But he wanted both. He wanted to be a boy who grew into a man, and for there to be space in the world for him.
His mother set down the knife. “Is that really what you want?”
Sam’s mouth was still too dry, his breath too used up from saying the words all at once, to answer. The inside of him was cracking and crumbling like the glass and paper frames of his moons.
Later, they would have to talk about this. They would have to talk about how he did not know if he wanted to change his body but he knew he wanted to change his name. How they would have to change his papers to say what they had made everyone believe they already did.
How there was no letting go of Samira, because now she felt like a friend he had imagined to fill the empty space before Miel. But he could not be her.
There was still a part of him, spinning and wondering, that wanted to know how long his mother’s calm and patience would stand, how long until it fell or crumbled beneath everything he was. Would it hold if, one day, he drew closer to the faith of her father’s family, or her mother’s, both these faiths she’d rejected because she was so sure God was bigger than religion? Would it stay if, one day, he left this town to hang moons every place on earth there were trees, or if he never lived anywhere but this place his mother had given him? Would it stand no matter what he became or did not become?
But for right now, that one sentence—What if I wanted to stay this way?—was all he had in him. He’d used up all his words.
So he nodded.
“Good,” his mother said.
With that one word, the space around them felt lit with the violet petals and gold threads of all those crocuses. He couldn’t see them, not straight on, but he could sense their shape, the soft lines of the flowers and the wisps of glowing orange. They were halfway between living blooms and the arcs of colors his grandmother had drawn him so many years ago.
His mother’s nod looked like a surer, quicker version of the one he’d given her. That was his mother, forever taking hesitation and making it into something clean and finished.
“People should know what they want,” she said.
bay of dew
Miel was on her knees in Aracely’s closet, pulling at her clothes. Aracely’s favorite nightgown, black velvet trimming copper satin, heavy and long enough for fall nights. The linen of her morning-glory-purple skirt, the hem stained from how she wore it to work in the garden. The skirt she put on to go out, covered in so many glass beads it looked jeweled with sprays of seawater.
But Miel could not find Leandro. She could not find any trace of her brother. Instead of the pressed clothes their mother always put him in, there were these twirling skirts. Instead of the way he smelled, the strangest mix of wood and powdered sugar from their mother’s kitchen, there was the amber of Aracely’s perfume. There was none of Leandro left, not because Leandro had become Aracely, but because instead of choosing to be Miel’s sister, Aracely had chosen to be a liar.
Everyone called Aracely the kind curandera. Other curanderas made the lovesick drink flaked deer antler, obsidian dust, and batata. That black milk would leave them sick for hours, making it easier to pry the lovesickness loose.
But there was nothing kind about Aracely. Her gentleness was as much of a lie as her name. She could have given herself their mother’s name, so Miel would know her. She could have told Miel the day she slipped from the water tower.
She could have been the sister who took her home, put a kettle on the stove. They would have passed back and forth aster honey crystallizing in its glass, the kind Aracely liked as much as Miel. She ate it like candy, and they shared a jar when they stayed up late talking.
Even that memory wasn’t soft anymore. Now it was as rough as the crystals along the edge of the aster honey jar.
Aracely’s perfume crept into the room, as strong and deep as aged whiskey.
Miel didn’t look at her.
Aracely, like Leandro, was the beautiful one of the two of them. Aracely was tall the way Leandro had been tall, even as a child. Aracely glittered with wry mystery the way Leandro glowed with kindness. But instead of Leandro’s dark hair, Aracely had so much gold flowing over her shoulders it looked like the crown of her head was spinning it.
Miel knew Aracely as well as she knew the crescent whites of her own fingernails. She knew Aracely’s eyes, dark as Spanish molasses. But now Aracely was someone else. She was a woman holding the heart of the brother Miel thought she’d lost.
She remembered the sense of Leandro, how he felt and how he laughed, the softness in his hands. But she didn’t remember him well enough to account for all of him. She could not number all the pieces that made him, and then find them all in this woman.
“Do you remember the town we lived in?” Aracely said. There was a sigh under her words, like she didn’t know where to start and decided this was as good a place as any.