Laurel Trees (And Other Things Women Become)

Lucia knew it would a bad idea to tell her superstitious mother about her peculiar dreams and had, more or less, expected the Central American Freud™ psychoanalysis, but she hadn’t quite imagined the sort of ritual her mother would throw down in the middle of her childhood home’s kitchen. The low-whispered prayers made sense, but the egg? That was one step too far.

“Ma,” Lucia groans, ready to repeat her mantra of que haces? Stop, ma’, ya, that’s enough but the egg went from hovering over her arms to juuuuust before her face and Lucia snapped her mouth shut. She shuffles awkwardly, moving her weight from one leg to the other, and lets her mother do her thing. She eyes the single white candle, half burnt from previous prayers, and let her eyes roam over the faded figure of Santo Tomás.

She snorts in aborted laughter, and her mom flinches. Almost in slow motion, Lucia watched the results of her jolt and her mother’s lifelong sensitivity to sudden movement.

“Well, damn,” Lucia says as the egg falls, falls falls, and then—

—thunk!—

—lands on the floor. Lucia and her mother lock eyes. There was a sound they had expected, and the lack of it forces them to reassure themselves with the other’s incredulity. Where did the breaking-shattering-cracking-wetness go? So they encourage each other with a glance and then look down at… the hardboiled, barely scattered remains of the egg on the floor between Lucia’s worn out Vans and her mother’s brown-leather chanclas.

“I take it that’s not the best of signs,” Lucia says before the long, drawn-out silence becomes a prayer of its own. Her mother looks at her, unimpressed. Saint Thomas, the patron saint of students and scholars, looks on with faded judgement in his eyes as well.

Everyone is against me, man, Lucia thinks to herself, avoiding the dual pair of eyes in favor of the egg-crime scene. Even you, you poultry bastard.

The first dreams had been hazy and unremarkable. Lucia knew she dreamt, though, and vividly if her exhaustion was anything to go by. She knew she dreamt something odd through her awakening reactions: one night she awoke with her arm reaching—for what? She could not remember and chasing the dream made it less distinct; the next night she awoke by punching the wall next to her bed; for three separate nights she woke up with a name on the tip of her tongue, then coughed and hacked it out of existence.

Lucia didn't believe in the supernatural, oddly enough, considering she had grown up and grown used to the macabre stories. Her mother didn't know tales like Jack & Jill or the one about the bean curd or stalk or tree or whatever it was. She did, however, know stories about brujas and siguanabas and demons that would devour people's faces if they looked the creatures in the eye.

So when things had started happening in her current apartment, she hadn't really thought anything non-human had been happening. Beyond the creaks and groans Lucia assumed were the pipes of a typical college-rented apartment, there were always easy explanations for the going-ons. Strange figure looming in a corner? Lucia's pretty sure that's where she had her laundry piled up for cleaning. TV is bursting out static at 3am— the witching hour her mom whispers from Lucia's memory nada bueno pasa a ese hora!— well the X-Box is always on the fritz so it makes sense that the same would start happening to the television. Electronics always get a little weird with age.

There was always an explanation, and there was always something more important to take care of. Lucia found that the usual cycle of work-keep-yourself-semi-functional-sleep kept her from looking too closely at everything around her.

Lucia figured this would be something her mother would be proud of. Instead, when her mother calmed down enough to speak to her daughter as they migrated over to the kitchen table, but not calm enough to scoop the eggy-innards from the floor of the kitchen, Lucia was surprised that her mother was actually upset.

"But ma'," Lucia says, and she hates how much The Look her mother gives her makes her feel like she's 13 again, "you told me that reacting to ghosts and whatever the fu—"

"Mi'ija!" Her mother's scandalized voice rings out.

"—whatever the heck else is in the place would only make it stronger." There's no need to tell her mother about the things moving around the house. Lucia had always been a bit of a memory-lapser, so things she put down were easily lost. Maybe there had been more to that than simple forgetfulness. "So I decided to ignore it."

"Mi'ija, listen," her mother says, softly," lo que te pasa, whatever is happening, you need to be careful." They both pointedly don't look at the egg mush. "Since your father, que dios le bendiga, left us, you've been ignoring everything else but your estudios and the work."

It wasn't true, of course. Lucia had also been taking care of funeral arrangements, of learning her father's half of the family. It was so easy to forget, when her father Ruben was alive, that he wasn't just her father, that he'd had a whole life before she was born. A whole life before marrying her mother.

He'd also had a whole 'nother family, not that Lucia had been planning to tell her mother about that.

"And mi amor, that is good, but you need to take time off. Take a break. Respira!" Her mother takes a deep, exaggerated breath. Lucia laughs lightly at the motion, and her mother smiles a small little thing in return. But, taking a second to collect herself, Lucia puts a hand over her mother’s, soothes the slight tremor. The scars, the ones without definitive stories, are rough on the otherwise smooth, wrinkled skin of her mother’s hands. All jokes aside, Lucia understands her mother’s trepidation.

Loss is not easy, and her mother isn’t ready to give more than she already has.

“And you, ma?” Lucia asks softly, pressing down lightly on a pale scar. She remembers that story, at least, three borders and one hell of an adventure. At least, that’s how her mother had framed it. “Como estas?”

Her mother sighs. She had always loved telling her stories, but talking about herself was a different, difficult genre. In English and Spanish, there just… weren’t any words anymore.

The tremor returns.

“Pos, I don’t,” a pause. Her mother takes a quick breath. “I don’t know, mi’ija. I lived half my life without your father. I guess I’m just… having dificultades reminding myself in the morning that I’m moving forward without him again. Alone.” Her mother gives a watery, brittle smile, flips their hands so she is holding Lucia’s in a gentle but firm grasp. “Y tú?”

Lucia looks at her mother’s hand, the contrast between her mother’s darker, aged skin and her own unscarred, lighter skin.

“I’m,” Lucia looks pointedly at their joint hands, “I’m holding on.” Her mother laughs, loud and bright and—

Her mother gets up, then, to turn on the stove to boil water for some coffee.

“Remember,” her mother advises from the stove, back turned to Lucia, “life is… uh, is complicado. What we are left with is sometimes not what we actually got.”

Lucia thinks about the scars, secrets left forgotten beneath mounds of old tube socks, hidden inside of an envelope with the name of a woman scribbled in sloppy, blue-black cursive. Maybe the same questions haunted her mother, too, but those refused to remain buried. No, they rose from the grave like wraiths and became new tales instead of being put to rest as unanswered questions.

“…sometimes people change. Sometimes we are not ready for what life gives us,” Her mother had still been speaking. “We do what we must, and we try to love and care for each other as good as we can. Entiendes?”

Understand?

Lucia is trying. When her mother fills two mugs for coffee—one to the brim, the other only meagerly, Lucia always had a penchant for coffee-flavored-milk—Lucia rises to prepare her drink. They pull out the sugar from a drawer, the milk from the refrigerator, and reconvene at the table. Her mother begins with another story about her husband, Lucia’s father, and nostalgia with a hint of sorrow follows each word.

I wonder who you were, too, Lucia thinks, pointedly ignoring the battered and forgotten egg remnants on the floor a few feet away, Maria Quijas de la Paz. Who were you before you became my mother?

---

After the Egg Incident, Lucia finds it strange to be back in her apartment. Everything is the same, she knows, but she can't quite shake the feeling that whatever is causing this—stress, sleep deprivation, exhaustion—knows that she knows about it, and the knowing-ness of it all seems to be reflected in the cheap furniture, the lonely atmosphere. Like that prank that moves every piece of furniture one inch to the left, Lucia felt that her home was now slightly off. Slightly manipulated to skew her perspective.

She knew she had a few emails to look over for the weekend but decided that it had been a long Friday evening and she would rather sit and watch infomercials until the ass-crack of dawn before reading any.

Dear Señora Tirado, she had sent, and the RE: Information Regarding Ruben Quijas was sitting in her inbox, collecting digital dust.

Lucia turns on her TV as she moves from living room to restroom, and the echoes of some news story fills the silence she dreads. Anything is better than the dichotomy of her own morose thoughts and the odd sounds she can no longer ignore. A catchy commercial's jingle plays and, singing along, Lucia starts to pick up the looming pile of laundry in the corner of her room. The laundry ‘room’, which is more of a half-wall against her shower but still in the restroom, is colder than the rest of the apartment. Lucia always figured the cold was a result of the tiles and poor insulation in the restroom, but that secondary, superstitious layer is starting to breach her mind.

She wonders, as she mindlessly shoves delicates and colored clothing into the washer, if the dreams she's been having are simply a response to finding her father's other family.

The woman in them is familiar, if anything, but vague enough to keep Lucia guessing. Maybe the other Woman? But she had only found a name, and a residence, and then Lucia had refused to delve further.

The dryer starts rotating, and Lucia nearly pees herself at the sudden movement and sound. Lost in her thoughts, she hadn't noticed the timer rolling over to the twenty-five minutes-damp-dry setting and then pressing in to start the other machine.

"You're getting too ahead of yourself," Lucia says to the Nothing there. "I'm barely throwing in a load!"

She feels like that Cyclops from the Odyssey. Poly-whatever-his-name-was. Shouting, who's there?

And her answer, which had been his answer as well, centuries and a million adventures and tales ago:

Nobody.

---

The woman is not facing Lucia, and never is. She is a tangible, solid mass that looks like she'll feel coarse to the touch, harsh where she should be soft. She weeps silently, but Lucia feels the agony in the air, can almost taste it.

It tastes bitter, leaves grains of sand in the back of her throat. Like an acrid scent that your brain cannot define as a smell alone, and you feel it on your skin like a layer of grime, and on your tongue it is tart and acerbic and and and—

She doesn't speak but Lucia hears her all the same. Words she cannot decipher, a language that does not exist. They are in a hundred countries and part of thousands of myths. They are written and spoken. They do not exist in this plain of existence, and they are true all the same.

There are ashes falling from the sky like putrid, rancid snow. Everything is falling apart around them, burning still though ashes are the only remnants of what once stood. Lucia walks forward, always, one step forward, another, but she never moves from her spot.

The skies are lit with fire beyond the thickness of smoke, fiery scarlet like a streak of blood smeared across haze. There’s a faint veil of gray there, like haunted and mourning specters crying in the night.

It is silent, though. Lucia breathes in, gags at the taste of smoke and burnt something. For the first time in her recurrent dreams, the woman moves; Lucia feels her heart miss a beat and then race to make up for the misstep.

The woman points forward, and though she does not speak Lucia feels something momentous has occurred but, like sand slipping through her fingers, she can't grasp it. But—that's different, new, strange, she is holding something in her hands, and Lucia looks down to see this stranger update and it's—

"Salt?" Lucia asks, and the two mounds in her hands answer by literally slipping through her fingers onto the ashy sands beneath her feet.

Lucia wakes up to the television singing something about car insurance. Lucia groans and stretches her legs, pats down the blanket thrown over her lap. It’s around late two in the morning now, she notes, taking the time from the cable box beneath her television screen. She has nothing but time this weekend with everything else for the funeral covered for now.

She thinks it's fortunate that her father had died of heart complications before she found out about whoever this Ana woman was to him, or she probably would have killed him herself.

Unfair. Lucia takes a deep breath to soothe the hurt-anger that tenses her muscles. She supposes it isn't fair to any of them, really, that a dead man can still hurt them after he is gone. She figures that maybe this is why she hasn't mourned, really, when the burning anger of having been deceived—lied to—her whole life is scorching so bright.

But what else is there to do? Since she saw the name on some off-hand document while cleaning her father's thing from their old home, all she could think about were memories she felt she had confused. Ruben had definitely been calling another family that one time when she was six. When she was ten. When she was thirteen. When she was—

It comes, then, unbidden: a lost relic of a memory stained with new truths.

She had stayed home to surprise her dad while her mom had gone out to get groceries. Having expected the home to be empty, Lucia's father had decided to make a call outside. Lucia waited on the couch by the window to surprise him when he entered and couldn't help but overhear his conversation. She must have been about eleven at the time. Old enough to get the implications of the conversation, but too young and naïve to really understand the severity.

"I love you too," her father says into the phone. Lucia scrunches her face in confusion, feeling the weight of her mother's phone in her pocket, dead with all the Tetris she had played during her wait for her father. "Let me talk to the kids..." Ruben asked, more hushed.

"Oh you did? I'm so proud of you!" Ruben had said. Confused and hurt and not knowing why, Lucia threw her mother's phone to the floor and ran into her room. She could hear her alarmed father come inside, but she had already slammed her door and locked it from the inside.

She couldn't understand why she cried, then. But she sobbed and hiccuped and rubbed snot all over her pillow. And then she forgot what about the entire situation made her so unhappy, so uncomfortable with her father that she stopped accepting his on-the-cheek kisses when he came home from work. She stopped letting him call her his little estrellita, little star, and just. Stopped being his little girl, his daughter.

Had that been why she decided to move out when she went to college? She didn't have to, Lucia knew, but... it had been such an easy choice. She would come to visit but he always worked long hours, had always done so since she was too young to remember.

Maybe that had been the catalyst and the proof she never asked for and never wanted. And now, she had a response from the woman on the other end of the line that day. The woman that had stolen her father and all his love, and all his attention and time.

Deep within her apartment, most likely in her bedroom, something creaked followed by the thud of something falling. Lucia thought about getting up for about half a second before deciding that, if it was not a ghost, then some kind of demon would probably be lurking in the shadows waiting to devour her soul. And if not some supernatural being, it was probably a robber waiting to murder her, skin her, and then wear her like a suit.

Either way, the couch seemed unbearably comfortable, and the television was playing one of those ridiculous new cartoons that was all colors and no sustenance, and maybe some mindless television was what she needed.

She remembers the hand, pointing beyond Lucia's gaze. Back. Back. Back there. Salt and ashes.

Lucia shuffles, pulls the phone out of her butt-pocket where it is wedged between her behind and the couch. The little blue light in the corner blinks at her, on, off. On, off.

Answers. You've wanted them for so long, without knowing. It's right there, Lucia, take it. Just a quick swipe of your thumb.

But something in Lucia doesn't want to. It wants to plant its feet down, become rooted to the ground, become unmovable. Stubborn refusal. She wants to... hurt, she wants to be angry.

"I deserve to," Lucia says to herself. Something whispers back from her restroom. Lucia guesses she's just going to have to get her laundry in the morning.

The image, again: the woman, pointing. Back. Back there. Ashes, and something else; smoke, and silence.

"I deserve to be angry," Lucia says again. "I have to, because—"

She isn't going to tell her mom. Her mother, who lost the man she loved. That lost the father to her daughter. But what made Lucia any better, then, to keep deceiving the same, world-weary woman her father had deceived all that time?

Why did Lucia feel like she deserved to suffer the truth? Like some kind of punishment. Here, your sin lies before you in a tapestry of half-faded memories of calls and text messages and suspicious behaviors. Was it because you grew up with stories of monsters and liars and filth that you recognized the signs on your father's face? You heard the lies and felt them?

“Todo tiene su magia,” Her father says. Had said. “Everything has its own magic.” Lucia, just around eight, sat with her father at the same kitchen table she sat with her mother at just hours before. Years after this moment. Her father, haggard from work and nursing a burn on the side of his palm, motioned to the living room. “When you lose something, cualquier cosa, what does your mama tell you?”

“Duendes took it!” Lucia announced, and her father smiled, bopped Lucia’s nose with a finger on his good hand. Lucia smiled and hopped off the kitchen chair, made her way further into the kitchen. The ‘First Aid Box’, really a re-purposed old Lego box with rubbing alcohol and different size bandages, was under the sink and Lucia fished it out from the cache of cleaning supplies with a flourish.

Her father sighed, leaned back further into the kitchen chair. He had come back a few times with kitchen-related injuries, and Lucia had been steady enough—stubborn enough, really, to force her father to sit down and be treated.

Neither had mentioned how late it was, either; past closing and bed time.

“I had a cat,” he told her as he lifted his injured hand for Lucia to observe. “His name was Tortilla.” Lucia giggled. What a silly name for a pet. “He would make things disappear. Poof!” Her father raised his good fist, clenched, and then opened his fingers in an airy motion. “Toys, hair bands, everything. Cats, they hide things, yes? Take things. Then, they teleport them.”

“Do all cats do that?” Lucia had asked, sleepy and breathless with wonder.

“Por su puesto que si,” her father said, nodding. “That’s their magic. Cat hides thing, thing gets teleported to other cats. Poof!” He motioned with both hands, one bandaged and one clean.

Lucia had laughed, asked him, as her father walked Lucia to bed, about other pets. Other animals.

You already know clovers are for good luck, the four leaf.

Dogs absorb sadness, and sense it. Con sus noses, yeah?

Crows aren’t bad omens, but the do steal things and then barter with each other.

“And me, papa?” Lucia had asked softly, her eyes fighting to stay open. To know more about this wonderful, ordinary, magical world. “Am I magic?”

“Si, mi amor,” her father had said, gazing at the light patch of skin-colored bandage on the side of his hand, “you love and are loved. That’s magic all of its own.”

Something in her kitchen falls, shatters. This time, Lucia startles badly as she attempts to stand and trips over the blanket on her legs. She flicks on all the lights from her living room to the dining room where she finds the culprit and laughs for so long she feels like this is it. All the stories and the nightmares and the stress has led to this final moment.

"I've lost it," Lucia says, tears falling from her eyes as her giggles become aborted sobs. "I've lost it."

The broken salt shaker on the floor does not respond.

It's mala surete! Lucia's mother says, appalled. Bad luck! Bad luck! Take a pinch, throw it over your shoulder!

Lucia cleans the mess and throws it all away, the salt, the glass. She takes a few calming breathes and wipes the mocos from her nose on a torn napkin from the roll. From a distance, she can see her phone on the floor still lit with the email-alert.

Fuck you, she thinks nastily, fuck you and your stupid fucking words I don't care anymore I don't care anymore I don't--

She's moved, already; has walked up to the coffee table protecting the offending device with a strange out of body feeling. She eyes the device the way she eyed the egg on the floor: a little surprise, a lot of caution, and altogether a sense of dread.

She thinks, suddenly, that she gets it. The woman isn't a woman, really, but some kind of... relic. A message in and of herself, and something in the room whispers yes.

Yes, it says, you get it.

A woman made of salt, pointing back. Back there. A sky full of ashes and mourning.

It reminds her of some line in a book she had read her mom, because she had been proud of it. A book her father bought her, finally, because he didn't believe in scholarly achievements but athletic ones.

(A life before my mother, Lucia thinks, and she remembers, suddenly, that her father played soccer when she was young and would take her to the park to play as he played his games. Sometimes she would just hang out in the jungle gym with other kids. Sometimes, she would just watch him play and move like he was an entirely different person. How could she have forgotten?)

"We aren't supposed to look back," Lucia whispers, thumb hovering over the unlock icon on her phone screen.

RE: Information Regarding Ruben Quijas.

In her room, Lucia's bed creaks. The email subject line is visible from the notifications, just above a text message from her mother:

"mija are y.ou k? Let m.e no if antyhign ha.pens. Lov mom"

Lucia reads the broken text until her eyes get tired. She sits on her couch, phone in her hand.She taps the home button each time the screen turns off, but does not open the email or reply to her mother. Instead, Lucia stays awake until the channel on her TV becomes service alerts, and loses track of time until she finds herself in the Wastelands of her dream once more.

"Why are you doing this to me?" She asks and expects no answer. The ashes keep falling. The salt-hand rises, rises, and points. Lucia sighs, and slumps to her knees in the sand. "What should I do?"

Like always, the dream offers no answers. The sand-woman points, and points, and she stays as still as the mountains around them. And then, Lucia knows. Hears it without hearing a sound.

Looking back, it says, and Lucia feels like she can hear this in the physical world where her body is holding the cellphone with both hands on her chest, is only human.

Lucia wakes up to the phone flying across the room to land in the corner, and the memory is overlaid with the memory she had forgotten all those years ago. She is surprised until she sees that her hand is extended in the direction her phone was thrown. In the restroom, the dryer starts itself up but the sound is weighted with the soggy clothes Lucia had abandoned to a fate in the washer the night before. It's early, just past eight thirteen, and Lucia weights her options.

She rises and moves to get the phone.

She is, after all, only human. But she understands, maybe, a little bit, but not really. Knowing is something she needs, something she yearns for the sake of understanding. But she can't—she can't keep up with this. She can't keep... covering memories of her father with the realities of what he lived.

She takes a deep breath, hoping a cracked glass screen and thirteen percent battery is enough to get her through the entire email response.

There are cleansings she can do to balance all the bad-luck of the night, all the odd omens. She wonders, vaguely, why life can’t be as simple as an Aesopian Fable, the ones where the moral or lesson is neatly presented at the end of the story. Perhaps because life was messy like that, it never lent itself to tidy conclusions.

None of her mother’s old stories ever started with “once upon a time” or ended on “happily ever after”. Maybe that was answer enough.