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That struck María as horribly dull, so to amuse herself, she’s taken to concocting sins to assign to each and every traveler.
“Careful. In nature, beauty is a warning. The pretty ones are often poisonous.”
Felipe likes to say that she looks like bread dough that’s been stretched too much and failed to rise.
But María has known, all her life, that she is not meant for common paths, for humble houses and modest men. If she must walk a woman’s road, then it will take her somewhere new.
It’s because there’s a moment, pressed beneath the weighted blanket of the storm, when her body stops fighting, when all the voices inside her finally go quiet, and her shoulders loosen and her lungs unclench and her skin goes numb and the line between girl and world gets smudged, and she is washed away. Made new.
Rose-petal soft and deep as a well,
Perhaps rich is what her body hungered for, she thinks, as she spears another candied carrot with her fork.
Silence is a kind of wealth,
“The woods want to keep me / the ground wants to eat me The trees want to hold me / can’t find my way home. The night’s getting dark now / the air’s getting cold So tired of walking / can’t find my way home.”
“How did he die?” she asks. The widow’s smile widens. “Slowly.”
“A name is like a dress. It might be by nature pretty or plain, but it is the person wearing it who matters most.”
“Strange, isn’t it?” she says. “The more you taste, the more you want.”
“One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.”
“Those grown in the midnight soil are never alone.”
“Bury my bones in the midnight soil,” he begins, infusing the words with the air of theater. “Plant them shallow and water them deep. And in my place will grow a feral rose.” He leans down to Renata and cups her face, running a thumb across her bottom lip. “Soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.”
Because rage shatters out, not in.
It is easy, isn’t it, in retrospect? To spot the cracks. To see them spread. But in the moment, there is only the urge to mend each one. To smooth the lines. And keep the surface whole.
Time doesn’t heal. It just wears you down. Tricks you into thinking, as the present slips into the past, that it will stay there. Safely buried in your wake.
