I remember flashes of those days, Mom taking us to protests. After the first time we were gassed, I refused to consume milk. Not in my cereal, not in chocolate. I remember the burning, how hot my tears and snot were as they ran down my face, the elders pouring milk made from powder into my eyes, telling me blink blink. Curfew. Hushed conversations about the kinds of babies being born. The bone-shudder late-night booms of what the empire called war games. I remember Mom and her sisters turning the music up high, telling us kids to dance and get loud while they went outside, whispering under the passion-fruit vines, arguing back and forth on pads of yellow legal paper they burned afterward.
We’re singing gratitude to a new mineral spring that was discovered by a runner from up North when Surem calls for me. The runner snapped her Achilles in the mud and crawled gods know how many klicks to a checkpoint. She punched in one of our codes. A cousin rode out, picked her up, and brought her back to us. The runner was more excited about the spring than what she’d learned up North. More of the same up North, worse. The border needs reinforcements. We try to look calm; we’re good at what we do; we won’t be asked to go to the wall. The others never let their eyes move in my direction. I pretend not to notice. I hold the heel of the runner’s foot. She screams as a bruja trained first as a Western doctor operates as best she can. We leave them and trek to the spring.
Surem calls for me and only me. There are whispers because there are always whispers. Even when the sky is yellow more often than not and children are being born without jaws, destined for harvest in certain lands, gossip is a food everyone eats. I keep quiet. I don’t even tell my blood sisters about Surem. Yes, all of us here are gifted brujas, we are a sisterhood of equality, but it was our mamita who made this possible decades ago. She’s why we’re all here. Surem calls for me because the seed Mamita planted found fertile ground in him. She’d planted the same in me.
We arrived at the point in humanity when we were born because the ancestors of these bodies did some fucked-up shit. All of us are the descendants of darkness. Humanity, this hard training ground, has been used to teach us the boundaries of what we can endure, and it has given us a sound for laughter. Time allows us certain gifts unavailable elsewhere: We can cook and grow things, bleed and heal. Age. Create and die.
Science was too busy dealing with the food crises to deal with the jawless babies seeding forth, but there were more mothers than scientists, and as always mothers found ways. A black market sprang up, the blackest of markets. It was a beginning.
Surem was born in Mexico, with a jaw; his twin brother without. Their parents had the privileges of money and favors owed. Surem’s brother, Gabor, lived ten and a half years. The wall came into its true purpose the year before he died. I was a kid then, on the other side. Mamita had been given the knowledge of a tunnel and we were among the first to cross South. I remember the chemical smell of the bag that was placed over my head when the van picked us up from the warehouse in Navojoa. Mamita comforted us while Mom and her sisters said, Fuck, Mami, what is this? so many times I lost count. Surem’s father let us stay. He was deep in grief over his son and scared of what was happening. The cousins and I were put in a wing decked out with televisions, video games, a domed room with a trampoline and rope swings. No windows anywhere.
Every crossing is an initiation. Mamita didn’t survive a landmine planted by the tattered remains of the empire. She had gone North to guide cousins through one of the dwindling safe passages. There was another tunnel, we’d learned, when the cousins showed up skinny and haunted. An older tunnel, its lowest point a test in breath-holding, its climb out an endurance against rats. It is still used. Our engineers can’t do much, and there are more-important projects. Some crossers come out and die of shock. Others drown and have to be dragged out by specially designed collars the border brujas keep handy. Nobody talks about it, but the dead are used to lure the most vicious of the rats away during planned crossings. We were born to do fucked-up shit. But sometimes it ensures survival.
The difference between the now defunct United States of America and Mexico is that the USA started as a settler state, decimating the indigenous population. Spaniards made babies. Those babies made Mexico, fucked up but brown and proud. When shit went down, the Mexicans on either side of the wall collectively woke up to seeds planted by our ancestors. Survival. The long game. Mamita was one of the tenders, one of countless brujas who made hard choices to ensure we would survive what was coming.
Surem is beautiful. His mother, Simona, was this blade-sharp beauty who put herself through school by being a round-card girl at the razor-wire rings. The blood didn’t bother her; she was from a rancho. She met Surem’s father, Antonio, at a bullfight outside Escuinapa. He tried to buy her a drink but she was working, a veterinarian on call to tend to the poorer people hurt at the fights. He talked his way into the pens and stayed with her, making himself useful as she stitched, reset, and joked to the injured. Antonio was the grad-school socialist son of a man whose business was plants: the kind smoked, inhaled, injected. Antonio spent a pittance of money on books and soapboxes and was mostly ignored by his father. When the fight was over, Antonio brought Simona hot towels and offered to drive her home. He stopped on the way for late-night tacos, a couple of beers. She made him laugh. He made her feel seen. They fell in love, married, and two years later Surem and Gabor were born, beautiful babies, brown as their mama, long as their daddy. Gabor destined for hard life, early death.
Surem is waiting for me in one of the smaller greenhouses. The compound is quiet tonight, everyone told to go home early or stay away from the gardens. His bodyguard, Delia, nods when she sees me approach and punches in a code to let me in, then locks it behind me. The greenhouse air is dank with the sugar-perfume of ripening guavas. Surem lounges with a book on the orchard-tender’s chaise. The small rest platform has a table set up with dishes, a bottle of something chilling. He begins reading to me as I approach:
“She is of the continent, around her everything is light and I observe her atop the slab in the image of her body.”
“Who’s the poet?” I ask. I climb the three steps slowly. The only light comes from the searchlights outside. I know my body is shadowed and speckled in foliage.
“A Mexican woman, from before.” Then he says my name so his mouth shapes into a smile. “Ivette.” I stand, my face in darkness, hands at my sides. Surem leans back, folding his arms behind his head. His hair is long these days, curling salt-and-pepper tendrils down to his shoulders. We’re not as young as we once were. When I go to him I go slowly. I kneel at the edge of the chaise. I let my hair down. I lean over so that my hair brushes his bare feet. I move forward. He reaches for me.
If this were a kingdom, Surem would be king. I would be his…well, there are a number of names history has created for women who love.
When the wall went up, it was to keep people out. Ridiculous, considering the vast network of tunnels the cartels had burrowed under the political border with the earth diligence of dwarves. Wall to keep the empire safe: strrrrrong empire, empire with mightiest military in the world, empire made of blood and theft, human and land. Before the wall was even finished the empire began to strip rights, silence certain people, keep others sparking in their skins of distrust. But most of the inhabitants paid attention to other things, shiny things, scandals. It would pass, hadn’t it always? White folks had short memories.
The conspiracy community screamed vindication when the leak came about a certain additive in the morning water of those in uniform. It was too late. Nobody expected the strongest military in the world to turn on their own people. Mothers, husbands, children, lovers, tried to reason with their beloved, but there were few defectors. Some swore it was an apocalypse. Others lamented that it was part of an old plan, maybe a secret society. Or maybe the parasite became greedy, trying to devour its host. Things went badly.
Surem wakes me. It is still night. We drink sparkling water infused with young guava. Surem wraps a sheet around himself, one around me, and leads us out. Delia makes herself small as she follows us from the greenhouse to one of the labs. The fluorescent lights hurt my eyes but Surem knows this, he knows much about me, and he has brought sunglasses. In the lab he wraps his arms around my waist, his mouth in my hair. He types a code into a wall panel and a partition rises in front of us. A man is behind the glass, naked, curled asleep on a narrow cot, arms shielding his eyes from the buzzing lights of his cell. Surem tells me, “We’ve found a way.”
I don’t mean to suggest this new world is joyless; there is a calm anticipation that most of us had never known before. Surem and the other leaders have one rule above all others: Here, no one dies of hunger. There are many other ways to die, of course, but satiated bellies change a society in ways no one could have imagined. There was pushback at first, and hunger, when the swells of people who risked their lives crossing came looking for comfort. Mamita and the other brujas who’d been planning told the jefes it was time: The circle was reset, a new age. No feathered serpents, no eclipses, all blood sacrifice paid over the last six hundred years. The brujas who had infiltrated the ranks of government and church stepped forward, shepherding the hungry and afraid toward the truth. Mamita had revealed the prophecy to the cartel jefes: They were the saviors of their people. All monies gained from the greed of the empire would be used to build a society where no one died of hunger, and the old ways were resurrected. It has been a process. We’re still figuring it out.
I take off my sunglasses. Surem taps on the glass with his ring. The man in the cell wakes up. He moves his arms so they form a pillow beneath his head, his back to us. Surem taps on the glass again. The man turns around and sits on the edge of the cot, bent over, resting his elbows on his knees. His chin is in his hands and he stares at the glass that separates us. His eyes are swollen red from crying, his nostrils and upper lip white with dried mucus. I raise my eyebrows at Surem. A white man in a cell, suffering. Surem pushes a button and speaks to the man.
“Tell us what happened, son.”
I see the man is young, early twenties. His skin is pale, long thighs, freckles on his arms below the elbow and from his collarbones up. His head is shaved. He sits up and pulls a blanket out from underneath the bed and wraps his body in it. I swallow. I don’t know what I’m looking at. There are so many experiments these days, so much to undo. I reach past Surem and push the intercom button.
“Hi. My name is Ivette,” I say. “I’m a healer. I’m sorry you’re locked up; I know that isn’t any way to live. Can you tell me what happened?” I keep my voice soft but put the Call into it, the sacred in me beckoning to the sacred in him. Surem leans against the wall, tries to pull me against him. I push him away. The boy clears his throat.
“I’m Sam. When can I get out of here?” His raw voice shakes when he speaks. I glare at Surem, who opens his hands in a What can I do? gesture. I turn my back to him and press the intercom button again.
“Hi, Sam. I don’t know when you get to leave, but I promise I’ll find out, okay? I promise I will tell you the truth.”
Sam rubs at his eyes. I wonder what he sees in his reflection, if he sees enemy or victim, if he feels strong, weak, curious about anything anymore.
“My name is Sam Roland. I’m twenty years old, I think. I was born and raised in the land of Nebraska. I was a soldier. I did things, horrible things—” Sam’s voice breaks and he covers his eyes and sobs. I want to rush in, pull him into my arms, comfort him as I would a son. He is young enough to be my son, to have been birthed from the passions Surem and I shared in the first days of this new world. I push the intercom.
“Sam,” I croon, putting every comfort I can imagine into my voice. “Sam, my love, it wasn’t you. It wasn’t you; they gave you something so they could force your body to do things, but it wasn’t you. It was a poison. We want to help you.” My hands are aching, healer instincts, and I need to touch, to give. I won’t touch Surem. I place my hands over my abdomen and send the light into my dwindling eggs. I turn to Surem.
“Why is he naked?” We cannot be as bad as our enemy; this is what we promised ourselves.
“Clothing reminds him of his uniform, soaked in blood. He hates anything touching his skin.”
“He’s self-aware, he’s asking questions?” I can’t hide the awe from my voice. For years we’ve been trying to reverse the effects of what the empire gives the kids in uniform; it makes them complacent and unquestioning. It dawns on me that this kid remembers everything.
My outpost is part refuge, part training ground. We’re in the coastal scrublands south of the Sonoran Desert. Enough water and wind to wash the sky clean of the yellow clouds from the burning oil fields. Our sea was once named after a colonizer. We just call her mar. We supply the markets with plant medicine we cultivate and gather from the land in seasons of abundance, specializing in those that thrive in seasons of scarcity. We supply the blackest of markets with the roots that offer easy, painless death. Yaqui elders give us only what we need and teach us how to take without being taken by the land. I live there with a crew of the strangest and strongest among the brujas from the North and a water witch from Gullah territory. She came as a trader and decided to stay. Her people moved in and took over what used to be the Southern United States. When the waters rose, their ancestors provided them the knowledge and a certain magic of blood that complements ours.
We’re near enough a checkpoint that runners sometimes stop by with news, for a healing or a meal. The wall nearest us is in the desert, the path to it full of landmines and drones. The runners risk more than almost anyone, proving themselves strong, brave, intelligent enough to avoid the traps set by the empire, the border military. We know first what is happening. There is still some electronic communication in the bigger cities and compounds, but our outpost lives by the cycles of the sun and moon. We bleed together.
We attend the yearly gathering of brujas from across the lands, discuss how the tending is going. I see my sisters, my nieces and nephews, our last living aunt. I fill my mind with what the artists are creating, dance until I can barely walk. I trade from my collection of books for books I haven’t yet read. I kiss and am kissed; we drink and weep, sacrifice an animal, and eat the flesh cooked over sacred fires. We sing. We rest in the arms of our elders; we initiate youngsters. We plan and promise. We go back to our homes and posts exhausted. We go home infused.
Surem closes the partition and beckons me to follow him. We enter another lab, where there is another partition.
“We haven’t dosed this one yet. This is why I called for you.” He punches in a code and the partition lifts. A young woman is asleep on the cot, arms folded across her chest as though she rests in a sarcophagus. Her brown skin is covered in tattoos, flowers intertwining with script, several names woven into her body’s surface. Her hair is growing out from a military buzz, and she has that soldier body, lean through the hips, bulging everywhere else. I go to the glass.
“Was she sentenced?” I ask. It’s always a hope that, even knowing what they do, the desperate won’t sell their bodies to the empire.
“Volunteer, oldest of six children. Mom dead, Dad hurt at the oil fields.” Surem puts his hand over mine on the glass. “She joined at sixteen, border military.”
I cringe. Border military is trained to shoot first, question never. They’ve managed to collapse most of the tunnels on their side, though a few still remain. They plant mines. Patrol with dogs trained to kill. They pile bodies for a fire every week.
“How many years was she in? How’d we end up with her?” I have so many questions.
“Five years in; we’ve had her about a year. She was concussed, left to die. A couple of traders found her and brought her to us.” I don’t ask what the traders got in exchange. I don’t want to know. Surem goes to the intercom.
“Soldier,” he says.
The young woman wakes up immediately, stands at attention. I look at her with my bruja eyes. Whatever the empire gave her tried to swallow and destroy the spark of her, but I see it, barely flickering in the miasma of poison. I push the intercom.
“What’s your name?” She doesn’t answer. “Come closer to the mirror.” She does, stands at the glass. I lean forward and read the names inscribed on her skin. “Tell me about Yelena, Gustavo, Anita, Felicia, Joe.” She doesn’t say anything, but the light in her flickers. Who she is still exists, I can see it with my trained eyes.
“Vetti.” Surem whispers my childhood nickname to me. No one has called me Vetti in years.
After Gabor died, Antonio and Simona eventually split up. Simona took Surem and moved to the old capital. Antonio set them up with enough resources and called-in favors to make sure they’d be okay. I was nine when they left and missed Surem hard. A few months after he left with his mom, Mamita joined the ancestors. I threw myself into the rituals Mamita had taught us. Surem and I had been her best students, accessing the Dream and beyond, deciphering the miasma. Things were hard those days, the Mexican government fighting on two fronts, the cartels and the empire. The empire was trying to divert all waterways that flowed south. It was chaos. The West Coast split from the empire and made water deals with the First Nations up in Canada. A water-and-food trade route. The empire lost thousands to the West Coast. Some fled north, where there was no wall, but the ice had grown thick and living was hard.
I was seventeen when Surem returned. Simona had died of infection. He was twenty-one. We met up to do a plant ceremony and something else entirely was watered between us. I was by his side during the bloody years, gathering my brujas for healing, for ceremony. We stood by the prophecy, the jefes returning the land to the people, who in turn would honor the land. It was I who convinced him to speak up and suggest that only councils of women could decide punishment for crimes. It was I who whispered in his ear as he slept that he must take a wife, make alliances. I helped pick her out.
“What do you think we should do?” Surem leans against the wall. I stare at the girl behind the glass. There isn’t a path before her that isn’t a devastation. Do we leave her as she is? Trapped in a mind where nothing but acquiescence exists? Or sentence her life? Choice and memory lock-gripped in every strand of her being? I try to think of what I’d want.
I live with some shit. After all, the cartels were a disaster to manage in the beginning. Surem, with a little help from us, plotted his way up up up into the top of his father’s plant empire. Things were scarce and the itch of addiction allowed certain alliances to form. Some of it got ugly. Surem and I went head-to-head those early days, fighting it out, fucking it out. I didn’t agree with some of the methods he’d inherited from his father, and he hated that my intuition whipped him from disaster more than once. Patriarchy. I ended up in the way a time or two and people died. It was a mess. We don’t talk about it. We live with it. Same with that little valor, our noble choice. There is so much I want to forget, that I’d give everything to un-remember. Mom dying from an earache. Bodies I’ve come across, so many women and kids, just destroyed those early years. The hunger. What hunger lets a person, a society, justify. But this, all of it, is grating proof of existence. That can sound strange, but gods alive and dead, we’re still fucking here.
“Dose her,” I tell Surem. I go to the door and bang on it. Delia opens it immediately. I go out into the compound, cursing as I notice I’m still wearing just a sheet. I see one of the compound jeeps and I climb into the backseat and curl up. I tilt my face and stare up at the stars. Even with the compound lights, the stars have little competition nearby and are brazen.
I breathe slow and soften my gaze, one of the first lessons Mamita ever taught us. Allow the bubble of grief to rise in me as it always does, until it is almost unbearable. I’ve known harder pains than this and survived. It isn’t my child behind the glass, not the child of my body. I know I’m lying to myself. Everyone is. Opening to the truth requires acceptance of the belly-wrenching pain of it all. There are moments I still let it double me over, but I have faith. The waters are returning. There are horrors but there is love, and this young woman made a choice to subject herself to horrors, knowing the money would go to her siblings.
Surem has children I’ve never met. It was a compromise, part of the marriage agreement with his chosen. There are parts of going back to the old ways that nothing can prepare you for. When I met her, days before the wedding, she insisted we meet alone.
“I have one rule and one rule only. You never meet our children.”
It was the first thing she said to me. I told her I would follow her rule, and then we talked an hour about songs and plants and women we had in common. By the end of the hour I knew Surem had made the right choice. The first time Surem and I met up after his firstborn arrived, I knew I’d made the right choice as well.
“He wants you there.” Delia has fetched my clothing and turns her back as I change. She’s old school, came up military on the other side, held a rank, defected rather than be killed for disobeying orders. She’s older than us, has been around since the beginning of whatever it is, this we’re building.
Back in the lab, Surem hands me a syringe. He has the look in his eye, the reason I’d never birth his children or become his wife. He doesn’t need to be hard with me—I offer no resistance—but hardness runs deep in those who rise up to lead. It has to.
Delia opens the door to the cell. Surem is on the other side of the partition. The young woman stands at attention. I hold the syringe between both my hands as I lift them in prayer. I pray that whatever wall comes down inside her mind will not destroy her.
“Give me your arm,” I say.
She does.
Born and raised in Chula Vista, California, to Mexican and Puerto Rican parents, LIZZ HUERTA has been navigating and erasing borders her entire life. Lover of story, chisme, daydreaming. Her fiction and essays have been published in The Rumpus, Portland Review, The Miami Rail, and other journals.