by Kim Freeman
Weary from covering another oven-hot seven miles, she squatted in the stingy shade of a creosote bush to study its pointy green leaves and yellow blooms. In a few months, the flowers would birth fuzzy white capsules fat with seeds. They’d litter the ground, take root in the sandy soil, and steal the water from nearby plants to survive. Alma understood the water-starved brush nearby. For weeks thirst had sat like an unwelcome guest in her parched, dust-coated throat. But she admired the toughness of the stinky creosote and its usefulness. Her Abuela had harvested leaves from the long stands behind their home, crushed them into a paste, and rubbed it on Alma’s skinned knees.
Her knees were full of scabs now from dozens of stumbles that had left a trail of flesh sacrifices honoring her home hundreds of miles to the south. No one in the caravan seemingly knew the secrets of creosote and her mamá said they could not stop to make a salve. Her scrapes were cleaned with a bit of water and her mamá’s dry lips soaked up her tears like a fresh sponge. Alma looked over to her mamá, who sat nearby on a smooth, flat rock. The dark circles around Luna's sunken eyes looked to Alma like the Dia de Muertos masks she and her brother had worn to celebrate the lives of their departed family. But those masks came off until the next year’s Day of the Dead festival. She feared her mamá would wear a living skeleton face forever.
Feeling her daughter’s eyes upon her, Luna turned, stopped fingering her worn rosary beads, and gave a tight-lipped smile. Alma knew her mamá teetered daily between determination and despair. Luna held Alma’s hand as they walked and in the other hand she held her rosary. Each mile Luna’s lips moved in silent prayer, her fingers moving bead to bead, her eyes fixed at hope on the horizon.
Alma started her walk in a worn pair of her brother’s hand-me-down sneakers. Somewhere in southern Mexico, holes as big as Abuela’s handmade tortillas consumed the shoes. She left the tatters, not much more than dirty shoe strings and a strip of faded rubber, behind and continued barefoot. Hot pavement, sharp rocks, and litter had toughened her soles to elephant hide, her mamá said. Even so, when her 8-year-old body couldn’t take another step her mamá scooped her up and let her ride piggyback. Alma understood the sacrifice Luna made at those times because hunger kept tight company with thirst.
The group stirred as more northward miles were needed for arrival in El Paso day after tomorrow. Alma watched her mamá do the sign of the cross, then make her way to her. Luna carried a small woven bag holding what she called “important papers.” It was among a few things they brought from their home near San Pedro Sala. Alma had begged to pack more but her mamá was as unmovable as the Mayan Ruins of Copan. She carried nothing but memories of her favorite dress, a beloved rag doll, her dog, Chico. Worse was leaving her Abuela and her papá, who stayed behind to care for his elderly mama and tend the gravesite of her brother, a casualty of poor health born of poverty.
Although young, Alma knew why her parents decided she and her mamá would make the long, dangerous walk north to America. Hard-eyed men with big guns started raiding homes in their village demanding “rent” for homes they didn’t even own. They grabbed people off the street and made desperate families pay for their return. Families that couldn’t pay got back the body and sometimes not even that. The gang members did “bad things”—that’s all her familia would say—to women, even young girls like her. Then they came to her casa. While she hid under a bed, a man with a gun told her papá if he failed to pay the rent, they’d take Luna and when they were finished with her, they’d be back for Alma. Her mamá wailed and threw herself at the man but her fists glanced off his chest like feathers striking concrete. He had just laughed while slamming the door behind him. Alma’s papá collapsed pale and watery-eyed and in that instant, a decision was made. Within a week, she and her mamá joined a caravan leaving Honduras for the United States.
Alma stirred from her dream, still smelling the creosote bush and feeling her mamá’s warm hand in hers. Sitting up slowly, her back aching from sleeping on the concrete floor, she pulled her thin silver cover tighter. Alma’s walk ended weeks ago. Glancing at the cage around her, hope and her mama gone, she dropped her head and cried.
This writing is part of a collection featured in the 2020 Celebrate the Arts Writing Contest, an annual contest hosted by The Arts Council of Westerville, Westerville Public Library and the ThisWeek Westerville News & Public Opinion as one of many events organized by the Arts Council to mark April as “Celebrate the Arts” month in Westerville.
