Each Tiny Spark

by Pablo Cartaya

  “How on earth are you so good at this?” Gus asks.

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “When I’m interested in something, I don’t usually miss details.”

  “If you keep helping your dad, you’re going to run this shop one day.”

  Gus’s comment makes me smile, and I think about the thumbs-up emoji Papi sent me.

  “Wanna go over to the woods now?”

  “Yep. Let me just tell Abuela.” I wonder whether I should talk to Gus about what I found at the library.

  There’s a man at Abuela’s office door. As we get closer, I recognize him—it’s Mr. Renter. Jay from my homeroom is his grandson. We wait behind him as he struggles with the door. He pulls and pulls until Abuela walks over and pulls the door open from the inside.

  “Thanks, Aurelia,” he says. “I always forget: it’s push from the outside and pull from the inside.”

  “No problem, Bill. How are the grandkids?”

  “Fine,” he says, standing about a foot taller than Abuela. He’s wearing his Renters’ Lumber collared shirt tucked neatly into his jeans. He keeps his sunglasses on as he talks to Abuela.

  “My grandson wants to try out for eighth-grade football next year, but I just don’t think that boy has it in him, you know?”

  “He’ll put on some weight and grow over the summer,” Abuela says. “Boys grow between fourteen and sixteen. And his grandfather is tall, eh?”

  Mr. Renter puts his hand lightly on Abuela’s shoulder.

  “Yeah, that’s true,” he says, turning to me and walking over.

  “How you doing there, Emi Rose?”

  “Fine, thank you, Mr. Renter,” I say.

  “School going well?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Renter turns to Abuela and pays his tune-up bill. He walks over to his truck, pops the hood, and inspects the work.

  Mr. Renter has been coming to Abuela’s shop for years, but he always struck me as someone who would prefer to get his oil changes somewhere else if we weren’t so conveniently located by his lumber business. I remember one time he kept exaggerating his English to Agustín and making a point to show him where the carburetor was on his truck. Agustín knows more about car engine parts than even my dad. He knew exactly where it was.

  “Hey, you mind washing my window here, son?” Mr. Renter stares at Gus, who turns back to see if anyone is behind him. “I’m talking to you.”

  “Uhh, I don’t work here, sir.”

  Mr. Renter’s eyebrows arch and he shakes his head.

  “Well, thanks again, Aurelia,” he says. “You all should come by the house for dinner. Would love to see Toni now that he’s back from duty. We’d like to thank him for his service. And besides, Cindy is cooking up some sweet potato casserole!”

  “Sounds delicious, but maybe another time, Bill,” Abuela says. “I’m going to take this young lady shopping for dresses.”

  “Okay,” Mr. Renter replies. “You have fun shopping with your nana, Emi Rose.”

  “Thank you,” I say. My first thought is: sometimes I want to tell people that’s not really my name. It’s Emilia Rosa. And my second thought is: what? Once Mr. Renter leaves, I ask Abuela why I need a dress.

  “You don’t want your LEGOs anymore,” she says. “And you’re asking to go to parties. You’re becoming a señorita.”

  “Abuela,” I start, “I am not becoming a señorita. You’re getting the wrong idea.”

  “Nonsense. Your quinceañera will be here before we know it.”

  “What? Abuela, that’s, like, three years away!”

  “It’s never too early to start thinking about these things.”

  I shake my head in frustration.

  “And you should start thinking about wearing perfume, too. Como una mujercita.”

  The sound of a duffel bag landing on the floor startles me. Gus seems completely mortified. Why would Abuela think it’s okay to talk about this in front of Gus? He’s my best friend, but there are some things you just don’t say out loud.

  “Abuela! You are so embarrassing!”

  I grab Gus’s duffel bag from the floor and ask him to follow me.

  “Gus and I are helping each other with our social studies projects,” I say abruptly. “We’re going to the woods to do some filming.”

  “Today?” Abuela says. “Weren’t you just at the library?”

  “Yes,” I say. “But we have more things to do. Like filming extra scenes. Right, Gus?”

  “Huh? Oh! Yes!”

  Abuela eyes us suspiciously, like she’s trying to decide what to do with this information. Before she says anything, I lead Gus out of the office.

  “Be back in one hour!” she shouts.

  I pick up the pace to get as far away from Abuela’s “mujercita” talk as possible.

  * * *

  We enter the woods through a different part of town this time. The light of the afternoon reflects off the tree branches and bounces off the rocks and patches of earth all around the woods.

  “Nature gives the best light.” Gus marvels as he captures the scene with his camera.

  We find an old gazebo that was crushed by a tree. It must have fallen during one of the hurricanes that swept through a few years ago.

  Gus explores the old gazebo. “Who do you think this belonged to?”

  “Not sure,” I say. “Maybe it’s from an old estate abandoned years ago?”

  “I think another story is brewing—a star-crossed-lovers kind of tale where one love waited by the gazebo but the other never showed up and she became so sad that she cried herself to death.”

  “Sad,” I say.

  “And her name is Llorona.”

  “Isn’t that already a tale? La Llorona?”

  “Sí, pero that’s from Mexico and we’re in the woods of Georgia, so I have creative license.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I slide my hand across a beam and catch a giant splinter in my forearm.

  “Ow! Darn it!”

  Gus rushes over and almost immediately runs the other way. “Jesucristo! Tita tells me not to use the Lord’s name in vain, but that looks so painful!”

  “Ouch! Hang on.” I drop my backpack and focus on my forearm.

  “Emilia, we should go back. That could get super-infected. If you don’t . . . ¡Aye, Díos mío! Emilia!”

  I pinch the splinter with my pointer finger and thumb and rip the giant sucker out of my arm. Gus almost faints.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “Sí,” he says. “But I would’ve gone to the hospital.”

  “Not for a splinter, silly!”

  It doesn’t hurt that bad anymore.

  “¡Por favor! Let’s change the subject before I puke,” Gus says.

  The rustle of our feet against the leaves sends a quiet echo through the woods. The farther we walk into this new trail, the more it feels like we’ve left Merryville for a different world. The forest comes alive with the possibilities of the stories all around us. The thought of anything bad happening in or outside these beautiful surroundings seems impossible.

  “See these roses here?” Gus points to a shrub with small flowers with white petals and a yellow center. The whole shrub is in full bloom.

  “Isn’t that our state flower?” I had to memorize all the state symbols for a geography test last year. Mom made me repeat them over and over and over again until I saw the state nickname (Peach State), state song (“Georgia on My Mind”), state vegetable (Vidalia onion), state fruit (peach), state dog (adoptable dog), state bird (brown thrasher), and even the state prepared food (grits) all swirling in my head for days. “It’s the Cherokee rose,” I tell him.

  “Yeah,” Gus says. He turns his camera to the shrub. “I read about the Cherokee rose online.”

  “What’s t
he story behind it?”

  “It’s about the Trail of Tears of 1838,” Gus says, pointing to the flower, “and what was taken from the Cherokee Nation. These seven leaves here are for the seven Cherokee clans. The center is for the gold stolen from them. But it wasn’t just gold that the white people wanted, it was land, and soon after, they forced the Cherokee clans to leave their homes. The Cherokee had to endure the harsh journey to Indian Territory out west. And in the middle of winter! Without enough food, or medicine, or anything.”

  “How awful!”

  “Yo sé,” Gus says. “Y también, I read that thousands of lives were lost, including many children. So each rose that grew along the trail represented a Cherokee mother’s tears.”

  “A flower so beautiful also tells the story of such a violent past,” I say, thinking about my conversation with Mom earlier about the Yoruba.

  “Yeah,” Gus says, still looking at the Cherokee rose.

  We’re both quiet for a minute, just observing.

  Not too far from the shrub is a beech tree trunk. It looks like the muscular, veiny calf of a giant. Leaves are just starting to grow back on its branches after the winter made them bare. They reach up toward the sky, all twisted and tangled, nearly blocking out the sun. Trying to figure out which branch belongs to which tree is like a gigantic puzzle.

  “I think I came up with a title for my movie,” Gus says.

  “Before you even start filming?”

  “I’m going to call it The Merryville River Monster.”

  “Seems a little obvious,” I say.

  “It’s a working title.”

  He starts to explain his idea for the story. It’s a mix of the water legend from Gus’s library book and something he invented. In it, a young woman gets lost on her way home and ends up deep in the woods. She stumbles upon a river where she encounters the creature on the other side of it. The creature watches but doesn’t move. Then it disappears.

  “Mr. Richt said to find places to share with visitors,” Gus says. “To me, Merryville is made up of a bunch of stories. Plus, he didn’t say we couldn’t get creative.”

  “Very true,” I tell him.

  “Now, let’s talk casting,” he says. “How would you feel about playing the girl and the creature?”

  “Wait,” I say. “Both? Why don’t you ask Chinh or Barry to help?”

  “I thought a choice like one actor playing both roles could say: what if we are the very monsters we are afraid of?”

  “That’s deep, Gus,” I tell him.

  “Es la verdad.”

  Gus sets down his duffel bag and unzips it. He pulls out an old tarp, a piece of aluminum, and a Baggie filled with lugs and washers. Gus grabs a few branches and places them on the laid-out tarp. Next he takes nails and a hammer from the duffel bag and secures the pieces of wood to the tarp.

  “Um, Gus?”

  “Darn thing!” he says, ripping the nylon.

  “Gus?” I repeat.

  “What’s up?”

  I get closer and ask him for the hammer. He hands it to me and I use the claw to take the nail out of the tarp. I grab a small and sturdy piece of wood and place it beneath the tarp, then take the wood Gus was trying to hammer down and put it on the other side. I hold the nail steady while I hammer both pieces of wood together. When I’m done, the wood is holding steady against the tarp.

  “She’s an actor and a carpenter!” Gus says.

  “Definitely not an actor. And I don’t really know carpentry,” I tell him. “I’m just good at figuring out puzzles.”

  I take the other pieces of wood and start to assemble the Creature. Gus uses a twig to take out a few dirty rags from his duffel bag to add to the costume.

  “Are those from the auto shop?” I ask, taking one of them.

  “I got them out of the garbage,” he says. “You shouldn’t touch those! Your hands are going to smell forever.”

  I sniff my hands and realize Gus is right—the odor of oil and grease is heavy. There’s something comforting about it, though.

  Gus sets up his camera and I put on the monster costume that’s really just a tarp with some dirty washcloths and tree branches stuck to it.

  “It’s like I’m a pile of garbage that’s come to life,” I tell him.

  “Don’t worry. It’s really cool on video,” Gus says, looking through the camera.

  After we film a few scenes of me as the creature wandering around the woods, Gus pulls out my costume change.

  “Okay, that was amazing, Emilia! Now you’re going to play the cop not listening to the kid describe the terrible creature she saw in the woods.”

  “I’m the cop, too?” I ask. “Where’s the kid?”

  “The camera,” he says. “Talk to the camera like it’s the kid.”

  “Um, okay?”

  We film the cop scene a whole bunch of times because I keep doing what Gus calls “breaking character,” which means I keep stopping to ask Gus what a cop is doing in the woods if the monster is supposed to be a mystery.

  “I’m filming nonlinearly,” he says. “It’s out of sequence with the narrative, but I’ll put it in order during edits.”

  “Oh,” I say, not really sure what he’s talking about.

  I finally get the scene right, and we move to the next one, where I play the role of “concerned citizen.”

  Before we know it, it’s almost six thirty, and I tell Gus we should get going.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Hey, thank you for helping me, Emilia.”

  “De nada, director extraordinaire.”

  We pack up Gus’s things and make our way out of the woods while Gus talks about Guillermo del Toro.

  “His movies have layers. That’s the genius of his work. He’s trying to say: lo que es diferente isn’t what we should fear; those who are unchanging are most terrifying.”

  “Gus, you’re dropping a lot of wisdom today.”

  The tracks ahead remind me of how trains connect different parts of Georgia to Merryville. Like Atlanta. What happens in one part of the state affects another. I can see Gus wondering what I’m thinking about, but I don’t have the right words to explain all the thoughts bouncing around in my head.

  A previous mayor called Atlanta an “international city,” but I see it with a whole lot of contradictions. How does the city of Merryville, with its different neighborhoods and schools, fit into all of this? I don’t know as much as I thought about my own home, and it’s getting the Millennium Falcon in my brain ready for another jump into hyperdrive.

  When I get home, my dad is on the sofa, watching TV. He doesn’t hear me come in. The house is quiet because Abuela isn’t home yet. Usually there’s a pan sizzling in the kitchen or the rumble of the dryer in the laundry closet, or the creak of wood under our feet. I check my phone and see Mom sent me a text a little while ago. We keep missing each other.

  I walk over to my dad, but he still doesn’t turn around. I wonder why he wasn’t at the garage earlier. Maybe he didn’t feel well and needed to come home. I want to do something to cheer him up, like bring him flowers.

  Papi makes a noise and moves his head from side to side like he’s in an argument with himself. He’s sleeping, but it doesn’t look like he’s resting. I go outside and pick bright pink azaleas from Abuela’s flowerpot on the front porch. I rush over to the sofa and throw my arms around his shoulders, flowers and all.

  “Hi, Papi!”

  He jumps up, totally startled. His body seems tense and his face looks angry.

  “Geez, Emilia! Don’t spring up on me like that!”

  His hands are balled up into fists and he’s staring at me all wild-eyed.

  I stop and remember what Mom said.

  There are a few rules we have when Dad is home.

  We never play dead.

  We never shout
.

  We never make sudden noises or drop things on the floor on purpose.

  We never, ever, sneak up on Papi.

  I step back and wait for my dad to feel calm. I remember what happened the time the “Welcome Home” balloon popped one year. That’s why Mami doesn’t do a big celebration anymore. She was there that day to comfort him. I think about what she did.

  She stood in front of him but gave him enough space to move around if he wanted to. She waited a little, then asked in a gentle voice if he needed anything. Next she put her hand in his until he made eye contact.

  In this moment, Papi holds a sofa cushion.

  “Papi,” I say, slowly approaching. “I’m sorry.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “Papi?” I say again, this time reaching the sofa and placing my hand on top of his.

  We lock eyes for a minute.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  He nods. “I’m sorry I scared you, Emilia,” he says. His body deflates a little and his arms sag at his sides.

  “I’m sorry I sprung up on you,” I tell him. “I forgot.”

  My dad stares at the flowers on the floor.

  “These for me?”

  I nod.

  He picks them up and holds them to his nose.

  “You know, I took that papier-mâché flowerpot you made me a few years ago everywhere I went,” he says. “You remember that?”

  “Yes,” I say softly. I made it for him in my fourth-grade art class. I cut out tulips, roses, and daisies using colorful construction paper and arranged them in the pot.

  “I carried one of the flowers in my rucksack during every daily patrol. They brought me luck on those four-hour treks.”

  I hadn’t asked him about the papier-mâché pot or the construction-paper flowers because I figured he’d lost them, or they’d gotten ruined. That’s why last year I decided to start sending video files. To give him something that wouldn’t break. Does he remember those, too?