She shrugged. “Maybe we all are.”
I couldn’t stop thinking of that as Emilia gave me some of her water. What if none of us knew what You wanted, Solís? What did that mean for our world?
For this journey?
“We should get going,” I said. “If we’re going to make it to our next stop.”
The two of us rejoined the others, and Rosalinda wore pity on her face. “Xochitl, we don’t have to—”
“No,” I said. “We can keep moving.”
“¿Estás bien?” Felipe asked. “You were crying a lot and it looked like you were sick and maybe you should take a nap.”
“Felipe!” Rosalinda gently swatted at him. “You don’t always have to say what’s in your head.”
“But why did she react like that?”
I gave Felipe a smile, hoping that it would convince him I was fine. “I had been taught something very different about us. About las cuentistas.”
“So your aldea doesn’t deserve one?” He scratched his head. “I’m confused.”
Emilia guided us back to the main trail as we spoke. All of us. Rosalinda explained what Felipe had been referring to, how her people believed that only deserving communities who had pleased Solís were gifted with a cuentista, and they were born into that aldea.
“But how can that work?” I asked.
Rosalinda, who walked alongside me, shook her head. “I don’t know that I think about it like that,” she said. “It just does. Those of us in Hermosillo know that we must be better, so that Solís will bless us.”
“Then … your cuentista is a child when you get one,” said Eliazar. He sighed. “How is that fair to them?”
“I was a cuentista at eight,” I said. “I had to start taking stories once Tía Inez passed on the power to me.”
“You can’t pass on the power,” said Felipe. “Solís is the one who decides that.”
“But I know it can be done,” Emilia countered. “I’ve seen it.”
“Ay, I’m lost,” said Felipe. “None of this makes any sense.”
That realization killed the conversation, and the only sound reverberating across the desert plain was our boots scraping against the earth. It truly did not make any sense. My life had been so rigid in Empalme. But the rules that had been used to control my life, to make everything defined and perfect, were not even true?
I slowed down, letting the others move ahead of me until I was alongside Eliazar. He had not said much during my outburst, but what he had said was interesting to me.
“So, only one in a generation?” I said to him.
He ran his fingers through his long beard. “That’s what I was raised to believe,” he said. “I had to travel to see a cuentista if we needed healing. They were living in a place to the west. So I often went years without talking to one.”
“Years?” I balked. “But … how did you deal with las pesadillas?”
He played with his beard some more. “In general? Ay, no sé, señorita. You can’t really control them, can you? You get them when you get them.”
“No,” I insisted. “Only when you are not honest with Solís. They take form. They become real.”
His eyes lit up at that. “Ah, you mean the things you see when you become consumed with dishonesty?”
I nodded at that. “That sounds familiar.”
“They’re rare.” Eliazar stumbled briefly but caught himself before I could reach out to grab him. He waved me away. “You have to be truly lost to Solís for that to happen.”
I did not know how that was possible. I had grown up seeing las pesadillas. They lived in the shadows, gained form the longer a person did not give up their story. So why was this not the case for the others?
The anger came first, and I remembered Ofelia’s rage, the sense that she’d felt betrayed, that she’d been left out. Her memory spread out in my mind: She read the note, felt the rejection, stormed to Lito’s in fury.
It only made me more mad, and it poured out from my chest, radiated into the rest of my body, flooding me like the gullies during a terrible rain.
And then Eliazar brought me back.
He cleared his throat. “Xochitl,” he said.
No.
I knew that tone.
I had heard it so many times.
I couldn’t.
“I have not been honest in a long time,” he continued.
My feet were stones, impossible to lift.
“I have sought out others, but…”
I was so full, so overflowing with the stories of others, and they swirled and churned inside me, eager at the prospect of another one joining them.
“They could not help me.”
My abdomen hurt, and I clutched a hand there, begging the stories to return to their slumber.
“I’ve been wandering for so long.”
I couldn’t do it.
“Later,” I said, the word draining out of my mouth as if it were the bitterness and refuse of a story being given back to You. “Ask me later.”
Eliazar smiled.
A hand over the eyes.
Over the chest.
“I am so glad you are here,” he said. “Solís must have wanted you to help me.”
I was so very far from home, and yet … I couldn’t escape it. I couldn’t escape the role that had been forced upon me. I thought I was safe. They were not from Empalme. They were not my responsibility.
But You knew, didn’t You? You knew I was trying to escape from what had been forced upon me.
I vowed right then to make it to Simone at any cost.
The heat weighed heavily on my face and on the bare skin of my arms, and there was a precision to it, as if You were shining on me and only me.
But I resisted.
Maybe Eliazar and the others saw me as nothing more than a cuentista, as a means to their end.
But I was choosing to end this.
This was my decision.
And I had never been so alive in my life.
I breathed in that freedom, and I was overflowing with purpose. It was not the one that had been assigned
