Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

he would tell us that it was better to sleep alongside your own clean conscience than to be a parasite of the state or of the militarized groups who were also just a different version of a state.

I told Petrona Weltgeist was god of the mountains. She was a bearded woman riding a magical goat. Petrona seemed impressed. “And what does the bearded woman do?” “She spreads the seeds of flowers, and she helps lovers meet.”

Through the night I dreamed of my hair in a ponytail dragging long behind me, a levitating knife coming down on it—the rope of my hair in dismembered sections marking the places I’d run.