shade of your story press into the dough [Geebs]

"It's early for this," Marisol says as a cool but not yet crisp autumn breeze drifts from the open front door to the kitchen window. "My mother always made tamales as holiday food—not Ratmas, but that time of year. Navidad. Christmas." She glances at Kassandra, idly curious whether either name sparks recognition, though she doubts it. Unless their families celebrate it themselves, young people have little reason these days to know about Christmas—although they might recognize at least the superficial trappings of it. Most of them are symbols of winter more than anything else, and though it still feels odd once in a while to see things from her earliest memories in another context, the overlap feels natural enough when Marisol thinks about it; she remembers even finding it comforting, that first winter in Eleven when her family lived under Peacekeeper scrutiny and suddenly no longer knew enough of their neighbors to gather a procession for las posadas, to be able to light candles and hang evergreen boughs around the house without drawing attention from dangerous places. Perhaps someone somewhere makes shrimp tamales for Ratmas, now. "Pero tener una visitante siempre es una ocasión especial." She hums a little as she eyes the oil pouring into the bowl in front of her. "Además, cada día es un buen día para comer tamales y para comerlos, tenemos que hacerlos."

Fourteen is not the hardest age at which to begin learning a language, but it's not the easiest, either. Back when they were barely older than Kassandra, Marisol and one of the other girls shucking corn after the harvest traded phrases in Spanish and Vietnamese—half to pass the monotonous hours with the joy of sharing something they loved, half to soothe their unspoken but mutually understood need to know that the languages they once heard throughout their neighborhoods and on the radio still survived beyond their own homes. At times those not-quite-lessons had been as frustrating as fun, or sometimes both simultaneously: Giang hiding a laugh behind a hand at Marisol's first attempt to wrap her mind around the idea of tones, Marisol grinning ruefully when Giang asked how she made pero sound different from perro and she realized she had never had to think about it. What babies pick up without so much as thinking about it, anyone else has to work for. Kassandra asked to learn, though, and wanting to learn is the most important part—more so than young ears, and in some ways even more so than having a teacher, though she has one as long as and to whatever degree she wants one.

She always would have—"Claro que sí, mija," Marisol said when Kassandra asked, meaning every word. "Of course." The whole of District Eleven isn't family in the way her children and their children are, but sharing a home makes family of another sort; there are few people Marisol would turn away from her house, least of all children. And she likes Kassandra, at least insofar as she knows her—filtered and tailored Games footage is never airtight evidence of anything, but Kassandra's stubborn core is evident in person too. Marisol appreciates that, as well as how she reaches through cards to the parts of the world beyond what humans see and touch, however different her way of considering them is from Marisol's. But if there had been any question in the matter, it would have been settled by the way she asked. Or rather, perhaps, by the way she carries herself; many children in Panem look a little haunted, a little hardened, but fewer fourteen-year-olds will declare we live for death.

If life as a Cortes and an Izar has taught her one thing, then it has taught her that her mother was right—para la suerte y la muerte, no hay escape—but people still hold on to each other and for each other, and for grand dreams but also for cool drinks under a warm sun and all the other tiny, mundane moments that make any given day more than something to survive. What exactly Kassandra is looking for here, Marisol isn't sure, but at the very least she hopes she can offer her a few of those moments.

Satisfied with the small pool of oil of oil, Marisol taps the top of the bottle against the rim of the bowl as she tilts it back upright, then slides the bowl of red masa toward Kassandra. "Knead this while I start the rice, la mano—" she raises and wiggles one hand for clarification— "es joven." With her other hand she gently shakes off the droplets left over from rinsing the cilantro. "Add a little broth if it feels too dry, like..." She rubs the fingertips of her still-raised hand together, imagining the grainy texture of underhydrated dough. "Como arena mojada—ah." With a shrug and a wave, she picks up a knife to begin slicing the cilantro. "You'll know."



title is from "Eating the Earth" by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, which was published in her collection Water & Salt and can also be read here (it's the second poem down).

when I started outlining this I decided to go with tamales for the cooking part because I fairly recently was taught how to make them, and then I remembered how much of that experience was my friend's grandmother periodically adding [water|cumin|etc] to the masa with no explanation while said friend and I shrugged at each other because asking was definitely going to get another "it didn't [feel|look|smell] right." (this is also how my dad teaches cooking, so such is being a parent who cooks but doesn't use recipes, I guess. :soy:)