We’re near enough a checkpoint that runners sometimes stop by with news, for a healing or a meal. The wall nearest us is in the desert, the path to it full of landmines and drones. The runners risk more than almost anyone, proving themselves strong, brave, intelligent enough to avoid the traps set by the empire, the border military. We know first what is happening. There is still some electronic communication in the bigger cities and compounds, but our outpost lives by the cycles of the sun and moon. We bleed together.
We attend the yearly gathering of brujas from across the lands, discuss how the tending is going. I see my sisters, my nieces and nephews, our last living aunt. I fill my mind with what the artists are creating, dance until I can barely walk. I trade from my collection of books for books I haven’t yet read. I kiss and am kissed; we drink and weep, sacrifice an animal, and eat the flesh cooked over sacred fires. We sing. We rest in the arms of our elders; we initiate youngsters. We plan and promise. We go back to our homes and posts exhausted. We go home infused.
* * *
—
Surem closes the partition and beckons me to follow him. We enter another lab, where there is another partition.
“We haven’t dosed this one yet. This is why I called for you.” He punches in a code and the partition lifts. A young woman is asleep on the cot, arms folded across her chest as though she rests in a sarcophagus. Her brown skin is covered in tattoos, flowers intertwining with script, several names woven into her body’s surface. Her hair is growing out from a military buzz, and she has that soldier body, lean through the hips, bulging everywhere else. I go to the glass.
“Was she sentenced?” I ask. It’s always a hope that, even knowing what they do, the desperate won’t sell their bodies to the empire.
“Volunteer, oldest of six children. Mom dead, Dad hurt at the oil fields.” Surem puts his hand over mine on the glass. “She joined at sixteen, border military.”
I cringe. Border military is trained to shoot first, question never. They’ve managed to collapse most of the tunnels on their side, though a few still remain. They plant mines. Patrol with dogs trained to kill. They pile bodies for a fire every week.
“How many years was she in? How’d we end up with her?” I have so many questions.
“Five years in; we’ve had her about a year. She was concussed, left to die. A couple of traders found her and brought her to us.” I don’t ask what the traders got in exchange. I don’t want to know. Surem goes to the intercom.
“Soldier,” he says.
The young woman wakes up immediately, stands at attention. I look at her with my bruja eyes. Whatever the empire gave her tried to swallow and destroy the spark of her, but I see it, barely flickering in the miasma of poison. I push the intercom.
“What’s your name?” She doesn’t answer. “Come closer to the mirror.” She does, stands at the glass. I lean forward and read the names inscribed on her skin. “Tell me about Yelena, Gustavo, Anita, Felicia, Joe.” She doesn’t say anything, but the light in her flickers. Who she is still exists, I can see it with my trained eyes.
“Vetti.” Surem whispers my childhood nickname to me. No one has called me Vetti in years.
* * *
—
After Gabor died, Antonio and Simona eventually split up. Simona took Surem and moved to the old capital. Antonio set them up with enough resources and called-in favors to make sure they’d be okay. I was nine when they left and missed Surem hard. A few months after he left with his mom, Mamita joined the ancestors. I threw myself into the rituals Mamita had taught us. Surem and I had been her best students, accessing the Dream and beyond, deciphering the miasma. Things were hard those days, the Mexican government fighting on two fronts, the cartels and the empire. The empire was trying to divert all waterways that flowed south. It was chaos. The West Coast split from the empire and made water deals with the First Nations up in Canada. A water-and-food trade route. The empire lost thousands to the West Coast. Some fled north, where there was no wall, but the ice had grown thick and living was hard.
I was seventeen when Surem returned. Simona had died of infection. He was twenty-one. We met up to do a plant ceremony and something else entirely was watered between us. I was by his side during the bloody years, gathering my brujas for healing, for ceremony. We stood by the prophecy, the jefes returning the land to the people, who in turn would honor the land. It was I who convinced him to speak up and suggest that only councils of women could decide punishment for crimes. It was I who whispered in his ear as he slept that he must take a wife, make alliances. I helped pick her out.
* * *
—
“What do you think we should do?” Surem leans against the wall. I stare at the girl behind the glass. There isn’t a path before her that isn’t a devastation. Do we leave her as she is? Trapped in a mind where nothing but acquiescence exists? Or sentence her life? Choice and memory lock-gripped in every strand of her being? I try to think of what I’d want.
I live with some shit. After all, the cartels were a disaster to manage in the beginning. Surem, with a little help from us, plotted his way up up up into the top of his father’s plant empire. Things were scarce and the itch of addiction allowed certain alliances to form. Some of it got ugly. Surem and I went head-to-head those early days, fighting it out, fucking it out. I didn’t agree with some of the methods he’d inherited from his father, and he hated that my intuition whipped him from disaster more than once. Patriarchy. I ended up in the way a time or two and people died. It was a mess. We don’t talk about it. We live with it. Same with that little valor, our noble choice. There is so much I want to forget, that I’d give everything to un-remember. Mom dying from an earache. Bodies I’ve come across, so many women and kids, just destroyed those early years. The hunger. What hunger lets a person, a society, justify. But this, all of it, is grating proof of existence. That can sound strange, but gods alive and dead, we’re still fucking here.
“Dose her,” I tell Surem. I go to the door and bang on it. Delia opens it immediately. I go out into the compound, cursing as I notice I’m still wearing just a sheet. I see one of the compound jeeps and I climb into the backseat and curl up. I tilt my face and stare up at the stars. Even with the compound lights, the stars have little competition nearby and are brazen.
I breathe slow and soften my gaze, one of the first lessons Mamita ever taught us. Allow the bubble of grief to rise in me as it always does, until it is almost unbearable. I’ve known harder pains than this and survived. It isn’t my child behind the glass, not the child of my body. I know I’m lying to myself. Everyone is. Opening to the truth requires acceptance of the belly-wrenching pain of it all. There are moments I still let it double me over, but I have faith. The waters are returning. There are horrors but there is love, and this young woman made a choice to subject herself to horrors, knowing the money would go to her siblings.
* * *
—
Surem has children I’ve never met. It was a compromise, part of the marriage agreement with his chosen. There are parts of going back to the old ways that nothing can prepare you for. When I met her, days before the wedding, she insisted we meet alone.
“I have one rule and one rule only. You never meet our children.”
It was the first thing she said to me. I told her I would follow her rule, and then we talked an hour about songs and plants and women we had in common. By the end of the hour I knew Surem had made the right choice. The first time Surem and I met up after his firstborn arrived, I knew I’d made the right choice as well.
* * *
—
“He wants you there.” Delia has fetched my clothing and turns her back as I change. She’s old school, came up military on the other side, held a rank, defected rather than be killed for disobeying orders. She’s older than us, has been around since the beginning of whatever it is, this we’re build
ing.
Back in the lab, Surem hands me a syringe. He has the look in his eye, the reason I’d never birth his children or become his wife. He doesn’t need to be hard with me—I offer no resistance—but hardness runs deep in those who rise up to lead. It has to.
Delia opens the door to the cell. Surem is on the other side of the partition. The young woman stands at attention. I hold the syringe between both my hands as I lift them in prayer. I pray that whatever wall comes down inside her mind will not destroy her.
“Give me your arm,” I say.
She does.
Born and raised in Chula Vista, California, to Mexican and Puerto Rican parents, LIZZ HUERTA has been navigating and erasing borders her entire life. Lover of story, chisme, daydreaming. Her fiction and essays have been published in The Rumpus, Portland Review, The Miami Rail, and other journals.
READ AFTER BURNING
MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY
IT IS CRUCIAL TO REMEMBER THAT MAGIC IS UNPREDICTABLE. Old magic, new magic, all magic. Magic has its own mysteries and rewires itself according to mood, like weather discovered between streets, rainstorms dousing only one person, or like a blizzard on the skull of a soldier, a brass band on the deck of a submarine. War magic exists, and wedding magic. Love magic and murder magic, spells for secrets kept forever, and spells for dismantling structures. Magic itself, though, sometimes ceases to exist in moments when it’s most necessary, and even when you’ve memorized the entirety of the history of spells and sacrifices, there are always ways to fail and invent, to combine traditions into something else entirely. There are ways to shift the story from one of ending, to one of beginning.
* * *
—
All this happened a long time ago, before the story you know. You were born in a world that wasn’t ending. This is a story about how that re-beginning came to be. It’s about the Library of the Low, about books written to be burned, and about how we brought ourselves back from the brink.
I’m old now, but old doesn’t matter. How many years have humans been looking up at the stars and thinking themselves annotated among them? How long have the stories between us been whispered and written and lost and found again?
This, then, is a story about the story: It’s about librarians. It begins on the day of my father’s death. I was ten years old. I knew the facts about blood; all ten-year-olds do. Do you? You do.
I knew this fact, for example: There was no stopping blood until it was ready. Sometimes it poured like magical porridge down the streets of a village, and other times it stood up on its own and walked out from the ground beneath an execution, a red shadow. There were spells for bringing the dead back to life, but none of them worked anymore, or at least they didn’t in the part of the country I was from.
I don’t need to tell you the long version of what happened to America. It’s no kind of jawdrop. It was a tin-can-telephone apocalypse. Men hunched in their hideys pushing buttons, curfewing the country, and misunderstanding each other, getting more and more angry and more and more panicked, until everyone who wasn’t like them got declared illegal.
When the country began to totally unravel—there are those who’d say it was always full of mothbites and founded on badly counted stitches, and I tend to agree with them—my mother was at the University on a fellowship, studying the history of rebellion. My daddy was the Head Librarian’s assistant.
The Head Librarian was called the Needle. She’d been memorizing the universe since time’s diaper days, and I never knew her real name. She was, back then, in charge of rare things from all over the world. Her collection included books like the Firfol and the Gutenbib, alongside manuscripts from authors like Octavia the Empress and Ursula Major. The collection also included an immense library of books full of the magic of both the ancient world and the new world. Everything could turn into magic if it tried. The Librarians had prepared for trouble by acquiring secrets and spells. They knew what was coming.
If you asked any of the Librarians from my town, they’d tell you their sleep went dreamless long before the country officially declared itself an oh fuck. They squirreled books and smuggled scholars, as many as they could, which wasn’t many. Some made it to Mexico. Others got to Canada. A few embarked on a ship loaded with messages in bottles.
The Needle, though, had plans for saving. She stayed, and my parents stayed with her. They spent the first years of the falling apart sitting at a desk deep beneath the University library, repeating everything the Needle told them, making memory footnotes alphabetically, in as many languages as she could teach them. She started them off small and got bigger.
“Ink,” she told my parents, “is not illegal,” and so they started making ink out of anything they could find. They made it out of burned plastic. They made it out of wasps harvested while eating the dead. They made ink in every color but red: blue and black, brown and gold. Red reminded the Needle of things she didn’t care to remember. My parents sharpened tools, started making plans, married each other in the dark of a room that had been reserved for books damaged by breathing.
The first tattoo the Needle gave was to herself.
The men in charge wanted people to forget penicillin and remember plague. They shut down the schools, starved out the teachers, and figured if they gave it a few years, everybody but them would die of measles, flu, or fear. Citizens ended up surviving on Spam and soup. No medicine. Little plots of land and falling-down houses. Basically conditions like those much of the rest of the world had faced for many years, but no one here was used to them, and so a lot of the population dropped dead due to shock, snakes, spiders, and each other. I was born four years into all of this. My mother died in childbirth, because by that time there were no doctors left in our city. The last one had been executed.
None of the magic worked that time.
The Needle delivered me, and she closed my mother’s eyes when it was time to close them.
You can call me Enry. That’s what my daddy named me. He said there was no H to be had in a world where hell had spit up this many fools and holy was this much in question.
I was not an unhappy child. The world withering above me was the only world I’d ever known, and to me it was a beautiful one.
Every few days a murmuration of soldiers came through town and said no one had any right to rights. Whenever they came, I hid myself in a knowledge shelter with the rest of the children born since the end of the world, and we waited for the soldiers to pass.
The rest of the time, we learned languages and studied history, farmed with sunlamps, and guarded the books. We were taught to read on medieval fairy tales about weather and Victorian poems about ghosts, on books of code in thirty-four languages, and magic books dating to long before Christianity. We were taught myths from Libya and poems from Andalusia and Syria, spells from Greece and gods from the land we hid beneath. We were taught about genocide but also about making the land bear fruit. We only came aboveground at night. We were not supposed to exist.
The adults, though, had to show their faces on the surface to get water rations and to be censused.
When I was ten years old, my daddy went aboveground one morning and didn’t come back by nightfall.
I found him on his back in the center of the old marble floor in the University library. Someone had decided he was smart enough to kill, or maybe he’d just walked in the path of a bullet. These were bullet years, and they flew from end to end of cities like hummingbirds had, before the hummingbirds had fled. Bullets wanted to feed. We all knew it. We’d been warned.
My daddy pointed at his chest and fumbled at his collar. I loosened his tie. I unbuttoned his buttons. I opened his shirt.
“You have to burn this,” he said. “Some books, you can only read after burning. Do you hear me? Do you understand?”
Blood was making a lake around us, and my knees were wet with it. My daddy’s breat
hing slowed, and his hands froze like winter had nested inside him. He was the only parent I had.
I had no spell to keep him from dying, though there should have been spells. Everyone talked about magic, but no one had all the magic they needed. That was another thing you knew if you were ten years old and living beneath a library, if the world had started ending long before you were born and now you found yourself alone in it.
There was never enough magic to save everyone. Sometimes you only had enough for yourself, or you had the wrong kind entirely. I had almost nothing in the way of spells back then. I knew how to make a dragonfly out of sonnets and a bird out of ballads. I could bring a little beam of light to life in my hand and watch it glow, but it wasn’t hot and it wasn’t a heart. I had nothing for my daddy and no way to refill him from my own soul, no way to split it, no way to share.
* * *
—
It is crucial to remember that life, when it is long, is full of goodbyes. I had a husband once. You are the child of one of the children of my children’s children. My husband was a man who could walk on water and whose veins ran with poems written six centuries before anyone insisted on religion. By the time I met him, I had enough magic to fill anyone with light. I could read in the dark, and the books of my family were written all over the world.
You are the amen of my family, and I am the in the beginning of yours. This story is the prayer, or one of them. This story says you can live through anything and that when it is time to go, when the entire world goes dark, then you go together, holding on to one another’s hands, and you whisper the memory of birds and bees and the names of those you loved.
When it is not time to go, though, this story says you rise.
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