The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina

by Zoraida Córdova

Yo quiero luz de luna para mi noche triste, para sentir divina la ilusión que me trajiste, para sentirte mía, mía tú como ninguna, pues desde que te fuiste no he tenido luz de luna. —FROM “LUZ DE LUNA” BY ÁLVARO CARRILLO

You are invited to my home on May 14, the Year of the Hummingbird. Please begin to arrive no earlier than 1:04 p.m., as I have many matters to settle before the event. The stars have shifted. The earth has turned. The time is here. I am dying. Come and collect your inheritance. Eternally, Orquídea Divina Montoya

Orquídea’s favorite color was the blue of twilight—just light enough that the sky no longer appeared black, but before pinks and purples bled into it. She thought that color captured the moment the world held its breath, and she’d been holding hers for a long time. That was the blue that accented the shutters and the large front door. A few months after her arrival, on her first venture into town to buy a car, she learned that all the ranch-style houses were painted in tame, watery pastels.

She learned New York evolved because it survived on blood. It was loud because it was a symphony of people shouting their dreams and hoping to be heard. Marimar had longed to add her dreams to that song but when she tried, her voice was a whisper.

She learned that no one was ever going to want her, for reasons she couldn’t control, and that praying to chipped statues of la Virgen María and el niñito Jesús didn’t come with anything but silence. She learned to survive and survived by learning. By the time she was thirteen, she was a full-blown beauty, with lustrous black curls, skin like the darkest honey, but still peculiar and still followed around by cats, though roosters had begun to join her daily parades to the river shore.

“Don’t come looking for me.” He returned to the docks, and that was when Orquídea learned that she was exactly like her father, untethered, belonging to nowhere and nothing and no one, like a ship lost to the seas.

“Latino families just think they’re cursed because they won’t blame God or the Virgin Mary or colonization.”

There were those who felt too much, those who felt too little, and others who knew how to deal with those feelings.