“Maybe I’ll go see if Mamá needs help preparing for the fiesta,” she says, wiping her eyes before winding her way out of the room. My heart, in all its wretched glory, stops at the mention of tonight’s celebration.
“Or you could see about the ristras,” I call. Maria Elena’s callused fingers make her particularly gifted at stringing the chili peppers we hang to dry in the sun. Mamá says they have healing powers, but I usually can only finish a few before my fingers burn from the peppers’ caustic bite.
I move through the room methodically, filling a willow basket with the threads that are fated to be cut tonight. They are easy to find, those flashes of silver amid a sea of color. My sister’s threads haven’t always been so brightly hued. I assume that it’s a consequence of our surroundings. Colors exist here that can’t be found anywhere else. Things aren’t just yellow in the desert; they are saffron flowers on the top of a prickly pear cactus, golden sands encircling a sole mesquite tree. And red isn’t just red; red is the carmine dye made from crushed cochineal insects and chili peppers warm from the sun. Blue is the heart-shaped blossoms on the indigo plant and black the pitch of the pi?on tree and that frighteningly dark desert sky.
I don’t think about the lives that are attached to the threads I’m collecting. It is a method I perfected lifetimes ago, but it seemed easier then, when we damned the gods to fates befitting their sins. Tucked into the band of my skirt is the thread I’ve carried since yesterday, when its strands began to shimmer. Try as I might, I can’t ignore the life that is attached to this one. I wind one end of the thread around my finger and watch as another red strand fades to silver.
By midday, our pueblo ranch is a bustle of movement and noise. Maria Elena sits among a gaggle of old women basking in the sun in the placita. The women’s cheeks are as withered as the blistered skins of the chili peppers resting in their laps.
“Come, sister,” Maria Elena calls joyfully, setting her ristras to the side. “You’ve finished in time to help Rosa with her dress.” My head suddenly rushes with a vision of my older sister in her bridal gown, a Spanish lace mantilla cascading down her back. It aches, the weight of it all: knowing the stars gave me no such image. It came solely from my own head.
My sisters were more than happy to let Mamá turn them into her good little mijas.
I watched as Rosa’s face became beautiful under Mamá’s proud gaze, as Maria Elena became strong. Even the names she gave them were telling. Maria Elena’s name means “beloved shining light,” and Rosa was named for the pink flush of her cheeks. Their tongues easily adapted to the cadence of Mamá’s language; their hands lent themselves to menial tasks like cooking and cleaning. Every morning Maria Elena fetched water from the nearby river; every evening Rosa swept the earthen floors. Under Mamá’s gentle guidance, my sisters weren’t monsters anymore. But me? My hands were clumsy, my tortillas misshapen, my torrejas either doughy or burned. My monster, it seemed, would not be so easily tamed.
I follow Maria Elena’s tottering steps, listening to the sound of the vaqueros driving the cattle farther down along the riverbed. They say only the promise of dancing with a pretty girl can persuade one of those wild cowboys to dismount from his horse, which perhaps explains the menfolk’s unusually jovial tones. The whole ranch has been bewitched by the possibilities surrounding tonight’s celebration, and all the while, my thoughts are consumed with the thread I hold clenched in my fist.
We escape into the cool retreat of Mamá’s bedroom only to find it filled with many of the other women with whom we share a home — women who insist we call them tía and abuela, though they share no kinship with either Mamá or Papá. I catch a glimpse of Rosa in the center of the room, but she is too busy being doted on to pay much attention to me. The women greet Maria Elena warmly, pressing sweets into her hands. There isn’t a soul in the village who doesn’t love Maria Elena. And who could blame them? My softhearted sister with her tottering gait gives them life. And though death flows through Rosa’s fingers like river water, she also brings them peace. She eases their suffering and puts an end to their pain. Besides, Rosa is so beautiful it is easy to overlook the scent of death that lingers on her skin.
But me? I’m not beautiful and I’m not broken, and as a result, my wickedness isn’t quite as easily forgiven. After all, if Maria Elena is birth, and Rosa death, then I must be everything in between. I am turmoil and loss. I am drought and starvation. I am lost love and lost chances and lost hope. It is my hands that tie knots into their lives. And for this sin, the women choose to celebrate my sister’s boda around me, avoiding my eyes as if I am the monster their children fear at night.