Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015

by Nino Cipri

  He jumped into the air, then bared his crooked little teeth and glared at me.

  “Your wood? Your wood?”

  “My wood,” I said. “I own this land. I cut down the tree. I bucked it. I hauled it out and split it for the winter. My wood.” It was, I thought, an argument that would stand up well in any court of law, but the only judge or jury in the clearing that night was the bright, silent moon, and the goblin just made a sound like a growl in his scrawny throat.

  “Killin’ a thing,” he declared, “don’t make it yours.”

  “It was dying already,” I protested.

  “So’re you!” he said, stabbing a finger at me. “Doesn’t mean I come in yer house at night to chop you down.”

  I frowned, suddenly all turned around by the strange conversation. “Are you claiming that the tree is yours?”

  “What I’m claimin’ is that the tree matters more to them that’s buried beneath it than it ever did ta you.”

  I blinked. “There’s a body…”

  “Two of ’em,” he snapped impatiently. “They courted beneath the beech as kids, made half their babies here, said everything that needed sayin’ to each other under the old branches, and they’re buried…” he stabbed a stick straight down, gouging at the frozen ground, “… right here. The tree is theirs, even if it’s dead. Even if it’s all chopped up. And it ain’t your place to go stealin’ the fire.”

  “But they’re dead, too,” I said, unsettled to discover these unmarked graves in the middle of my land.

  “And ya think the dead don’t wanna be warm?” He raised the thicket of his brows in disbelief.

  I stared at him, then shook my head. “Why do you care?”

  He looked at me a while, then back to the pile of wood he’d made. “I liked the way she sang,” he muttered, “when she was in the fields. She sang even when she was alone, like she knew I was there. And him.” He nodded at the memory. “When he went out with a bucket for berries, he always left a bush unpicked. For the birds, he said, but I figured he meant me.”

  Then he was quiet for a long time. We both were, just sitting there like we’d known each other all our lives, like I hadn’t just caught him stealing from my pile. The ground looked so cold.

  “All right,” I said finally. “I’ll help you haul the rest of the wood.”

  It took most of the night, and both of us were wiped when we finished. The pile was pretty haphazard, but it was good wood, that old beech, and it was dry. I only had to light one match and it went up like kindling. We sat on the stump—it was wide enough to hold the both of us—and watched the sparks fly up, small as the stars, but hot enough to burn.

  “What were their names?” I asked, gazing into the fire.

  “Leave the names alone,” the goblin snapped.

  I turned to him, taken aback. “I thought I might place a gravestone here, now that the tree is gone.”

  “Whadda they need a gravestone for?” He gestured with a gnarled hand. “They got a fire.”

  “But a fire…” I said, shaking my head. “It’s so short.”

  He looked at me, then held his twiggy hands out to the flame. “But it’s warm.”

  About the Author

  Brian Staveley has an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He works as an editor for Antilever Press, and has published poetry and essays, both in print and on-line. He is the author of The Emperor’s Blades. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Copyright @ 2015 by Brian Staveley

  Art copyright @ 2015 by John Jude Palencar

  Solitreo

  “If it were not for Thee, what would become of me?”

  She’s not speaking to me when she says this. Her poetry nests behind a prison’s walls. I am an unknown noise on the other side of her door—the only spot where sound enters or exits her world—a sweep of bristle against wood, some transitory trace of life that has nothing to do with her.

  She and her people are in cells lined along a corridor in the deepest reaches of the convent. On occasion the mentally disturbed have been kept here, tended to and made safe by walls so thick they are more than an arm’s length. These people, however, are all one family: a mother; an adult son; four older daughters; and this one, who has spent nearly half her life in here.

  That was all the information the Dominican Brothers shared with me the day I started. Except that I must not attempt to speak to the girl or her family through their doors. The Brothers made me swear this before I swept even one stone.

  In the language I share with jailer and jailed, my name is Bienvenida, though my Nahuatl name is different. By the Brothers’ reckoning, it has been 1,562 years since the death of God.

  As I sweep in front of the locked doors, I don’t really think of who is behind them, or why. I think of my traps and whether they are filled or empty of food. I think of the lessons my mother teaches me, because I am the eldest and must care for my siblings if something happens to her. I think of how many chambers are left for me to clean before I can get back to the turquoise and emerald of our world. A world filled with living gods, not dead ones.

  Though that, like everything else, is changing.

  But if the timing is just right, if I’m by the door as the girl recites her poems, I wonder about her then.

  Is she like me, alive for words? Someone who believes in offers of beauty? Who trusts that a perfect couplet will prompt the gods to fulfill its meaning?

  I sweep. I wonder. I think about the ways of walls and words.

  This Day, For It Is Your Day

  I say the names aloud, so I won’t forget, and so the walls know who we are: Francisca, Luis, Isabel, Leonor, Catalina, Mariana, and Anica.

  My name is Anica but I bear others too: one from the land my forebears claim as home; one for our hidden heart; one for the many times that heart has been betrayed.

  I was born where the water shapes the coast of New Spain, the only one of us natural to this New World. Eight generations of our family lived along a different coastline—the Iberian one my mother still talks about—so the sea is part of us. I learned young to mix salted water into dough and knead it with a rhythm that pulls and crests.

  When we moved inland to the greatest city in New Spain, my mother shed enough tears to harden the crusts of many loaves.

  It was a shift from the domain of one element to another. This city is guarded by mountains that open their mouths to spew fire. After she wiped away her tears, my mother taught me to consign a piece of dough to the flame before baking. Though it might seem so, it is not a concession to our new home nor its governing element.

  What my mother teaches is deeper than element or place.

  We are behind these walls because we sweep the house clean on Fridays. Because we light two new candles before sunset, and bless our wine and bread at the table. Because, when we are done, we hide what none but family may see behind locked wardrobe doors.

  When we say Dyó, we mean one, not three.

  Someone took our tale to the Holy Office. That is what my mother thinks. My brother believes it was not a story but success that betrayed us, and my sisters accuse each other’s husbands. In Old World or New, the outcome of attention from Inquisitors is the same. In a plaza full of people, we were ordered into captivity. To renounce and reconcile.

  Conversos. New Christians. Judaizers. Marranos. Anusim. There are many names for us. I hardly know myself what name to use. Except family.

  At first I tried to do as the priests commanded. But I cannot go days on end without saying prayers the way I was taught, and I do not believe my mother would go even one. On the first anniversary of our imprisonment, after hours on the rack, my eldest sister Isabel confessed what everyone already knew: forced conversion is not faith. What resides where no human hand can touch it cannot be forsworn.

  I look out my window now and, instead of an empty sky caged by bars, I imagine the leaves of our fig, pomegranate, and lemon trees fluttering there. My mother bought them dear,
right off one of the Spanish ships, then planted them in our courtyard so that they would rub lovingly against one another when the wind blew. None had yet given fruit when we were taken from our home, but I picture globes of brilliant red, ovals of green, and sweet, dark teardrops hiding among their leaves. I pretend I am swallowing the sparkling, rubied seeds of the first, and reaching for the scion of the last amid its fragrant greenery.

  And for a moment, by the power of memory and imagining, the sun pours down on my shoulders as it does on those of the free.

  There are many hours in a day. When my imaginings turn sour, I fill the emptiness with the cantigas my mother and sisters and I used to sing together, for these are made for women’s voices and women’s work—the work of keeping things alive. When evening falls, the songs turn into to my brother’s words: prayers once celebrated in literary societies, praised for their clarity. “Las palavras klaras, el Dyó las bendize,” we say, and I hope it is true.

  Let the harsh chains be smashed;

  this day, for it is your day,

  has to be the day of forgiving.

  Only I change the last word. Instead of forgiving I say escaping, and in my mind, I grow wings.

  We Unwind the Jewels

  The slab and block with which the Spanish have hidden our ancestral city is full of fault: it does not fit together without seams. The gaps between the stones of the cells are sealed with a paste that cures hard, but begins to crumble with time.

  The mortar between the stones near the girl’s cell door needs a bit of coaxing. I work at it with my broom until I clear a small gap. I squat to look through, then whistle to get her attention.

  “Aquí,” I say. Here. The edict that the Spanish should learn Nahuatl still stands in the city, but the reality is that most of them won’t. There is power in words, and they want that power to be shaped to their speech, not ours.

  The girl gets up from her bedding, follows her ears.

  She is my age, or perhaps a bit older, but not too many years after first blood. Her hair is curly, even around the mats. She is no beauty by Nahua standards, but the Spanish seem to admire skin like hers—lustrous like the inner chamber of a shell. Her garments are filthy, but except for her hair everything else about her is tidy. It must take her a long time to scrub clean with the water the Dominicans provide for drink.

  She drops down so her eye meets mine through the hole.

  “Your poems are beautiful,” I say.

  “They are prayers,” she answers.

  “Of course. Our Nahua poems are too,” I say. “Would you like to hear one?” I recite it in Nahuatl, then translate it: “We take, we unwind the jewels, the blue flowers are woven over the yellow ones, that we may give them to the children.”

  In the quiet that follows, I hear her hitched breathing. All of them breathe that way. Breath caught between walls is what my mother calls it when the Nahua who work in the city’s mills come to her for treatment. She can’t cure it, only lessen it with anacahuite.

  “I miss the moonflower and morning glory vines my mother planted so they twined all around our courtyard,” the girl says. “Are there many flowers where you live?”

  “No,” I say. “But sometimes the trees fill with blue and yellow butterflies, and then it is as if they are in bloom.”

  She closes her eyes to picture it behind her lids.

  “How is it you speak Castilian so well?” she asks when she looks at me again.

  “My mother says I was blessed with a quick mind just to torment her.”

  “My mother says that to me too.” Then, “Used to say it.”

  “She is in the cell next to yours,” I say, motioning at the wall to her right. “If she is taken to be questioned you will be able to see her pass by through this hole I’ve made.”

  Her face twists. “I must hope never to see her, then.”

  “How is it you are here?” she asks after a time.

  “I was recently considered converted enough to clean for the Brothers.”

  “Are you?”

  “The Dominicans are mostly concerned that we repeat exactly what they say in exactly the way they say it. My mother tells me I sound like a parrot.” When the girl doesn’t smile, I add, “My real words come from her.”

  I can tell my answer troubles the girl because she turns her face away from the gap and says something under her breath. Not in Castilian.

  When she turns back, her face is hard. “If you come again and recite more of your poems for me, you must not include mention of any pagan gods. Are we agreed?”

  I nod even though I suspect she knows a poem doesn’t have to mention the gods to be meant for them. “You liked my poem then?” I say.

  “I like that it brought the outside in with it.” Then, “You know what I miss even more than flowers and trees?”

  “What?”

  “My mother used to spend an hour running a comb through my hair every night before I went to sleep.”

  “I have something you can use,” I say. I take the small comb from where I stick it in my nest of braids and push it through the gap.

  “Thank you,” she says, “but that’s not really what I meant.”

  “Take it anyway,” I say.

  “It is so small and my hair is so snarled. It’ll probably break.”

  “No, it won’t,” I say, getting to my feet so I can start my work again. “The turtles around here are tough, and so are the combs I make from their shells. Still, if you want, I can give you a charm to say so your hair untangles as easy as water pours from a gourd.”

  I hear her nervous laughter. “No. No magic.”

  I want to tell her it’s all right. That magic, like poetry, is a gift from the gods. But then I remember where I’m standing. Neither gods nor gifts abide between these walls.

  With the Keys of Abraham

  Bienvenida’s daily visits have become everything to me.

  She brings more than just the images that form in my mind when she recites her poetry. Despite the meals the silent priests bring twice a day, I am always hungry, so she secrets morsels of food in the folds of the sash under her tunic. She passes the day’s tidbit through the gap between the stones with such reverence, I bite my lip to stop myself from laughing at her odd ways.

  “Food can be as strong a magic as poems,” she tells me, when she notices my facial contortions.

  I nod, even though magic, as we know it, is the province of men. My mother cannot leap from bread-making to alchemy, nor from siddur to kabbalah, though she is accounted nearly as wise as my father was.

  What Bienvenida brings with her is strange fare: Grasshoppers roasted crisp and dusted with a salty, spicy ash; cactus fruit with lurid flesh; even a small, greenish steamed pudding made of corn, pumpkin, and honey, wrapped in a leaf. I turn down the chunks of dark turtle meat she brings me though.

  When I push the unclean meat back at her, she takes it, pops the chunk into her mouth and starts chewing it loudly. It occurs to me that this isn’t just an expedient way to get rid of it. She’s really hungry.

  “Of course I am,” she says when I ask her. “After the encomendero takes our tribute, there isn’t much, and some days my traps are empty. I have three siblings.”

  Before I can say anything, she adds, “Plus, turtle meat is like no other. Yesterday Fray Antonio said I had left dirt pushed into the corners of the refectory so he grabbed a stick but, because I had eaten turtle meat the day before, his blows rained off my back as if from a shell.”

  At my snort, she gives me an obstinate, hard look. I’ve learned that when she gets angry she doesn’t raise her voice or huff away, as I would. Instead, she goes quiet and everything about her seems to turn darker. She scares me a bit.

  The silence between us draws out until I ask about her progress in creating gaps in the other cell walls. She hadn’t intended to create any, but I’ve asked her to. Because these are the thoughts I worry most between her visits: if my family is alive; if they stand; if they ar
e still themselves.

  “A small hole in the wall to your mother’s cell,” she answers. “And an even smaller opening in another, which houses one of your sisters. The other walls are too freshly sealed.”

  “Which sister?”

  “The one they say has eyes like water.”

  “Mariana,” I say. “Have you been feeding her and my mother as well?”

  “No. Are you asking me to?”

  I remember the hungry look when she gobbled down the turtle meat and still I say yes. She is my friend and, some days, all that keeps me from despair—but that is no bond compared to the one among family.

  “I have to go back to work,” she says after a moment, and gets to her feet.

  She’s told me that along with sweeping the hallway of cells, she’s responsible for cleaning the Brothers’ whole convent, from top to bottom. Except for the chapel. She says she’s fortunate it is only a convent and not a full priory or her cleaning would burn all the hours of sunlight.

  “What does your mother owe that she would agree to let you be worked this hard?” I say. It’s half query, half sympathy.

  Bienvenida shakes her head as if she doesn’t understand. “We owe everyone. We’re a rope of people, all woven together. Even the Brothers are part of the rope now.”

  After a moment, she continues. “My mother’s knowing is a debt owed to the gods. She cannot turn her back on those who come to her—sometimes on their knees—begging a cure. And when Fray Bernardino comes to her to learn herb lore, that teaching is owed too.”

  “But she could still do what she does elsewhere, and more happily if she were farther from the priests. Couldn’t she?” I ask after a moment. Maybe in saying this I’m really wondering why my brother and mother chose for us to stay here, even after my father died and his brother asked us to join him in Nuevo León, far from the threat of Inquisitors.

  “I already walk a long way to get to my work here,” she says. “More than an hour according to Fray Bernardino, though maybe his long legs make it shorter for him than for me.”