Fragments. [Xuxa]

July - Year 54

Xuxa had been fretting all morning, in a mood since the moment she’d awoken. Ayena had seen her ruffling through her closet to find another gown, in spite of the heavy and humid heat. Xuxa pouted that the wigs she’d been intending to wear were all tangled due to the heat wave, and had instead moaned about wrapping her head – later hailing the false jewel she’s placed at the center of her head wrap as a tour de force – and told Xuxa she might as well lock herself indoors if the omens had anything to tell her.

Ayena had been the one to greet the boys at the door and offer them each a bowl of oatmeal to eat. She’d had them take off their boots at the front door, told them to spend some time finding a book to settle down to read to, and before long, their aunt would come down from her room to give them a great big hello.

Miss Ayena was a curiosity those days. She’d been partners with Xuxa for some thirty years or more, in a big house with a gate and an archway covered in ivory and red roses. The big house had seen much better days, but Ayena’s warmth and grit had mended much of what threatened to crumble.

‘How long have you lived here, Tía Ayena?’ Bakar had asked on the porch, her atop the hanging swing, her slender frame against the railing, and he across the steps with Druso. The other boys scattered across the slats of wood, Vasco, Aresti, and Jurgi playing cards. Now and again Jurgi would point to Vasco and Aresti cheating, the two speaking Spanish in a whisper (and he, unable to understand).

‘House been up near sixty years I’d believe. Seen all the struggle and strife. And good times, too.’ Ayena sipped at her sweet tea and gave a nod. ‘Enough to spin a few stories.’

Almost as if reading a cue, the screen door screamed open to reveal Xuxa, arm pressed against the wooden frame, shadow cast long across the steps.

She’s queen of the afternoon court – a woman dressed in a dress tailored to look as expensive as any capitolites, stitched to hold to her curves, a pattern stolen from a set of flowery window curtains – hand on her hip, the other holding a fan to whip away the heat of an afternoon in the middle of July. Five boys sat, tucked along the edge of the front porch, hands in their laps, glasses of lemonade perspiring at their sides. Ayena gave a grin at the sight of her, and leaned back into the porch swing.

Great Aunt Xuxa could spin a tale that’d leave them rapt for an afternoon, hanging on her every word as she curled her lips and raised her voice. She would pause to exaggerate her face, sometimes reveling in the villains she’d create, other times casting her heart deep into a romance. Often swooning with a hand up to her forehead to play the foolish damsel, a role that would draw huffs from Ayena the longer stories drew on (she much preferred when the women didn’t need anyone to come and save them, but, she rarely told stories and much less for comedic effect).

They’d spent enough summers on that porch to dream about knights, men on boats crossing a difficult sea, pirates, spaceships, soldiers, and explorers that made it to the edge of the world. Bakar enjoyed the tales of war; Aresti and Druso the tales of magic and fantasy; Jurgi of worlds far away; and Vasco of space men who sailed across the stars.

But today, as dust scattered through the wind, and sweat dripped down from their brows, fiction fell way to truth.

Maybe she’d sensed the change in the wind that day. Or seen how the earth cracked like honeycombs out in the field. A part of her fevered nostalgic, the only cure a telling for the boys of what they’d needed to hear for some time.

The Izars took pains to warn their children early on all the cues they needed to follow in eleven. That they were to stick together, never traveling alone, especially the girls, but even more especially, the boys. Any peacekeeper that wanted a word with them was to be treated with respect. They’d leave the house just as good looking as they could, even to take to the fields. They’d learn to speak their language, first, and then they could start to unravel the words the rest of panem spoke.

When they questioned the rules that had them looking over their shoulders, their parents would motion to the fields and tell them we’ve got to work harder just to keep our heads above water. To be an Izar meant sidelong glances from the men on horses that stalked the rows of crops; it was to be honest and still be met with incredulous glances (are you sure? How do you know?).

But their history had been, until then, a matter of tales from a hazy spot of time before the dark days. The gentle reminder that some were equal, but others more equal than they were. Their skin the wrong color, and their language held the wrong refrain.

Still – they were here, playing cards, sipping lemonade, basking in a warm summer’s day that they didn’t have to shuck corn or tangle through the strawberry patch.

Xuxa stepped across the porch and pressed herself halfway across the railing so she could get a better view of the road.

‘You ever wonder how we ended up here?’ Xuxa asked. The boys looked from one another, and to Ayena. Their great aunt had a habit of the rhetorical, and none dared interrupt Xuxa, should she be ready to set off on one of her moods.

‘The Izars didn’t used to be the only family that was here, oh, ho, no,’ Xuxa cracked her fan and waved it in front of her face.

They craned closer like flowers toward the sun. She side stepped along the panels of the floorboards, her heels clacking as she turned. Another crack of her fan, and she glared back down at them.

***

February, Year 1

You used to believe in fairytales. Maybe that’s why you tell them now – because you don’t want anyone else to feel like they can’t have them. They deserve to have a chance at magic, to feel as though there isn’t something horrible binding their feet and hands.

That’s the hope of every generation. That even if our hands our bound, and our eyes are covered, our mouths gagged, that our children will struggle free, will cut the binds and run. You hope to live long enough to see that they can make it free, and not so long as to see the ropes be tied around their hands and feet just as yours had been.

But you know it’ll happen.

You know the world is cruel, that one generation to the next isn’t so much a span of decades but a heartbeat between. They’ll have the same twine to wrap them until they’re struggling to be free right next to you

(Oh what is that around your mouth, Vasco, a kerchief the same shade as mine?).

They spoiled the sunset, you know.

Uxue’s death saw to that.

We couldn’t look out at the world in front of us without thinking how much we’d sacrificed to be here. Even if she’d been the one dragged screaming from our house and paraded on screen like a scared animal led to slaughter, we were the ones left to face the after.

My mother didn’t want me to watch but by the time the third child had fallen, she was too struck to shoo me out of the room. The little television set crackling black and white, some dozen or more of us breathless at every turn of her face toward the camera.

Your bisabuela prayed over her rosary. She rocked back and forth on her rocker as though she were going to slice right through the floor. She can’t help but shake at the sight of Uxue being chased across that abandoned playground, or stadium – whatever they wanted to call it. But you can only watch as your sister finds the little boy, holds his hand, and keeps him safe for so long. Long enough that she sacrifices herself for him, taking on the ones from ten until at last – close enough to coming home, and then – she’s a vision of vacant eyes scrawled across crimson grass.

She doesn’t come home. As though they could erase her, that she’d meant nothing. As though we didn’t already have the candles burning. That we didn’t cover the windows and mirrors with black fabric. That we didn’t wear veils and set about making a marker for her in the field. You watched them ring the bell at the steeple above the barn. Ringing to make sure she would echo through the night and into morning.

You’re too young to understand that the pain in your heart isn’t from losing her, but what she’s left behind. It’s that you’ll go on for fifty more years and have to tell your nephews how she used to sing like a cherub in the fields so that the men would take off their hats to stare and listen. Or that in her wedding dress, she could ascend to another space, as though she might sprout wings and fly away then and there.

She killed a boy, and a girl – she had blood on her hands, that much you knew. But you excused it, selfish, wanting her to come home.

But they could not – not the ones that saw her as playing both sides. Ones that had been awakened to the thought that your family had escaped the worst of the troubles, never sending a man or woman to fight against the capitol. And still others for not swearing allegiance to the ones who ruled over you now.

It’s funny, listening to Adder spout off about them, and us, as though there were ever two choices. You didn’t know then, but now, so many years later? You can see through the bullshit of selling people on such a choice.

They all sought the same solution, a shift in power from those who had, to those who did not. An overthrow of something that had existed long before the districts scattered into existence. Was there ever a mention of anything alongside uniting the districts? Or was it war, and bloodshed to be replaced by a peace decided by the victors? Even the word sent a chill down your back, victor. What peace could ever come when the powerful sought to glorify a single voice, or message.

Uxue hadn’t forgotten her history. She could see through the likes of the rebels, even as she’d given her heart to one. You can’t win a war by promising power. Only if they’d promised freedom. Radical and complete freedom. But they were never interested in people like you and her being free. Only themselves, so they could teach the rest of us just how free we were allowed to be.

Maybe the only peace we’d ever earn was in death, when at last we couldn’t take any more from one another.

They painted words across the side of your house in black, calling you traitorous, and telling all of us we were better off dead.

They broke into the stable to scare off the stallions. Killed one out in the fields, a wound at its back, another through its undercarriage, and a final through the chest. The other was never found, chased off to who knew where.

They stopped letting your mother sell trinkets and treats at market. Made your father work until the sun had gone down, through the dark of the night until his fingers bled. And still your uncles were made to march through the fields until one of them collapsed and swore he couldn’t go another step, so they beat him until he got to his feet and left him bloodied when he couldn’t.

You were a child, but not a fool. You could see cruelty, and anger – directed at a scapegoat that was easy to hate. A symbol for those who should’ve known better. They’d forgotten to choose a side.

They forgot that to be a part of the great mandala, you must first erase every last piece of yourself. There was no future in a world of old traditions cradling and clinging to a piece of yesterday.

Winter came and you thought that all the hatred and harm stirred up would dissolve in the snow. Maybe a fresh fall of white would chill the men who liked to ride their horses across the fields at night, screaming and hollering as they did. Or that your father wouldn’t have to fish the charred model of a man out of a tree, hung by a noose, ever again.

You weren’t alone.

That much you all clung to. The Rodriguez and Torres families, the others that dotted Casco Viejo could at least stand shoulder to you. There had been difficult times, though never had you all felt the need to look so much over your shoulders, but still – they knew your hearts. You’d stay strong together, strong enough to weather this.

Winter crystallized their hearts, and a sea change came, as though Uxue’s little death gave them all the reason to hate.

Maybe they could never put a word to it before any of this, all the anger and the wailing, all the despair that curdled when the capitol drove the last men down.

You want to be able to forgive them, even after all these years, for what they’d decided to do. Hate couldn’t just live within someone; it’s bred and born and nurtured like a babe suckling at its mother. You have to feed it through and through, so that one day when it’s strong enough, you can turn it on whatever it is that you wish to break.

That’s what they do. You know it and see it. Because most of the time it’s right there, in the glint of their eye when they look at you. They listen to how you speak, how your hair falls, the way you say your name. That it’s different, their voice raising as though it were a question. This sort of stoked hatred still well fed after all these years but slumbering.

You kept inside the acreage between the families. You’d gone to their shops and you’d started up in a little school where your Aunt had agreed to teach. And the world grew smaller, but brighter. With warm hugs between families, and quiet voices greeting, as though it were a secret to say hello.

It came late February, a year on from the death of your sister, on a night after a fresh snow.

Ernesto Rodriguez was leading his cart across the town square at the center of the district when one of the wheels on his cart seized, cracking off, tipping the cart, and scaring the lead horse. It reared its legs and trampled one of the fair skinned women before galloping across both of her children, both scarcely five years old. The crowd that gathered to free them from underneath where the cart had overturned grew bigger and bigger, witnesses screaming how heartless Ernesto had been, and careless, and then – piecing together what a tragedy it was to take one life, and then two more, their anger hot and growing – that he had to pay.

Those days there was a rule of law here, but in a most fragile of states, even if they’d brought peacekeepers to make sure that none of the food went missing. But they couldn’t quell what started to bubble, and break, not when it had been building for so long.

This had been purposeful, this carelessness. He was from a part of the district that didn’t respect them or anything about how they were supposed to be. A set of folks who acted as though the world hadn’t changed. Ones that had gone on as though there hadn’t been a war – some of them friends with rebels, still others not choosing to run off and join. What did it serve, to call this an accident, when they could go on doing these sorts of things without ever having to suffer a consequence?

He needed to die to pay for what he’d done to the women and children.

To show that who he was, and how he lived, had no place in Eleven. Not when he ran off to the little spot on the map the rest of them had wished to forget, or worse, erase.

A few men had rattled Ernesto in the crowd when he tried to press past, swearing at him and spitting in his face. He was still in a state from the blood that’d sprayed across his front and his cart turning over. He staggered out of the square just as the crowd started to chatter that this was no ordinary accident. No accident that someone from there could do something so vile here.

Why did they let you live here at all? Why did they let them breed and build and grow, as though a weed settled deep into the ground of Eleven? That’s all they were good for, ruining the soil and stealing from what truly needed to grow. Better to go to the source, to rip them out, to make it so that none of this happened again. Let them find a way to live with us, or not at all.

You never saw what they did to Ernesto. Not when the men and women gathered outside his home, banging at his door, with torches and pitchforks and rope, all manner of things that you’d think he were some sort of creature towering a hundred-foot overhead. But the slight man answered the door to this crowd after ten minutes of chanting and jeering. A man with two children of his own, and a wife.

What happens when the damn breaks, and all the hate flows in one direction?

They never found all of his body, but then – you don’t know if you would’ve wanted to see it, not before years had taken away the flesh to leave bone and skull. At least then it could be stacked and boxed and put to rest. But you suppose the showcase of their hatred would at least remind those young enough what a vile thing all that festered was. Easy enough to talk about how dangerous it’d been; quite another to picture what was left after those you’d considered your own neighbors, men of flesh and blood, had done.

Words couldn’t stir the heart so much the sight of a pile of limbs and torso scattered across an empty field.

They looked at the houses of Casco Viejo, the farms, the shops. They saw the flags hanging. They saw the warm yellow lights in windows and the way all of it could have kept going, kept living, kept existing as though none of it depended on them.

Perhaps this was worst of all, a secret that the anger brought out in them, that you and the others didn’t need to exist at their whim or will. You could be just as strong, and powerful, without their attention. Their world knew no common thread, no way to settle among memory aside from their own. There was no power in their precious individualism. Stories of heroes and victors all faded to nothing but you – your family, your friends and neighbors – could live on, through one another.

If only you lived.

First there was the set of shops on the main street. Windows shattered easy enough. Rocks through glass, hands reaching through to unlock doors. Others shattering mirrors and cracking apart chairs. Your aunt’s dress shop torn to tatters, not more than a few months old. Fabrics tossed out the windows, hats scattered across the floor, gloves set alight. They poured gasoline across the front and set fire with matches.

A whole row went up in minutes. Flames crackled and spun, embers leaping up toward the sky. Smoke plumed and by morning, all that would be left were smoldering piles of white and grey ash.

The crowd already cheering moved onward, some scattering down the street toward another farmhouse, others breaking to get toward the edges, to flush out the families that lived in smaller shanties.

Now – you’d stop and ask about peacekeepers, about order, about keeping us safe. But this wasn’t a rebellion. This wasn’t as though they dared to call out the capitol or set fire to some barracks.

This was a group of men marching on little scrap of district that hadn’t meant much to anyone; it was a tilling of soil.

As far as the Mayor or anyone else saw, this was a renewal of long blighted land.

They broke through glass and charged through living rooms. They found families at the dinner table, and others setting children to bed. They looked at them and through all of it could not see people. You understand? They couldn’t see the same blood that pounded through their veins. They couldn’t hear the way they screamed out and begged them to leave, the way their mothers wept and their fathers cried. They’d seen it all on television before.

They’d seen their sons off to war. They’d seen their crops taken, they’d been scorned and lost, they’d felt as though there was someone, anyone to blame for why they had nothing to show – why they hurt, who they’d become – and so it’d been your people. It’d been here, on this edge of the map, along the river.

It was as though the anger of all those years at the bottom had welled up inside of them and they had found someone to blame for all of it. Never mind our world had always been a fraction of their own.

You can beg and plead that all of it never come true, but they’d made up their minds in the instant that we did not deserve the same freedom.

You remember how it’d been said that whatever we spoke could not exist, not when they couldn’t understand it. They didn’t want to understand you, when it would mean they had to see all that had been taken from them, and who they were, wasn’t because of you. Or that their own pathetic grasp at power meant only as much as keeping someone else down.

How could you exist without them? How could they see the streets and the homes, the farms with flags of long ago, and not be shocked that any of it could exist without their doing? It couldn’t be fair that you had an ounce of all this. Not unless they granted you the right, first.

This was the way of the world.

You heard they chased the Torres children, a girl of fourteen, and a boy of twelve, out into the fields. Both of them were barefoot, but ran even as cold as their heels felt. They’d found a rain duct to hide in together to wait out morning. You remember she told you she could hear the fire crackling in the distance. That it wasn’t the smoke that had her crying into her brother’s shoulder, but the sound of all the cheering, and hollering.

Still others were wrapped up and rope and dragged behind horses, men struggling, ripped away from their families and jeered as though they were animals, bodies scraping bloodied across the gravel road.

Some fought the crowds, as one will try to do – but there were so many of them, too many.

There was no stopping the blaze of their hatred, not when they’d decided what they wanted more than anything was to destroy what we had built. For breaking and killing us was one thing, but there was a satisfaction in annihilating a history they could only ever dream of having.

Some souls took off for the hills, running as though with one more step they might take flight.

Where did they run, if they never came back?

Your father had heard the bells when they’d started in on the shops. He’d seen the smoke and the flames at a distance, which gave you time. Enough to wrap your grandmother in her shawls, and your mother to pack all the little things she could save. A photo of Uxue, her rings, a book written years before the dark days. Your father and uncles took out their coats and their rakes and stood on the porch to watch the drive.

We ran to the hills, to the forest that dotted the river. Oaks with knotted limbs cast long shadows as you staggered through the darkness. Yet you knew your steps – this a place where you and Uxue had played, your mother, and her mother too – hands together, a memory of a memory. You remember your grandmother whispering, and your mother hoisting you up the tree, your cousin Gero climbing up, too. Your hands cold against the bark of the tree as you pressed higher, your heart beating through your ears.

They found a way up a set of trees and climbed high as they could.

When you broke free of the scatter of limbs, you could see all of it.

The great red and orange light that had been Casco Viejo roaring across the horizon.

***

July, Year 54

They were quiet for a while when she finished.

No one dared to speak, or even lock eyes with Xuxa.

‘Why did you tell us the story, Xuxa?’ Vasco’s voice was the first to break the silence.

Like all boys their age so often do, they did their best to hide how much it had hit each of them.

Had they never taken it so seriously? Did they not know, when folks made sidelong glances in the market, it spanned decades, generations, for apparent sins that had never been done? Or that they had no way of mending what had happened? That the crumbling ruins of the old homestead were a constant reminder of what they’d lost, never to be regained?

“Because you’re still here,” Xuxa whispered back. She crouched closer, hands on her knees, hair scattering in front of her face. “Because those flames ripped through what had been, and took away everything we had ever known. They scattered so many from these lands that we were left all alone. They were too scared to come back, and we – we had nothing.”

‘But why would you stay?’ Bakar was shaking his head.

“And where would we have gone? To the edge of the district? Travel to another space, to leave behind all that we knew?” Xuxa scoffed.

‘Wouldn’t you want to give yourself a chance somewhere else?’ Vasco wondered.

“Our hearts were in that soil. Our blood. The ash of what was taken from us, too.” Xuxa’s voice was a whisper, her hand holding the fan lowered to her side. “We thought, we’ll never make it anywhere. It’s true. We thought about giving up what we’d known, giving up. It would have been easier.”

‘Except that’s never been who you are,’ Ayena spoke from her spot on the porch swing, matter-of-factly. ‘You don’t give up who you are if you want to be free. Or if you want to feel alive.’

“They did it for me,” Xuxa said. “To put me here, to give me a chance. To hold onto what had always made them who they were, because it gave us something to believe in. Something that was stronger than all of that hate would ever be.”

She wouldn’t know if it struck a chord with them. All the talk of terrible history didn’t hit as hard for those that’d never been through it themselves. They’d never had it so hard as she had, growing up in a house with tin walls and dirt floors. Having to keep from being out after dark or going through the wrong part of town. That she had to whisper when she spoke their language. Other families they’d known would see them in the street and pretend as though they’d never known one another.

All of it felt so far away then, sitting on the porch with her nephews who knew what it meant to go hungry, but who’d never seen that fire across the horizon.

But maybe that was half the point.

---

¹Events loosely based on the Rosewood, Florida, massacre, an attrocity committed in the 1920s