The Great Divide

by Cristina Henríquez

During the day, they worked the same land they had worked before they were free, only now they earned a wage. It was the best they could do. And it was what many other people did, too. “Officially unchained,” her mother said at the end of the story, “but tethered just the same.”

Sixty years earlier, Pierre knew, when the Americans built a railroad across Panama, there were so many deaths among the laborers—men from China and the Indies—that the railroad company, without space to bury them all, pickled the bodies and shipped the cadavers to medical schools to use for research.

But she was only herself, and try as she might, she could not manage to be any other way. There were times she longed to be different, but she guessed everyone felt that way at one time or another, and so in wanting to be different, everyone was the same.

her mother had told Ada and her a dozen times or more: A woman should have no need for a man. Millicent could sit by the sea and hold her own hand, she supposed. It was why she had two.

He stood in the middle of the house and shouted, “¡Hola!” just to hear the sound of his voice, which he had not heard in the house for nearly half a year. He shouted, “The rain is drowning the frogs!” He shouted, “I cannot make sense of this life!” And then he stood alone in the echo and felt worse than before.

When he had broken his ribs, Marian had asked him with great tenderness, Does it hurt? And he had wanted to scream, Yes! Something hurt. But not in the way she had meant. Why could he not retrain his thoughts and be a different sort of man, free of the darkness in the pit of his soul? Let the seed wither. Let the bat fly away. Why could he not root it out once and for all?

For so long Francisco had thought that when he had lost Esme, he had also lost his faith—his faith in mysterious, magical, unexplainable things. Such things had not even seemed possible to him anymore, as though in the wake of her death, Francisco’s imagination itself had withered and, devoid of imagination, his entire world had shrunk to the point that he could not see beyond what was right in front of his face. He was aware, having experienced it before, that there was another dimension to life, but, frustrated that he could no longer access it, he had eschewed it altogether, rejected its powers, and derided it in order to make himself feel that he had lost nothing at all. He had convinced himself that it was enough to live in the rational world, which is what most people did. There was nothing wrong with that. Yes, it might have been smaller and less wondrous, but what did he need with wonder? He had had something wonderful once and it had only broken his heart.