Ella Flores
Hagiography of a Bisabuela
Born between continents, hair soaked in Bosporus, Eufemia prefers walking barefoot,
only puts shoes on for guests. She is tall as wildgrass, spry as a rooster, that’s why
Eufemia’s father warns her not to run the empty fields or duendes will match her
steps. You see, Eufemia can’t tell you much of Tula or Toltecs, she’s not well-read
and much less spoken, but Eufemia knows why dancers wear masks for the festival
of Xantolo, she understands her mother’s tongue and why her mother tells her
only use the common one. At fifteen Eufemia stops offering to the gods. Her sentence
is the wheel. It’s knives still wet when it refuses to turn. So the furnace is lit for her.
When Eufemia first showed, she hoped the child wouldn’t come out as dark as her.
Of course, the child came out darker. Soon, Eufemia has eighteen partos. Five
will survive. Neighbors whisper the devil can’t seem to get Eufemia off his mind,
that at the springs fed by El Popo, she tells her kids and nephews to behave or she’ll
dip them by the leg like she used to have defeather the chickens. And yet, Eufemia
steps from the furnace unburnt. Has the arena prepared for her. Spiked pits covered
in straw, but when she walks, the ground doesn’t give. By Eufemia’s 80th birthday,
she’s heard of telephones, telegraphs, and wonders why any word need travel faster
than a mule. Because, you see, Eufemia was born two-thousand meters above the sea,
so when she laughs, it carries over every ranch and field, like the one her father
warned her for fear of caving mines below. But lately Eufemia’s can’t open her
husband’s hands without hurting them. And today she’s outlived her oldest daughter.
It’s on these nights Eufemia tries to hear God beneath her pillow, prefers to forget
the dreams of loosed beasts bowing to her, licking a nicked shoulder clean, soothing
her raw heels. In the morning, Eufemia buys bread in town to sell in her village,
goes about gathering dew in the arch of her foot, thinking how her chest feels
planted with a sword and can’t seem to remember where the hollow fields end.