by Alisa Valdes
“Now the hard part to explain. I’m able to take human form during daylight hours, for now. When I died, I was involved in some bad activities. Ordinarily, a person who has done such things is automatically sent to The Very Bad Place at death. But in my case, and in my brother’s case, the Maker was willing to give us both another chance. We weren’t supposed to die young. It just happened. So we were allowed to linger, to prove ourselves worthy of The Very Good Place, to redeem ourselves if we chose to.
“The people you see here, my teachers, the mayordomos, they’re the gatekeepers to the Great Beyond. Every cemetery has a set of gatekeepers. They’re spirits. They have a house here, you’ve seen it, just over the hill, where I stay with some of the others who linger.”
“The assignment, Demetrio,” prompted the woman. “Time is nearly gone.”
He nodded, exasperated. “My assignment, Maria, is to do 1001 good deeds along Highway 14, haunting it in a good way basically, but in human form during the day and equipped with a host of lifesaving skills. I rescue people and animals, and other things - bugs, trees, whatever - because The Maker of All Things doesn’t differentiate. Life is life, souls are souls. Spirit is spirit. There are rules to being a revenant. Strict rules. There are lots of them. The one rule that applies to you is that I am forbidden to tell any human what I am, unless,” he paused for effect, and smiled, “unless they are a Kindred. If I break this rule, I face harsh consequences.”
“Whoa,” I said. “But what if I’m not one of your Kindred Others? What happens?” The man answered for him, chomping at the bit. “Then he faces the eternal damnation of his soul to The Very Bad Place, with no chance of escape or the redemption he has been valiantly working toward.”
“You shouldn’t have told me any of this, Demetrio,” I said. “It’s too big a risk.”
“It’s not,” said Demetrio. “Not if you feel for me what I feel for you. That’s why I couldn’t kiss you, Maria. Because kissing a human is forbidden, unless it is a Kindred.”
“So it wasn’t that I’m ugly.”
“Hardly.” He bit his lip and looked me up and down.
“Not now,” said the woman.
“I got eight minutes from the time the first drop of blood falls and the Quetzocoatl appears to tell you everything. If you agree to complete this ceremony, you will have to sacrifice eight drops of blood to the bowl, and see what appears.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, no hesitation.
“But be prepared,” said the man to me with great solemnity. “If it goes right, we know you are one of Demetrio’ Kindred, and he can continue on his journey of redemption.”
“But if it goes wrong,” said the woman, “he will turn immediately to dust.”
I gulped. I looked at Demetrio. “Are you sure we’re Kindreds?”
“I am.”
I looked at him. “I don’t know. We could stop this all right now, right? And we’d both be fine?”
He smiled patiently. “It wouldn’t matter for me, mamita. I’ve already taken my chance, by telling you all this. If you choose not to participate, I will be dust anyways, and you will be fine.”
“Give me the knife,” I said.
“Atta girl,” said Demetrio, gratefully.
The woman handed me a different knife, one with a red handle and a silver blade with lime green writing on it. I stepped up to the table, placing my left hand over the bowl as I’d seen him do. With my right hand, I drove the tip of the blade into my skin, and through to the meat below. The pain was horrendous, but nothing compared to what I went through after the crash. I bit my lower lip and tried to think of happy thoughts, as I tilted my hand and let the bright red blood flow into the bowl. Again the mayordomos counted the drops, in Latin.
After eight drops had fallen, the woman wrapped my hand in a clean white towel, and I backed away. We all watched as a red smoke formed this time, and moved, and to my astonishment, took the shape of our solar system, with the planets orbiting the sun, and tiny moons orbiting the planets. One of the planets grew larger, and larger, pulsating as though it were a human heart, crowding out the others. I counted the planets, and tried to remember which one it was. Venus. It was Venus. The other planets faded out, and only Venus remained, beating and glowing, bigger and bigger, brighter and brighter, before flaming out and dying away in a puff of smoke that took the shape of a heart before dissipating into the cool air of the chamber.
“Xolotl,” said the woman, peacefully, pleased.
“Booya! I told you!” cried Demetrio to the man and the woman, jumping up and pumping his fist into the air with joy. He turned to me now, and embraced me. “I knew you were a Close Kindred,” he cried. He spun me around and around.
“A Close Kindred,” I said to myself.
Demetrio set me down and did a dance of the sort you often saw NFL players do in the end zone after making a touchdown.
“I told you,” he said to the pouty man, gloating now. “How ya like me now, homie? How ya like me now, boy?”
“This journey is not over yet,” said the man skeptically. “You don’t know if this girl is your Primary, and acting as if she is might still get yourself into a terrible predicament with this. No one knows. That’s the thing. You’re reckless. Both of you.”
“Can I tell Kelsey?” I asked Demetrio. “Is it safe now?”
“You can tell her, but I can’t,” he said. “As long as you think she’s a Kindred to you.”
“Oh, she is,” I said. “She’s been my best friend for eleven years.”
“Then go for it, mami, but know that it has risks.”
The woman’s face burst into a warm, beautiful smile, as she came around to embrace me and Demetrio. The man visibly relaxed, but could not stop pouting. The woman touched a clear ointment to my wounded hand, and it healed instantly.
“And now,” said the woman, stepping away from us, and sprinkling a handful of pale gold dust over us. It twinkled like stars as it fell. “By the powers invested in me, I announce that you may kiss one another without negative consequence.”
“But not until I leave,” groused the man. “I don’t think I can stomach it.”
“You’re just bitter and jealous,” said Demetrio.
“I’m not jealous,” insisted the man. “I’m logical.”
“He sounds like my mom,” I whispered to Demetrio.
The man, Diego, whistled for the dogs and cats, and they all gathered around him - including, to my astonishment, Buddy. I felt betrayed.
“You can get him later,” Demetrio told me. “I think we need some alone time right now.”
I watched as the man and woman left the church, closing the doors behind them, and then I turned to face Demetrio in the soft light of candles.
♦
Demetrio wasted no time, pulling me in close to him, and moving in for the kiss. Gone was the reticent bad boy from before; he’d been replaced by a seductive bad boy with only one thing on his mind: Me. The hunger in his eyes was completely intoxicating, knowledgeable and mature, and where I’d longed so desperately for his kiss before, I now began to wonder if I could handle whatever it was he had in store. I was relatively inexperienced, having only kissed two boys in my life, and even then not so much.
“Don’t worry,” he told me, as though reading my thoughts once more, “I’ll show you what to do.”
I held my breath, and closed my eyes, waiting, every cell in my body resonating in pure and perfect harmony with his frequency, more alive, and afraid, and excited, than I’d ever been.
He kissed me, and the music in my soul and cells swelled and crescendoed, beyond where I had imagined it could ever go, into a felt but not heard thrum of the lowest low and the highest high, woven all through me in every direction.
I felt the floor drop out from below my feet, as it had in the dream, but this time I didn’t fall. This time, it felt as though I floated for a moment, with his arms holding me; and then it - and I mean this literally, and not in a hackneyed rom
antic symbolic sense - felt as though we spun, and soared.
When I opened my eyes, I was still in Demetrio’s arms, but we weren’t in the sacristy of the church in Golden. Only a few seconds had passed since our lips had blissfully touched, but we were somehow now on the side of Highway 14, at mile marker 21, in the bright blazing light of the winter afternoon. My feet were on the ground once more.
It was real.
I stared about me in shock, as Demetrio chuckled, apparently delighted by my discombobulation, and by the fact that he had someone to share his world with now.
“How did you do that?” I demanded. It was starting to be a habit with me, that question of him.
Demetrio pulled back from me just a smidge, cocked his head to the side again, to get a better look with those unflinchingly beautiful eyes, at my dumbfounded face. He grinned like the cat that got the mouse.
“Do what, mamita?” he asked. “I didn’t do nothing.”
I didn’t hold back this time. This time, confronted with his ridiculous denial of obviously miraculous accomplishments, I reared back and slugged him, playfully but hard, in the arm.
“Ouch!” he cried, rubbing the spot where I’d made contact, affecting a much more beleaguered face than the blow required, playing along.
“So you can still feel pain?” I asked, popping him lightly again on the arm. “Yeah?”
He grinned, and held my hands back now, far more powerful than I was, but gentle, too. Every fiber of my being quivered as the did this. I wanted him with a profound ache. He came close, and brushed his lips against mine again, biting me a little, playful still. I could scarcely breathe.
He whispered in my ear now. “Of course I still feel pain. During the day, everything about me is human, as it was in the days before my death. Everything.”
He kissed my neck, and below my chin, and then the chin itself, and my lips. I couldn’t move, except to accept his offerings, my eyes closing on their own accord. I let out a little groan of pleasure. He pulled away from me, and began to tickle me, switching gears.
“You suck!” I cried, tickling back.
He laughed, and dodged my hands. I managed to slug him again.
“Easy there, mamita.” He grabbed me in a powerful embrace now, and held my arms down at my sides. “Don’t make me hurt you.”
“Unlikely,” I boasted, enjoying this normal, childlike display of affection.
“True. You’ll probably hurt me first,” he said. “You’re a strong girl, Maria Ochoa.”
“So you can bleed and break bones and die?”
“Sort of.”
“What if you get killed again?”
“I forfeit my rights to redemption.”
“That’s rough.”
“It’s part of the deal.”
“Why’d you take it?”
“Beat the alternative.”
“How are you so glib about all this?”
He nuzzled my neck as he answered, hungry for me. “What else can you do, you know? I try hard to be careful.”
“Where do you go at night?” I asked him.
“Too many questions,” he said as he ran his finger across my lower lip. “Too little kissing.”
He kissed me again, harder than before, and longer, and more deeply, pressing me hard to his body. I kept my eyes open this time, though, hoping to catch any shenanigans he might try to pull on me. The world around us began to move, the way it does when you’re on a carousel, faster and faster. The bottom fell out again, and suddenly we found ourselves in the center of a gold and white tornado, though we floated in complete stillness as the sparkling light spun around us. I gasped, broke away from the kiss, and looked at his face. Demetrio looked back, calmly, comfortingly, and winked to let me know it was okay. I giggled, and tried to push away from him, to touch the sparkling lights, but he grabbed me, hard, with a stern look.
“Do not let go of me, whatever you do,” he said. “Not here.”
I heeded the advice, and clung to him. In short order, the spinning stopped, the storm faded, and we were once again at the side of a road, one I’d never seen before. It looked to still be New Mexico, but there wasn’t any snow now. It was warmer, and the vegetation was different. I looked around me, and saw another set of descansos, near a road sign that indicated we were about twenty miles from Carlsbad Caverns. We were in the Southern part of the state, south of Roswell, hundreds of miles from Golden.
“What the…?” I asked, breathlessly.
“Kiss me, mami,” he said with a naughty, teasing grin.
I did as he said, and again the ground fell away, again we were enveloped in the warm tornado of golden light, and again we alighted in a new place, this time in a foot of snow, next to a field with six freezing, skin and bones cattle hunkered down against the wind, two of them calves, one a large black bull who seemed to be trying gallantly to protect the herd. Again, we were near roadside crosses.
“Come with me,” he said, as he jumped the fence to the field, and strode toward the cows. They looked at us with weary, tortured eyes, but didn’t move away. They were too cold. The babies especially seemed to be in terrible condition. I was sickened by the sight of them, at the cruelty of people toward these peaceful creatures.
I watched as Demetrio laid his hands upon the weakest of the babies. It looked hungry before he touched it, but its sides fattened under his touch, it’s fur patched itself and thickened against the cold.
When he’d finished with the animal, Demetrio seemed to spin a warm wind out of nowhere, and wrapped it around the little herd. The cows noticed, and stomped their feet and nodded their heads lightly, snorting their relief. The snowy ground was now melting where they stood, as though they were protected in a heated bubble of air.
Demetrio tended to the others now, healing frostbitten legs and noses, fattening where starvation had set in. The animals did not have facial expressions like ours. I remembered reading about this in one of Kelsey’s mother’s vegan magazines. Cows had all our same feelings, but they didn’t show them the same way we did. This was what made people think it was okay to eat them, or to gore them to death in bullfights. They were by nature gentle, thoughtful things who meant us no harm.
“Okay,” he said, after he’d finished. “Time to get back.”
“They’ll only be slaughtered and eaten in the end,” I told him. “Why do you bother? Why can’t you save them from that?”
“Everyone has a fate,” he said. “Save them from the slaughter, and someone else starves. It’s a strange universe we live in, Maria, equal parts creation and destruction. The best I can do is try to ease their suffering for now. There are millions, maybe billions, just like them. If you include all of time, too many to count. I am only one revenant.”
“It’s very sad. The owners don’t seem to care if they freeze.”
“To the extent that they remain alive, the owners don’t care. To the owners, these are not souls. They’re money.”
“How can that be?” I wailed, as he took me by the hand and led me back to the fence. He jumped it, and waited for me to do the same.
“You want to hang with me, mamita, you gotta toughen up.”
“No!”
“Listen to me. The people who do this to them, Maria, there will be justice. Not here, and not now. But it’s there. You have to believe it. That’s all that keeps the despair away.”
I began to weep, and fell again into his arms.
“I’m sorry the world is this way, too,” he whispered in my ear. He kissed my cheek, my mouth, and then said, “For all the good we do, there are chindis, others who pull the balance the other direction. That’s how this whole thing works, apparently. No good without bad. No bad without good.”
“Why can’t The Maker stop them?” I cried.
Demetrio held me around the waist with one hand, and with the other he touched the top of one of the roadside crosses. The ground gave way again, and again he held me up, and again we moved through a twinkling storm.
He did not answer me until we’d alighted once more, this time in the churchyard in Golden, next to his own grave marker. Incredibly, Buddy was there, too, with Nutmeg. They seemed to be waiting for us, biding their time with a rawhide chewies.
“There are things I don’t understand, either,” Demetrio said, and I saw that his own eyes shimmered with tears. “I suspect sometimes that there’s more than one Maker. Or there’s a Maker and a Destroyer. Twins, of equal and ever-conflicting powers.”
Together, we stooped to pet Buddy and Nutmeg. Buddy seemed different, but I would later realize it was I who was different. I understood more, felt more, intuited more from living things, for loving Demetrio.
“You use the crosses to move, don’t you?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Sort of. Yes. Crosses, or any other kind of memorial of love built to a departed soul by someone good left behind. Mounds, stones, cards. Outpourings of love, connected like highways, one to the other, like a web. I’m not sure how it works, but it has to do with love and memory. I can go anywhere in the state of New Mexico, those are the rules. I can do good deeds anywhere I land, but I’m really supposed to stick to the Highway where I died.”
“Who made your descanso?” I asked.
“Girl named Claudia.” He spoke this name plainly and without hesitating.
I felt a pang of jealousy. “Is she the one in the picture of you?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s very pretty.”
“Yep.”
“Was she your girlfriend?”
“Yeah.”
I pouted at him through narrowed eyes. Demetrio lifted my chin with his fingertips and forced me to look him in the eye. “Listen, mami, that’s unnecessary now. Jealousy.”
“Yeah, but you were jealous of Logan,” I complained. “You were checking up on me and everything.”
“That ain’t it, Maria. I’m not jealous of Logan. I just don’t trust the guy.”
“Same thing.”
“No. Not the same thing.”
“Double standard,” I said.
He seemed extremely irritated by this. “Ain’t no room for jealousy on this side of things, where I’m at. It’s hard to explain to a human, but jealousy disappears here, where I stand.”
