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Beatriz felt positive no owl would travel with such surety unless it was headed toward a miracle or a disaster. And what other miracle or disaster could be taking place in this valley tonight but something having to do with the former Saint of Bicho Raro?
The stars stopped their laughing to watch her gallop beneath them, and the moon covered its face with a cloud, and then, as she grew close, the stars scrambled down below the horizon so that they would not have to watch. The sun delayed its rising, too, so as to not bear witness, hesitating just at the edge of the earth, so the early morning hung in an eerie half-light.
He looked like all of the icons Beatriz had ever seen. The martyred Saint, gaunt and frail, long hair hanging.
It was no natural owl, but rather an uncanny creature bred of miracles and darkness.
it had Daniel’s eyes painted on it.
it stole his breath. I tried to catch it.”
She had been told her entire life that Soria darkness was a terrible and fearful thing, far stranger and more difficult than an ordinary pilgrim’s darkness.
“Until his darkness leaves, he is not dead,”
“The miracle dies with the pilgrim.”
she did not understand the rules of its theft.
The lesson Daniel was meant to learn was that miracles were made to be interfered with. He was never supposed to be able to banish this darkness alone. His darkness was a puzzle that was meant to be solvable only by another Saint.
This was Beatriz’s thesis: The Sorias must have once upon a time confronted their own darkness in the same way that all pilgrims were asked to confront their darkness. Somewhere along the way, a Soria must have lost the taste for facing their demons, however, and either died before performing the second miracle, creating a legend, or merely stopped the practice in its tracks, proclaiming Soria darkness too difficult to tackle.
“I endured my own darkness and I will endure this, too.”
the one who had hatched from the fire.
It is not fear, but it is something people are often fearful of, so it is easy to see how the two are confused.
Doubt widened. Doubt was not truth, though; it was opinion.
was not a real animal after all; it was only fear and darkness under her fingers, which seem solid only until you have them in your grasp.
The things that made her happiest didn’t have concrete forms, which made them extremely hardy. Ideas couldn’t die. Cousins could die.
That meant that her second miracle could be interfered with, and even though Daniel’s lesson was that Sorias could interfere with miracles didn’t mean that he was in a state to help her.
Daniel’s. This was about her, somehow—a lesson, not a fearful punishment.
She mused on how the Sorias’ real collective darkness was that they would not let themselves help others because they were
too afraid of losing themselves, that they were so afraid of being open and true about their own fears and darkness that they put it in a box and refused to even accept that they, too, might need healing. And the longer they blocked it up, the more the pilgrims also blocked up, and the worse everything got, until husbands and wives parted and siblings fought and everything was terrible.
So her darkness must be something else. Now, for the first time, she truly realized how difficult it was to be a pilgrim, a realization Daniel had just come to days before—a realization that all budding Saints should be led to. It was often so easy to identify the darkness from
the outside. But from the inside, your darkness was indistinguishable from your other thoughts. It could take forever to learn yourself.
it was only love that had kept him dying from the first heartbreak. It has a way of plugging holes in the heart even as it punches new ones.
Faith is a funny thing, and Beatriz, as only a reluctant Saint, had never truly accepted it. But now Pete was relying on her to be able to cure herself so that she could cure him. “How do you know I can do this?” she asked. “I reckon I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know much of anything about what’s gonna happen.
In her head, Beatriz heard all of the arguments she had mounted against the possibility of a relationship with him, a young man so kind and so soft, and her, the girl without feelings. And then, of course, just like that, she had it.
Miracles and happiness are a lot like each other in many ways. It is difficult to predict what will trigger a miracle. Some people go their entire lives full of persistent darkness and never feel the need to seek out a miracle. Others find they can exist with darkness only for a single night before they go hunting for a miracle to remove it. Some need only one miracle; others might have two or three or four or five over the course of their lives. Happiness is the same way. One can never tell what will make one person happy and leave another untouched. Often even the person involved will be
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After having to wear a wedding dress every day for over a year, she had vowed that she would never again wear the same clothing two days in a row. That night after the dancing was done, she would sit at the kitchen table with Antonia as she had every night before, tear the seams out of the blue dress, and sew herself a new one.
his hands bore eight more tattoos: eight closed half-moon eyes just below his open spiders’ eyes, to remind him of what he had learned during the hours that he could not see.
And thanks to my old Camaro, which hurtled and lurched its failing way into a small Colorado town years ago. I was looking for a miracle, but I got a story instead, and sometimes those are the same thing.
