by Ian Gibson
“Not this time,” her mother answers for the grandmother. “Your grandma hasn’t been feeling well lately and your father has to check on her, and we don’t have much time before we need to start making dinner.”
The grandmother leans into Itzel and whispers, “It’s not a good time of year to go deep into the forest, so you better be careful out there today if you walk past the northern statue—there are nasty spirits lurking out there, beyond its protection. Keep an eye out for them.” She grabs Itzel’s arms and pulls her inward, laughing maniacally and making a scary face. “Or they’ll gobble you up!”
Itzel squeals in laughter.
The grandmother stands upright with her arms akimbo as she sets her sights on Itzel’s brother, who’s still sitting in the car with the door open, looking very downtrodden. “My precious Miguel, are you coming to hug your poor, old grandmother?”
“He’s in a sulk because he’s missing football practice today,” Itzel whispers to her.
The grandmother laughs and bows her head to Miguel. “How could I possibly be worthy of such a big sacrifice?”
Miguel alights from the car and goes to hug his grandmother.
She squeezes him tightly. “There’s only one person I know who’s grumpier than you, and he lived at the top of a very tall tree to get away from the world. Is that where you want to be?”
“He doesn’t like climbing trees anymore,” Itzel says, sticking her tongue out at her brother.
“Because he’s a big, tough man now!” the grandmother says, before leaning into him and holding his head firmly to plant two embarrassingly big kisses on his cheeks. “And since you’re so big and tough, you’ll get two kisses from the Sun.” She squeezes him tightly. “And a great, big hug from the Moon!”
Miguel grunts and tries to turn his head away, contorting his face like he’s struggling to hold back a smile because the kisses were so ticklish. “Grandma!” he yelps in protest. “Come on!”
“Stop squirming,” his grandmother tells him. “And stop complaining.”
Their baby sister laughs, which invites a laugh from Itzel too, as she begins to wonder if her baby sister’s already able to take amusement from Miguel’s moodiness just as much as she does.
“All right, I’m done with you,” the grandmother tells Miguel, setting him free from her loving clutches. She then kisses and hugs the mother. “You endured half a day’s worth of complaints about the condition of the roads for me.”
“Now that was a big sacrifice,” the mother says with a smile while glancing at the father.
The grandmother takes the baby from the mother’s arms. “Let me nab this big-eyed kinkajou again.”
"Help me with this, Miguel," the father says as he opens the car boot. Miguel goes to help him take out a fold-out bed to bring into the hut. It’s for Itzel and Miguel to share, as their grandmother’s hut is small and has only two small beds. After they’ve taken out the rest of their things to bring them inside, the father asks the grandmother to sit on her bed. He’s carrying his bag of medical equipment, opens it on the bed next to her, takes out his stethoscope, and places it on the grandmother’s heart to listen carefully. She’s still holding the baby, and when she notices Itzel looking at her, she smiles and winks at her.
The mother doesn’t want them to see this, so she asks Itzel and Miguel if they’d like to go for a stroll through the forest before it gets dark. Miguel declines and takes his football outside to kick it around, but Itzel is already eagerly waiting at the doorway to go—especially as it was her suggestion in the first place. She’s sad her grandmother can’t join them this time, but at least she might tomorrow.
As they leave the house, the grandmother tells them, "You've come at a time when the spirits will be roaming that forest. Tell me if you see any! And remember to be careful. Watch your backs—the bad ones will sneak up on you and take you away!"
“Hold still,” the father tells the grandmother.
The grandmother groans anxiously. “Will this take long? I have things to do!”
“It won't if you hold still and stop blabbering," the father says impatiently.
She scowls at him. “I hope they take you away.”
Itzel walks through the forest with her mother, following the same path through the forest that they always do, passing the jaguar statue marking the northern border of the village, and continuing onward until they come to a large ceiba tree, which is usually the point where they decide to turn back. She closes her eyes and listens to the music of the rainforest, and as she hears the warbles and whistles of melodious blackbirds singing in duets—whenever she thinks of the rainforest, these are the exact birdsongs that play in her head—she feels a sense of comfort that she’s finally back in her home-away-from-home.
There’s something magical about the forest lying just beyond her grandmother’s hut—whenever she steps inside, she feels like she’s been transported to an alternate world populated by fantastical creatures, many of whom she’s been lucky enough to spot. Among them, she remembers a tapir brushing against tree trunks to scratch itself, a white-tailed deer who locked eyes with her before bounding over a hill, an eagle perched on a branch spreading its wings proudly, and a peccary who seemed very intent on sniffing everything it could in spite of its own overpowering musk. She hasn’t seen a jaguar yet, but she’s hoping she will someday, even though her family tells her how unlikely that would be as they’re endangered.
She and her mother come to the ceiba tree, with its large buttress roots sticking high out of the ground, and they look up at its branches—it’s so tall it rises higher than the rest of the forest canopy, and Itzel often wonders what the view must be like if she were able to climb to the top and sit on one of its branches and look across the treetops. She hops on one of the roots that slope sharply and crawls along it to the trunk, which is covered with little spikes. She wishes they were much larger, as she’d be able to grab a hold of them and use them to climb up. But as it is now, that’s the highest she can go.
Her mother chuckles. “I’ve never seen a tree my little monkey can’t climb.” She picks Itzel up and helps her down from the root. “Though not so little anymore—you’re getting so big I can barely lift you!”
When they’re about to leave, Itzel thinks she hears a squawk. She looks up the ceiba tree. “Did you hear that?”
“No, what was it?” her mother asks.
“It sounded like a parrot.” Then she becomes very excited. “Maybe it was a macaw!” Her eyes scan the treetop, and she thinks she can glimpse a hint of redness amidst the greens of the leaves. It’s very high up, so it’s difficult to see for sure. It could just be one of its flowers—the ceibas blossom in pink—but this is a much starker red, and she can’t help but wonder if it’s a scarlet macaw. She’s never seen one in the wild before.
“Whatever it is, it clearly doesn’t want to be seen,” her mother says. “Come, we’re already running late.”
Itzel continues staring at it, but her mother starts heading back. "Itzel," her mother says sternly, turning back to her. "You know we plan to have dinner early. Your father is tired and cranky about driving all the way here."
"Okay, okay!"
They start walking back down the path to the village. On the way back, Itzel spots a bright green hummingbird flitting around a red hibiscus shrub, licking from one of its flowers, and she whispers to her mother and points to it. When it flies away, her mother walks to the shrub and takes the flower that the hummingbird was licking from, and she puts it in Itzel’s hair.
“I don’t know why your brother never wants to come with us anymore,” her mother tells her. “But you love the forest a lot, just like me, don’t you? Your grandma said that you’re a forest spirit.” She strokes Itzel’s hair, admiring the red hibiscus flower in it. “Now you look like a forest spirit, too.”
They return to the hut and start preparing dinner in a separate open-air hut behind the grandmother’s home, which is smaller and used just
for cooking—most of the huts in her village have their kitchens separate like this so they don’t fill their own homes with smoke and soot, or worse, burn their wooden houses down. Itzel helps them by rolling the corn masa into balls to flatten into tortillas. The grandmother is singing while she does the cooking, and the hut is full of delicious, spicy smells of annatto seeds and hot chilis. Itzel loves her grandmother’s cooking—in fact, it’s probably her second favourite thing about visiting her, after their forest walks, of course. Her grandmother asks if she’d like a cup of hot chocolate, and Itzel nods very enthusiastically—that’s her third favourite thing she looks forward to when coming here. Her grandmother pours it for her, and she stands on the stone patio outside the home, looking dreamily at the rainforest lying ahead of her, an invitingly short distance away, as she blows on her chocolate to cool it off. She sticks her nose in the cup to breathe in the rich aroma—her grandmother always flavours it with honey and spices—and when she lowers the cup, she notices some of the chocolate got on the tip of her nose.
She then hears a croak and looks down to find a reddish-brown frog hopping over to her feet. It lashes out its long, sticky tongue to lick up the chocolate that has dripped on the patio, and croaks again, much more loudly and excitedly.
“Hello, froggy!” she says as she watches it curiously. “I don’t think frogs are supposed to eat chocolate.” Upon saying this, she realises she’s not actually sure—the matter of whether or not chocolate is suitable for frogs hadn’t come to her mind till now—but she figured it’s a safe assumption to make.
The frog slurps up the rest of the chocolate on the patio, looks up at her with its bright yellow eyes, and croaks again, its throat sac bulging up and down in glee. She finds it funny that it’s come so close to her and is looking at her so expectantly, as if wanting more of her chocolate. She turns to her family because she wants to show them—her mother and grandmother are in the kitchen hut chatting away while preparing dinner, her father is inside the house walking back and forth trying to get signal on his phone, and Miguel is lying in their bed idly tossing his football up and down with his hands, clearly bored out of his skull already.
“Miguel!” she whispers to him. “Come look at this frog!” She doesn’t want to be too loud, as she might scare the frog away, but either Miguel doesn’t hear her, or he does and simply isn’t paying her any mind. She looks back at the frog—it’s staring at her as if still wanting more of her chocolate. “I thought you’re supposed to eat flies, not chocolate! Or maybe chocolate-covered flies?” She smiles at it, and notices that it looks rather chubby for a frog, and wonders if it’s made a habit of coming around the village to eat any sweet things that’s been dropped on the ground outside the villagers’ kitchens. She then glimpses something moving in the grass just ahead of them—a green snake has its eyes set on the unwitting frog and is slithering straight towards the patio like it intends to gobble it up. “Oh no!” Itzel quickly puts down her cup of chocolate and scoops up the frog with both hands. She walks around the corner of the hut and kneels down, about to release it into the grass there, but much to her surprise, a green snake drops through the air and plops onto the grass just ahead of her with a loud hiss. It looks almost exactly like the last one she saw, with the same ravenous look in its yellow eyes as it starts slithering towards her. She looks up to where it came from—there are a few trees around, but none of their branches hangs anywhere near where the snake fell from. Did it just drop from the sky? It couldn’t have. Snakes don’t fly!
She again covers the frog in her hands and runs around to behind the hut, but much to her astonishment, yet another identical green snake drops to the grass with a plop and a hiss, and she glances up—again it seems to have just fallen from the sky! It immediately starts slithering through the grass towards her, as if intent to gobble up the little frog in her hands.
“What’s with all these snakes! And where are they coming from?” she says to the frog in her hands, who doesn’t look all that happy about the prospect of being snake food. She walks into the hut holding the frog and tells Miguel, “It’s raining snakes out there! I’ve got a frog and they’re falling from the sky trying to eat it! Go look!”
“What?” Miguel hops out of his bed and looks around the front patio, in the grass, and up at the sky—though as he does this last part, it quickly occurs to him just how ridiculous it is to be checking the sky for snakes—but there isn’t a single snake anywhere to be seen no matter where he looks. He checks around the corner of the hut but finds no sign of one there either—even glancing at the sky again just to be absolutely sure. “I don’t see anything,” he says disappointedly, thinking that some snakes would have been the only interesting thing he’d see on this entire trip—especially if they were dropping from the sky as his sister claims. “Where are they?”
“They’re everywhere! It’s raining snakes!” Itzel tells him as she scours their grandmother’s house. She finds an empty glass jar and drops the frog inside.
“You’re crazy, sis.” Miguel comes back inside and slumps back on his bed. “Just like grandma,” he says, knowing that his grandmother is too busy singing to herself in the kitchen hut to hear him.
Itzel’s mother peers through the house window, wondering what all the fuss is about, and sees Itzel holding a frog in a jar. “What are you doing? Stop bringing animals into your grandmother’s home!” she scolds her.
“I’ll free it later, I promise!” Itzel takes the cover of the jar, stabs some air holes in it, puts the cover back on, and places it under her bed so the others won’t be bothered by it.
The grandmother is still cheerily singing to herself in the kitchen, off in her own world, until she calls everyone for dinner, and they come take their food—tamales with spicy chicken and chaya wrapped in banana leaves—and bring it into the house to eat together on the small wooden dining table. They usually eat in the house at dinnertime, as it’s much cosier and roomier in there than the tiny kitchen hut, not to mention warmer in the evenings that can get a bit chilly in the highlands this time of year. They eat and talk about their plans tomorrow—what to bring on their picnic in the forest and the route they might take. Itzel is kicking her legs with excitement and is already convinced it’ll be the best birthday ever, but the father yawns as if he’s tired out just by the thought of how long a day tomorrow will be, especially after the long drive today, and his yawn proves infectious as the mother and Miguel shortly join in on it, so they decide they’ll have an early night tonight. Once they’ve finished eating, the mother washes the dishes, as she knows the grandmother has a tradition of standing outside every sunset to wave goodbye to the Sun. Itzel offers to help her mother wash up, but the grandmother calls to her from the patio.
"Go join your grandma, Itzel,” her mother tells her warmly. “I'll finish the washing up."
Itzel goes outside on the patio and waves to the Sun with her grandmother. "Goodbye, Sun!"
“Did you know the Sun has a name too?” her grandmother tells her, and she whispers, “His name is Kinich Ahau.” She says the name very delicately, like it’s something too sacred to be said out loud.
"Goodbye, Kinich Ahau!" Itzel says to the setting Sun, then whispers back to her grandmother, "Did I say it right?"
Her grandmother smiles and taps her on the nose. "Perfectly."
They watch the Sun as it dips below the forest, and already they hear the forest slowly come alive with the night-choir of chirping crickets and frogs, and they chat while watching the fireflies blinking as darkness sets in. Itzel finds it incredibly relaxing to stare dazedly at the fireflies in the evening, as they often do after drinking their evening cup of chocolate.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” her grandmother remarks. “Like they’re putting on a show for us. But they only flash like this for a couple of weeks before they die.”
“Two weeks isn’t long at all,” Itzel says, feeling a bit sorry for them.
“Two weeks isn’t long for us,
but it’s long for them.” Her grandmother raises her head to the stars glittering the sky as they gradually peek out from the Sun’s faint afterglow. “For the heavens, we’re little more than fireflies ourselves. We’re here one moment, gone the next.” She looks back to the fireflies dotting the dark forest that looms mysteriously before them in the dusk light. “That’s why you need to make sure you appreciate each one of them while they’re here, because in a moment they’ll be gone forever. Just as we need to appreciate each other, because before you know it”—she snaps her fingers—“our light will go out, too.”
Considering how many fireflies are out, Itzel finds that a rather daunting task, but she does try to look at as many flashing dots of light as she can, as if to acknowledge each one as it blinks and flits about.
Her grandmother pulls a stool to the doorway to sit, as she’s tired from standing. She looks like she’s straining herself from bending over, so Itzel offers to help her bring it, and her grandmother settles down on it. The evening is already getting quite cool, so her grandmother takes the scarf hanging over her shoulder and wraps it around her neck. As she does so, Itzel notices the scar on her grandmother's upper left arm—just below the shoulder—which she said she got when she was young. She claims a bad forest spirit tried to take her, but her mother says she probably grazed it on a branch when falling from a tree—she loved to climb them as a child, just like Itzel does—and she just likes to embellish her stories to make them more fun.
“It’ll be a full moon tomorrow,” her grandmother tells her, looking up at the Moon in the clear sky, which is just shy of being full. “Just for your birthday!”
“Does the Moon have a name, too?” Itzel asks. “Like the Sun?”
Her grandmother smiles, still staring at the Moon. “She did.” She looks at Itzel and taps her on the nose again. “Maybe someday I’ll tell you.”
Itzel laughs. Her grandmother enjoys being vague and mysterious sometimes—probably because she knows it makes Itzel even more curious about it—but Itzel likes that about her. “Are you coming with us to the forest tomorrow?”
