The trail rose higher and higher, and I looked behind me, down into el valle, back into my past. Even if I could have seen clear out to Empalme, it was too far.
I was too far from it.
I faced forward, refused to think about that for too long.
I had been stuck in a recurring sequence that blended into itself—walk forward to the next turn in the trail, glance back down, continue ahead—when I collided with Eliazar, who braced himself on the sheer wall of earth to his left. I was about to apologize when I saw that he was helping tie something around Felipe’s head: a strip of cloth.
“It’ll help keep you cool,” he explained. “Let me know when it dries out, and we’ll refresh it.”
“Gracias,” said Felipe, and when Eliazar stepped out of the way, I saw the redness spreading over the face of that boy. The sun was burning him. We still had a couple of hours left in our climb. How was he going to make it?
But You were now on Your decline to the west, and I tried to give myself hope that this wouldn’t get worse. Another pang hit my lower stomach, and I let everyone continue on so I could quickly relieve myself at the side of the trail. It was a bright yellow trickle, and I frowned. I needed more water. When I stood, though, the pain continued to needle at me. Was I still bleeding? I hadn’t seen anything on my padding, but I dug my fingers into the cramps, trying to will them away.
The moment passed. I took another long drink before I increased my pace to catch up with Rosalinda and Felipe.
It never ended. At least, it seemed to be perpetual. Each switchback led to another one, each rise brought us only a tiny bit closer to the summit. The heat bore down on us, and the endless cycle of it all began to erode my hope and replace it with a sick sense of futility. I’m never going to make it, I thought. I’m going to die right here, and I will become part of the earth. I will be forgotten.
El olvidado.
It was a strangely comforting thought, and somehow, it kept me going. I thought about how I could return my own body to the earth, giving not just the stories but my entire self over to the living things that would feast upon me.
No one else saw it. If I had not looked down, if I had not teetered around that steep turn and seen the dark shape to the side of the trail, all of us would have passed it by. How many others had done so?
I’d seen dead cactuses before, their hollowed bodies brown and shriveled, but the shape of this one caught my eye. I walked to the edge of the trail, stared down into the patch of barrel cactuses, saw the arms of the cactus wrinkled and—
Fingers. They were fingers.
I cried out. To You. To the others. The group was above me on the trail, and Emilia’s head popped over the ridge. “Xochitl, what is it?”
I couldn’t speak. I lifted a shaking finger.
Felipe was at the top of the next curve, and he misinterpreted my scream as something exciting. “¡Yo quiero ver!” he exclaimed, and I wanted to warn him, to stop him from seeing this, but my gaze fell back down to the body, as if I couldn’t pull myself from it. The corpse had been cooked in the heat, but most of the torso was picked clean. The mouth was wide open, as if the person had died screaming, and even the teeth were discolored, rotten.
Felipe stared. He said nothing.
This person had died trying to … what? Where was their destination? Were they going to Solado, too? What were they hoping to find there? I knew nothing of them, of their reasons for leaving home and risking their life for this unforgiving journey, the same one all of us were making. The sadness—Eliazar’s sadness and mine—spiked in me.
I saw Gracia’s body in my mind: pale and lifeless, splayed out in the sand.
But this person at our feet had no story. They had nothing in death.
“Raymundo,” I said softly.
“¿Qué?” Felipe backed away, his face wrinkled up in confusion. “Who is that?”
“I’m naming them Raymundo,” I said. Then I repeated their name aloud. “Raymundo.”
Felipe was now tucked behind his mami. “Who is Raymundo?” he asked.
How could I explain this to him? How could I tell him that there was so much sadness swimming within me, that not all of it was my own, and that I needed this person to have something to be remembered by?
“I’m giving them a story,” I said, my voice wavering. “And you can’t have a story without a name.”
Eliazar, who looked upon us from the rise above, made the sign. “And we honor the dead by remembering them,” he added.
I lifted an eyebrow at him, but he smiled, his face peaceful and calm.
There was a brief silence as we stood next to the remains. Emilia squeezed my hand.
I squeezed back.
Felipe tugged on Rosalinda’s hand as we continued up the pass. “But we know nothing about that person,” he said. “How can we give them a story?”
She ruffled his hair as we made another turn, and Raymundo dropped out of sight. “Well,” I said, “what does that name make you think of, Felipe? What do you see in your head?”
“I don’t know. Maybe … a blacksmith. Someone who uses fire to make things.”
“What sort of things?” I asked, hoping to keep him talking.
“Swords, maybe.” He gasped. “¡No, puñales! Those ones that hang at your side and you put them in sheaths, and you can whip them out like this.” He stopped walking and imitated it.
Felipe didn’t even realize that he had given Raymundo a story. The
