The Hacienda

by Isabel Cañas

Behind me, high white stucco walls rose like the bones of a long-dead beast jutting from dark, cracked earth.

each dull thud seeking the heart’s sweet sap, each man becoming more intimately acquainted with the give of meat beneath metal, with the harvesting of hearts.

It is said that mortal life is empty without the love of God. That the ache of loneliness’s wounds is assuaged by obedience to Him, for in serving God we encounter perfect love and are made whole. But if God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, if He is three in one in the Trinity, then God knows nothing of loneliness. God knows nothing of standing with his back to a gray morning, of dropping to his knees in the dust. Of his shoulders slumping beneath the new weight of knowing what it meant not to be alone, and an acute awareness of his chest’s own emptiness. God knows nothing of loneliness, because God has never tasted companionship as mortals do: clinging to one another in darkness so complete and sharp it scrapes flesh from bone, trusting one another even as the Devil’s breath blooms hot on their napes.

Now, the thing I feared most spread like a shadow in my breast: here, far from the eyes of the Inquisition, the parts of myself that I had shoved into a box began to unfurl, soft and curious as plumes of smoke, testing lock and hinge.

demons. It broke people.” Fervor hardened his voice. “They need to be listened to, they need to be heard, and there are things they can’t speak about with the other priests.”

is my home. I know these people. Their wives are like my mother, their sons my brothers. I know. And I listen.”

“Some illnesses we cannot cure,” my grandmother said. “Others we can soothe. Sorrow is one of these. Loneliness is another.” She searched my face. “Do you understand? Tending to lost souls is our vocation.”

houses to purify their energy with copal and smudging of burnt herbs on the walls and hearths, houses so diseased she ordered me to stand outside with the inhabitants, the voices rippled off her like water off silver, her aura as impenetrable as a warrior’s gleaming shield. She was a prophet in a land that had been stripped of its gods: a healer of the sick, a beacon in the night. She reached into steel-dark clouds to control the storms of the rainy season, seizing lightning as her reins and bending them to her will to turn harvests into gold. She called the voices to heel and banished them.