All the Crooked Saints

by Maggie Stiefvater

not a logical goal. The conception of perfection exists only so that we have something to strive toward: Impossibility is built into it, which is why we ...

The truth is that only a few things in history have ever been perfect. There was a perfect sunset in Nairobi in 1912. There was a bandoneon constructed in Cordoba that perfectly captured the drama of human existence in just a...

Marisita could do extremely well was a large one. She could do everything expected of a woman in the early 1960s: She could clean, and she could cook, and she could sew. But she could also play the foot pedal loom like Paganini played the violin, and it was said that the latter had sold his soul to the devil for his skill. She formed pots out of clay that were so striking that sometimes, when she went to gather clay for a new one, she discovered that the clay had eagerly already begun to shape itself for her. Her voice was so well trained that bulls would lie down when they heard her sing. She was so famed for her studied and just empathy that men and women would come for miles to solicit her as mediator in disputes. She could ride two horses at the same time, one leg on each horse, and still hold down her skirt to maintain her modesty, if she felt like it. Her segueza, developed from an ancient recipe, was so excellent that time itself stood still while you were eating it in order to savor the flavor along with you.

Before, she had wanted to go out into the desert because of despair.

She vowed that now she would go out into the desert only in the name of hope. She at least owed Daniel this new purity of purpose. Now she cooked a new batch of

“Oh, I didn’t mean that. I just feel strange watching you do all the work, is all.”

She wasn’t sure which part startled her more: that he expressed his discomfort so easily, or that she was put at ease by the explanation.

Of course, if she thought about it, she knew this was the way to do it. If a pair had come to her for advice back in Texas, she would have advised them to be free with each other no matter how foolish it seemed. She did not know why she found it difficult to take her own advice.

Marisita was quite suddenly overcome with frustration with all of them. Daniel’s sacrifice hadn’t healed her, because she was too tormented by her terrible past, and Jennie couldn’t find an original word no matter how hard she tried, and Theldon kept growing moss, and they all seemed beyond hope. She missed Daniel, though she felt she had no right to. He had never been hers to miss, because she was a pilgrim, and he was a saint, and more importantly, because she would never stop being a pilgrim. She

would always be Marisita and her butterflies. Tears were prickling in her eyes again, but no one would even know if she began crying once more, because this rain would never stop.

“The Singing Sands of Alamosa,”

“The world’s a madhouse,” Padre Jiminez corrected. “This is a place to heal it. What’s your name, traveler?”

“Right, Jennie?” Jennie echoed, startled. But after a pause, she nodded, too. Because other people’s words had been the problem for so long, it had not occurred to her before that minute that sometimes, someone else’s words might be exactly what she needed to say how she felt. Later, this new knowledge would come in handy, but for right now, she felt only a hint of the value it would have for her.

Padre Jiminez noted the complexity of this exchange.

when miracles are afoot, and he was having that suspicion now. Some priests fly like owls, too, like Padres Quintero, López, and Gonzalez, who all received the gift of slow-motion flight as a result of the first miracle when they arrived to Bi...

“God, kid. I can’t decide if I hate or love what a square you are.” Pete grinned for the first time. “Better love it, because it’s not changing, buddy.” This was the moment they became friends. They became even better friends after this, because time improves on these things, but this was the moment it began. Tony sensed it, because he rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Okay, now beat it.”

“Beat it? Why?” “Because I’m starting to think you’re all right, and I don’t want to give you a chance to say something that’ll change my mind back again.” “Okay,” said Pete, but he didn’t go. Instead, he tapped on one

and the force of his passion caused already weak porches to collapse upon themselves.

He smiled is a good line for almost any kind of story. Beatriz found she liked the way he looked: sturdy and true, responsible and square. The night had left his white T-shirt dirtier than it had begun, and his neatly combed hair was no longer quite so neat—but it had only served to wear down the outer layer of kindness to reveal that there was only more kindness beneath. She smiled.

Sometimes, Francisco thought that people might be roses. It was not that he disbelieved Darwin and the classification of the species. It was only that every time he carefully applied the pollen, he thought about the process, how the pollen would work its way over the rose’s stigma and then enter the egg cell and fertilize the egg nucleus, and how wondrous and strange it was that it was the same process by which we were made. Many of his days, particularly in these slow summer months, were spent engrossed in thought clouds triggered by small actions, and he lost weeks to thinking about what it might mean that so many creatures under the sun, from roses to birds to trees to sharks, came to life by the same, complex process. Even those whose process often looked quite different from the outside—like the meiosis, or cell splitting, of the sea urchin—still used much of the same raw stuff: cells, fertilizations, sharing of chromosomes. He mused on why it might be that evolution had not instead designed most of the world to share the simple asexual process sometimes used by plants such as pelargonium, a flower known commonly as storksbill. A cutting was taken from the original plant, dropped into moist soil, and left to make another plant. By the same process, to create Beatriz, he would have merely planted one of his fingers and she would have emerged later, fully formed and independent.

Why indeed, he wondered, did we need life to make more life? We took it for granted that two creatures met and mated and made another creature, when we would not expect a cloud or a fire or a cooking pot to be fashioned the same way. Yes, all of those processes required combining other ingredients as well, but without the cell, the egg—? If there was a great creator who had fashioned us in his own image, why, then, was more life not made in the same way, by merely breathing a word over a handful

of dust? I...

reproduction and love became a messy process, and messy processes meant there were many p...

By relegating the things we fear and don’t understand to religion, and the things we understand and control to science, we rob science of its artistry and religion of its mutability.

“Beatriz,” Francisco whistled. “The answer to your question, though, is yes.”

But they both felt the same. It was one thing to be sending sounds out into the night with the hope that someone, anyone might be listening, and something else again to be sending sounds out into the night with the hope that someone in particular would be listening. And it is a third thing altogether to send sounds out into the night and know that you are being heard by the person you meant to reach.

Prayer

“What does it mean, Beatriz?” Judith asked. They all knew that Beatriz and Daniel were the closest of the cousins, and Judith assumed (correctly) that this also meant Beatriz knew what the message meant. Beatriz, however, said nothing. She said nothing for so long that most of them forgot Judith had asked Beatriz the question in the first place, including Judith. (People often forget the power of silence, but Beatriz rarely did.)

We almost always can point to that hundredth blow, but we don’t always mark the ninety-nine other things that happen before we change.

tonight, know that I, Diablo Diablo, am, too. It’s an enormous sky out there with a lot of stars above it and a lot of folks underneath it, and all of us, stars and human, are missing someone in the dark. But I, Diablo Diablo, think that if we’re all out there missing someone, that means that we’re all really together on that one note, aren’t we? So none of us are really alone as long as we’re lonely.” It is difficult to convey how mesmerizing Joaquin was in this

“As I walk along, I wonder what went wrong.” All eyes landed on her. No one knew

“No matter how I try, I just can’t turn the other way.” “Connie Francis,” Tony said. “ ‘My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own.’ ”

Jennie’s second miracle, and they all remembered how late it was.

“You’re gonna need to listen to the radio a lot more.”

As she danced with Pete, Beatriz was thinking that perhaps this was what performing the miracle felt like for Daniel. The sensation inside her felt like it came both from inside her and from someplace very much outside her, which was impossible and illogical and miraculous. If Daniel had been there, he would have told her that this was because holiness was love, but he was not, so she had to merely wonder if she finally understood her family a little better.

Perhaps another Soria could have freed them from their darkness faster or better. Perhaps he had been just a man playing at God. “Forgive me,” he prayed, and his heart felt a little lighter.

It had not even occurred to Antonia that he might take ownership of her undirected anger. Her surprise over this passed swiftly away from shock, took an inexplicable side trip through grief over Daniel, and finally arrived at yet more anger. She snapped, “I’m not angry at you or Beatriz!”

“Ma’am, do you mind me asking who you’re angry at, then?” As Antonia Soria opened her mouth, dozens of names filled the space behind her teeth, waiting to be said. But in that moment, as she saw Pete’s guileless face and, behind him, the outline of Francisco’s greenhouse and, in it, its sleepless occupant looking back at her, she realized that the only name that was true in that space was her own.

This is the way of our work: We cannot help but color it with the paint of our feelings, both good and bad.

Pete wasn’t much for speeches, but he’d been thinking on one sort of like this since Antonia had given him an earful before the sun had even come up. So he laid it out for her. “Well, I reckon that’s what you just told me the problem was with the pilgrims, right? There’s an awful lot of things that go on here that don’t get said. A lot of shut doors and closed eyes, just to be on the safe side. Maybe if you want things to change, you should start in yourself. Tell him what you’re thinking. You might just find that it’s already occurred to him, too. Everybody’s thinking about Daniel, aren’t they?”

“Do you hate us?” Rosa said. She had believed that Joaquin had broken the taboo the moment he read the letters out loud from the sisters, and now was crying from fear and relief on seeing that he was unchanged. Merely disobedient, not lost to darkness. “Why would you play with this, Joaquin, like it is nothing, when Daniel has lost everything for the same price?” Joaquin stood frozen. He had been suspended in the high of the

show. He had thought it was good while he was writing it, and he had thought it was even better with Tony’s notes, and he had thought it was very good when he recorded it, but when he heard it broadcasting from the radio, he had thought that it was great, and he was not wrong. He was still suffused with the powerful sensation of doing exactly what he had been designed to do. This was his miracle and he was drunk with this electric holiness. For the entire drive back to Bicho Raro, the thrill and correctness of it had left him unable to contemplate anything else.

So when he found himself confronted, he could not think of what to say. It was too opposite to how he had just ...

Only feet from him, her pulse pounded so strongly that it was as if she had already found him. “Daniel,” she said, “I’m not afraid.” This was not true, but she wanted it to be true badly enough that the difference did not matter.

The one Marisita displayed right then was one of them, and the kind that Daniel displayed was another. Everything in him wanted to call to her, but nothing in him gave in to the impulse. He had risked everything in order that she might live without her darkness, and he would not give that up just because he did not want to die alone. Marisita hesitated. She believed that her desire to find him had invented the feeling of certainty inside her. “Daniel?” The Saint remained hidden. Marisita returned to Bicho Raro to tell her story.

very few people are ever healed by being told a truth instead of feeling the truth for themselves.

don’t need to be made into something that I’m not,” she said, “something easier, with feelings, something more like you. I am trying to think of what to do next and it’s taking all of my mind and I don’t need you to imagine me as something softer to make you feel better about who I am!”

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.