“Jaila,” Ursula said, “I found his body. His human body. In the ravine. Someone had stabbed him and then rolled him over the edge. They wrapped him in a goddamn blanket, Jaila, and I found him like that.”
It was Ursula’s eyes that made Jaila believe her. They were so steady and so full of pain, so sorry for everything they had seen. “But didn’t he lead you to the sacred well? Didn’t you see him bite me to push me in?”
“It wasn’t him,” she said. “His nagual is dead too.”
The coyote looked as though he were dying on her lap now, panting and groaning in an effort to stay conscious that Jaila didn’t understand.
“Then who are you?” Jaila asked softly.
Tizoc, he said. Not the same one but not a different one, either.
“And where are we?” she asked.
She got a faint grimace, which she took for a smile. The subjunctive tense.
“Shoulda, woulda, coulda,” she said in her first language, the one that the two of them didn’t understand, and she laughed so hard that she cried.
“It is him,” she told Ursula through her tears. They turned Jaila’s flames beautiful shades of purple and blue, but the fire held. “He’s dying again, but it is him.”
We cross paths with our other lives, with our other selves when we pass through here. We are in between our own possibilities.
Now Ursula gripped Jaila’s hand hard enough to hurt. “Tell him he could have been brilliant—tell him he could have been loved for his real self, not that power he chased until he died.”
The coyote gasped a laugh. I didn’t deserve it, but I was loved. You never told her?
Jaila remembered that one night—the blanket in the desert, the stars like sand strewn across the sky, the promises he’d whispered, the money he was saving, the plans he had. But she hadn’t seen the photos then. She hadn’t known the money was rotten, like those bodies in a hidden grave that their families would never find.
She shook her head, and the coyote sighed and was still.
They floated for a while afterward, heavy and pendulous with the dead weight of the coyote.
Ursula broke the silence. “We have to leave.”
Jaila nodded. “But we’ll never get back to where we were before.”
“We can’t stay here forever. We have to try.”
“We can’t go back together?”
Ursula hugged her. “No, little sister. You know we can’t.”
“You’ll find me?”
“Will you find me?”
Jaila gripped her shoulders. “Always,” she said, and the flame leaped from her mouth, blue and gold. It burned through the slick with the ferocity of an oil fire, and left a hole just large enough for her to jump through.
“Go!” Ursula shouted.
“But what about you?”
“Don’t worry about me. The wind will find me a way through. I have a debt, anyway, to the coyote.”
They met each other’s eyes one last time. Jaila caught herself smiling. Then Ursula pushed and Jaila tumbled, and she fell through the hole her heart had made.
*
She landed in a gas station bathroom in Pearsall, Texas, on broken tiles that had once been white. She recognized that sink, the broken pipe gushing water from fifteen seconds before, when she had tried to climb it to reach the window. She was wet. Her arm hurt from where she had fallen.
Federal agents were waiting for her outside. They had caught up to the bus, and she wasn’t going to escape them this time. She wasn’t going to make it to Ursula.
Jaila stood up. She peeled off her wet hoodie. It smelled, very faintly, of dried marigolds and coyote blood and the desert wind that blows down far away hills at night.
An officer pounded on the bathroom door.
“Always,” Jaila said, in the language of that place, and let him in.
“Aw, hell,” Jackie said. “You sure you didn’t eat some bad peyote or something?”
We’d been walking for a couple of hours, slowly making our way over increasingly rougher terrain. The woods had given way to rocky ground and boulders, and we’d had to backtrack a couple of times to find a path down that wasn’t so steep. Tino was out front again, but he was following Jaila’s directions, even if he wouldn’t admit it. He was a control freak, but he wasn’t stupid. Even if Jaila didn’t know exactly where we were or where we were going, she knew the general direction we needed to hike, which was more than the rest of us could say.
We picked some roots that Cody swore were wild onions, which he said he remembered from one of Doug’s lectures on what we could and couldn’t eat in the woods. Jaila said we had to be careful they weren’t death camas, but they smelled like onion, and that was good enough.
“Believe what you want,” Jaila said. “It’s just a story.”
“Did Tizoc or the coyote or whatever he was,” Georgia asked, “did he really die?”
“I said it was only a story!”
Tino started laughing. It was a dark, bitter sound that carried through the woods. “Girl falls down a well or some shit and thinks she knows how to get us back to camp.” He was shaking his head. “Come on, Jaila, talk to the wind or whatever and figure out where we are.”
Georgia shouldered up past Cody. “Leave her alone, Tino.”
“Mind your own business.”
“You really think Doug would miss you if you didn’t make it back with us?” Lucinda said. “Is there anyone back home who wouldn’t be happy if you disappeared? Keep talking and maybe we’ll find out.”
Tino snorted. “One rich girl defending another. I’m shocked.”
“Why don’t you tell us why you’re here?” Jackie said. “What’d you do? Rob a convenience store or something?”
“Why I’m here’s none of your damn business,” he said. “But I got a story for you. I got the winning story right here.”
“A CAUTIONARY TALE”
by Stephanie Kuehn
I WAS ON THE BEACH when I met him. Dover Springs was throwing its annual Feast of Avalon party to celebrate the autumnal equinox. This tradition involved hundreds of wealthy college students playing pagan for the night. Gripping lit torches and armed with cases of beer, they’d marched off campus and down the hillside as a unified force to flood Dover Cove, that narrow sliver of beach carved along the southwest end of our midsize California coastal town, where they’d promptly set a massive bonfire ablaze. Everything after was flicker-flame and hedonistic persuasion. A drum circle pounded away near the water’s edge, a rhythmic invocation urging the toga-draped crowd to lose themselves in the sand and the darkness, to dance, drink, fight, and fuck, all beneath the bone-colored moon.