YaniMarie Izar, District 11 {done}

He kept sinking.

Trudging along the narrow row of space between strawberry bushes, his boots kept pressing into the earth fresh from a summer thunderstorm. His picker-cart got stuck each time its little wheels caught another rock or upturned root. He was forced to give another shove to press forward, though by mid-day he’d fallen so far behind the rest of the men and women that lined the fields that their shapes blurred like phantoms into the horizon. He was left with the hum of cicadas and the heat of an August sun overhead.

His tawny beige skin dripped with sweat, down from his temples and along the edges of his shoulders, further down the small of his back. All his flesh exposed to the heat, having stripped off the thin piece of cotton he’d worn that morning, now wedged between his jeans and hip and dangling off at his left side. Vasco cast a small shadow across the strawberry bushes, his lean and wiry form spoke to years out in these fields, day after day of collecting, planting, and turning them over again and again.

Vasco felt a tightness gather in his chest as he leaned to collect another set of strawberries but he pushed through, fingers trailing over the thick, red treasures tossed freely into the buckets on his cart. There’d been years in his youth where they dared to pocket them, and sneak the pieces back home, his siblings all emptying their winnings across the table so that their mother could make a pie or boil them all down into jam. He remembered when they were teenagers, some twenty years since, when he’d drop one on the ground into the dirt and mud, and scoop the thing up between handfuls of dirt, no longer wanted as part of the pile he’d collected.

He wondered if they escaped their persecution because of their cleverness, or that those who rode on horseback had given way to a different generation. Those men dressed in white that followed high above, baton at their ready and whip behind them. There’d been an unwritten rule that they wouldn’t draw a weapon unless a scuffle had broken out. The gray at their temples had chipped away at the hardness in their hearts. And while they were still men who saw him as no better than a dog, they still knew his name. Knew that his family spoke an old language, celebrated the traditions of what’d been lost, and for all their differences it couldn’t change the work they did.

A dangerous peace, as his father liked to remind him. These same men had once been boys, had worshipped at the altar of power and the desire to rise through the ranks above one another like dogs biting each other’s backs. Cruelty had been given a new skin, had faded because they needn’t show their true devotion. Which didn’t mean that it didn’t linger at their fingers or couldn’t be called back in an instant, when, a young man stepped out of line and uttered something profane, they’d beat him in front of all the rest. Or they’d put him in chains and drag him along the edge of the field with a bell to remind boys like Vasco the consequence of having his own voice.

Perhaps he’d been too comfortable for the reason he’d not asked for too much from these fields.

He’d been born to a family that cradled one another and kept out the darkness through old tales lighting a way far and away from the usual path. They could whisper in a language the others couldn’t understand, setting themselves apart but linking them to a history far more beautiful than Panem could ever offer. Centuries worth of a people whose hearts spoke more of humility and compassion toward one another than those that’d fallen back into themselves.

He’d always grown up thinking we and not me, had offered as much as he could give because there’d been no reason for the world to harden his heart even if he’d had less. He’d just as gladly offer his cousin a hand to move a broken cart out of the road or spend an afternoon pulling a tree stump out of the earth if it meant they could rest a bit easier.

And that was the beauty of the Izars, that they could look around and see the loveliness of the hills, the gorgeous river in its bends and curves, the warm earth between their toes and gentle sun shining overhead, and know that none of it was theirs to claim for eternity. Rather – that they could care for the trees as they shot up toward the sky and pluck their fruit, could till soil and fish across a stream but all these things would be here long after they’d come and gone. They were pieces of a great mandala, colors and shapes pieced together with a history as rich as what refracted across the river itself. No one person’s worth could measure more than the sum before him.

‘You aren’t keeping up.’ Behind him, he heard the grumble of one of the overseers in white. Vasco never knew their names anymore – they never bothered to stop over to the shade of the trees where the rest of them would spend lunch outside of the sun – they were men on a mission, disappointed they had winded up in the dirt of district eleven and not within the confines of the upper districts. Places where air conditioning kept them cool during the summer and electric heat that thundered during the winter. ‘There a problem here?’

Vasco shook his head no and shoved his cart forward. He pressed along the mud and struggled to pull a few more strawberries from the row at his side.

“No, sir,” He swallowed, parched in the heat of the sun.

‘Fucking speed it up. You’re half hour behind the rest of them. Unless you want me to drag you back to them.’ He spat the words out toward Vasco. He didn’t bother to look at the man on his horse, didn’t want to see the way he had one hand at his side, itching to use the baton still in his holster. One wrong word, one syllable uttered in a disagreeable tone and he’d let out all the rage against Vasco that’d built up in the heat of the summer.

But Vasco ambled along, pushed harder against the dirt and swallowed down whatever pride he could’ve mustered. He swallowed down this poison and felt the heat hit his throat. He could taste the week prior, when his daughter Raquel had been stabbed to death across a television screen. The tight squeeze within his throat of her screams, of the same child he’d held in his arms and whispered te quiero, who’d been fussy her whole life through. But one that could’ve been great as any that’d walked these fields. One who’s shadow cast long over him, who’d run with such ferocity she’d kicked up dust to cover all the doubt and shame.

He had to keep swallowing, breathing in the heat and dust of the field to push through the heaviness that descended again. It came it waves, all of a sudden like a tidal change, he along a shore unprepared for the strength and height. He’d be swept out once again, embrace the way it carried him toward the center of its ocean, and pray that somehow, he could keep kicking above the water.

She would’ve wanted him to keep the faith, he’d tell himself as he crouched plucking one more strawberry, ignoring whether it was sweat or tears streaming down his face, then.

Sorrow and sadness were party to grief, and one only hoped to survive their stay.

At least, he’d come to believe, no matter how hard it had become.

In the quiet of the shade on the hill, he listened to his brothers tease one another about how old they’d gotten, how everything ached, how the little ones were not so little anymore. They skipped over Vasco, then, let him listen to their laughter, asked him if he needed a drink of water, why he hadn’t touched the sandwiches they’d made for him. Emma was quiet, too, kneeling on the same patched blanket at his side. She said little, too, but before lunch had finished, drew her hand in his. She leaned her head against his shoulder and he felt the heaviness still, the depth so endless and yet –

Here he was warm, lighter, and while the pain could collect in his throat and he still wasn’t sure that he would crumble tomorrow, there was love.

He would swear on his heart, eyes closed, he could picture all of them together, forever and always, even if more of them disappeared – to age or taken wrongfully – they had this, they had one another.

And his wife, her touch so soft, he leaned his head against hers and could feel the smile return to his face. He would stay alongside the same woman who’d taught him that they were as powerful as the bond between him. That love, his heart, could mend even the most broken of things. Which sounded laughable, in a space where the world tore them asunder each and every chance. But how strong could it be, if he could still share a piece of himself with her? If they could teach that this gentleness was not undone by selfishness, that truth lay not in strength, but their capacity to carry one another?

Afternoon gave way to evening, to the dim light of their kitchen, to pinto beans in the pot, mixed with ham and onion, white rice and plates that spread across four places – Vasco, Emma, Emmanuel, and Sofia – enough to fill their bellies and find strength in the day. The children toddled to bed, faces washed, hair and teeth brushed, and cries for a story, one that Vasco managed even if it took all the energy from head to toe. Some simple distraction about boys and girls flying to the moon and starting life on the cool, rocky soil far away.

He closed the door to their room and stripped off his pants, fumbling his feet out so that he nearly fell over. He left them at the edge of the bed, because he always discarded his clothes as though he could pick them up later, that later the end of a long week and in a pile at the door. Emma sat reading under the light above their bed, deep again in a pulp world – one whose shadows he wondered over, but never picked up himself – turning pages without flourish.

He lay beside her, flat on his stomach, head swimming in the pillow in front of him. He lay there, head turned to watch the frame of her face in the light. Her shoulders hunched forward as he studied the book in her hands, unaware of his gaze. She was her own person, used to his fawning and settled in her own rhythm. Which was why he kept thinking back to the touch of her hand in his, the choice she’d made to acknowledge what both of them were feeling, that they could in that moment understand the ache without succumbing to whatever sought to break them.

“Mi vida…” He whispered out with a grin, her unmoving as he sat up in bed, pressing closer to her, “I wanted you to know, I – this afternoon, was harder than most. I think you know, I think all of them do. I don’t know,” The words swam through him, as though he couldn’t chart the right course. But he could see her, see how Emma had put down her book on the little wobbly nightstand beside their bed to listen to what he was saying. He took her hand in his, lifted it to his lips and gave a kiss before putting his hand over it. “You mean everything to me.”

His whisper came out as a sigh and he turned to face Emma. The quiet between them gave way to a kiss, one on her cheek from him, and another at her neck, until they came to understand that they were two and one.

They were tired of sunsets, of worlds that darkened from gray to black. Tired of how their Emmanuel slumped his shoulders and Sofia’s voice had gone soft, edges dulled. Awakened from some sort of sleepwalk the moment her hand had touched his, that they were here together, just as they’d been twenty years prior, that as much as they lost, they’d far more to gain together. Which wasn’t to say they’d lost a piece of each of their hearts; simply that the only way to mend was to hold one another, to be the sort of people who didn’t turn inward at what the world had done but see that there were so many just the same.

Sunrise came with arms linked and legs coiled, sweat under sheets even as a chill whistled through the windows.

Somehow the beginning of a new day in orange and red across the same fields from their youth felt as though they were seeing it for the first time.

elegant

She waited at the edge of the kitchen, her hands wrapped around the corner of the doorframe and head pressed against the hardwood.

Night had come more swiftly these past few months, with each long day of summer swallowing the reddening sky with purple and black. They’d marched back from the fields, one foot in front of the other with forced conviction.

-

She’d say it was one of her earliest memories, her sitting on top of her father’s shoulder’s, carried out from a day’s work back toward home. They walked along the long rows of whatever had been planted – she could close her eyes then and tell you it’d been lettuce or tomatillo – so tired that the greatest sound was their boots crunching against the earth. She’d worn a floppy hat to cover her head and block out the sun, her skin soaked warm and fine in the heat. Their clothes were always drench in sweat, so much that most of the men stripped off their shirts and the women tied up theirs to expose their stomachs to the afternoon air.

Silence held like a knife overhead.

She was too young to do much better than idle along with her father or mother in the fields, but she did her best not to make trouble. Men on horseback came stomping along now and again, and she had seen what happened to those that misbehaved. A boy not more than six had carried on, running up and down the rows, grabbing handfuls of whatever he could, chewing it up and spitting it out, all within view of one of the white men, as she called the peacekeepers in their glowing uniforms that reflected back the sun. He’d clicked his tongue and tapped his heels against the sides of his horse, and before the boy’s mother could grab his wrist to settle him from the youthful thrill, the man on his horse had charged.

He’d struck the boy on the shoulder with his baton. She would always remember the sound of the crack when he’d connected with the boy’s flesh and bone. It sang out over the earth and raised up dust from beneath their feet. He’d gone down wailing, suddenly remorseful, startled and dazed and broken.

So she was a good little girl, all of two and a half, one that would not raise her voice or carry on. Because boys and girls that spoke out of turn, who carried on in these fields, they were met with a crack – from the men who could do whatever they wanted with their bodies, because that was the way of the world.

But their silence then was different. They were heavy from more than the heat or threat that one of these men could shatter their collar bone in three places.

Gabriel had been taken from them at the start of summer.

He was the third in almost as many years, another child that had been doomed to repeat what her sister, Salome, and Benat had all gone through.

All of it had been a dance she didn’t know the steps to.

First, they marched in rows along the square, her hand in her mother’s, clenched tight and afraid that if she let go, she’d never see her again. That morning she’d heard her father whispering bathroom prayers up through the tiles and down the drains as though anyone would listen.

Her mother had brushed her hair and tied the fussy black curls in bows. She’d starched and pressed her one and only sundress, and wonder of wonders, Yani had been gifted a pair of gently used shoes from Romana for this occasion. They’d eaten deep fried tortilla, her father taking special care in the pain as he always did before setting it down atop the table – covered in egg and cheese, with bits of onion and parsley. Emmanuel and Sofia barely touched what he’d put down, but Yani had taken whole handful and gobbled it down, reminding them that queso was yum, and giggled when Emma had tried to wipe the mess from her face.

They’d set out not long after sunrise, which hadn’t been so much of a problem since they always woke before sunrise. The hum of energy had been enough that she’d taken to wondering of the commotion and what they were hoping to celebrate. Emma had warned her that today would be a hard day, but that she would be fine, so long as she held tight. And Emma’s hand was warm, and smelled of lavender and fresh air as they walked along the cool of the morning. She’d always marvel at her mother, just a hair shorter than her father, with all the stolid calm that so many of the others that crossed the threshold of their home lacked.

She was – is – like the trees that grew on the hill by the river, reaching up toward the sky but always firmly planted in the earth.

It was only when the hours of walking had passed, and they arrived in the growing throngs of people did Yani begin to feel a tickle in her stomach.

Her grip grew tighter on her mother’s hand as they stepped forward in the long lines of people, some whispering, others letting out hisses and whistles, some laughing so as not to cry, and still others staring off at the sky as though someone might scoop them up right then and there. Every passing moment felt as though they were digging deeper down into the earth under her feet, ready to be buried by the time that it took to get to the front of the line. The men and women that chattered out at them, that called names and looked at them as though they were not anything, through them toward the emptiness that was to remain just as soon as they’d gone. Their names held no weight but the air around them; they were fingerprints in a big book, only mattering when they did not exist, when they failed to produce themselves for the book.

“Te quiero, Yani,” Sofia had kissed Yani’s forehead and wrapped her arms around her little body. Yani felt lost in the strength of the hug, the fear that ached between them, the pressure that was unexplained, that only she had to go for a little while, out toward the long lines of other girls, all wishing themselves birds so that they could fly out of this place, but instead kept chained down and wingless. Yani had started crying before she knew what was happening, before Emmanuel had told her he loved her very much, and that that night he would tell her his favorite story – the boy who landed among the stars, shadow puppet theater about a young man who took a balloon up through the clouds and up to the stars – which was not enough to stop her sniffling but enough so that she did not begin to wail.

Her mother had lifted her up in her arms to bounce her along her shoulders, to whisper for her to cálmate, ever more imploring the closer they got to the front of the line. And when she’d had her thumb dipped in black ink and pressed onto a page, she’d only the remnants of tears to share. If her mother could be brave, if her sister and brother, her cousins, her father and all his brothers could stand in these rows then she could be brave, too.

All the flashes of lights and the screen projecting faces of children she’d never heard of were presented in a dizzying mess of colors and sound. Her mother kneeled to hold both of her hands, and to whisper – hey, why don’t we play a game, why don’t we think about the trees on the hill, and the rocks on the shore, the way we can swim together, that we’ll do that tomorrow, and maybe even see a fish – so that it was only her, that the crackle of a microphone was nothing to either of them.

Except at the sound of Gabriel Izar’s name being read, when her mother had let out a soft hush of air and turned to look anywhere but the stage.

He’d taught Yani how to roll dice. A tall and gawkish boy that bounced her on his knee and smelled like wood ash, he’d been kind, with a heart that opened for her as the sun greets the day. Had they any more summers with him, she might’ve learned to play cards, or how to gamble Uncle Elias out of his pocket money.

But he was going away and would not return –

They didn’t say so, didn’t say much of anything when they’d gone back home that night. The hours long walk dotted with more whispers and heavy eyes that kept staring ahead, searching. She’d wanted to help them look for whatever it was they seemed to be trying to find, but no one said a word as to what it was, and so she was left to drift among the silence.

Yani spent her afternoons on the porch with her paper dolls, idling in the summer breeze. Her father sat with her, sanding away at the wood at their feet, a man lost to the grind of sandpaper. He would strip off his shirt and cough at the sawdust that would collect, sometimes looking back at Yani as she dreamed out another adventure for her dolls.

“Quién es esa?” He asked on the third afternoon. She’d been skipping back and forth in the dirt in front of the porch with a doll in each hand. She explained that they were magic, flying up and away toward the stars, far and away from the earth.

He’d taken one of the smudged dolls sitting atop the grass and held it in his hands. She kept spinning around, now and again chittering out that they were going off to another part of the sky. He smiled, and moved close to her, his doll waving in the wind next to hers.

They spent the week traveling through the galaxy, to fabulous moons and off to stars that growled red or shivered blue.

Gabriel’s death put an end to their afternoons on the porch. They’d gotten word from Emmanuel, who’d wandered out to Vasco with tears in his eyes. His father had set down his doll and gone through the screen door and left Yani quite alone.

She found that they left her alone when confronted with all that she could not understand; loneliness never stayed with her long, for as soon as it had begun, she would not be left alone again, cradled close to her mother or father, or holding hands with her brother or sister. She felt like a paper doll finding her own story, told through all of their points of view. She just observed what passed, as though perhaps one day she could tell her own story.

-

Tía Abuela Xuxa had been the one to greet them that night, some months on after Gabriel’s death.

She spent most of her time in the old brick mansion an hour north of them. There was to be no mistaking this for some grand luxury, of course – the crumbling piece of property had confined Xuxa and her partner Ayena to a set of rooms in the main house. The rest had splitting beams and broken windows, open ceilings and pot holed floors.

She’d gotten into another argument with Bakar about his needing to take up the state of the district with the council, and perhaps the mayor, given all the family had been put through.

Over dinner, she’d harangued Vasco and Emma that none of the boys – she called Vasco and his brothers boys, despite each of them approaching or past forty – listened to her.

“And yet I’m the only one that remembers what any of this place looked like before they set their troops down and walled up the borders…” She’d sat at the edge of the table, a wiry, spectacled woman with her hair pulled back in a long braid and in a dress that placed her heart closer to an age much younger than eighty-six years.

“You were what, six?” Vasco had been nodding along but couldn’t help but remind Xuxa that anything she could’ve known was an approximation of the truth. But then, most of what she believed came as a dream rather than reality.

“And we let them, come in, take what they need, and we bow our heads and beg in prayer for something new,” Xuxa looked as though she wanted to spit on the floor, but instead turned to drill her painted nails across the tabletop. “Twenty years ago, you and them all took to the streets with me, you remember? You’d said, we should make noise!”

Yani pushed the peas on her plate back and forth as the adults chattered. They went on like this for some time, Xuxa winding up enough that at the end of dinner, she stood from her place to step out through the kitchen door to the backyard so that she could light a cigarette. As if on cue, Emma scooped Yani up for bed, and Sofia and Emmanuel wandered close behind.

But as Yani lay in bed, she could hear their voices down the stair and in the hall, her father hissing back at Xuxa. She couldn’t imagine a time when he’d ever been so moved, so ferocious sounding. She’d been gripping at the sheets in her bed, hands tight on her covers, afraid of how his voice had sounded.

When silence returned, she’d remained awake in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. It was then she’d wanted one thing – to make it so that whatever had bothered her father could disappear from his heart. She’d inched down the stairs, hands grasping at each pole connected to the bannister before she toddled down into the foyer and then the doorway to the kitchen.

Xuxa and Vasco sat quiet at the kitchen table, heads bowed.

There were five candles burning, long strands of wax wrapped around wooden paddles. The light flickered and she watched them in their quiet.

“Yani…” Vasco spotted her first, one eye open and staring at her shadow on the kitchen floor.

“Ah, hush,” Xuxa had whispered. She motioned with her hand, the bracelets on her wrist clinking, “Venga. Come see the argizaiola.”

She took the toddler into her lap and held her so that she could reach the edge of the table. They watched the candles burn. They listened to the quiet of the kitchen, and the space they’d put between one another.

“For each of your cousins, your sister, my sister,” She’d said, motioning to each of the funerary candles. “To guide them, to wish them well. So that we do not forget, eh?”

She did not feel sad, even at the mention of her sister. And though she thought she should have, watching the candles burn, and sitting beside her Tía Abuela and across from her father, it was as though they were performing something magical. Something beautiful that she could keep in her heart.

“Death takes us as we are; it doesn't wait until we've perfected ourselves before it tears into our lives,” Xuxa spoke to her father as he sometimes did to Yani. “And we have one another. But it takes more than that – there’s much more than that – we must protect. Defend. And love.”

elegant

Sofia had come to fetch her when it’d happened.

Just after breakfast in the kitchen.

Burned into her brain was the moment he’d gone to wash their dishes in the deep sink, his hands shaking as he took up a plate, the porcelain slipping from his grasp and clattering down onto the hardwood to pieces. He’d swayed like the wheat across the fields, back and forth before he’d slumped forward, hands splayed out across the countertop. He’d tried to brace to catch his fall but slipped, body keeling to the left before he’d hit his head on the floor.

‘Papá!’

Her voice carried out across the kitchen before it’d been swallowed back up again by a scream. She started until there wasn’t any air left in her lungs. And then after, wracked her body in sobs that choked away any voice she might’ve had.

But they were Izars –

Not the lion hearted, like those in district one, or the stone hearted like those in district two.

Their hearts were clay and earth; their souls were fireflies across a summer’s evening sky.

Wrapped in blankets, she’d sat at Marisol’s kitchen table with a plate of cookies set about before her. She’d only felt like crying, asking now and again about her father, when she could see him, and why she’d been taken away.

They told her the truth – her father had gotten sick, suddenly. He needed a doctor to treat him, and because they thought it might’ve been something they could catch, or that he could get sick from them, Marisol had taken in Yani and Sofia for the time being. They’d let her stay up the whole night, too. Because no one else could actually sleep, it felt like another family reunion, with her aunts and uncles wander through to check on Marisol. They’d ask how she was holding up.

It hadn’t been about Marisol, of course. The softness of their voices betrayed the fear that they might lose their brother, their cousin, to something they’d never seen coming. He’d have been organizing something right away, checking in on their families the moment something like this would’ve happened to them – they teased how he rarely forgot anyone’s birthdays to an annoying degree. Or that him dying of a broken heart would’ve been the biggest irony the universe could’ve given them.

To which they’d gone quiet for some time.

Yani kept watch on Marisol, on the quiet strength her bisabuela contained. That she could listen to each of her children and grandchildren’s fears, could name what moved their hearts, but did not hesitate to reveal her own. Yani marveled at how as broken she’d felt, Marisol still snuck her abanicos with a wink, reminding her that something sweet could help. It had been the hug that followed that’d settled her stomach, but Yani knew that chocolate helped, too.

She’d played cards with Alfer, who taught her how to cheat when people weren’t looking close enough. She’d listened to poetry from Alfonso and the harsh critique of Magdalena that followed. The hearty laughter of Druso drowned out the whispers of Sarina. No one wanted to sleep and so they’d turned another pot of espresso to be made. She’d fought sleep as long as she could, though it’d been half past midnight when she’d drifted off.

He did not die.

She’d seen him, with Emma when he’d been on his bed, all wrapped up in blankets. Pale as she’d ever seen, and dripped in sweat, too. The doctor had told Emma there’d been a chance he might not mend. She’d taken Yani to give her a chance to say goodbye, if the worst came to pass. She wouldn’t keep her daughter from the truth, no matter how painful it might’ve been.

She’d left him a paper doll, one placed on his chest. The same little girl that’d saved the boy from the stars. For safe keeping, she’d said. She would get it back soon enough, she’d determined, when he was well enough to give it to her.

A nasty rumor had started in the week that followed his illness that he’d been buried, and now the family was hiding the truth.

People would always be cruel when they tasted a chance for power.

But though the recovery would be slow, his fever broke, and the sickness left. His speech slurred and balance shot, he was alive.

They were alive, still, too.

elegant

His favorite shadow puppet show was Gau and Enara.

He’d flick on a kerosene lantern posted up atop a trunk at the foot of her bed.

With his voice low, he’d start with his hands in the shape of a heart – this is the story of an old love, he’d shape it into a fist, a sad story, one that she had cried the first time that she’d heard, of when there were gods, of when times were much harder, long before anything like Panem had existed.

Gau had been a boy born with a gift – one from the gods themselves, who blessed him to create. All sorts of stories, poems, but most of all, songs that could move even the hardest heart. He had been set beside the foot of the mountain of souls, of between the living and the dead. The last little town where all souls passed through before they moved on.

Enara had been so moved by her song; she had forgotten to go down below to the underworld. She had tasted poison and been sent to shuffle off the mortal coil, but it had been Gau’s songs that kept from walking to where the other souls had gathered.

Gau was so moved by the woman who had refused death that he could only write songs for her. They made a life together singing songs and writing poetry, out on a little farm.

But the gods did not like that Enara had defied death.

They came in the dead of night to take her from her bed, through the window and taking her by her feet out – only to leave Gau quite alone.

But while he wept for her loss, he did not despair. He took his guitar and all he could throw over his shoulder to march with the rest of the souls to death so that he could demand the gods return her.

Mari and Sugaar sat on their thrones while the spirits were cast down around them. Fearsome, blinding gods – Mari a woman ten feet high and her husband Sugaar a serpent wrapped around her thrown – they ruled in death and could stop time itself.

Gau worked up his courage, and told them that he had come to ask for Enara to be returned to him.

They laughed at his request, drowning out any explanation he might’ve had.

Until Gau decided to sing.

He played a ballad for Enara, extolling her beauty, her grace, and his love.

The gods fell silent to listen to his melody, until at last, they were moved to tears.

They would free Enara, but on one condition. He could not see her until they had gotten back to he surface of the world. To which Gau would only happily agree. He could wonder with a song in his heart, so long as he felt Enara beside him.

But the gods kept Enara a shade, and no matter how she called to him, Gau could not hear her. Still, he soldiered onward, out toward the edge of the world.

Yet the doubt built within his chest. Wasn’t it too easy for the gods to let them be free forever? Why would their love matter so much to them?

He was five steps from freedom when he’d turned to look back at her –

When she’d disappeared, forever.

Yani still remembers how she’d cried, asking him why he would tell such a sad story, of love that could never be.

“Because we love them all the same, no matter the ending. And sometimes we tell stories to remember and honor those that we love.” Vasco had been quiet, his eyes somewhere else. “We tell stories hoping the endings will be different just to feel – to know – that maybe one time, they just might be.”

elegant

Someday she’ll tell them,
Gathered round to know
How had the bad been defeated

Was it their soldiers
Gone to graves in blood
To march on freedom?

Was it the flashes of light
Whole bits of fire rained down
To end a world as it was?

Or had it been one voice
Rising up from a garden
To say that they could be

Enough?

elegant

<<Sometimes, I think about how many of us have died.

My dad would probably be horrified to know that I thought about them a lot. He didn’t want to let me watch the games until this year. As though I hadn’t lost my sister before I was even born.

But I don’t blame him. I don’t like watching the games. I don’t like how much people forget that it makes us relive what’s been buried until we can’t feel it anymore.

Though I can’t say I don’t feel it –

I’ve seen Raquel. In photos papa carries around. The flowers that mama planted for her. Across dog eared pages of books she used to read.

Can you be nostalgic for someone you never knew?

It’s not the same as Gabe, who taught me how to play dice. Or Sarina, who’d braid my hair so gently I could fall asleep in her hands. I can still hear Alfonso laugh, if I close my eyes and press my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

I know that tragedy might make us hurt. And that we’ve lost things we can’t replace.

I just can’t live in a world without seeing that we’re doing the best we can.

And that as much as I’ve lost and hard as some nights have been, I’ve never lost myself.

My family’s never made me feel as though I could never be – an artist, a baker, a gardener. That I can turn to them in grief or in love, and we know we have one another, still. Always.>>

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