Part One:

DAY OF THE DEAD

Oh those bones, oh those bones,
Oh those skeleton bones.
Oh those bones, oh those bones,
Oh those skeleton bones.
Oh those bones, oh those bones,
Oh those skeleton bones.
Oh mercy, how they scare!
- Traditional

___

The human skeleton consists of 206 bones. Humans are actually born with almost 300 bones, but they fuse together as a person grows. Where do the bones go? And once a bone is absorbed by another bigger, stronger bone, what is left of what used to be?
____

1

Zöe

The skeleton woman whispered her name to me when I was thirteen, the night I first began to bleed. “I am Necahual, The One Who Was Left Behind,” she said, “and I have lost my people.”

2

Necahual, The One Who Was Left Behind

The moment between being alive and being dead moved too quickly for me to catch. Men arrived that morning wearing shiny steel armor. They rode black horses that sweltered under the weight of the silver metal. The men set fires, poked people with swords until they bled from thousands of tiny holes. I didn’t see the whole of the slaughter until I was dead; one swift solid stroke from behind severed my head and before I could miss it, it was gone, lifted up on the point of the spear that claimed it. It was the twenty-fourth of June, 1520. San Juan de Junio, St. John’s Day. It was in Tenochtitlan, in the Valley of Mexico.

It was the last day I wore flesh.

3

Zöe

Some say there is one day each year when we can walk with our dead. On the Day of the Dead, All Souls’ Day, marchers and mourners come together to remember, to release. The spirits come to eat our food, drink our wine, and touch what they have left behind. We come to the spirits with hope that there is something beyond this flesh. We come to them to touch what we have lost, to touch what we will become. We come to them to remind ourselves that we are alive.

The Aztecs were among the first to celebrate the Day of the Dead. They kept skulls as trophies and displayed them during the festival. The cycle of birth and rebirth brought joy, not fear. For over 3000 years, humans have walked with their dead, broken bread with them, sang to them and cried for them. For over 3000 years, humans have held onto their dead – realizing our flesh and blood lives are far more fragile and short than our spirit lives.

I wish there were only one day each year. To hold the dead close 365 days a year is exhausting. To hold the dead at bay even more so.

Tonight will be my last Day of the Dead parade in Tucson. I will say good-bye to David, even if he doesn’t say good-bye to me. I will move forward tonight. I will say good-bye to Necahual, although I don’t know what I will be without her broken bones to hold me. I will move forward tonight.

I will.
 

4

Necahual, The One Who Was Left Behind

I can no longer touch my rage.

What was once all I breathed has settled into ash. Cool debris I could smudge under my eyes if I had them. Gray soot – what my bones should be after all this time, all this time, but by some cruel joke are not, gray soot that should blow away with the offhand swipe of a desert wind – but they do not. My bones are as solid and strong as when Cortes moved into my land and killed me, killed Fire Wolf – my man, took my home. Strong and solid as I’d always believed our gods to be – Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, Chalchiuhtlicue. Our gods are gone. Our language is gone. The land is still there. The Valley of Mexico. But it tells different stories now. It worships a different god. Those of us who grew corn, wove blankets, offered ourselves as sacrifices to the Sun, we are gone. From time to time, a descendent makes an appearance in a National Geographic article or on a PBS documentary and a few people notice, maybe thumb back through the article or playback their VCR tape. Something about that girl, that boy, is familiar. Something in the blackness of the eyes, perhaps, or the wideness of the forehead. But then they go about their days, turn the music up, change the channel, perhaps even open a book, and the image slips back into the silt of memory.

I had what you say you all want – family, work, plenty of food, a lover who kissed the earth – but in 1520, everything changed, and I have been trying for almost five hundred years to get it all back.

Before they came, some of us had dreams of green parrots and four legged animals that carried men of silver.  Some of us tried to warn Moctezuma not to trade with the men from the east. Some of us even tried to run away, but I was not one of those lucky ones. The man responsible for the erasure of my people is Hernando Cortes. I now know he was a Spanish Conquistador. I now know he was looking for something we did not have, and I now know that there is nothing that could have stopped him.

I have raged for centuries, but now, I’m not able to find that burning fire. If I am without the fire too much longer, there will be no one to carry the stories. And everyone knows, when there are no more stories, there are no more people.

5

Necahual, The One Who Was Left Behind

The night before, Fire Wolf visited my dream. He was two days late returning from his trading trip. I knew before I knew, and had tried to stay awake so the confirmation of his death would not come. Eventually, I collapsed on the rug, searching the fibers for strands of his dark hair. When I closed my eyes, the parrot shrieked and I saw Fire Wolf riding the back of the huge green bird into blackness. In my dream, he was a sharp turquoise light, wrapping circles around the parrot’s neck. He reached down, handed me a feather. I woke up, fingers clutching the edge of the rug, knowing we would never lie on it together again.

On the day it happened, I watched from the mesa while the conquerors tossed my head from one man to the other, dropping it on the ground and pushing it along with sticks.  My hair stained blue-black with my blood, cut jagged at the base of my skull.  My black eyes were still open, watching without recognition while they kicked me, laughed at me. 

My mother, missing arms and legs, roasted over a fire pit.  The conquerors laughed and laughed, passed a glass bottle among them, laughed some more.  My mother’s flesh fell into the coals.  Coyote ate her.

My father huddled with the other men, the elders, in a pen on the north side of the settlement.  He was naked, cold, bleeding.  He held his son, my brother, close to him.  The two men shivered against each other, trying not to cry; braids severed from their scalps used as fly swatters for the horses.

My youngest sister Xoco still lived, though her cheek had been branded like those of the other women and youth.  She hid under the earth and shoved the dirt into her mouth so she would not scream.

Their priest stood in the center of the settlement, black robe gray with dust and smoke.  A heavy cross hung around his neck. The priest, who I soon learned was called Father Domingo, closed his eyes to the game the conquerors were playing with my head.  He closed his ears to the snarls of the coyote who tore at my mother’s bubbling carcass.  He closed his heart to the naked old men, bound and held like cattle, behind him.  Instead, he held his cross tight to his chest and whispered a prayer to his god-of-the-cross and knelt.  In the middle of the massacre, he knelt and only whispered. 

From the mesa, the setting sun looked like an ocean of fire engulfing the edges of the pueblo.  The conquerors sliced bits of my mother’s burning breast and placed them on their tongues.  My father fell.  The fire around the pueblo dimmed to dusk to dark and the pale skin of the conquerors shone in the moonlight.  Coyote howled.  Xoco, buried in earth, coughed, grateful her eyes were forced shut from fear.  In the morning, the conquerors would push my father and the other elders along a trail no one could see.  They would cut off the right foot of each man.  They wanted gold.  My father knew nothing of gold.  They wanted to bring the glory of their god.  The glory of their god chewed hearts, lungs, livers.  The glory of their god broke bones and made huts from them.  The glory of their god did not see the people of our pueblo.  He treated them like flies.

I burrowed into the rocky floor of the mesa to sleep.  I did not understand why I was still there. Why even death did not stop me from seeing. I tunneled deeper, hoping to find Xoco and bring her with me. I did not think I could be in this place alone.

In the morning, the smoke from the burning corpses of my villagers woke me, though I no longer had eyes to close in sleep. I hadn’t found Xoco. I saw my own dismembered body. From my spot high on the mesa, I could see the men in their shiny armor back away from the heat. Father Domingo looked sick. He should be sick – the smell of human flesh was a heavy meal. He held the crucifix in his right hand and made lines in the air with his left hand.

He must not hear the screaming. I wondered if deafness was required to be a man in a black robe. He heard Cortes well enough, though I had no idea what he said. His language was trilled and gutteral to me. It didn’t have the openness – the space – of my language. When I spoke my words, they were warm and round in my throat. When I opened my lips, the words took their own journey out into the community, settling where they needed to, moving on when they had done their work. The words these men spoke would never move on. They would settle, stay, remain in the cells of those they touched until the people believed they had always been there. I knew this in the way that women always know even though they forget. I knew the words of these men would build walls instead of spaces, and that the angles of their consonants would erase the spirals of my vowels.

Suffering makes men mean. I knew this as well, even before that day. My father’s brother was born with hands where his feet should be and feet where his hands should be. He was mean and spit sandy water through rotted teeth at the village dogs. Fortunately for the dogs, he did not live long enough to drown them with his venom. These men could have come from a village where the children were malformed. They could have come from a village where there had been famine. Flood. Earthquake. There is always a reason for meanness. But that day, I had no tolerance for reasons.

I watched the smoke patterns from the bodies. I could see the spirits ascending to the Grandmothers. They clouded around me and tried to pull me with them. I couldn’t go. It was like my spirit was anchored to this suffering place with a chain as heavy as the silver the conquerors wore.   All I could do was close my eyes and look to where my feet once were until the spirits choked and wheezed their way back to their beginnings. Safe journey, Brother Hungry Coyote. Sister Rain Flower, travel swiftly. Grandfather Angry Turkey, watch over us.

Even as they swirled around me, I knew most of them would not return. Bee in the Reeds might stay. Chief Topiltzin nodded sadly to me as he passed me by. He should stay, and he knew it, but he could not erase the sight of his first wife’s burning flesh – her brown eyes so soft and wet with him just last night today melting into ash. He had let her down. He had let his people down. When the men in shiny clothes approached him, he tried to trade with them, too. He had offered them six of his finest women. He offered corn. The men wanted something else that he didn’t understand. And his lack of understanding cost them their lives. I reached for him, but my reaching dissolved into dust.

The wind drew macabre patterns in the sky with the remains of my villagers. I thought of sky painting and the way Xoco and I used to lie on the roof and make pictures from the clouds that appeared during summer monsoons. We would make up fantastic birds and create grand stories of being rescued from evil men and we would giggle until lightning struck too close and we were called inside. I watched the smoke, silently begged to see something in the patterns other than what I saw, but I did not, and knew I was not supposed to. I was not ascending to the sky like the rest of my people. I noticed that though I knew I was dead, I still had form. I thought I might be too heavy to be swept into the heavens by only a desert wind.  Just then, Fire Wolf tapped me on my shoulder.

“You need to go over there,” he whispered.

I paused, hoping to embrace him, smell his living flesh, lick the neck of the man I was supposed to spend my days with. When I dared to look at him, I saw his hanging limbs, fingers missing, his spine a black shattered snake. “Fire Wolf,”

He spoke without speaking. “You need to go over there.” He gestured towards Father Domingo. “You are the Word Carrier. You have a duty to do. You cannot sit here on the mesa and mourn.”

“I cannot carry these words. I don’t even know how to form the letters.”

“Necahual.” His voice broke and I heard the tenderness I had heard when I lay with him during my last moon cycle. He had drawn his mark on my belly with my blood. I brought him into me, hoping to make a child. “This is your work to do. See them all going away? You saw this coming. Remember when the temple burst into flames? You knew before the shamans knew. And because of that, you are still here.”

“How long will I be here?”

Fire Wolf was dissolving in front of my eyes.

“Fire Wolf!”

“I will come back for you if I can,” he said. “You have to go to him. You have to understand his language so you can keep ours.”

“Fire Wolf!” But he was gone, a tiny piece of obsidian on the earth beside me the only part of him left. I picked it up. It was still warm.

When the temple had burst into flames in springtime, I had the first dream of blackness. Fire Wolf was beside me, stroking my tangled hair.

“What do you see?” he spoke into the crown of my head.

“ ‘X’s’ and black flat earth. The sign of the ‘X’ is everywhere. It drips blood. It is a strange ‘X’ though. It is turned up, more like a ‘T’, but not quite.” I pressed my lips against his ear. “I heard things.”

Fire Wolf stopped touching me. Hearing things in a dream was an assurance the dream was a bad omen.  “What kind of things?”

“Words I don’t understand.” I traced my collarbone with my index fingers. “They stop here. At my throat.”

“What does?”

“All of it.” I turned on my side, facing the clay wall. “Don’t ever stop touching me.”

Fire Wolf licked the point of my shoulder blade, where a wing could have been, and I pushed the dream into my womb.

Now I sat on a mesa, the piece of black obsidian cooling in my palm, a strange throbbing in the place where my throat used to be, and watched Father Domingo standing in the center of the smoke like a god. Maybe that is what he was. Maybe this was retribution for something. Maybe the Sun God was unhappy with our sacrifices. Perhaps these people were rebirths of the people our village had sacrificed and conquered. But I knew, as I watched my villagers shriek and become air, that this was not simple retribution. This was a new kind of existence that was going to swallow everything I knew and spit it out in different colors and shapes.

Father Domingo clutched his metal ‘X’ and I thought it must be scalding hot down there so close to the flames. His expression pained, contorted into swallowed cries. His black hair stuck to his scalp in thick clumps. I had to go into the fire. This was a choice made long before I could speak. Long before I dreamed of the darkness and Fire Wolf touched the nape of my neck at midnight.

I am Necahual, The One Who Was Left Behind.

Zöe is my last hope.

6

Zöe

Before I dressed for the Day of the Dead parade, I wrote:

He was a little like Elvis, I guess. Talent and desire so strong he couldn’t cope. He struggled with desire in a way I never knew. I wanted to struggle with it – feel it, embrace it – he had too much desire to contain in one body, one relationship, one job. I didn’t have enough. Maybe that was some of the opposite pull that drew me in. I wanted to devour that desire. Wipe the juices of it from my lips and call it mine.

He put pepper in his scrambled eggs. I always told him not to put any in mine, but he forgot. When I would come out of the shower, the eggs would be in the chipped baby blue bowl that had come to mean morning for me. I knew on the nights I stayed over that there would be eggs, a coldness in his kiss, the itch of pepper, and a period of days or weeks before I saw him again. I knew when I wasn’t with him, someone else was. I told myself this was freedom. Liberation. After all, I could sleep next to someone else too. The difference was, I didn’t.