altars. Before that, I only recognized you as a traveler and welcomed you as I had been welcomed on my previous Earth trips. And yes, you will die here.”
WaLiLa lays back on the bed and pounds her fists against the mattress in frustration. Then turns back to Elisa.
“Does that mean…?”
“That means you shall no longer collect nectar. Nectar shall be gathered, the ancestors shall be fed. But you will no longer do it.”
WaLiLa is overcome with strange sensations. Water drips from her eyes.
“Don’t look so confused. You died, but you have just been birthed. You are breathing your first breaths as a human being.”
“A human!”
“Yes. You have human emotions now. You have the ability to cry. Haven’t you noticed how easily you’re speaking? You were also given the facility to speak human languages.”
“But I thought…” WaLiLa touches the water dripping from her eyes and rubs it between her fingertips. “I thought death was supposed to make me an ancestor.”
“Not here. The rules of our people don’t matter anymore. You will never see the ancestors again.”
The strange sensations wash over WaLiLa again. More water falls from her eyes.
“How could this happen? Was it the smoke? The poison?”
“What smoke?”
“The flowers I took from your room were filled with smoke.”
“Ahhh, so the poison saved you.”
“Saved me?”
“Smoke is lethal to us, but not to humans. Think of it this way: the poison you consumed is known here as ‘mortality.’ It is a death agent for humans. Their death is not like ours. They consider death to be a finite thing.”
“What is
“The final thing, nothing more will happen after death.”
“But how can death be finite? Death is transformation. Death is change.”
“WaLiLa, I know that’s what you learned, but you must remember, you are on Earth. Humans are bound by such things as time and gravity. At least they believe themselves to be.”
“Will I die a human death at the end of this journey?”
“I cannot know until I meet my own death.”
“So I am never to be anything other than human?”
“I don’t know, WaLiLa.”
“But this is my first life, I will know nothing else!”
“That is not true, you are beginning your second life now. Although you still exist in the same outer shell, life here will be different from your life as a nectar collector. I promise you that Earth is not without its delights.”
“But how—”
Elisa interrupts. “We will talk later. For now, let your body do its work…”
“But why…”
“Rest,” Elisa repeats firmly. “You shall need your strength.”
Debris has a bad effect on me. It’s in my heritage. Everyone knows about the great Limione who got dust in her nasal holes and spent the rest of her life bequeathing her bones to cripples. It was harmless enough when it began. She offered a few of her decrepit digits to a little boy who was missing a foot. Sharing is a good thing, Grandmother told us, hobbling proudly through the house, the model of benevolence.
We stopped admiring her charitable spirit the day she was wheeled home with no skeletal structure from her pelvis down. She waved off our horror by claiming she’d been using her legs less and less. When she was down to just her skull, her daughter—my mother—put my grandmother’s head on a marble desk and locked her in the altar room.
It is legend how my mother kept my grandmother’s eye sockets clean with the pure white feather of a cockatoo. She often sent me to the forest to pick marigolds to stack high around Grandmother’s skull. Grandmother loved the smell of them. She told me so every time I entered the house with an armful of the fragrant weeds.
After my grandmother’s head had been sitting in the altar room for a month, my mother realized my grandmother was dying—not because of her missing body, but because she was bored. Mother brought Grandmother into the living room and positioned her right in front of the window. There Grandmother sat happily for a week until Dad caught her promising her skull to an epileptic candy vendor.
Mother couldn’t bear the thought of locking Grandmother up again. So Dad came up with the idea of sitting her in the middle of the living room facing the kitchen. Grandmother didn’t have much visual stimulation, but she could hear the sounds of the street. While staring at boiling pots and waiting for one of us to keep her company, Grandmother amused herself by mounting day-long monologues in response to the whizzing, clicking, and chattering that wafted into the house through the window.
One November, Trucia decided we should suit up and go down to Earth for the Days of the Dead. The humans make so much mischief during those days, they don’t notice us creaking through on our bones. My costume had seen better days. Trucia said it was my sin that had made me run my robes down into dirty tatters. Lorki doesn’t believe in sin—he doesn’t believe in costumes either. Easy not to believe in anything when you’re always aligned.
When I started slipping out the door that November night, I swore I heard Grandmother whisper “be ill.” I stopped and looked back, but she was silent. I stared at the cracks that worry their way down the back of her skull, but they, too, were silent. Grandmother said nothing more, so I turned and slipped out the door. Down on Earth, we looked for the cemetery with the most lights. We figured the busiest graveyards were best. While people drank, ate, and cried for their dead, we could sneak in unnoticed.
We found what we were looking for in Oaxaca, a tiny little desert town in the middle of six kissing mountains. Lorki’s black velvet cape covered us as we rushed into the swirl of activity on a dark, dank wind. The minute we landed I started trembling. That happens whenever I find myself in close proximity to humans. They have the best emotions. Their feelings are so sharp and hysterical and self-propelling. Their auras make me vibrate. With the candlelight swimming around us, the buzz of voices and the emotions flying through the air, I felt a sense of intoxication. A grandeur.
How can I explain what it felt like to dance with a stilt walker whose stilts were thicker than my femur? How can I tell you about the eerie flesh-like shadow that shrouded Trucia’s cheeks as she laughed at Lorki yanking people’s souls out of their chests and juggling them with one long-boned hand? How can I describe the moist succulence of a tiny child’s fear when it glimpsed my weathered, pocky bones and swallowed the sight of me with undiluted dread?
Trucia thought it funny to pass her hand through people’s spines. She would reach into their backs until her wrist bone was buried in their flesh. She’d rub the tip of her index finger along their hearts, moaning filthily when their bodies went stiff with pain. While she was enticing me to find a spine to disturb, I felt a sudden chill licking between my fifth and sixth vertebrae.
When I turned around, I saw a huge child running toward me. “You can’t catch me,” it yelled. The child did not touch me, but the force of it passing knocked me over. I fell across a grave, and a parade of children—yelping in delighted terror—ran by.
Humans are dirty beings. They never learned how to transcend Earth, especially in their graveyards. The debris kicked up by those murderous little feet covered me in a canopy of dust. This was not the little spray of dirt that, once stuck in Grandmother’s nasal openings, induced her suicidal bone-endowment spree. This was huge clumps of dirt. I was clogged, I was suffocated. I was nothing more than a pile of jammed joints and rigid bones.
