Signs Preceding the End of the World

by Yuri Herrera

You don’t lift other people’s petticoats. You don’t stop to wonder about other people’s business. You don’t decide which messages to deliver and which to let rot. You are the door, not the one who walks through it. Those were the rules Makina abided by and that was why she was respected in the Village.

Makina spoke all three, and knew how to keep quiet in all three, too.

Anyhow, Makina had neither been naive nor lost any sleep blaming herself for the invention of politics; carrying messages was her way of having a hand in the world.

everything was still the same, but now somehow all different, or everything was similar but not the same: his mother was no longer his mother, his brothers and sisters were no longer his brothers and sisters, they were people with difficult names and improbable mannerisms, as if they’d been copied off an original that no longer existed; even

Makina could never be sure of what she’d dreamed, in the same way that she couldn’t be sure a place was where the map said it was until she’d gotten there, but she had the feeling she’d dreamed of lost cities: literally, lost cities inside other lost cities, all ambulating over an impenetrable surface.

She didn’t know how long she struggled frantically, and then the panic subsided, and she intuited that it made no difference which way she headed or how fast she went,

One came to perch on her eyelashes; it looked like a stack of crosses or the map of a palace, a solid and intricate marvel at any rate, and when it dissolved a few seconds later she wondered how it was that some things in the world—some countries, some people—could seem eternal when everything was actually like that miniature ice palace: one-of-a-kind, precious, fragile.

The city was an edgy arrangement of cement particles and yellow paint. Signs prohibiting things thronged the streets, leading citizens to see themselves as ever protected, safe, friendly, innocent, proud, and intermittently bewildered, blithe, and buoyant; salt of the

These were her compatriots, her homegrown, armed with work: builders, florists, loaders, drivers; playing it sly so as not to let on to any shared objective, and instead just, just, just: just there to take orders.

More than the midpoint between homegrown and anglo their tongue is a nebulous territory between

what is dying out and what is not yet born. But not a hecatomb.

Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world happening anew, Makina realizes: promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects. Who knows if they’ll last, who knows if

names will be adopted by all, she thinks, but there they are, doing their damnedest.

She asked finally for the way to the promised land and that person looked annoyed before responding. There was still some light in the sky but it was turning dark, like a giant pool of drying blood.

And when she arrived and saw what she’d come to find it was sheer emptiness.

redhead. It hadn’t fully dawned yet—the sky was barely a reddish exhalation that hadn’t quite made up its mind to spread over the earth—but

And what was the point of calling the cops when your measure of good fortune consisted of having them not know you exist.

All those nights he slept in the boy’s

room and wondered why anyone would give up such a soft bed, but he answered his own question immediately: everyone had to do something for themselves.

I guess that’s what happens to everybody who comes, he continued. We forget what we came for, but there’s this reflex to act like we still have some secret plan.

He leaned in toward her, and as he gave her a hug said Give Cora a kiss from me. He said it the same way he gave her the hug, like it wasn’t his sister he was hugging, like it wasn’t his mother he was sending a kiss to, but just a polite platitude. Like he was ripping out her heart, like he was cleanly extracting it and placing it in a plastic bag and storing it in the fridge to eat later.

We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.

but a second—or many—later she stopped feeling the weight of uncertainty and guilt;

and she saw that what was happening was not a cataclysm; she understood with all of her body

and all of her memory, she truly understood, and when everything in the world fell silent finally said to herself I’m ready.