Published in Issue 62.3: Summer 2023
The day the water arrived, Luis was working in the cellar, the dogs were tied up to the trees, and Cecilia and I were digging holes the size of thumbs. We were poking the earth with screwdrivers and dropping in handfuls of seeds. To pass the time, Cecilia was telling me about home: “Remember the kioscos where we used to buy chocolates?” She reminisced for both of us. If we were actually from the same city, Cecilia said, we would have been friends. “And the awful smell of meat steaming out of the carnicerías. The stench so bad it sends you flying. And we got a haircut once by two men at midnight.” She trailed from one memory to the next without pause. “Saw them in the window, thought they were cute, turned out it wasn’t a bar but a hair salon!” On this empty farmland, kioscos and hair salons sounded so foreign to me. But she made me feel that my own life must have been like that, too. I smiled. I wanted her to keep talking. We were the last girls left on this farm, but I did not feel so alone when she told me about our past. The cracked earth was dry from the drought, dry forever it seemed, but still we always dug and planted seeds because that is what you do on a farm. Dust floated up from our fingers like the opposite of mist, and it was the day the water arrived.
Cecilia touched her hair, the long braid it had become. She was younger than she looked. I stroked the ends of my ponytail, wondering when my last haircut had been. She reached over and yanked it, and I yanked her braid. We laughed, and dust got into our mouths.
“The zoo isn’t a zoo anymore, just a bunch of exhibits with cardboard cut-outs of the animals living in their habitats,” she said. She could have been saying anything. She could have been talking about the moon. “We’d sit there for hours, watching them.” Then her smile turned. “We could be there right now,” she said, and the glow in my belly went cold.
We’d been living on this farm for a long time. Had it been eight months already, nine? It was hard to keep track of the season under the painted blue wall of the sky, where not even a wisp of cloud materialized in the distance. The mid-morning sun bore down on us while we crouched in the dirt. The fat brown seeds we planted were olive tree seeds, according to Luis, but it was hard to imagine they’d ever sprout. The trees that did stand out of the ground were stunted in their growth across a strange gradient. Far out in the field they were tiny; the ones planted close to the irrigation channel were closer to full growth, telling a story of a time when water once flowed into their roots. Luis said the irrigation channel had once been filled with water, but it had dried out long before we got here. To us the trees had always been leafless, no olives dangling from their black branches, monuments to the halt of time.
This week we’d already raked away the dead bushes and pruned the dead or dormant olive trees in hopes that one day, when the water came, they’d wake up to the flurry of life returning to their stiff and aching branches. Looking at our rows of holes, I missed the sight of the other girls who’d been out here with us, walking around in their work clothes and messy ponytails, Sofia and Lisa, Martha and Sandra, Gabi, Natalia. They had come from all over the country. Listening to their stories about their lives helped me learn so much about the world out there, beyond the dust, the hard and cracked dirt, the empty channels that stretched like veins to the mountains in the distance, eternally capped in snow. What were they doing now? I pictured them back where they’d run from, back with their boyfriends, husbands, or alone with bellies growling, on the streets again, fingers raw sewing in a factory, or somewhere worse. But no other girls—runaways, tossed or fallen from grace, lost and ashamed—had shown up to work alongside us on Luis’s farm. Now it was just Cecilia and her story, which was almost like my story, filling in the edges of it, but not enough to remember my own.
On my first day here, I sat on the floor surrounded by girls in the firelight, and I tried telling Cecilia who I was and what my life was like before running away. But when I reached for the words, there were none. I hugged my shoulders, my body still familiar, but my mind was empty. As though to stop me from struggling, Cecilia cupped my cheeks in her hands and said, “No, no. Don’t you remember? We used to dance cumbia on our friends’ balconies.”
“Oh,” I said, looking at her brown eyes, her eyes like a pathway. “That’s right.”
Everyone had their reasons for showing up here. Cecilia did not make me feel like a fool for not knowing mine. She made not knowing better than knowing. Dancing, friends—it could have been her, but it could have also been me.
When we finished our row of holes, we stood up and shook out our legs, me in my bright red overalls and Cecilia in her giant blue jumpsuit. The farmhouse was tiny in the distance. We hadn’t realized how far we’d strayed. The wind picked up like it did sometimes. Luis said this type of wind funneled in from the other side of the mountains, past the ice pack, bringing the momentum of distance and the shiver of snow. It was called the Zonda wind, he said, as if this feeling could have a name.
“Should we go back?” I asked, although it was only morning, and we didn’t need to start preparing lunch for another hour. Cecilia looked at me, uneasy, feeling it too: that we were approaching an edge we couldn’t see.
As we walked back through the orchard, Cecilia let out one of her sighs, a breath that said, I am tired, or worse, Look how tired I am. A language of their own, Cecilia’s sighs emerged when her mood dropped into a shadowy place, which lately she’d begun occupying more and more. It was as if the sight of trees that had given up in the ground provoked in her a sense that all the work we’d done today had been for nothing. But it hadn’t been for nothing—our work kept us busy and hopeful for the farm’s future. One day the water would come and we’d see everything change.
“He should pay us,” she said when we reached the trees as tall as us. “We’ve been here long enough to deserve wages.”
Luis was in the cellar beneath the house, always in the cellar. He was the only other person for miles. The house was just a small thing in the landscape, walls crooked as though about to fall over, with a little puff of smoke coming out the chimney like in a picture drawn by a child.
“He feeds us. We have beds,” I said, although they weren’t beds but cots thrown on the ground. I thought of reminding her that Luis had given us his old work clothes, which was nice, but also necessary, so maybe not nice but just his duty, since we had no other clothes. She was making me nervous. Whenever she spoke that way, she sounded ungrateful for being allowed to live here in exchange for our labor. But I knew she wasn’t, not really. I didn’t want to assume I knew how it felt to have to run away from the home you share with your boyfriend. She never talked about whatever he did to her, but like all things that go unspoken, I could feel that it was pressing in on every conversation, like hands looking for a way in.
When I arrived that first night, I thought the purple shadows beneath her eye and speckling her arms were a trick of the firelight. She and the other girls sat hunched beside the fireplace, and when they saw me walk in, Cecilia leapt up with a squeal. She ran to me, took my hand, pulled me to the floor where the rest of them sat in the warmth. Up close, I could see the bruising, but her excitement about my arrival muted the impression of her wounds. She’d arrived the same day as me, so maybe she felt less alone with me around to share her timeline for healing. Now she was long-haired and muscled, with cheeks tanned beneath the sun. If only Luis’s house had any mirrors she’d be able to see this.
The trees near the house were walnut trees, which sprouted no fruit or leaves, but dogs, chained up against the thick trunks. As usual they ran at us as we walked by, howling with their necks yanked back, yearning for us girls just out of reach. But today there was so much noise—more than howls, more than wind. A frantic flow, the static hiss of something old and familiar, though not from this place.
Cecilia looked at me. Could it be?
We ran. We passed the house and reached the edge of the irrigation channel. We couldn’t believe it. Fresh water was rushing through its cement walls, close to overflowing.
Luis was out of sight, nobody around to call us back, tell us no, there is still work to do. Without stopping to take off our clothes, we jumped in, screaming.
The cold water knocked the air out of me. Cecilia yelled and dunked her whole body around, splashing at me, laughing. I caught my breath and looked around. We were standing in our own river, spouted as if from nowhere. Luis had told us the only way for the water to come was if the reservoir in the mountains filled up enough to release excess water down the channels, which branched off in hundreds of directions to nourish the other farms. Part of me thought this was a myth to keep us hoping. But it was here now, it was real.
The water was perfectly clear, like submerging a hand into glass, and brought with it a sudden vibrance to everything around me. Cecilia was incandescent. The blue of her jumpsuit, the redness of her cheeks shocked by the cold. She dunked her head underwater, and I did too. I was with my best friend, my companion. Reaching for her fleshy, wet arm, I had the strange feeling that I’d done this before. I remembered my mother. The feel of her love, the curve of her arms: a memory entirely my own. Not one fed to me by Cecilia’s stories, the way she drew the lines I could then fill in with color.
I let go of her, afraid. I took a gulp of water and its cool touch loosened my throat.
Cecilia, in her own world, let out another sigh, her mood suddenly deflated. “You know, we’re going to have even more work now,” she said.
She was right. We’d need to divert the water towards the orchard. But I felt betrayed by her creeping distaste for her life here, her duties, the way she was earning her keep. Today was special—we had been waiting for the water to arrive since the beginning—so why couldn’t she be happy?
Before the other girls left, we all used to walk through these empty channels, turning left and right at random, and we’d wind up on other farms, abandoned except for the stretch of wild grasses with dried flowers still clinging to their stems. One day we stumbled across some animal bones. A dog jaw, the perfect symmetry of it, tilted and bent like a howl. The entire skeleton of a horse, its ribcage domed over the dirt like a death-home for rats. We wandered for some time through these fields littered with bones that seemed from a distance like they might be strange plants native to this part of the country. When we found the skeletons of two cows, Lisa in her too-big work shirt kicked one of the skulls, sending dirt everywhere. Then she wouldn’t stop. She kicked the other bones, breaking them off their joints with her boots. Gabi said, “You know you’re lucky to be here. It’s better than being back home.”
But a week later, Gabi announced that she was going home. And one by one, the other girls left, too, until it was just Cecilia and me. The water’s arrival was the gift we got for sticking around.
“Work, work, work,” Cecilia said, flapping her arms. “I’m so tired of work!”
“You’re a little duck,” I said. “A crow. A vulture.”
She swatted her wings again and splashed. “You’re not going anywhere,” I said. “You’re staying with me.” She smiled devilishly, and dunked me underwater. We came up for air, laughing, and let ourselves go limp on the surface. The current was strong for an irrigation channel. This was better than I could have ever imagined the water might feel. We sailed all the way to the next fork, dipping left down another route in this maze.
“Back home, the sea flowed into a channel separating our city from another city far away. They called it a river—it was a big brown body of water where fish went to die. But we used to stand on the boardwalk and lean against the iron railings anyway, imagining it was not a rotting river, but a blue and endless ocean.” Cecilia said this with a voice dulled by sunlight, free from any longing. Maybe she wasn’t serious about going back after all. Maybe it was a sudden whim, and a whim has no grip. I kicked, picturing that ocean, and the water didn’t feel so cold anymore.
Floating for what felt like forever, my mind wandered like it did sometimes. I pictured a cramped apartment, the honking of so many cars, uneven cement tiles on the sidewalk. The familiar tug in my belly told me we’d gone far enough. I grabbed onto a pipe, and Cecilia, who’d been floating like a doll, her arm outstretched and connected to mine, stood up too, and we climbed out. We dripped water the whole way back to the house.
By now it was noon and we had to prepare lunch for Luis. In the kitchen we took out the recipe book, filled with girls’ loopy handwriting and little drawings sketched in the margins: carrots, slices of cake, a cartoon Luis with a chef’s hat holding a fork. Lunch was the easiest part of the day, the part of earning our keep that felt less like work than a game, the frenzy of leafing through recipes, and looking for the right ingredients in jars preserved from a time when food grew on this farm, canned by people we had never known.
Feeling elaborate for the occasion, we decided on milanesas, turned to Lisa’s page and followed her instructions. For a while it had just been the three of us left. But Lisa’s outbursts started growing worse than the time she’d kicked all those bones. In tears, she’d look up at the ceiling of the sky and say Fuck you, I love you, over and over again. When she pulled on the same jeans that she’d arrived in months before, I knew she was leaving. Like all the others, she said “See you,” and hugged me so tight I felt her breath expand inside my own lungs. Then she pulled away with a gap-toothed smile that said I am ready. It seemed impossible to imagine her anywhere but on this farm, the way people belong in your mind to the place where you met them, her essence imbued with digging, cooking, and taking long walks in the dusty fields. Not wearing tight jeans and tank tops, not walking past cars honking at her, not arguing with some guy, but crouched under the black branches of olive trees. Cecilia and I watched as she walked past the cellar door and down the stretch of dirt that we knew led to a road. The dogs howled at her from their chains, as though mourning the loss of a girl not fully healed, but who was determined to return to the life that treated her so nasty.
“Leaving, like staying, is a choice,” I told Cecilia that night. She lay in her cot, just an arm’s length from mine in the living room. My voice sounded too loud beneath the pitched ceiling. “There never is a choice,” Cecilia said, and turned off the lamp.
As we were taking the milanesas off the frying pan and filling the salad bowl with carrots, frozen from last year’s harvest, Luis came in. His appearance in the kitchen surprised me, carrots rolling out of my hand onto the table.
With his black neck scarf covering his mouth, only Luis’s clear blue eyes were visible behind his oval glasses. His gray hair was a mess, like he’d cut it himself in three blind strokes hunched over a trash can. He hung his scarf on a hook and sat at the table, folding his hands. There was always a blankness in his expression that I imagined was due to his being in the cellar all the time. With that empty look, whatever we thought about him could be true. But we never asked him to explain about his life, and he didn’t ask us to explain why we showed up on his farm—out of respect for our privacy or because he didn’t care, I didn’t know.
We waited for him to say something about the water. Today the myth of the water had become real, and anything felt possible. Maybe I am exaggerating. Maybe it wasn’t special, it was just the forces of time that had pressed into the snow in the mountains, melted it, and delivered it to us now, since only time knew the best moment for these changes to occur. But the water was here, and to me that meant something. I was involved in the beginning of the farm’s new life.
“I’m starving,” Cecilia said, tearing into her meat. Luis’s hands held the fork too softly, as though his fingers were stuffed with straw. He ate in silence. Did he think the food was tasty or just fuel? His plate of golden-brown milanesa, steaming hot beside the finely chopped carrots, was now a mess of brown and orange and grease. When he finished, he placed his hands on the table. “So, the water is here.”
“We know that,” Cecilia said, chewing. Our hair and clothes were still wet.
“We’ll need ditches.” Luis barely knew how to talk to people, it was all order after order, or some simple thing he noticed, like there’s dust on the windowsill, there’s a rake in the dirt. “Have to divert it to the orchards. The garden, too. Have to fill the water tank.”
“Good luck with that,” Cecilia said. “Hope it goes well for you.”
“Stop it, Cecilia,” I said.
“Door’s always open.” He didn’t even look at her when he said it. He was so stupid sometimes, a man made out of hay, strange and undignified. I wanted Luis to tell Cecilia that she was needed. That without her, without us, the farm would be nothing.
The water had arrived and yet everything felt ruined. I stood up from the table and ran outside. Here we had a place to eat and sleep. Here we worked the way we wanted to, because we wanted to, and our labor was for nobody but ourselves. Did leaving mean being brave enough to go back where you came from, even if where you came from broke you, tossed you out, left you, of all places, on this farm? “You are brave,” I told the dogs. “Leap up! Run!” A black one with ticks on his neck lifted his head, sneezed, then went back to sleep.
I thought about going for a walk, but instead I sat on a rock. Luis came outside, and I watched him crouch beside the water tank, checking its valves. Unlike all us girls who grew tanned and burnt in the constant sun, hands calloused, hair long and knotted, it struck me that Luis looked the same as he did when I showed up on his doorstep, when he opened the door without a trace of surprise, like he had been expecting me. Maybe not me, but someone else like me, the idea of me. And I filled in her figure with detail: Brown frizzy hair, skinny arms, in a beat-up wedding dress with a dumbstruck look on my face. How did I wind up like this?
The bus driver shook me awake and kicked me off the bus when we’d reached the end of the line: an empty road in a rural part of the country I didn’t recognize. I walked in the dark, no stars out, no moon. I ran into a fence and then I ran into another fence, trapped between fences and darkness. But I kept walking until the fences opened themselves up to a field, and there was a tiny light in the distance that I had to follow. I stepped into a ditch and fell on my palms. Dry grass crunched beneath my heeled bridal sandals. I could hear howling and barking, which sounded like something close to speech, words scrambled in the distance, unsure of their origin or audience.
Almost reaching the house, still blind, I came close enough to one of the trees for a dog to pounce. It ripped the dress on my thigh with its paws, and its hot breath steamed over my face. An assault in the dark, so unexpected and sharp I couldn’t even yell, just squirmed away and sprinted to the house and banged on the door.
“Welcome,” Luis said, and behind those glasses were his eyes, clear and blue and unseeing. He made it obvious that it didn’t matter why I was there. And already, I’d forgotten.
Inside I saw girls in their work clothes sitting around the fireplace, finishing their dinner on the floor. It was all girls. So many of them in this tiny house, just one common space to sleep on cots on the ground. Later I learned that boys would come to Luis’s farm too, sometimes, lost or kicked out or addicted to drugs, or simply traveling the country with the freedom to leave whenever they wanted on a motorcycle or bike. With their unshaved beards and unburdened backs, they’d holler down the dirt road, excited about the future. But most of the time those who showed up would be young women like us. All of us had known that running away was our only choice. Tossed out from homes and left with nowhere to go, or having snuck out in the middle of the night, we showed up here, lost, and Luis took us in.
The next morning, the girls handed me a shovel, and Luis gave me giant red overalls from a bin of his old clothes. We had to work to earn our keep. I threw my wedding dress into a black plastic bag and stuffed it inside one of the kitchen cupboards. The girls led me down the orchard, where we stood in a circle beneath the black branches to think about what we should work on that day. Every day, it was like this. One girl would suggest, Let’s rake the soil? Let’s pick the weeds? And then we would. Luis, usually down in the cellar, never bothered us or gave us instructions. We enjoyed the dirt, we endured the heat, when it was ours. We were far away from home and we were safe. Occasionally a girl would let the past into our world. “Look,” Gabi said one day as she lifted up her shirt and lowered the waistband of her too-big work pants, showing us the pink scar beneath her navel. “Almost gone.” And then she told us why she ran away, how she got here months ago. The stories would pop up like that, so natural, and we’d nod in understanding. The other girls were doing well. They were talking about their lives. So what was wrong with me?
As I pulled roots and dug small holes and listened to girls with their own stories of their fall from grace, I couldn’t remember myself. All I could picture from my past were the spaces that I once occupied, not the presence I must have been within those spaces. A hollowed-out cutout of me, wandering lost within my memories. I could picture the subterranean train in my city, and the little boys who would try to sell me gum, their faces all dirty with boogers. And the constant motion of traffic on the streets, the men on motorcycles cutting past in dark leathers. Buildings falling apart and the construction workers that never finished the labor of putting them back together.
When the girls asked about my life, a garbled mess of images came to me: bath tiles flooded with water, a wedding dress thrown at my face, a window with streetlights glowing outside. But I saw no story to piece them together, and I was scared of the story that would appear if I tried to create it myself. I’d try to speak, but all I could muster was a sigh like Cecilia, so the girls did not press on. In the fields we’d clump together in the morning, all of us chatting about anything, and then we’d scatter across the orchard as the day wore on, but Cecilia always stayed by my side, the two of us bent over the dirt. While we worked, Cecilia would tell me stories about her past, which became like my past, too. And the rest of me was who I was on this farm, cooking, readying the soil, planting seeds and hoping they wouldn’t die in the drought. I felt in my bones that I wasn’t just me, but I was also Cecilia, and the other girls, as well, and we were growing into something better than the runaways we had been when we arrived. The rip and pull of weeds, our arms growing stronger every day. The simplicity of this place, and the prison of it.
Luis was still inspecting the valves of the water tank and hadn’t noticed me sitting in the sun with the dogs. He looked like a man preserved forever in a jar. “Luis,” I said, and he turned to me. I wanted him to put his hand on my shoulder. I wanted to blurt out stories about my life like Cecilia. Maybe then Luis would know me, would look at me and finally nod in understanding. But I said, “Where should I start digging?”
When Cecilia came outside, Luis handed us gloves, shovels, and a pick-ax. He directed us over to the banks of the irrigation channel where we would need to start digging the drainage ditches. None of us girls had thought to dig them earlier, when more of us had been around. Now Luis was telling us to do it, just two girls left for this enormous task. “They should stretch all the way down to the back of the orchard,” he said, pointing toward where we’d planted the seeds this morning. Cecilia groaned and began heaving furiously into the dirt, still hard and cracked from months of no rain.
This was brute work, work for mules or horses or a tractor, but strength had possessed my arms and I knew I could do it. As the sun slinked across the stale blue sky, I bore into the earth, and again and even harder, not making holes the size of thumbs, but wrenching out entire shovelfuls of packed dirt. Sweat dropped from our brows into the ditch like feeble hints of rain as dirt piled up along one side of the ditch that we stretched deeper into the orchard. Luis kept watch beneath the trees, not speaking any words of praise or encouragement to keep us going.
It took hours to reach the trees that were only as tall as our knees. By then, the sun had begun to lay itself down on the mountain ridge. Cecilia wiped her brow and talked for the first time since lunch. “Remember the boy we loved? He worked at a grocery store. We walked in, saw him next to the vegetables, and he smiled at us. Remember that smile?”
In the falling darkness, I tried to remember, and in my mind I could see a boy, any boy. My stomach turned with the excitement of the idea of a person looking at me like that. But the way Cecilia told this story, flat-voiced and staring blindly into the dirt, I wondered if she was even talking to me.
“We used to be in love,” she said, several minutes later. The hands of her past threatened to bruise her face all over again, which was darkened in the purple light of the sky. “Remember how we used to know everything about each other?”
Our ditch stretched all the way to the end of the field where we’d dug the tiny holes. When the first pinprick stars appeared, Cecilia threw her shovel on the ground and sat in the ditch, weak at the knees. I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. We walked back home, our legs sagging in our work clothes. I wanted to support her on my shoulders so she would know I was with her, a real body, not a cutout made of air for her to fill in with her stories. We did not have to think about the past, I wanted her to see. We had each other, and we were growing more defined on this farm every day.
“Do you remember,” she said, “the way it feels when someone you love smashes your head against a wall?”
“Come, Cecilia.” She was exhausted. I pulled her arm and led her inside. We fell into bed, and I waited until I could hear her breathing grow slow before I drifted off to sleep.
The next day Luis was waiting for us on the banks of the irrigation channel, blank-faced as ever. Cecilia ripped the shovels and pick-ax out of his hands, and he didn’t even flinch. He directed us to the next row of olive trees, still black, no trace of life that I’d hoped might have appeared overnight. The orchard looked huge—this chore would take weeks. Luis stood watch again as Cecilia and I bore down into the earth, cracked and dry as yesterday.
If we were thirsty, we refilled our bottles in the channel, relishing brief moments of contact with the icy water, clear as the day before. We let the breeze cool our necks, tempting us to rest beside the banks just a while longer. Then we trotted back to our place along the ditch, our shovels etching the places where green would soon sprout, and we’d heave, again, again.
“Remember the day the robbers broke into that party?” Cecilia said. I knew I wouldn’t want to hear this one. Bits of skin were peeling off her cheeks, so many months of sunburns finally taking their toll. “They arrived sometime past midnight, pulled out guns and knives and told us to sit on the ground. They stole our phones, wallets, and all our friends’ valuables, too. They threatened to shoot us if we screamed. Remember the look in their eyes when they said it, as though they could not see us, but could see right through us to the wall, like we were part of the furniture?”
I could try to ignore this story. But the problem was I really could remember that night, that ghostly feel of fear and something being taken. “Not now,” I said, and I kept digging. I would not let her see my unease.
Luis hadn’t left his post in the shadows beneath the branches, black and leafless. Even with my back turned, I could feel him standing there, a motionless figure keeping watch. Couldn’t he see that Cecilia was struggling, grunting loudly, panting and leaning on her shovel for a rest?
Part of me wanted him to help us, but another part of me was glad he wouldn’t. This was his farm, but we had always been the ones to work in the dirt. And this was our Zonda wind, and our dust that blew into our eyes. The water was a boon for us girls who deserved the fresh feel of it on our faces, our tired muscles. I wanted to jump into the channel with Cecilia so she could feel the farm’s potential on her body. But Luis was asserting his presence over us like a scarecrow in the field, too far from his usual place in the cellar.
My first night here, when I sat at the fireplace next to Cecilia, who had fresh bruises on her face and arms, she already felt familiar to me. Maybe it was the way she greeted me with the sudden squeal of excitement reserved for seeing a friend in an unexpected place. The way she looked at me with eyes that seemed to already understand my story despite my inability to remember it myself. Even her bruises felt familiar to me, as though I’d seen them on myself long ago. She asked nothing of me, so I was free to be whoever I was becoming on the farm. Sitting beside her, I felt safe among strangers.
But who was Luis? That man who welcomed us, and then disappeared without another word into the cellar? I asked the girls.
They had theories about what he was up to down there. It was a whole other home, someone said, “Just like the one we live in up here, except underground and no windows.”
“He builds tools,” said Martha, who was somewhat lacking in imagination. “That’s his workshop.”
“It’s where he spends his days crying,” Natalia said. “Because he’s so lonely.”
“His wife died, you know,” Lisa said. “He can’t stand the sunlight because it reminds him of her.”
I was struck with dread, which creeped into me from a place I couldn’t recognize. Maybe I hadn’t escaped what I had run from.
“At least he doesn’t bother us,” said Gabi, shrugging in her giant painter’s shirt. “It’s nice that he doesn’t ask us why we came here.”
But everything was changing now that the water had arrived. It was drawing Luis out of his hole. This is my farm, he seemed to be saying, standing with his hands on his hips, as though all along he had been waiting for the water’s arrival to tell us what to do. Could he hear Cecilia’s pain, the stories in her breath? Her stories were getting worse. I didn’t want to hear about hitting our heads against the wall. I just wanted her to tell me again about dancing on rooftops, about cardboard zoo animals. I almost wanted the water to go away, retreat to where it came from, slurped by a giant straw back into the mountains. And I wanted the girls to come back to the fields, all of us planting seeds and sitting by the fire, while they talked about the places they said they’d never return to: home to their abusive boyfriends and jobs and random men on the street. I wanted everything to go back to the way it was when I arrived, and for a moment I wondered if this was exactly how those girls felt when they were ready to leave. Did they want to undo everything they had done that had led them here?
I was here now and I would stay here with this dirt. We reached the trees as tall as my knees, Luis still watching us with those blue unseeing eyes. I suddenly felt that though Luis was Luis, he was also just like my father. Sick with grief, mad with yearning I could not understand: to love the sunlight like it was love itself, to black it out with the force of his own grip.
Go away, I thought. This new life of mine does not belong to you.
The next day Cecilia did not speak while we worked. She just grunted, then her grunts became sighs, and she sighed her whole way down the row. Look how tired I am. Look at the depth of my exhaustion, she seemed to be saying. But I could feel myself breathing heavily, too. My arms hurt, but I bore into the earth harder and faster, refusing to give in. The sun spun over our heads. By the time the sun was setting behind the mountains, we had made it to the end of today’s ditch. It felt like the greatest accomplishment of our lives. The ridgeline glowed orange, and the first stars were beginning to shine.
“Remember all those women?” Cecilia said. “So many of them. They would show up on the news every week.”
“Cecilia,” I said. She was going to ruin this moment.
“One of them was beaten with an iron rod by her husband and his two friends, and they dragged her down the street for three blocks and tied her to a tree. Remember? They left her there, in plain sight, but nobody untied her or took her to the hospital. The men said they did it because she’d talked to another man. She died against the tree, slumped over, alone.”
“Cecilia,” I said again. “Please.”
She took her shovel and walked toward our home. Luis left, too, back to his cellar. I was alone in the field beside the ditch I’d spent all day digging. I stared at the shadowy space beneath me until the sky fell black, as if the shadow had grown and swallowed me. I didn’t want to go inside and face Cecilia, but I didn’t want to leave her alone, either. I was stuck inside my desire to lift Cecilia out of her exhaustion and for Cecilia to help me know myself, both tasks that were getting harder. The night air began to make me shiver, and I didn’t need the Zonda wind or the tug in my belly to tell me that it was time to go back home. I found my way back in the dark.
I woke with a start at dawn, relieved to see that Cecilia was in her bed. The field outside was dark purple as I shook her awake, turned on the bedside lamp. I brought her favorite tea, peppermint, and stroked her long braid.
With sleepy eyes, she said, “Remember the father who tried to marry his own daughter?”
“What?”
“His wife had died, her mother.”
“Stop it.”
“The daughter pulled her mother’s arm, but it was cold and limp in the bathtub. Do you remember how, just days later, the father told her she reminded him of his dead wife?”
“Get dressed,” I said, “We have work to do.”
“He said she was beautiful. Even more beautiful than her mother. He made her strip naked. He pulled out her mother’s old wedding dress from the closet, and she had no choice, she zipped it up along her waist. What kind of person had he become? Or, she wondered, had he been this way in secret all along? He went into the kitchen to fetch the champagne, to celebrate. She saw an opening that she had to take. She ran to the door, she was on the street, she got on a bus. And she told herself, as so many foolish girls do, that she would never go back.”
Cecilia put down her tea, got dressed, and went outside to keep digging.
“Cecilia,” I said, sitting on her bed. “Come back to me.” I could hear, in the distance, the sound of her shovel pounding the dirt. Why was she doing this to us? I put on my red overalls and boots, warm and comforting after all this time, and followed her into the field. “No, Cecilia,” I said, “the bravest girls are the ones who never go back.”
That night Cecilia squirmed beneath the covers, sighing and sighing, as though with each breath there was a world of Cecilia trying to get out of her body. The once bruised Cecilia, the Cecilia splashing in the water, the Cecilia who was running out of good stories to tell. I got out of my bed and slid into hers. I put my arm around her, held her tight. She kicked beneath the sheets, and I used my feet to clamp hers down.
The dogs were howling. They raised their noses to the air, and I heard it as a song, a song that would not stop, insistent, insistent, into the night. It seemed to me that they were calling for us to release them. I wanted them to be quiet. I wanted the sun to rise. I held Cecilia closer, bore my face into her neck, closed my eyes. I could feel the entirety of her, the edges of her body so close to mine, as though no gaps had ever existed between us.
When I woke up, the bed was empty. I pulled on my overalls and slipped into my rubber boots at the door. Outside, it was still dark, and the world, dry from months of no rain, crunched at my touch. I was the only sound for miles. I felt I could have been on the moon. The dogs were quiet now. They were curled up together, latched to the tree trunks, heaps just visible in the dark. I could hear them breathing, paws twitching with dreams of running.
At the bank beside the irrigation channel, I waited for dawn to come. It would be another day soon. The mountains in the distance turned purple and pink, and I could see the yellow of new flowers, and in the infinite fields around me, a layer of dust floating in the Zonda wind. Maybe Cecilia had gone swimming through the channel waters, clear as they would ever be. In a few weeks, the water would turn brown and muddy as the current took in all the dirt from the fields, and tall shoots of wild asparagus would grow along the edge of the channel. Our seeds in their tiny holes would sprout, become trees, little black olives clinging to their new branches. Bees would come, and birds.
This is what I knew, sitting there alone. And I knew that my father was somewhere far away, and my mother was floating in the bathtub. She would stay there forever, and my father, too, would remain in that apartment, holding two glasses of champagne, running from room to room, calling my name. That’s where I would keep them. Luis would go back to his cellar once we finished these ditches, and we’d tell him to stay there and leave us to our work. But where was Cecilia? This farm would only be getting better, and I wanted her to see it happening to us. ■
Cristina Fríes is a Colombian American fiction writer. Her work has appeared in PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018; EPOCH; Action, Spectacle; and War, Literature & the Arts. She is the recipient of a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Tin House Scholarship and is an Adroit Journal Anthony Veasna So Scholarship semifinalist. Her operas have been performed nationally, and she lives in San Francisco.
