He’d had a whole family. The shape of it was rising toward him like kelp breaking loose from a seabed and floating to the surface.
He’d had a mother. With hair the color of a cork tree’s outer bark, and with hands as soft as lily petals. She and her sisters used to hunt these mushrooms in the forests, finding their pale caps at the bases of white pines and oaks. Her grandmother sold them in the markets. They had to be sold quickly because within a day the blue turned dark green, and the rich families sending their cooks to buy food would not pay as much for green mushrooms as for blue.
Estrella stroked her fingers over the caps. She lifted the margin to look at the gills herself, dark as blue amethyst.
Fel put his hand on hers, the memory of his fingers moving them. He snapped the stem, and blue paint spread over their palms.
Wonder made her laugh light as a breath. She cracked one of the stems, let the milk bleed onto her fingers, and pressed a dot onto Fel’s nose.
He laughed. “Hey.”
She ran her thumb over his left eyebrow.
He snapped another stem, and the blue trickled into his palm.
She scrambled to the other side of a cypress tree, her laugh as soft as the brush of leaves.
He came after her. He ran his hands through her hair and streaked it blue. She ducked out from under his hold and hid behind a tree in bloom.
“Give up yet?” she asked around the tree.
She had her back against the other side. All he could see was her profile, the sweep of her hair on her shoulder, the edge of her skirt.
“Never.” He found her and painted comet trails on her cheeks.
She smudged bands of blue amethyst on his hands and forearms, staining his skin indigo. When they needed more paint, they cracked another stem, and the color seeped onto their fingers. The milk in his hair brushed onto his forehead. The whites of his fingernails were blue sickle moons.
He reached for her cheek. Without meaning to, his fingers grazed her mouth. A slick of milk rested on the inner curve of her lip.
He came a little closer, pinning her against the tree not with his hands but with the small distance between his body and hers. Blue shone wet on her eyelashes. She blinked, and they left wisps of paint on her cheek.
The warmth under his palm registered. He’d set his hand against her waist, and his fingers left darker blue stains on the blue fabric.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be.” She put her hand to the side of his face.
The gesture felt as dangerous as it was small, a calling back of him kissing her in the dark.
Then he felt the mushroom milk on her palm. She’d painted half his cheek.
He set his hand on hers. “You did that on purpose.”
A smile curved one side of her mouth. She dropped her hand, her palm dyed indigo.
A rush of blue sped past the corner of his vision.
He turned, looking for it. Another fairy ring maybe. Or the moon lightening the sky between trees.
At first, he saw nothing. Then, far off in the aspens, he found it, a horse as deep indigo as the mushrooms’ gills. A colt, small and young but strong, a carved horse figurine come to life.
“Fel?” Estrella called.
He startled at how far away she sounded.
She was no longer under his hands. He staggered toward the blue horse. He set his palms against the trunks of flowering trees, steadying himself.
The horse flicked its mane, a lighter blue like the mushrooms’ caps. Then it galloped off, the dark taking it.
“Fel?” Estrella said.
But her voice didn’t find him. One word echoed across the night, dyed indigo, until it settled on his lips.
“Caballuco,” he said, like the name of someone he’d just recognized.
“What?” she asked.
He shut his eyes, and saw the carved horses together. Green, yellow, white, purple, orange, red. And two he remembered that were not on Estrella’s shelf. One pure black as her hair, the other indigo, deep as the mushroom’s gills.
That color opened him, and there was more rushing back to him than his hands could hold.
He remembered his brother smelling like hay from being around horses. How he brought the faint sun scent and tang of it home on his clothes. How Fel got it on him, too, the few times his brother talked his way into bringing his younger brother with him to see a criollo stallion or a red-shouldered mare.
Fel’s brother had taught him the names of horse colors like they were another language. Palomino and dark bay. Blue roan and red roan. Dun and dapple gray. His brother had taught him the secret meanings of the names. How could flea-bitten gray mean anything good, Fel had wondered until his brother taught him it meant a white horse freckled auburn.
His brother, who had seen Fel come home with a bruise on his temple, had never offered pity or scorn. Instead, he had taught Fel one thing: how to tell, from watching how other men walked and laughed, whether an unbroken stare would provoke them or scare them off.
His brother, who had made Fel believe that the brown of his skin was a thing to wear with pride. They would never be pale men, never fair like the drying husk of a white onion, and for this, they should be proud. Their blood held the history of their family.
A family. Fel had a family, and they were all this brown his brother told him to take pride in. His brother marked their family by the colors of horses, the brown of a bayo rodado or bayo encerado. If anyone else had compared Fel to an animal, it would have stung as an insult. But the hills of his brother’s dreams were crowded with horses, so there was no better compliment.
Estrella took hold of his arm, saying his name.
He looked at her.
There were so many colors of her. Her hair as dark as a grulla colt’s mane. The deep gold in her skin. Her eyes as brown as his brother’s favorite Andalusian horses.
Fel could not remember the awful things he had done, the sins that had made God strip his memories from him, giving them back only in small pieces.
But this girl. She had led him through these gardens. She had given him back everything good. She made him more than the things he had done that were written onto his back.
Her heart had a stronger pull than all of it. And the beauty and force of her pulled him down to his knees like she was some beautiful, terrifying angel.
Under his shins, the grass gave off its clean, damp scent. He put his hands on the small of her back, the blue of her skirt billowing and settling. He let his cheek rest against her stomach, and through the fabric of her dress, he kissed her hip, a place she’d let him touch in the dark.
He braced for her to pull him to his feet and ask what he was doing. But she set one hand in his hair, and the other on the back of his neck. His tears came without sound, so when he saw the darker blue stains on her dress, they surprised him. He tried pulling away.
But she kept her hands on him. Her fingers met on the back of his neck.