Sia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything

by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

Three years ago, your father, a deputy sheriff, turned my mom over to ICE, who sent her to Mexico, a place she hadn’t seen since she was six months old. She tried to come back to us a hundred times, but they didn’t let her. Finally, she decided to cross the Sonoran. That was the last thing we heard from her.

I want a good reason why I shouldn’t sue your school for a callous and baseless assignment that triggered Sia’s PTSD.”

My dad’s been searched a dozen times for “papers” in the last two years alone, even though he was freaking born in Oklahoma. Plus,

“Sia. We can’t hold onto anger, to hatred like this. It makes us no better than them.” “Have you forgiven the sheriff, Dad?”

When I’m eighteen, I want to find my mother’s skeleton. I want to string it together and sing her alive, just like my grandmother said the first curanderas did, their clay skin still wet from the fog of God’s breath.

I’VE READ SOME OF THE house of the spirits by Isabel Allende (one of Mom’s books),

She said for all we knew, we came from pieces of corn at the beginning of everything.

“Well, this,” I say, holding up the papers, “isn’t part of the terms of my punishment. I’m not supposed to be able to catch up.”

This town is so tiny and close to the border, sometimes it feels like everyone thinks all the brown folks ought to be on the other side of a big, ludicrous wall. So I like being part of a secret revolution against Jeremy and Tim McGhee. It’s like being on the side of Wonder Woman versus Ares. Or maybe God and Lucifer.

There were a lot of things I didn’t write. Like, after I found out my mom was dead, I went out and begged the moon to tell me otherwise, to tell me it could see her, still breathing, tracking her way through the Sonoran. And how sometimes I wonder if the moonlight that touches me when I light saint candles in the night is the same moonlight that also touches my mami’s bones. And if somehow, I’m connected to her through that light. Like I’m still touching a part of her.

When I was, like, eleven, my grandmother said there were countless worlds in addition to ours. The underworld, the ghost world, the world of beetles and bats and hummingbird moths. There’s a world for warlocks and brujas and one for coconut trees and even a world just for our dreams. That one, she said, was always changing.

My grandmother found that spot, after she moved here, to the States. She had to up and leave everything, with nothing to her name but a few pesos and a baby. I can’t even imagine that. White people pretend they can imagine it, but you really can’t, not unless you’ve been there.

In that watercolor morning light, she said she felt like she was witnessing the beginning of the world all over again. She knew this space was sacred.

God, why do I get so weird and hostile like this with boys? Well, actually, I know exactly why. So I make a point to remind myself as I walk to my next class. Noah isn’t Justin. Noah isn’t Justin.

MY GRANDMOTHER SAID THAT IN the beginning, there was nothing but the wide black nothing of space. She said this big nothing was a woman, and the woman longed to be touched. So this woman’s belly grew big with longing, and soon she pushed out a baby. And when the baby ate from her breast, the milk that flowed became the whole universe.

she could feel the prickly magic of that beginning.

“That’s Saint Kateri. She was Mohawk. And something else, I think.” Kateri’s one of my favorites, because when I see paintings of her with her long hair and brown skin, she reminds me of my mother. “Oh, right. She converted after smallpox killed her whole family, right?”

It’s so unfair that the world ceased to be beautiful once Mom was gone.

LOOK UP FROM ARISTOTLE and dante discover the secrets of the universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

SOMETIMES, WHEN I’M IN THE desert, I pray for any girl who happens to get near Justin. That her hair will stand up, that some part of her wild animal body will know he’s a predator. And that she will run fast and far away, away from all the boys who think they deserve to be sucked off just because they have dicks.

I WASN’T THERE WHEN THEY took her. I wasn’t there, so I can imagine the worst. See, there, her brown hands, clenched and spinning; her screams, high and shattered. There are skid marks on the sidewalk where she dug in her boots and said, No, no, no, what about my family, what about my daughter? ¿Qué va pasar con mi esposo, y mi bebé, qué va ser de mi vida?

If only she had just stayed in Mexico. Even next to homeless. Even not knowing anybody. Even weeping her guts out every moment we weren’t together. If only she’d stayed. Brokenhearted and hungry and so lonely, her chest aching like a part of her flesh was still pinned to me and Dad and Abuela here in Arizona, aching as though she were dying, dying, but not actually dying, not completely. That’s better than dead, right?

And Rose was the one who made me see it, you know, that everything being a miracle doesn’t negate the power of miracles. It means that everything is extraordinary, just as it is. The cracking of seeds to roots, the burning of a star in the sky, the two most perfect angelic babies in our arms. All of them. Extraordinary. I keep

“I’ve always seen the moon as belonging to the Earth. You know? Like it’s Earth’s great love. I don’t like that it’s edging away.”

“You ever think, Sia, that maybe the moon belongs to itself?”

imagine what I should’ve said to them instead of nothing. She shouldn’t have broken the law. Can’t say how many times I’ve heard that one. I want to scream now, that my mom was a baby when she got here, that this land, this sand, this moon under this dry sky is all she’s known.

She should’ve done it legally. She tried, assbrain. She tried. Both before and after ICE dragged her away just outside my school.

Her parents shouldn’t have broken the law, then. First of all, I thought when Jesus came, we stopped punishing peop...

If you had to become an undocumented immigrant to feed your children, wouldn’t you?

There had to be another way. White people—guys especially—always imagine another way because their paths have always been saturated with forks. For Abuela and mi mamá, there was no fork. No other way.

When I can speak again, I tell him about a mean boy pushing my face to his ugly dick. About how dicks have freaked me out ever since and I wanted to be fixed, fixed so badly, I want the thousands of pieces of me to be sewn back together again,

God, Sia. You’re perfect. Not broken. Perfect.”

NOW I KNOW HOW THE universe was created by touch. Now I know. Now I understand. That woman out there, what she desperately wanted was not a baby. That came later. First there was someone who knew how to make her feel so good, planets and their teal rings and full moons and nebulas and nothing and everything came from her, from her hips and hair and the tips of her fingers. Later, there was a baby, and yes, her milk made the stars. But first, there was this. Me, my legs shaking, pulling Noah’s mouth closer. Closer.

I HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED THERE’S a spirit in everything. It’s the one thing that set me apart from the cosmologies of my mother and grandmother. Mom was convinced mosquitoes were soulless; with Abuela, it was mice. Like some things are too small and annoying to house a spirit.

I told Rose the women in our family have always been able speak to the dead. It’s very simple. God made many pathways into heaven. He pierced holes where the light leaks back down to Earth. We see these and call them stars.

Taking walks in the starlight makes our senses raw. And we can hear and see and feel our ancestors. They’re always among us, traveling back and forth by starlight. It’s a kind of magic, my madre told me.

Star magic is the oldest sort. It’s how humans became something a little different from animals.

Drarry means a Draco and Harry pairing, which at first makes no sense because they spent the bulk of the series being enemies, you know? But then there are cracks open in Draco, in which we see he isn’t all bad, and then cracks in Harry, in which we see there’s some bad in him. Flaws, which everyone has. Some more than others.

“Things aren’t looking that great for her case at the moment, though. With him being a sheriff and all. He’s got a lot of officer buddies who can confirm what a great, jolly fellow he is.”

Once, I asked my father what those little specks were, the ones you can see in light rays. He said dust. And later, I asked my mother. She said they were prayers.

Mom bites at her lips. “The people who did this to me? They’re not going to stop. Not unless someone holds them accountable. And the only way that’s going to happen is if we expose what they did. What they’re still doing.” She grabs my hand. “I have to. I want—need—everyone to hear my story.”

She sat down and listened to me very carefully. About how there was an enormous explosion and all of matter splattered in all directions, until planets and stars formed. And on our planet, there was some great soup with bacteria, all cooking in the ocean like boiled tamales, till they became fish to snakes to elephants to apes to us. And when I was finished, she looked out the window at all the Joshua trees in her yard. “So that’s what they’re reaching for,” she said. “I always wondered.”

“Groups in power have been performing unethical experiments on subjugated peoples since forever. It was the first thing we learned in world history.” I huff. “I mean, this whole setup, it’s kind of their MO.”

“I’m just saying that anything that’s gonna give the military more power? They will pour their money into it. This country is obsessed with war and shit. I mean, think about that jet they’ve been working on for the last couple of years. The F-35 Project? The most expensive military project in history? It’s considered a failure, and they’re still throwing dimes at it.”

“You know, once upon a time, I used to think only bad guys did bad things. But then…” She sighs. “I met two people. Good people. And they did some bad, bad things. Because they thought it would save their families. Their people.”

But we all make mistakes, Sia. We have to remember that we aren’t our mistakes. We aren’t what people have forced us to do, to be.” Her voice is so low, it’s almost at a whisper. “No one is all good and no one is all bad. Remember this when the anger feels like it’s burning everything inside you. Remember that most of us are just doing what we think is right at the time.”

“They can’t not find us, Luis. It’s the government. They’ve got satellites, cameras, drones. Guns, bombs—”

Cell phone tracking

Jeremy isn’t hideous, with his running back shape, gold hair, eyes the color of lapis. The ultimate proof that a book’s cover can hide a heart made of cockroaches. Plus, a lot of girls find the whole aggressive and racist thing attractive, I guess.

I begin to wonder if there’s a secret world hidden in everything, like words in the whine of mosquitoes or myths in the hums of bees or even ancient tales in the microscopic mumbles of water bears. Sounds we find ridiculously annoying, but on a level we can’t sense, they somehow hold the whole universe together.

The leshii can take the form of anyone on Earth, but it’ll go for someone you love. Someone you’re missing, someone your heart is aching to see. Just to get close to you.