Category: Fiction

The days were more dear now.

She could give minutes to the snapdragons, pruning their spent blooms and freeing the stems to flower again. Or spend an hour with her glasses and notebook, hoping for a tufted titmouse to report to the lost species trackers.

Or she could stay inside on Shredder and save a person’s life.

She plucked a call from the ether. Shredder’s voice . . .

Hice una manda, ¿sabes?, antes del collar, antes de todo. Le pedí a la Virgencita que nos ayudara con lo del terreno y yo la representaría en el Viacrucis. Pero me tocó ser Jesús. O algo así.

Ese día mamá no quería dejarme sola con las trocas dando vueltas por el pueblo. Sobre todo, por la amenaza. Pensó en llamar a su jefe de allá, de la maquila, y pedir el día, pero al . . .

I prayed a manda, you know? Before the necklace, before everything. I asked la Virgencita for help with Abuelito’s land, and I offered to act as her in the Via Crucis procession. But I got to be Jesus. Kinda.

That day Mamá didn’t wanna leave me alone with the company’s trocas roaming town. Not after the threat. She thought of calling her boss at the maquila and asking . . .

Morning dawns and Lou has exactly nothing left to give. She goes out to the garden anyway because that’s the way she was taught, and she waters as the heavy hose drags behind her and threatens to knock down tomato plants or flatten the sweet potatoes. Between her tee shirt sleeves and leather work gloves are bare brown forearms and dark elbows. Her short Afro is salt . . .

The agent assured Tyrel it was a good contract. Eighty-five years wasn’t bad, as far as these things went. Could be worse. They could be sending him to Amarok, or Ragnar, or some other red dwarf gravity hell.

Not that Tyrel had much of a choice. More people arrived at the camp every day: dusty, desperate, dropped by coyotes at the border. He remembered his family’s . . .