phoenix rising {nekane + vasco}

Vasco Izar

Sunrise this morning like I’d never seen.

I was out on the porch swing I put in after the eighty-second, the one that creaks too loud (and that Emma worried I’d fall right out of), watching the sun come up over the fields. All those pretty shades painted across the sky like watercolor. Violet fading into fuchsia, then burning magenta piercing clouds that gave way to tangerine. I must’ve looked like old Gero those last few years he was with us, patched quilt across my lap, coffee cup in my hands to keep them warm. Cane tucked alongside the stone front of the house, between the door and the swing.

A far cry from the old photos hanging along the wall inside on the stair. One in the porcelain frame of me and Emma not a year or two past eighteen, still fresh faced. Aresti took that photo of us up against the tiles of an empty silo. Emma was laughing at something I’d said, and me looking at her with a grin, whiskers on my cheeks when I tried to grow a beard. We still had a glow about us, eyes that hadn’t dimmed with circles underneath, or been etched with all the depth years bring. Just a pair of kids who’d fallen in love, without the weight of grief to tie them down.

Time’s slipped away from us now.

Silver hairs have started to peek out at my temples and pop up here and there across my beard. Stiff legs at morning and aching joints by bedtime, feels like I’m falling apart when I try lifting my daughter Yani up off the ground. Makes me remember when Gero would say, his voice all soft and warm, where did the time go, mijo?

We collected all those memories, photos for the wall and scrapbooks, too. Markings on the kitchen doorframe with names and ages (Emmanuel, 4; Sofía, 9; Yani, 3; Raquel, 11). Second or third-hand jackets that’d been restuffed with goosedown, stitched up and darned to keep us warm in the winter still hanging in the hall closet. Stacks of bills on the kitchen counter that went paid with a mayor’s salary, past due notices becoming a stranger to us these past four years.

There’s something to the morning, then, when the world’s quiet hasn’t been broken. A dark sky ready to burst into color, with clouds to light up, alight from the sun. Another chance to hold Yani’s hand and walk to market or play cards with Druso. To fall asleep beside Emma, her head against my chest and arms across me.

I guess it’s what makes the sunrise so appealing.

We look out at that sky and could forget about all those days that disappear behind us.

I took to praying after the eighty-first. Head bowed and hands together, eyes closed and me a million miles away. It’s better in the stillness of daybreak. A time when I can be patient with myself, when no one asks a thing of me, or expects an answer. When I can let my thoughts wander down the road of grief a little while and pay my respects. They tell me to stay awhile and I do, not wanting to be rude. After all, most of what’s been done seems on my account, at least, nowadays.

By the time I break back to the porch, birds are calling and the sky’s a deep blue.

That morning I wiped my eyes and steadied myself along the side of the house. Pressure was low in the well and we could’ve used some more firewood for the wood burning stove, just in case spring brought a cold snap. Yani’d be up soon, too, stomping around and getting her nose into this and that.

Out the window of the kitchen there’s a figure tending the flowers. I pour another cup of coffee and watch her steady in the dirt, folding through the clay and topsoil.

Nekane comes through as clouds across the sky. Here and there, calm and steady, but sometimes a storm. She’s almost as old as Benat would’ve been. A year or two older than Sampson.

There’s a half-second when it hits at the back of my mind, the sight of her in darkness. Of the hours I’d spent pleading, begging, for mercy. Fleeting as it was, the cold of it lingers along the length of my forearms and crackles in my chest.

I filled up a glass with water and drop in an ice cube. She was too busy, or I too unassuming for her to move from her work on the ground when I set the glass beside her.

I wondered as she looked if she could see the dark circles under my eyes, or the way I balled my hands into fists at my sides to keep them from shaking.

“There’ll be more daffodils,” I crouched down on one knee, and winced, shifting from my right to left. “You just have to keep tending them. It’s a shame to lose some, but I’ve seen it before. Figure it comes with these seasons. Soil’s not what it used to be, I’m afraid.”

“But at least we have roses, eh?” A season’s poor weather and poor soil couldn’t keep them from blooming.

“It’s good to see you out here Nekane. I hope you know,” I shifted back to cross my legs and get comfortable in the dirt. I plucked a few rocks out of the ground and avoided looking back at her. I couldn’t, not today. I was too tired to force a smile. “I’m grateful for you. I’ve felt a little low lately and seeing you this morning has made my day.”

“You hungry?” I chose an easy question. Let me build up my strength, first.

Vasco Izar

It’s as though we’ve fallen into the briar patch, thorns in our skin, and we’re here, tangled next to one another, saying, (estoy bien) back and forth while the blood empties from us, smiles and all. Those thorns of grief pierce our flesh and we’re taught to think, this trauma’s going to purify us. But trauma’s what killed those daffodils. It’s the cold snap on a spring morning that leaves the tomatoes rotted. The crows nipping at corn. The lightning storm that strikes a silo and makes a mockery of harvest.

Maybe I should’ve prayed harder that morning. Make a fool wise, I’d ask, make my heart whole. Teach me what could make us better people. I could have used an answer.

But all I found was the wind drifting in from the east, and a robin’s call from the forest on the hill.

‘We just gotta show them we care.’

It started as a quiver in my cheeks, and then a swallow to bear down an upswell that was bound to bring out a bout of tears. Not for my niece and nephew that have fallen (I’d cry enough when their bodies came back to us, handkerchief over my mouth and eyes). A hopeful glimmer poked through the dust and dirt, sprigging upward, even as her words came out soft and unsteady.

I didn’t think they ever knew how proud they made me, time and again.

It would’ve been easy to get buried in the dirt after all the funerals we’d seen. Sink six feet down so you were far enough to not feel anything anymore. To take that righteous anger and burn away to nothing. Sampson bought into it, exploded his rage and left ash and dust as his legacy. Tempting, when justice means losing a cousin, a brother, your daughter – wasn’t it?

When the smoke had cleared, though, there sat the rest of us to pick up the pieces. Boys like Sampson saw us as expendable, much like the capitol, too. All for a greater good, one that left his uncle concussed and his cousin rotting in the darkness of a basement. Better not to feel, just as he’d been taught, or admit that real solutions took time. His outburst a tantrum that left the rest of us for dead.

I’d never found the same sort of strength wielding my anger. Maybe in a world that so idolized rugged loneliness, we’d forgotten how our kindness kept us strong. That in living for another person, I wasn’t taking a piece of myself apart. I was bringing together, and lifting up, the people that could’ve needed it most. That was what I tucked into my heart, what I returned to, when I saw my nephew’s chest run through, or my niece torn to pieces.

‘I’m just grateful for something to keep me busy.’

We stay put on the ground, her refusing my offer to go inside and take a rest. She had an energy that reminded me of Sampson’s. A need to burn through it or go to pieces.

I’d be more careful with this one, though.

I crouched closer, hands still shaking. I wrapped them around a set of weeds and gave a heave. Tremors had been coming and going since my sickness after the eighty-first. I brought a shaky hand across my brow, smudging some dirt as I wiped away sweat. Nekane never needed a reason to come to our porch, or keep the garden. But that she’d found a better purpose, however small, was all the reason to tend to it. Life was more a steady set of hands tilling soil, watering the roots, and plucking away weeds than some lightning strike or grand design.

‘How are you holding up?’ Nekane’s voice barely carries out over the rustle of my hands through dirt.

I focused on an unruly nub of a weed with my thumb and index finger. I dug my nails through the soft clay and pulled, only to slip, breaking a piece off into my palm. I steadied again, plucking at the root.

‘You don’t have to, but if you want talk... I’m here. I’ll always be here.’

“Gracias, mija,” I answered, just above a whisper.

Do I tell her that I felt their deaths were my fault? That I could’ve done something about Sampson two years ago, to stop him from tearing up the square, from Nekane being dragged and taken by peacekeepers, from a reaping bowl having names full of Izars? That every line seemed to connect back to me, seated in the mayor’s chair?

If I were another man, I’d have told her I was fine. I’d look at her and think, why burden her, look at how frail she is, she couldn’t bear it. But I’m not like other men and she, not like other women.

She’s an Izar, and that meant a mettle that burned through fire and flames.

I stopped pulling at the weed to bring my hand across the front of my overalls and wipe them down.

I found it harder to recognize myself these days.

No matter the smile I tried to keep, the way my hands twist across beads as I prayed on the porch, walking to Yani to market, cooking tostadas for Marisol, these things that are etched through me that routine couldn’t begin to explain, that man trudging along looked less like me than yesterday.

"Sometimes I think about how nice it would’ve been to have stayed asleep,” I found my voice as all Izars did, in honesty, “When I was sick, and dreaming. I saw Raquel, you know, and I thought, oh my god, if I could just be with her forever, entiendes? And sometimes I wake up and I think, oh, you could’ve been with her, and not here. Where it was so warm, and bright, and,”

I needed to breathe; the honesty too much too fast for me.

“And I think about how selfish that is, to wish something like that with all that I have but it’s… heavy,” I shook my head. “But it’s only for a little while. I don’t want to worry you.”

There are good days and bad days, even if the good ones seemed harder to come by.