I See Fire | Wattys 2021/22 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Two

Jem and Emma broke into smiles when we stepped back into the village. They made me wonder sometimes if we were sharing the same view. Theirs looked nicer than mine did. What I did see was the moment Jem quirked me a sideways smile. Emma squeaked as we abandoned her. We raced each other to the cookfires, shouting greetings to anyone we passed. The village center was bustling. Women—sisters, cousins, friends—chopped, mixed, stirred and shared recipes. Pots bubbled and spat over the three long fires set in troughs in the ground. At one end of these, the village cricket baskets sat like a row of oblong eggs the height of a sitting adult. Their chirps grated out from beneath the antelope skins slung over them to keep off the sparks and retain the heat.

I set down my cargo and planted a fat kiss on my mother's cheek before I was swarmed. Jem's uncle, Mateo, had found winter chillies dried on the bush, enough to spice every dish we made tonight. My uncle Rodolfo had returned with as much fish as he and Elías had set out to find. Elías had not returned with him, for reasons that appeared to be a secret.

The smells from the pots were enough to make my mouth flood. Caldo de pollo with wild chicken and found potatoes sent up steam beside frijoles and an enormous pot of pozole. My mother watched filling for spicy fish tacos, and a fleet of tamales marrones. These last were a Grillo Negro invention, made of maize supplemented with amaranth and cricket flour. We cobbled food together from whatever we could find, or whatever we gleaned and stored in summer when the gardens of the scorched towns flushed green. It was a wonder—or a miracle—that for everything Fuego had taken on the day the world burned, it had left the plants alive.

If not a miracle, it was magic, but I was a lot more inclined to believe the former option. Either way, we were grateful. 

From the end of the cookfires came the slapping, chatter, and peals of laughter of a tortilla-making station run by my cousins. I ducked over and grabbed a ball of dough to help. A cheer went up behind me. Elías strode into the village center with something in his hands. I lost sight of it through the throng, but the smell reached me on the breezes: a wild honeycomb. My cousins leaped up to go see.

Left alone by the comal, I found my gaze on the stump where my cousin Lupe had been sitting. My sister's kids had left a painting around it: a ring of their closest friends and family, holding hands with painted smiles on their painted faces. I suddenly knew where the maize flour Miguel had pillaged yesterday had gone. Most had been used on painted Elías, who some joked was the reincarnation of the one white man among the village's founders, right down to the part about not leaving kids. It took a generous helping of charcoal to get Jem, who could stalk a coywolf in the darkness of the clouded night; so long as he moved slowly, it would never see him. Mix both with soft desert earth and you had most people in the village: brown-skinned, with a warm undertone that was not quite golden, not quite red. Mestizo, mixed, with high cheekbones, kind eyes, and hair that was some degree of curly.

And then you had me.

I threw my tortilla on the hot comal, rinsed my hands, and dragged my hair out of my face again. It was thick, straight as a knife, and never stayed where I wanted it to. I twisted it up and delved in my pocket for a piece of string. Another glance at the painting told me again that it wasn't just straight hair that made me stick out like a wasp in an ants' nest. You would have to fill the kids' paint with chili powder to get the terra-cotta undertone of my skin.

The kids had painted Jem and I holding hands, something we hadn't done since we'd last officially dated, three years before. We'd broken it off on good terms—by which I meant I'd broken it off so I could reconcile how I felt about the village with how I felt about him. I'd rather live anywhere else, but it was easier to maintain that feeling when he didn't kiss me.