Dinétah to Santa Fe. I could hear Jordan in my head telling me it was nothing, it was my friend, he’s only visiting, but the voices got louder and muffled Jordan’s. The hammering, the memory, the splashing, the hurt all built up and pounded like monsoon thunder. The water bubbled as it filled the tub. Steam wafted against my skin and the mirrors fogged with moisture, fogging Jordan’s reflection.

“Baby, are you going to talk to me?” he asked.

The pounding, the memory, the bilagáana, the splashing, Shidine’é, my long walk through the hurt which puddled and splashed in the water.

“Baby?”

Jordan’s eyes remained blue as the sky when his pupils dilated and darkened below the water. A single bubble formed at the tip of his nose until it finally let go and surfaced and popped. His mouth remained open. His chest hairs reached for the air, but the water kept them silent. Jordan’s arms went limp and I watched his fingers release the shirt he grabbed onto — mine — the tattooed bands of his arm exposed.

The water calmed before the voices stopped.

I have not returned home since the incident in Santa Fe.

My dad is worried about my well-being so far away, so far from the sacred mountains that protected our people from going crazy. My dad asks about the voices in my head. “Are they still talking?”

I tell him they’re gone. I lie. The earphones are what muffle them, but the ghosts are still here.

The subway stops at 125th Street and I see the blond smile once more.

He holds a blue box in his hands, takes out a cigarette, and waves.

I smile and wave goodbye, but I don’t think he catches my gesture.

He walks up the stairwell and into the light, his shouldered bag and a ghost-trail of smoke following behind him.

Each day, I make sure my phone is fully charged when I enter the subway stations of New York. Each day, I make sure to close my eyes and hold my breath when the train travels under the water. Each day, I walk with the guilt and grief of yesterday in hopes that music will muffle the memory of Jordan. I’m told I am a child of water. Both my parents’ clans represent the redness and bitterness of a monster who lives deep inside me — that monster is filled with dryness and guilt, and a regret steeped in eternal shame.

Waterfall by Elizabeth Lee

Ten Thousand Waves

They came for new bodies.

Droves of them from all over the world flooded the place every day, looking for salt scrubs, Japanese foot treatments, and hot herbal wraps that would make their bodies sweat and flush out all the toxic things that had been collecting on the inside. They wanted clean organs, clean blood, fresh polished skin. The chance to begin again. Afterward, they emptied into the steaming tubs and saunas, and laid their just-dunked bodies like soft noodles onto tatami mats in the relaxation room where, through heavy lids, they could look out giant circular windows and see the engraved wooden signposts over treatment rooms and private tubs called Cloud and Willow and Waterfall.

When they came to, they helped themselves to free goodies in the changing rooms: pine- and citrus-scented lotions and shampoos, facial mists and oils made out of tea tree, oregano, rosemary, and jojoba. And once all the body thirst was satiated, there was all that gorgeous nature of the mountainside to drink up too — soft, loving, and quietly wild. Amid the pine and juniper trees, deer and rabbits and coyotes and hummingbirds flapping around globes of sugar water. Thousands of black basalt stones piled up on rock walls were arranged in pretty swirling patterns along the footpath between the locker rooms and the main bathhouse, remnants of nearby volcanoes that had erupted millennia ago and had since been cooled and smoothed by streams and rivers into beautiful polished circles.

All the massage therapists at the spa knew the wild around the place was in check, just like they were, because while they were encouraged to use their intuition with clients, they were also instructed to use soft voices around all the poor frayed nerves coming at them, to wear black, and to move soundlessly among the guests. Like ninjas, Bella thought when she was given the details on “proper therapist behavior” by the spa director on her first day. It made sense that all those tired and healing bodies might need witnesses who touched and loved, but quietly; invisibly if possible.

She was the latest hire, and she kept quiet that first week. It had never been a problem for her to go deep inside herself, and to do what she did best, which was communicate in the nonverbal ways; the ways of the body. Each had its own special story and history where a person had lived hard or fractured something or ignored a pain for too long. She touched all those places — the rock-hard knots, lopsided backs, curved spines, faded tattoos, pale thick lines over wrists, star-shaped scars on shoulder blades and stretch marks along stomachs and thighs — with all the love she could muster. Loving strangers’ bodies was the closest thing she felt to God. When she held a part of the body, it was the same to Bella as holding time and memory in her hands.

The man looked harmless enough. He was smoking a Camel nonfilter, the same kind Bella smoked by the dozen after her evening joint. They were sitting at different tables at a chocolate shop in town and she had been so engrossed in her elixir and the changing purples and reds of the sky that she was surprised to find she wasn’t alone.

“Sky’s emotional right now.”

“Excuse me?”

“Locals call the sky New Mexico’s version of the ocean since we don’t have one. Others see God in it, magic, aliens, blah blah blah.” The man took a long drag. “So the painters come, the artists come, all sorts of folks looking for healing, for hope. But I think mostly it’s the crazies who come. And boy do they come and come and come.” He looked up and shrugged. “Looks like plain old sky to me.”

The man had that unkempt and dusty look to him like so many others in town. Bella figured it had something to do with the high winds and all that dry high desert going straight into people’s clothing, hair, and skin. Maybe into their heads too, scrambling things lawful and logical up there, because it seemed to her in the three months she’d been in town that locals liked being uncivilized and a certain sort of dreamy. She wondered what else it might do to people to get all that dust and rock and time into their bodies and bones. And even older and wiser things. Dinosaurs. Volcanic dust. The sun, perhaps.

The stranger looked familiar. They must have met at that AA meeting she’d gone to the week before. Bella had heard that people in AA were worse than Jehovah’s Witnesses, circling around newcomers and demanding phone numbers and commitments to attend more meetings. “Don’t stop until the miracle has happened, they’ll tell you,” an old coworker warned, but Bella suspected he just wanted her to keep drinking so she would let him have sex with her whenever they got drunk after work. In reality, the experience hadn’t been the worst thing in the world. The idea that addiction could be a disease comforted her somehow and she knew a part of her wanted it to be true. Still, all that talk of God and Surrender and Forgiveness was too much, and she decided not to go back.

“You don’t have to do this alone!” the man had called out as she made her way down the stairs of the shop. “Let go and let God!”

You should mind your own business, you freak, she thought, getting into her car. She smiled and waved robotically as she drove past the man and turned out of the lot. The whole group seemed like some scary cult with everyone pushing God when she’d already had God stuffed down her throat when she was young and it had never done anything to protect her. Not when it had really mattered.

As she sped past Owl’s Liquors, her forehead and chest blossomed with sweat. She hadn’t had a drop of alcohol in three whole days, and that Want started to infect every space of her body again, showing her where she was empty, hungry, and in the deepest kind of pain. A pain older than anything in her life that could have mattered. “It’s like coming in from an ice storm,” a young blond lady had said to her after that same meeting. “You begin to thaw, and your feelings, your fears, all your old pain, numb and frozen — they start to move and all that moving hurts.” Bella hurt all over, but her head hurt the most. She turned around, then pulled over in the parking lot at the local honey shop. All those needling questions were swarming around her head like tiny hummingbirds, sharp and picking her clean with their beaks. She pressed her forehead against the steering wheel until the bone couldn’t take any more.

Signs of Dry were everywhere up in that high desert; the air was swimming with sunlight and juniper pollen and dust and microscopic things too small to see and name, too dense to ignore. The world of Dry had been getting into Bella’s insides and her outsides and making her thirstier than going three days without booze already had. It was in the space between her eyeballs and her eyelids, wedging its way between layers of skin inside her chalky hands, getting into the long follicles of black hair, making them crackle like tiny, quiet wildfires; it was even creeping into the places in her body that were supposed to be wet: her lips, her tongue, down her dark pink throat, and then all the way up the other end of her, between her legs where pleasure, the very bud of her, still waited. Even her nipples were still tucked completely inside her chest, tiny and shelled, and so it made sense to Bella after three months of living in Santa Fe that she had once and for all found an earthscape where life was waiting beneath the surface of things, because it still waited inside of her.

What could that inside wetness feel like? How would it feel to be so wet you could finally orgasm? She had heard so many stories of what orgasms felt like from the women in her life. She wanted to know what it was like to feel those waves of hot move her toward that kind of bliss. Because that would feel entirely different to the burning feel of splintering rope moving in and outside of her every time she did have sex, like she was part of some stupid herd of cattle, taking turns, trudging forward and backward under a dark-gray sky.

She restarted the engine and sped through all the yellow lights down St. Francis Drive.

Carrie’s house was a two-story gray adobe located in the north part of town, just off West Alameda and close to the small co-op and a coffee shop where hipsters hung out and wrote poetry and screenplays. As soon as Bella got out of her car, half a dozen black cats swarmed around her feet. “Oh, pardon me, excuse me!” she said, and laughed as they purred and rubbed against her calves.

“Well, hello there, stranger!” Carrie ignored Bella’s hand and came in for a hard hug instead. It took Bella’s breath away. “Nice hair. You look good.” Carrie had makeup on and her hair was swept up in a tight bun, but her large brown eyes were the same. Large and full of gold and black specks.

“Oh, thank you. It needs a cut.” Bella ran her fingers through it. It had never felt so dry.

“Well, I can see you’ve met the posse. Turns out the black cat superstition is especially strong in a town like Santa Fe. But it’s not their fault how they look, is it?”

Bella looked down at a cat with different-colored eyes and decided he was the cutest of the bunch.

Carrie picked him up. “Well hello, Oscar!” she said into his face, before motioning Bella to follow her. “So,” she called over her shoulder, “I guess you haven’t lived here long enough to know you’ll have to put gobs of coconut oil into your hair. It’ll help with the dryness, I promise!”

Bella followed Carrie down the cool hallway and into a large kitchen with terra-cotta tile floors and a kiva fireplace in the corner of the room. The whole space was flooded with color. It was beautiful.

“Wow,” Bella said, amazed. “I’ve never seen a fireplace inside a kitchen.”

“Yeah, it’s an old Santa Fe thing. You can have a fire while you’re making a snack.”

“My gosh, how nice.”

“Yeah, it’s a shame — most other houses around this area are like cinder-block dungeons. Made fast and cheap. Not with real wood ceilings or in the real adobe way. Come with me for a sec. I was just finishing up with something.”

Outside the kitchen, three large black pots stood three feet from one another. Each had a different design of turquoise inlay. “I’m just getting ready to ship these to a gallery in Texas.”

“Oh, are these yours? Amazing, Carrie! I had no idea.” Bella came in for a closer look.

“Yeah, they’re mine. Let me just finish this.” Carrie began cutting large swaths of bubble wrap before wrapping each vessel.

The last time they’d seen each other they were fourteen and probably friends because they’d been the token ethnic kids at their Catholic boarding school in New Hampshire. They’d always been shocked by how much their classmates owned. Their rooms were full of down duvets, feather mattresses, velvet hair accessories, plush rugs, Beverly Hills creams, and French perfumes. Even Bella’s and Carrie’s mothers, who both worked in restaurants, wouldn’t have been able to afford such fancy items. Bella did her homework in Carrie’s room because of all the rooms at the dorm, she felt most comfortable there. It smelled like fast food and chips and the linoleum floor was bare like in her own room.

“So, what have you been up to?” Bella managed to smile, knowing how flat and stupid her question must have sounded.

Carrie cut a piece of packing tape and wound it around and around the bubble-wrapped vase. She draped a faded quilt over it and sat down with a sigh. “Geez, I don’t know. It’s been, what, twenty years?”

Bella nodded. She wanted some good news. Anything to get out of herself. The cold sweat covering her chest and back was giving her the chills.

“Well, I got married and divorced. Lost my parents. Worked as a waitress. Work as an aesthetician up at Ten Thousand Waves now.” She winked. “I’m excited for us to be coworkers up there. Sort of like the old days.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear about your parents.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“Well, I see that you still don’t go by Caroline.”

“That’s right, it’s still Carrie.” Her eyes brightened. “But now I introduce myself as, I’m Carrie, like Stephen King’s Carrie, so there’s that.”

Bella smiled. “Yeah, true. That tells me something.”

“Then I’ll tell people something like, But I don’t seek revenge on young white girls I knew in high school, because people around here might want to know that kind of thing. You know — with all the liberal white guilt and all.” She laughed, and grabbed an orange from a bowl on the ground. “No, you and I both know those little bitches didn’t know any better.”

“And what about the Korean girls?”

Carrie snickered. “Of course not, I love you. I’ve always loved you.”

Bella fidgeted with her hands. Such declarations made her uncomfortable.

Carrie elbowed her leg. “But you do remember them, don’t you, Bella? Those arrogant princesses with their black Mastercards and their feather beds. Meanwhile — meanwhile — we had magazine ads decorating our walls and our late-night stashes were the cheapy instant ramens and Doritos.”

“Yeah. It sucked.” Bella pushed a few pebbles around with her sneaker and shivered. The sun had dipped behind the mountains while they were talking.

They had constantly complained about their classmates, but Bella knew, and she knew Carrie knew, that they would have traded in their “real” for the other girls’ “fancy” in a second, and probably still would.

“You used to introduce yourself a little differently back in the day.”

“Ha! Right. Something like, Hi! I’m Carrie, like a fairy! I know.” She shook her head. “So stupid.” She finished peeling her orange and offered Bella a section.

“No, it made me laugh!” She glanced at the orange. “No thank you.”

“Well, you were the only one, I think. Sort of innocent, both of us.”

“Yeah.”

Carrie bit her lip. She watched Bella move pebbles around with her sneaker. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I hate that word, innocent. It’s a stupid, stupid word.”

“No, it’s true. We were so, so innocent. Especially me.”

“So — how are you now? Were you ever able to get over that... whole... episode? God, I’m sorry, I’m not sure what to call it.”

Bella smiled. “Oh yeah, of course. I’m good now. I mean, pretty good. You know, life isn’t perfect but I can’t complain. I’ve just followed my interests and they’ve led me here. I do massage and write poetry. It’s a weird, lonely life, but I like it. It suits me.”

“Well, good. Your face filled out some. I hope that’s okay for me to say that.”

“Of course, and I know. I used to have such a tiny little face and body! What did the senior girls used to call me? Baby doll?”

Carrie nodded. “Sounds right.”

“You were the pretty one and I was the baby doll that followed you around and got into bad things with you.”

“Like stealing the wine for Mass.”

Bella smiled. “Like stealing the wine for Mass. I’ve been stuffing myself with sugar lately ’cause I quit drinking and smoking pot.” She shrugged. “Partying can only numb so much.”

Carrie leaned forward in her chair, suddenly more interested. “So so true. I should know of all people.” She took Bella’s hands and got a serious look in her eye. “When I was eleven, my father’s father lost his land. It was land from the part of his family from Spain and so he was sad, like deeply, almost-go-crazy sad, and my grandmother got that way too. Then all of it spilled down to my father and mother and both their siblings, and it was happening to all kinds of other folks in Española who had also lost their family’s lands. Fucking US government. The sadness took everyone. It took and it took and everyone was chasing the numb.” She shrugged. “And it had already gotten their souls.” She brushed the white skin of the orange off her jeans. “But before all that taking and chasing, taking and chasing, it was just the sadness.”

Bella pulled her hands back to her lap and noticed they were cold and trembling. “I don’t know, Carrie. All I know is that I feel dry. Like bone-dust dry and I might disappear. Fly away or something. I don’t want to fly away like some plastic bag.”

“No, but think about it. What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

Bella looked around at the rusted patio chairs and the rotted-out firewood and ax by a pile of stones. “I’d disappear.”

“So disappear then, Bella. See what it’s like. Might not be as bad as you think.”

Bella got to her feet. “Look. Sorry if this is rude, but I didn’t come here for advice. I just wanted to catch up, especially if we’ll be working together. I didn’t plan—”

Carrie tugged at Bella’s sleeve. “Shhhhhhh, okay, okay, I’m sorry, sit down, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry or push. You’re perfect. Sit down.”

“Can we change the subject?”

“Of course.”

Three months passed before Bella found herself free from cravings and feeling more upbeat than she had in a long time. She had moved in with Carrie shortly after their reunion, and living together felt natural. During those months, Bella was experiencing all kinds of déja vu. At fourteen, Bella had always wanted to be more like Carrie, and she was finding years later that she felt that way again. Carrie was brave and strange and blunt and she cursed and spoke about menstruation and masturbation like they were completely normal things to bring up in small talk. And this delighted Bella.

Carrie also wore tight black outfits and different-colored scarves around her neck every day, which Bella found sophisticated and different, especially in Santa Fe, where people mostly wore ugly shapeless dresses and Birkenstocks. She figured Carrie must have a thing for Audrey Hepburn, like Bella’s mother who used to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s obsessively when she was a young girl growing up in Korea. Charming girls had a thing for other charming girls, as if recognizing their gift to entice. Carrie’s swearing and her humor and her bright-orange and blue and green scarves were all so very charming. To Bella, at least, who preferred wearing neutral colors and always thought long and hard about what she said before she said it. But like most things in life, the moment usually passed and her chance disappeared. She wanted to sparkle too, but she drew into herself like introverts usually do, and she just watched for the shine in others.

At the very least she knew she felt at home with Carrie and up at the spa. The walls and slanted ceilings of the rooms at Ten Thousand Waves were covered in honey-colored wood, and like the rest of the natural desert landscape and the adobe architecture in New Mexico, the wood relaxed Bella’s body and made her feel at ease. Protected. Even the ancient samurai sword and the changing display of fine silk kimono robes by the lobby gave Bella some feeling of old world beauty and order, which she needed, what with all the moving that was going on inside of her. Shortly after she first laid eyes on the sword in its silk-lined case in Sakura, Bella watched a documentary about samurai sword-making and how putting the blade repeatedly in fire and folding the metal thousands of times upon itself drove carbon into the belly of the steel, and gave the sword its notorious power and strength. Their sword in particular was rumored to have killed ten thousand soldiers in one day and had gone on to protect the Emperor from the dead soldiers’ and their families’ vengeful spirits.

Perhaps most fascinating of all, Bella heard from the other therapists about a little girl ghost who lived in Sakura, and though people said she wasn’t bad or mean, Bella knew somehow she was a revenge ghost, the kind that her parents spoke of when she was young, stuck between earth and the afterlife because of some grave injustice done to her. “This type of ghost is the most sad and angry,” her mother had explained when Bella was five. “They have holes deep inside that can only get filled by getting their revenge.” Dead flowers had been disappearing and reappearing in the bathtub of their hallway bathroom. “My younger sister fell down a well when she was three and drowned. She never got to live the life she was supposed to live, and she’s angry for that. I don’t blame her. I was supposed to watch her. I didn’t.” When her mother hit a deer on 495 outside of Boston and died shortly after the crash, neither Bella nor her father asked to see the deer’s body or had any questions for the police officers. They knew some circle had completed in the universe. They had both been waiting.

Whenever Bella was assigned to Sakura, especially on nights when darkness began swallowing the pine trees and small waterfalls outside and the windows reflected only her faint image back to her, arms outstretched, back sloped over the table, she kept quiet watch. She thought at any moment she might see black smoke or steam floating up from under the massage table, perhaps some ugly green thing coming out of one of the vents. But she never saw anything. A few times at the end of the month when she was menstruating, she thought she felt a warm breath on her neck, but she would turn and there would be nothing. She figured it must be the hormones moving inside her, but she never thought about all that blood slicking down her insides. Carrie had only mentioned the ghost one time, saying she didn’t know much about her, only that she had heard she showed up through blood.

Bella’s shift on Easter Sunday was booked solid with eighty-minute massages, salt scrubs, and yasuragi head and neck treatments. By seven, Bella’s joints ached and she felt lightheaded from not having eaten enough before the shift. She quickly ate two apples and a handful of nuts before splashing some water on her face.

The sun was shining a strange gold light through the branches of the pine trees and the waiting room danced with light and dark shapes.

A handsome man in his forties was sitting by the fireplace, sipping from a white paper cup.

The spa hostess introduced the two of them to each other before bowing to the guest and then bowing to Bella.

Bella smiled as she always did during the ritual, thinking the whole affair of white people bowing to each other was sort of ridiculous.

“I’m Chris,” he said, extending his hand. He had a friendly smile but his eyes were wet and unfocused and he stank of alcohol.

As soon as they touched, Bella saw bright red. She felt a stinging in her right temple.

“I’m also drunk,” he said, kicking one of his blue slippers off his foot.

Mary, the spa hostess, immediately picked it up with both hands, bowed, and placed it before the man’s bare foot.

“Your restaurant has the best sakes outside of Japan. It’s true! I tried them all.”

Bella motioned him to the double doors. “We’re upstairs in Sakura. Follow me.”

It was an unusually warm night outside. The two climbed the wood staircase, then headed past the communal tub and down a long hallway. When they reached the blue tapestry with the image of a moon and two red-eyed cranes on it, Bella was still wondering where she had seen this man before. Something familiar was circling around her. Something evil.

“Don’t I know you? You look so familiar.” She closed the door behind them and locked it. She pointed to the black hook on the wall, then raised the edge of the sheet and towel off the massage table, and looked away. “Go ahead and hang your kimono up on that hook and then lie facedown. We can adjust the face cradle if it’s uncomfortable.”

The man got on the table and Bella immediately covered him.

“Did you go to college out east?” Chris asked.

“No, west. UCLA.”

“I see. Class of ’99?”

“Yeah that’s right. ’99.”

Bella dropped the towel and sheet over the naked man’s body and folded the sheet back up around his back and legs. She walked around the perimeter of the table and smoothed out all the wrinkles. She undraped the man’s back, squirted some lotion and warm oil into her hands, and worked her forearm and elbow over a dozen points along his spine.

“Oh, that’s amazing. Like you know exactly where to go.”

Bella kept working, trying to concentrate on just the skin and the muscles and the tendons of the man, not on the man himself. Not the red she was seeing or the stinging in her head that was getting stronger by the minute. She closed her eyes and said her usual prayer: Help me give this person what he needs. But the man’s energy felt dark, like oil and thick poison beneath her hands; she could feel it trying to move up into her insides and she trembled, then stepped away.

Chris raised his head suddenly. “Wait a second, I remember! You were one of the bad girls at St. John’s Academy, weren’t you? You and that funny friend of yours, Carrie. You guys used to steal the wine for Sunday Mass and get drunk in your dorm rooms!”

Her back stiffened. “Ooh, that’s right. That was me”

“Like the boys, that’s right. Man! We were all such bad seeds back then, weren’t we?”

“I think we were just being kids.” Things were getting blurry and a few tears rolled down her cheeks. The pain at her temple was getting unbearable. She would do anything for a drink.

“God, it was a crazy time, wasn’t it? All that pressure for Harvard, the all-nighters with Jolt and Ritalin — but I do! I remember your face! Didn’t we party together or something?”

Bella quietly wept into the back of her hand and leaned back onto the wood table holding the scented sprays. She wiped the wet snot from her mouth and chin. Do you also remember taking turns with all the other boys and being so fucking polite to each other while you were being so hard to me and to my insides that now I can’t even grow a baby even if I want to? Do you remember your parents paying off my parents to take me out of school nice and quiet like nothing had even happened? Her lips were curling and uncurling and her mouth was starting to ache from gritting her teeth so hard. It felt like her skull might explode from all that pressure.

He chuckled. “That’s right, you were better than the other girls? More sincere. Less makeup.” His voice was much higher back then and his hands were different, not soft and conditioned by the tub and rich hand creams from the spa. They were cold and sticky fourteen-year-old hands that he had put all over her after he yanked off her tights and underwear at the railroad tracks. She had fought them off, hadn’t she? Kicked mud into his face, into all four boys’ faces, put up a fight before they pushed her so hard into the mud that she thought she heard something go crack in her back, but then her face went smack into the mud too, cold and nasty and full of shit smells. And then someone flipped up her skirt and Chris was the first to get his cold little hands all over her before he was shouting, I’m inside! I’m inside! And then after the burning from him, there was another burning, another, and then another. Bella had been touched all over by four boys’ grimy hands and their sweaty hips and thighs and blood-thick genitals, but all Bella could think about with each turn was how different each boy’s hands felt as he used her body to push and pull up against. And then after the high fives and the zipping up of pants and a pat on her bare butt, there was nothing. She was alone. The sun had gone down, leaving her freezing cold with just her tunnels of air in the mud.

“So — are we getting a massage here or what?”

“Oh, I was just going to say it’s time to scoot down a few inches and turn over.”

Bella removed the face cradle and went to place the foam bolster under his knees. She placed her hands on both of his shoulders and tried to ignore his erection.

“You have the most amazing touch, you know that?”

Don’t do it, don’t. Please don’t. Bella wanted with all her might to disappear herself or the man. Either would be fine.

“Say, would you, you know... touch me?”

Bella glanced over at the crockpot set on high heat, and could see herself pouring the hot water onto the man’s disgusting face. His shit-talking face. It would melt his face like crayon.

“You know — I remember you too. I remember the last time I saw you; we were at the railyard tracks and there was a lot of rain and mud. Remember that?”

Chris’s lips twitched.

“I remember wearing a new green skirt but it was cold and none of you offered your varsity coats.” She suspended her hands over Chris’s chest and up around his neck and face. Energy work, she was telling herself. It might help move all that darkness and poison out of his system, regenerate him into something better than his past.

Chris smiled. “I do remember us having some fun at the railyard once.” He began rubbing his palms against his chest in slow circles and curling and relaxing his toes. His hands stopped. “What the—”

He batted away the rice bag from his eyes and blinked. But the blood had already started. The whites of his eyes were filling with dark red and blood streaked down the sides of his face. It dribbled out of the nostrils, the ears. The sheet bloomed deep crimson beneath his head.

“What’s happening? What’s happening?”

Bella stood up and screamed. Bright red veins covered both her feet, and she pulled up the hem of her pants to see tiny red lines going up over her ankle bones and branching up over her calf muscles. In shock, she looked down at her arms and her hands and they were covered as well. In the mirror across the room, her veiny face was almost unrecognizable.

Red was ballooning onto the white linens and Chris shook his head and cried. The blood ran in all directions down his face. “Why can’t I move? What’s going on? Help me! Jesus, help me, will you?”

Bella felt a weight on her thigh. She glanced down. The prized samurai sword, suddenly so much larger than inside its demure glass case on the wall, leaned up against her leg. It was surrounded by a halo of red light. Something in her stomach started to rise, and the rising moved up into her armpits and up her arms until they started to move with the rising. Bella watched her arms float up, and the outline of the sword in its soft veil of red appeared inside her hands. Suddenly the dark red lines all over her arms turned into a blinding white, like electricity, as if thunder and not blood was shooting through her.

The blade came down fast and made a wet sucking sound as it passed through the man’s neck. At once, the top of the massage table came loose and was now hanging by a piece of yellow foam and green pleather, and there was a soft thump as Chris’s head fell on the floor and rolled toward the stool. Thick blood pumped out of the decapitated head on the floor and the body on the table. Bella found large portions of her body slick and warm with it. Something broke inside, some root of her, and a warm flush began to spread and move up until she couldn’t stop it and it was now in her throat and she had to open her mouth to make space for it all. “NO!”

She collapsed onto the floor and put her hands into all the blood puddled there. It was warm and thick. It felt good. She moved her hands around like she was a baby playing in rain for the first time; like she was four and trying to find matching images in a deck of cards; like she was fourteen at railroad tracks in New Hampshire, bleeding from the front and from behind. She was smelling all that new blood from her own body, metal smells mixed in with dank shit smells. Dirt and mud and dead semen.

And then everything was quiet and she felt a movement in her chest. It wasn’t pounding in her ears, or grinding in her mouth and skull. It was soft, steady. A heartbeat, quiet and good.

Things were already vanishing by the time she opened her eyes. Particles of red were turning clear. Outlines of the puddles and foam table and sword were all disappearing; objects were returning back to where they had been. Within moments, the grain inside the wood floor came into clear view again; the stickiness and warmth of the blood evaporated and Bella could see her skin once again. There were details there, tiny details like brown freckles and moles all along her arms that she had never noticed before.

When she got up, there was nothing to clean. No blood or guts or even a man’s headless body. Instead, there was just a clean white sheet and the towel and face cradle, exactly where they should be. The table was ready for a new body. She climbed onto it and spread her arms and legs out. Even the stinging in her temple was gone.

The moonlight streamed through the windows. She let it soak into every part of her until she felt something inside beginning to fill. Her entire body started to swell as her heartbeat grew strong and her long, deep breaths moved clean air through her throat and chest.

So much beauty, so much light.

The Night of the Flood by Ana June

Casa Solana

I’m going on thirty-six hours at the blackjack table counting cards and watching my chips pile up when Russell, the night manager, tells me I got a call.

“Tina, it’s your sister,” he says, and I shrug him off because I already told him I’m not to be disturbed. Throws off my rhythm, and I lose track of what I’m doing.

“Tell her I’m not here,” I bark over my shoulder.

But of course I’m on the phone with my sister after my next hand because she tells Russell she’ll just keep calling and doesn’t mind tying up the phone lines. It’s a small casino, and my sister knows me too well.

“Aunt Mimi died,” my sister says without so much as a hello.

I don’t even pause. “Why are you calling me here to tell me that?” I hiss into the phone.

People have called me cruel but I think they just don’t understand me. Those people are fully irritating. It’s been fifteen years since I’ve seen my Aunt Mimi. Fifteen years since the summer I spent at her hippie, armpit-smelling house in Santa Fe “drying out and finding my mystery again.” Bunch of hippie bullshit, really, that involved doing yoga with her students daily (skinny white women, mostly, with veiny arms who twittered to each other about balancing their constitutions) and eating plants. But I was seventeen then, and I’d crumpled the family station wagon around a light pole when I was on a bender. Internment at Aunt Mimi’s seemed preferable to the other choice my parents offered: rehab.

Little did I know...

“I told you, I’m in Los Angeles all week,” my sister snaps. “Go check on Mom. See how she’s holding up, for fuck’s sake. She’s been trying to contact you too, and frankly, you’re just lucky I didn’t tell her where you are.” She pauses, then goes for the jugular: “Katrina.” My sister knows how much I hate my full name, so our conversation is over. I slam down the phone.

I’m outside next, squinting at the skyline, all neon and amber glow against the clouds. I pull a cigarette from my purse. Try to feel something for my Aunt Mimi, but fail. She meant well, but there’s literally nothing about her that evokes anything like grief in me. I try, honest I do, as I smoke my cigarette to the filter and flick it toward a puddle a few feet away. The orange tracer lingers in the night; I turn, go back inside, and lose all my money.

A month later, I get a card in the mail and nearly drop it when I see who it’s from. Aunt Mimi’s full name, Mildred Grant, and her Santa Fe address are etched across the upper left corner in her unmistakable script. The envelope is postmarked three days earlier, as though Aunt Mimi’s ghost is trying to catch up on things left undone.

I mean, probably someone found it and popped it in the mail, right? I rip it open.

Dearest Katrina, it begins, if you’re reading this, I’m dead.

In her handwriting, reminiscent of my mother’s family cookbook, Aunt Mimi tells me from beyond the grave that she enjoyed having me live with her, despite everything, and was proud of how I tried to redeem myself in the end. I bristle at the mention of redemption. I always just knew how to play the game, ’cause that’s how you get what you want in the end, you know? Redemption is all sorts of brainwashy, so fuck that.

The note continues with an apology for labeling me a failure, something she barked at me when I didn’t pass a drug test in the second month of my internment at her house. Up to that point I’d earned freedom by degrees, over some very painful weeks of yoga and vegetarianism, and when I met Tic on the plaza one night, while I was lurking around Häagen-Dazs scoping the party scene, I was smitten immediately. He was a beautiful human being. He parted his hair on one side, and dyed the tips blue, plus he was taller than me, which was no small feat given that I’m six three. He wore black rubber bracelets stacked up one arm and all I could imagine was that he’d give me a bracelet or two after kissing me. And then he’d kiss me again for good measure. He also had the best weed, so there was that.

Anyway, in the card, Aunt Mimi writes that she wants to make it up to me for calling me a failure. She finishes her missive with a hope that her death will help me “sort out my karma,” and says that her lawyer will be in touch soon.

I can’t help speculating that maybe she was a millionaire and made plans to leave me her fortune. It makes sense, after all. My mom kept me updated on Aunt Mimi’s life after the summer I spent in Santa Fe, as though I cared. Apparently, Aunt Mimi’s business in natural healing books and paraphernalia was thriving, so she traveled around a lot.

“She’s in Europe this week,” Mom would say, or, “Aunt Mimi is spending Christmas in Hawaii this year, isn’t that great?”

I remember Mom hesitating then, after she told me about Hawaii. She looked at me over her knitting, and said, “Wouldn’t that be a nice thing to do, Katrina?”

That was code for Get your shit together so you too can go to the beach. Joke’s on her though: I don’t even like puddles. There is nothing whatsoever I like about being in or even around a body of water — flowing, stagnant, whatever.

Not after what happened toward the end of my stay in Santa Fe that long-ago summer.

It was the evening before the Santa Fe Fiestas; the burning of Zozobra. Tic and his friend Rachel told me about it, describing it as a local ritual of symbolically burning away people’s “gloom.” More importantly, the party on the plaza after the burning was the best of the year.

“It’s kinda like New Year’s in summer, drunken Santa Fe style,” Rachel said.

Even though I’d lost most of my privileges for flunking the drug test, Aunt Mimi let me go and I didn’t even have to beg.

“Zozobra is something everyone should see,” she told me, all matter-of-fact, when I asked. Then she looked at me over her glasses, thin readers with paisley frames that sat atop her head on her wild gray hair when they weren’t on her face. “You can go, but on one condition.”

“What?” I asked, crossing my fingers behind my back.

“Pee in a cup tomorrow,” she said, then added, “and be home by eleven thirty.”

“That’s two conditions,” I replied.

“Well, you don’t have to do either,” she said, turning back to her book. “We could just stay in and read.”

“Fine,” I conceded, and turned to go.

“That’s eleven thirty p.m., young lady,” she called after me.

An hour later, just outside the Fort Marcy baseball field where the burning would take place, Tic offered me a hit of acid with what looked like a Looney Tunes graphic on it. I asked him if LSD would show up on a drug screen.

“Nah,” he said, smiling. He licked the tip of his finger, stuck it to the hit, and raised it to my lips. Our eyes locked and I took his finger in my mouth, all of it. He tasted like salt and chocolate and everything I wanted but didn’t know I wanted until that very moment.

As we crossed the bridge over the arroyo and entered the park, Tic ran his hand up under the back of my shirt. It was all I could do to keep myself from dragging him down into the shadow of the bridge and ripping his clothes off with my teeth.

Zozobra blew my fucking mind — a fifty-foot marionette that moaned and rolled his paper-plate eyeballs while the crowd chanted, Burn him! Burn him! I yelled along with them, keeping one finger curled through Tic’s belt loop so we didn’t lose each other. The crowd pressed against us from all sides, the fever of thousands of people straining to see, yelling and pushing, like some massive animal wanting blood. The sun disappeared on the far horizon, casting a long red glow that foretold the spectacle we were about to witness, and then the lights in the park went out.

The fire dancer and the Glooms — local kids dressed in sheets, Tic explained (“I was a Gloom one year,” he boasted) — made their way down the stairs. The Glooms waved their arms all ghostlike as they walked. Fireworks exploded, reflecting off my body, Tic’s body, everyone’s body. Over the mountains, lightning cut the sky into jagged shards. The crowd pushed and roared, and I could still taste Tic on my tongue.

Then, Zozobra caught fire. A falling arc from one cherry-red firework rained on his orange tissue-paper hair, melting and lifting it into a flame toupee. Pushed on by a rising wind, the flames licked across Zozobra’s ear and wrapped around his face. That’s when it hit me, the acid... the world suddenly sparked and animated. I was transfixed by the flames. Watched as they became spirits and animals and, for a split second, the falling face of my dead father.

Zozobra was fully aflame when the sky overhead split in two with lightning. Then the rain came. First it was a thin drizzle, then a downpour with fat raindrops I hadn’t imagined in the desert. Tic hugged me close as though to keep me dry, and the rain washed through my eyes, distorting the already distorted world. The lights came up; raindrops buzzed through the beams, as smoke rose from the blackening mess that was Zozobra. Pushed by the crowd, we started toward the exit, and when we left the pool of lights over the baseball field, the rest of the evening snapped into pieces. It’s broken, in my head. The memories are like snapshots laid out on a table, each image dim and smoky.

I lost Tic for a moment as the crowd surged; then I saw him, but from a distance. He was walking rapidly away from the plaza, where I thought we were headed, hunched against the rain. I rushed to catch him, wondering what he had in mind and trying to focus my eyes against the acid and the rain as the night pulsed and swelled.

I called out once, and Tic turned around in a pool of light from a lamppost. His face swam in my view, his features crawling... he didn’t look like himself... suddenly he’d acquired a cap. Where did you get the cap? I think I asked or yelled, or maybe I just thought it, and then Tic turned and jogged away. I tried to call to him, Wait up, but the night split with lightning again and an instant crack of thunder. My words were lost.

Then I was falling down an embankment, sinking to my ankles in sand, losing my shoes. I was in an arroyo, and everything was so black. The air pulsed with visions of demons, monsters... dinosaurs? I thought I saw one and rushed up to it, ignoring whatever scrap of reason was still lingering at the edge of my brain. It was a tree, the most beautiful tree, and it seemed to glow from within. I stopped to feel its branches, distracted in a second, and then I saw Tic off to one side in the shadows. I went up to him and wrapped my arms around his waist.

I think I spoke his name. Over and over, shaping it in my mouth. I could taste the letters... I had never tasted letters before. But Tic wriggled free and grabbed me by my upper arm, pushed me away. Looked into my face. He was in shadow beneath the cap he wore, and I think I asked him again where he got it. Then I reached for it; pulled it down on my own head.

This is where I’m still very confused. I saw it with my own eyes, but what did I see? Long dark hair fell to Tic’s shoulders from beneath the cap, and then his face morphed into something unrecognizable. He grabbed my other arm too, and gripped until both arms were on fire and I couldn’t get loose. Stop! I wanted to scream, and maybe I did, but Tic just stood there... he wasn’t Tic but he also was, both at the same time. It looked like he was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of... at first I didn’t know what it was. Thunder? The rain?

More lightning and I saw movement to my left. Something coming. Tic tried to drag me away from the tree and into the middle of the arroyo, the sand sinking beneath us, but he fell and pulled me down with him. I was so fucked up, my head imagining people in the dark, and then I saw the water. It was a trickle, but the roar was getting louder. Tic scrambled up and something about his movements frightened me and, freed from his grip, I jumped back. He lunged, tried to grab my arms again, but I ran. All my energy, despite the world looking like it was being painted into existence before my very eyes as I moved, propelled me through the sand both sodden and sharp, until I reached the embankment.

Tic’s hand was on my shoulder then, and my arm. And with the last bit of my strength, I shrugged him off and spun. Pushed him backward, then scrambled up the lip of the arroyo.

I looked back just in time to see what I can only describe as a monster filled with rocks and trees and trash roll the space where Tic should be, but he was gone. Vanished.

It was as though he’d evaporated.

So, here’s where I lost my shit. I was standing on the edge of the arroyo watching it chew through itself, basically. The tumbling of rocks and debris sounding like a freight train. I screamed at least once, paced the crumbling edge, and stumbled toward a nearby street. I stood on the sidewalk, barefoot and dripping, screaming my fool head off, when a car rolled up to a stop. Its lights on my body made the world drop away and I felt suddenly so alone. Alone like I’d never felt before.

Then Tic was there; the car door slammed and he ran up to me, pulled me into his arms, and I knew it was him. He was alive!

I explained everything to Tic that night and he said it sounded like some grand-scale hallucination, with sensory experiences and everything, but the next morning, when I took off my clothes to get in the shower, I saw what looked like a handprint of bruises on my left bicep. A ring around my arm... a palm and five fingerprints.

What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck... I said to my reflection.

I didn’t see Tic again until the following week, on my last night in Santa Fe. I’d passed the pee-in-a-cup test Aunt Mimi set as a condition of my Zozobra night, and she must have decided not to say much about the state of my clothes and hair and face when I woke up the next morning, because, well, she didn’t say anything.

I mean, I guess she knew it had rained all night, and I was out in it.

Anyway, I covered up my arms so she wouldn’t ask about the bruising, and I almost didn’t show Tic either, because what could you possibly say to that? Bruising is not the same as a hallucination, and I was petrified that whomever it was I had encountered in the arroyo that night was a living, breathing human being.

A living... breathing... human... being.

Was a living, breathing human being.

Fuck, I thought, what if I killed someone? Or at least directly contributed to a person’s death?

Tic laughed when I showed him the bruises.

“Look,” I said, “it’s... a handprint.” I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice.

“Oh my God,” he said dramatically. He poked the bruises with his index finger and laughed.

“What?” I said.

“I know who you saw in the arroyo,” he told me, and winked.

“Who?”

“La Llorona,” he said, his voice sinister.

I’d heard of La Llorona, the Wailing Woman who, in Mexican folklore, drowned her children after being spurned by her lover — her husband? — and then wandered the riverbanks wailing and grabbing feckless children who were out after dark. Drowning them. I’d heard she haunted Santa Fe arroyos.

But in what version of the tale does La Llorona herself drown?

I asked Tic that, and he laughed.

“Nah,” he said, “she didn’t drown. She’ll appear somewhere else, someday. In the meantime... she branded you.”

“Branded me? Is that something she... does?”

Tic laughed and poked my bruises again. “These will never go away,” he said, “and she’ll always be able to find you.”

“Look,” I said, annoyed by his laughter, “whoever it was, that person looked so much like you.”

Of course, the long hair that fell from beneath the cap didn’t fit — Tic’s was longish on one side, but short on the other. The person I had seen in the arroyo had long hair that fell past his... her?... shoulders.

Rachel was sitting nearby, eavesdropping, and said, in all seriousness, “La Llorona can shape-shift, you know.”

Tic, who had just stopped laughing, guffawed again.

“She can!” Rachel insisted. “She can look like somebody else... like an old dude or something, or even Tic!”

“People always tell me I look just like La Llorona,” Tic said, giggling, “and what better way to lure you into the arroyo?” He struck a pose, then doubled over in more laughter.

“What the fuck, you guys?” I said, looking from Tic to Rachel and back again. They were fucking with me and I didn’t like it. “La Llorona’s just a folktale. A fucking myth. A fucking, I dunno, lie when you think about it. Designed to scare kids.”

Rachel went straight-faced and looked me square in the eye. “Don’t say that. Don’t fuck with La Llorona, or she’ll fuck you right back.” She lifted a pipe to her lips and took a long drag, held it, exhaled, then leveled her dark eyes at me once again. “And I don’t mean the good kind of fucking.”

Tic collected himself and wiped a tear from his eye. He put his hand on the side of my face, and smiled at me. “Tina, Tina, Tina...” he said. “You fell down in that arroyo, what, three times?”

I nodded.

“I mean, what better way to get some bruises?”

I shrugged. Looked at my arm.

“We’re just fucking with you,” he said, and kissed my cheek. “You’re so easy to fuck...” he paused, dragged out a long silence, “with.”

I left Santa Fe after that. Went back home, across the country where rain meant green hills and trees, not flash floods, and on my twenty-first birthday I got a wild idea. I sketched up an image of whomever it was I saw in the arroyo, cap on and hair down, smudged it with charcoal (the one class I excelled in through high school: visual arts), added some deep black outlines, and then walked into a tattoo parlor.

Had that visage engraved into my upper left arm.

There’s not much you need to know about my life from then until right now, except that I’ve always been shit-ass broke and in debt. So when Aunt Mimi’s Santa Fe lawyer calls to tell me that I need to come to Santa Fe for a reading of the will in one week’s time, I don’t hesitate to sell a few things so I can afford the airfare. I can go back to counting cards again, ’cause I am pretty good at it, and maybe even borrow money from my mom, but I’ve got it in my head that I won’t be needing much from my current life after this. My hopes for the future are pinned on that phone call, that trip, to a place I hated, mostly, but where I also found love for a moment or two.

I think about looking for Tic when I get there, but I’m not even sure where to start. Perhaps for now it’s sufficient to just go and claim what Aunt Mimi wanted me to have so I can reckon with my karma, or some shit, and get on with my life. Say adiós to my shitty job, my crappy-ass efficiency apartment with rats in the walls, my beater car pockmarked with Bondo and held together, in several places, with baling wire. And maybe, once the dust settles and I have my inheritance in hand, I’ll go to Hawaii just to spite my mother. Take a picture with a view of the beach. Send it to her.

Wouldn’t this be nice, Mom? Signed, Tina.

I get into Santa Fe an hour before the reading of the will. The office is near the plaza so I walk around a bit, killing time. Grab ice cream from Häagen-Dazs and scrutinize faces for something familiar.

At the lawyer’s office, I’m alone. A sole heir? I wonder, as I settle into a leather chair and prepare to hear my fate.

“To my niece I leave the key to my house, within which she will find more information about what is to be rightfully hers,” the lawyer reads. She pushes a single key across the desk to me, and I pick it up. Turn it over in my palm.

“So, she’s leaving me her... house?” I ask.

“Officially, she’s leaving you the key to her house,” the lawyer responds. “That’s all it says here, so I suppose you’ll need to go look for yourself.”

“But...”

“Katrina, I suppose it’s possible she signed the house over to you and left the deed for you there,” the lawyer says, and shuffles a stack of papers. “I suggest you go look.”

It’s just like Aunt Mimi to set up hurdles for me to leap over even after she’s departed this world and really shouldn’t care anymore. Of course I go to the house. I use the key to unlock the big wooden door and step inside to a smell of musty feet and stale food. The refrigerator is still packed full of perishables, all, sadly, perished. Worse: the front toilet bowl still has piss in it. “If it’s yellow let it mellow...” Aunt Mimi used to sing, because save the water or some shit. Now it’s anything but mellow... it’s fucking rank. I wonder why nobody bothered to clean shit up before I came.

“Isn’t that what a lawyer or whatever is supposed to do?” I mutter to myself.

I have my hands full, clearly, but I’m not too disappointed. Real estate prices in Santa Fe are astronomical. At the very least, I can sell the house and make a kick-ass profit.

That’s when I notice a padlocked wooden box sitting smack in the middle of the dining table, and there’s a card with my name on it pinned to the top of a wire stand, like the type you put place cards in for fancy dinner events. Not that I’ve been to a fancy dinner event... yet. I open the card, hold it into the light from the dining room window, and read.

I sigh. More hurdles to leap, and no, I don’t remember Mrs. Santo. Maybe she was one of my aunt’s yoga students? I grab the box off the table — it’s not as heavy as it looks — and walk down to the corner. Ring the doorbell. Let’s get this over with, I think.

A very old woman opens the door and looks at me. Her dark hair is streaked with a flash of white like lightning and it falls past her shoulders. Her face is a network of wrinkles, like riverbeds running from the corners of her eyes down over the curve of her jaw. Yes, I realize, when she pushes the screen door open and gestures for me to come inside, she was one of my aunt’s yoga students. She doesn’t smile; says nothing. I go inside and hold the box out to her.

“I’m Tina,” I say. “My aunt died and she wanted me to bring this to you.”

Mrs. Santo nods and takes the box from my hands, places it on the table. She walks away then, down a hallway, and I’m left standing in her darkened living room alone. What the actual fuck is going on?

She’s back a moment later, and hands me something. It’s the cap. The cap I took off the head of the person I thought was Tic. I hadn’t seen it since that night — it vanished, much like the ghost in the arroyo.

“Where did you get this?” I ask, incredulous, and suddenly everything goes downhill.

“So, you recognize it,” Mrs. Santo says, and pulls open the living room drapes. The room floods with light, and I turn the cap over in my hand. How does this relate to the box? To my aunt’s death? To... anything at all?

I shrug. “I mean, yeah, I do. But—”

She nods and claps her hands. “But nothing,” she snaps.

That’s when I hear it, a high-pitched whine and the crunch of plastic — a sound I recall from my childhood, when my grandfather lived with us. He used a wheelchair in his final days, and my mom put down thick plastic runners over the hallway carpeting to make it easier for him to get around. I’d know that sound anywhere.

I turn and there he is. Unmistakable. The spirit... the person... from the arroyo. His dark hair still falls past his shoulders, and in his face I see what I saw that night, but without the distortion from the acid. He looks like Tic, but not, and he’s in a fully motorized wheelchair. His limbs are Velcroed to the chair, a tube runs from the front of his throat. Only his eyes move.

And all I can do is look from him to the cap and back again.

Mrs. Santo walks over to the man in the wheelchair, and puts her hand on his. “This is my son,” she says to me, then to him she asks, “Is this her?”

The dark night after Zozobra rushes back in fragments, and I’m rooted there, staring at the man’s face, as his eyes travel the length of my body. They stop, then, on my upper arm.

He pushes his lips out, and his mother follows the gesture. Sees my arm too. Walks over and grabs it to look.

“Why do you have a tattoo of my son on your arm?” she asks.

I pull my arm away; her fingers burn. “It’s not... him,” I answer, tipping my chin at the man who clearly resembles my tat.

“It most certainly is,” she says, and looks back at her son. He blinks once, and I realize that means yes.

“You’re the one who was in the arroyo that night, aren’t you?” Mrs. Santo says. “You’re the one who pushed my son down as he tried to get away from the flash flood.”

“That’s not...” I stammer. “I didn’t mean to...”

“You didn’t mean to push my son into the flood?” Mrs. Santo says, her voice rising.

“It was an accident,” I implore. “He grabbed my arms and—”

“You didn’t report the incident.”

I stand there, my legs rooted to the spot. A rush of anger burns my face. “It wasn’t my fault! I was high... tripping... and I thought...” I gesture at the man in the chair. I’m about to say that I thought maybe he was just a hallucination... maybe even that he was La Llorona. But I stop. I can hear how ridiculous I sound.

“You thought nothing,” Mrs. Santo says. “You are the reason he’s in this chair, and worse, he was only trying to help you get away before the flood hit.”

That snapshot image comes back to me: him pulling me, then falling, then lunging for my arm.

“I was scared, I didn’t know—” I try, but Mrs. Santo cuts me off with a wave of her hand.

“Enough,” she says. She swipes the cap out of my hand, and gently places it on her son’s head. Then she walks over to the box.

“Your aunt found my son’s cap in your closet when she cleaned up the room where you lived that summer,” she explains, pulling a small key from her back pocket. “She saw his name written in it, so naturally she walked over to give it to me.”

She sticks the key in the tiny padlock. Twists.

“She didn’t know then that my son was gravely injured in that flash flood, and all because of someone who had pursued him to that arroyo, through the night, then assaulted him as he tried to avoid detection.”

The lock springs.

“And even after being assaulted, he tried to help his assailant.” Shaking her head in disgust, she lifts the box lid.

I can’t see what’s inside, but whatever it is, Mrs. Santo seems satisfied.

“Your aunt wanted you to work out your karma, as I think you know,” she says then.

“That’s, yes... what she wrote...” I have visions of being pushed in front of a flash flood wave — an eye for an eye. Absent that, a train? Truck? Bus? What’s even happening?

“Well, this should suffice.” Mrs. Santo closes the lid, walks over to her son, and places the box on his lap. “Had you only found my son’s cap on the ground while walking home, I would be handing you this box. But in light of the truth of what happened that night, your aunt wished for my son to have it. Everything she left behind.”

“Everything...?” I can’t form sentences. What’s she talking about?

“Yes. Everything. Her house, her bank accounts, her home in Hawaii. All of it.”

Rage rushes through me. “What?! It was an accident! I didn’t mean to push you into the flood!” I’m yelling, looking from Mrs. Santo to her son. “I didn’t mean for you to get hurt! I just—” I stop, try to catch my breath. What’s happening?

“You just what?” Mrs. Santo asks, stone-faced.

“I thought he was trying to attack me,” I screech.

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Santo says, “you pursued him.”

“I thought he was somebody else!” I can’t breathe. My heart is racing and my face burns with anger. “He bruised my arms when he grabbed me, and I—”

“I’ve heard enough,” she interrupts, her voice rising again. “If you need more proof of what’s to happen, here’s your aunt’s statement.”

She hands me a piece of paper in my aunt’s hand, notarized on the bottom and dated more than twenty years prior — essentially a month after I left Santa Fe. In it, each detail Mrs. Santo just explained to me.

“I—” I start to protest, but stop. There’s one stipulation at the very bottom that Mrs. Santo didn’t mention: she’ll seek criminal charges against me for attempted murder unless I agree to move in and care for her son in perpetuity.

“Take it or leave it,” Mrs. Santo says to me, then pulls out a small recorder and places it on the table. She’s been recording everything.

My anger turns to fear. I have nothing. I sold everything of value, not that I had much, and I only bought a one-way ticket to Santa Fe. Plus, I admitted to my involvement... on tape.

I may be good at counting cards, but I’m an expert at losing everything.

The paper slips from my fingers and flutters to the floor.

Mrs. Santo nods, and the room spins. All I can hear in my head is Rachel’s warning to me years ago: Don’t fuck with La Llorona, or she’ll fuck you right back.

“Welcome home,” says Mrs. Santo.