Xóchitl Ramírez

You are running the night in the other skin when someone — not knowing what they do — speaks your full baptismal name. The name strikes you like a thrown stone: the change jams, and something is left crooked between the two skins. Create the Stigma of that night.

Nicanor was coming back from the Amecameca fair with six mules and half a bottle in him. I was crossing the royal road with the other skin already on, and the man took it into his head to say hello: he shouted my whole name, the baptismal one, all four pieces, the way you shout to a neighbor woman across a market. It hit me in the ribs like a stone. I stopped half-folded: the muzzle already made and my left hand still a hand, the fingers stiff, the nails black. That is how it stayed. I cannot close that fist or set that paw down properly. In the village they call it the sleeping hand, and I let them say it. Nicanor never spoke my name again, not even by daylight.

My whole name in a drunk man's mouth, in the middle of the royal road.

Your mother sweeps where she never sweeps and finds the bundle. She unwraps the skin you are not wearing, believing you have hidden a shroud — and in a way she is not wrong. You watch from the doorway as it lies spread across her hands like one more child, and she raises her eyes and sees you. Neither of you speaks first. What do you read in her face: fear, mourning, or something she has suspected since your birth? Write the Trace of that silence.

She swept behind the water jar, where nobody ever sweeps because of the ant nest, and there was the bundle. By the time I reached the doorway she had it open across her hands, as long as a child, smelling of wet hillside. She did not scream. She looked for my eyes and then she looked for the nape of my neck, the seam Petra stitched the night I was born. It was not fear, and it was not mourning. It was the face of someone closing an account that had not balanced in sixteen years. Outside, the Trejos' dog did not bark once in that whole hour.

My mother held the other skin the way you hold a newborn.

What she decides, decides you. If she burns it, part of you turns to smoke; if she blesses it, she carries a weight that was never hers; if she keeps it, your other half now sleeps under her roof and her key. Whatever she chooses, that night you understand that not everything of yours belongs to you anymore. Something you kept is no longer yours: surrender a Tether.

She did not burn it. She folded it again, slowly, the way you fold a dead person's clothes, and before she closed the mat she tucked her palm cross inside, the one from Amecameca, the one she had worn at her neck since before me. Then she handed it to me without looking at me: «You keep it. I know where it is.» Since that night, every time I unfold, I move the cross aside with a splinter of ocote and set it back when I am done. I do not touch it. It is hers and it is a bar across the door, both things at once. My half sleeps under lock and key, even if the key is mine.

I move my mother's cross aside with a stick, every single time.

No one warned you, or you didn't listen. One night you treat salt crossed over the threshold like a rumor — and the rumor was true. You survive, but something of you is changed for good, plain to anyone who knows how to look. Create the Stigma of your first mistake.

I smelled Casimira's boy from out in the yard: rotted chest, two days of life left at most. I went in through the gap in the door thinking about the boy and not about the floor. Someone had crossed two lines of coarse salt. The air turned to glass, my mouth opened on its own, and I dragged myself out of there with no skin and no name, as far as the trough in the yard. I was left with a white line from one corner of my mouth to the other, like dried saltpeter. In the village they say I fell against the griddle. Nothing has tasted of anything since.

Two lines of coarse salt, and the taste that never came back.

Every year the town celebrates, and every year you choose: move among the torches and the songs and risk a gaze that lingers too long, or stay away again and let your absence become its own conversation. This year you decide differently than before. What do you do, and what nearly goes wrong? Write the Trace of that festival.

This year I did not hide. San Mateo's feast, the twenty-first of September, the Bonillas' firework castle and mole all through the churchyard. I danced a whole jarabe with Fermín, the one who tans hides, who told me I smelled like rain and then laughed at his own nerve. It nearly cost me dearly: they had scattered salt over the flagstones to run the ants off the pots, and I was about to step on it barefoot when Petra took me by the elbow and walked me to the other side to dance, saying nothing, with that midwife's strength of hers. I came home happy, my braids smelling of gunpowder. Toward dawn Petra asked me whether I remembered spinning thread with her sister. I said yes, so as not to stand there silent. I spent the hours until sunrise hunting for that girl inside me. Not the thread, not the sister, not me.

I said yes, I remembered, only so as not to stand silent in front of Petra.

First came the stakes with ribbons, then the men with theodolites, then the cut: the railroad splits in two the wilderness you used to run in a single breath. Your oldest route dies under the crossties. Surrender that Tether — and create the Gift of crossing the iron: learning its timetables, its cars, its new shadows.

First they set stakes with red ribbons; the children stole them for their braids. Then came the men with the theodolite, who greet nobody. Then the cut. My oldest path — from the mouth of the hill down to the ahuehuetes in the ravine, the one I used to run in a single breath — ended up under the crossties, water crossing and all. I went down the last night, before the ballast, and left my grandfather's obsidian there at the bottom: you have to leave things where there is no one left to give them to. And I set about learning the iron the way you learn a prayer. The nine o'clock mixed train. The three-fifteen freight, which climbs slow at kilometer 74. The step of the last boxcar, the jump before the bridge.

I left the obsidian under the ballast and told no one.

At the plank station works someone who keeps the night watch and has learned not to log everything they see crossing the rails. Certain nights they leave the boxcar unlocked, out of fear or respect. Create that mortal Face.

Elpidio Rosas, night watchman at the plank station. He hangs the lantern facing the other way and coughs twice before he walks the platform; that means now. He has never said anything, not even to his wife. Once, only once, he left a jar of coffee with piloncillo beside the boxcar and walked off. It was still warm. I do not know whether it was for me or for him, and I do not intend to ask.

Elpidio coughed twice before he turned down the platform.

You wake from the long sleep and the room contradicts you: the dust has paths in it, the chair faces the wrong way, your hiding place breathes differently. Someone was here while you were no one. Nothing forced; they knew the way in. The worst is not what was moved, but reckoning how long they watched you sleep. What sign did they leave — by accident, or on purpose? Write the Trace of that visit.

When I sleep, I sleep months at a stretch. I woke at the bottom of the hill and the place contradicted me: the dust had paths in it, the chair faced the door, the air inside smelled of cold tobacco. Nothing forced. Whoever came in knew the way. And that was not the worst of it: the skin was folded with the corner tucked inward, the way my mother folded it and the way I do not. I spent the day working out how long they would have watched me sleep. That same morning I went to say the other one's name under my breath — to steady myself, the way you count your money — and the word was not there. I know how to come down, I know how to run, I know what smells of what. Not the word.

Someone folded my skin with the corner tucked in, like my mother.

No torches this time. These people do not shout: they take notes. They have crossed registries, dates, testimonies, and at the bottom of their files lies a pattern shaped like you. They do not have your face yet, but they have your habits. You must break the pattern without leaving another. How does one disappear from paper? Kindle a Gift to make it so.

They did not come with torches. They came with notebooks and the district census, and they had crossed baptisms against deaths against payroll lists, and at the bottom of all of it there was a drawing shaped like me: a woman who turns up every so many years in the same parish and never at the burials. I erased nothing; erasing leaves a hole. I multiplied instead. I ran six nights straight without sitting down — Chalco, Tláhuac, Amecameca, Tlalmanalco — and in every register I died under a different hand and a different year, three times over, in three colors of ink. The pattern broke. My legs never came back: since then the whole night is too big for me, I run a stretch and then sit down to wait for morning like anybody else.

I died three times in three registers, in three different hands.

Your tona grows old, because tonas grow old even though you do not. You see it in how she rations the slopes, in the frost on her muzzle, in the way she now waits sitting at the field's edge instead of running out to meet you. You run slower so as not to leave her behind, and she pretends not to notice. What do you owe her, and how is a debt paid between bodies that share one soul? Write the Trace of that courtesy.

She does not come out to meet me anymore. She waits for me sitting at the edge of the magueys, frost on her muzzle, rationing the slopes the way you count out centavos. I run slower and she pretends not to notice; that is our entire conversation. Last night I brought her one of the Bonillas' hens and set it down in front of her, and we both pretended she had caught it. I asked her, talking the way you talk to what barks, who it was that taught us to fold. She wagged her tail. I did not know either.

I brought her a hen and we both pretended she had hunted it.

They raise the new temple with the stones of the old, and one of those stones was yours: your hill, your cave, your crossing of paths lies buried under a bell-topped courtyard. You cannot reclaim what officially never belonged to anyone. Surrender your fixed Tether.

They pulled down the old chapel and with its own stones raised the new parish church, taller, with two bells. For the footing of the churchyard they hauled off the stone at the mouth of the hill, and with the stone went the rest: my cave, my crossing of paths, the reed mat that lay in there with my mother's cross inside it. I went to watch them fill it in and said nothing; there is nobody to claim from over what was never anyone's on any piece of paper. Now I carry the skin rolled up in a cotton sack, in among my clothes, and I sleep in the linekeeper's hut at kilometer 74, which stood empty when they closed the post. My mother ended up as foundation.

My hill underneath a churchyard, and bells over it at six.

You begin writing to someone who does not exist yet: a friend's grandchild, the heir to a certain house, whoever opens a certain drawer in a hundred years. You tell them what no living soul can be told. Letter by letter, without meaning to, you invent them: a voice, a patience, a question. Who do you hope they will be? Give them a name: create that mortal Face.

I write to someone who has not been born. I started on the spare freight stubs at the station, in indelible pencil, and by now it is a bundle tied with twine. I tell her what I cannot tell anyone who breathes: about the salt, about my hand, about what it is like to wake and find that the dust has paths in it. Rufina, who used to draw me in charcoal in the courtyard as a girl and always gave me four legs, we buried old, the year of the comet; the ones who are left I can no longer tell anything to. So from writing to her so long I have been making her up: patient, foul-mouthed, big handwriting, and she answers me with stubborn questions. I named her Aurelia, after Nicanor's most obstinate mule, which was the only one that ever arrived.

I named her Aurelia after a stubborn mule nobody remembers now.

You begin to treat the future as a pantry: money buried under signs only you can read, keys with instructions attached, letters addressed to whoever you'll be decades from now. Today you plant the first piece of the network. What do you hide, and what do you write in the note? That patient hoard holds you: create a Tether.

Today I planted the first one. A La Reina lard tin, sealed with wax: eleven silver pesos, an old deed, and the key to the room in Tláhuac. It goes under the third stone on the deer path, counting from the spring. Inside I left a paper folded in four: «If you are reading this, you do not remember me anymore. Count three stones and keep going.» I signed it with the sleeping hand, which is the one signature I cannot lose. To myself, I call this the sowing.

«If you read this, you do not remember me.» I signed it myself.

You hear yourself telling it again, the old anecdote, and halfway through you notice the ending changes with the audience: one heroic, one comic, one sad. All three sound true to you. All three sound worn. Which do you tell tonight, and to please whom? Write the Trace of the version you choose.

I told it again, the one about my first night. To the muleteers I tell it heroic and they laugh and stand me a pulque; to the children, funny, with the dog and the puddle; to Elpidio's widow I told it sad, which is how she likes things since she was widowed, and she cried and gave me beans with epazote for supper. All three sound true. All three sound worn, like a coin from passing through too many hands. Tonight I picked the sad one. Afterward I went to check it against what actually happened that first night, and I could not find anything to check it against.

Three true endings, all of them worn out, and none of them mine.

You find out by accident: the object that defined you — the chest, the portrait, the weapon — has changed hands and is traveling to its final resting place. You follow it the way one follows a funeral. At the counter, at the glass case, at the edge of the tip, you say goodbye with a lie that sounds true: 'it belonged to my grandfather.' Where does it end up? That fixed Tether is no longer yours: surrender it.

The Rosas family sold the curved-lid chest when the last of them died. I followed it the way you follow a funeral: from the house to a warehouse, from the warehouse to a shop on Donceles. «It was my grandfather's,» I said at the counter, and the girl did not even look up. A restaurant in Coyoacán bought it. It is varnished now, with a fern on top and a false padlock nailed to the front. The letters were not inside anymore.

«It was my grandfather's,» and the girl did not even look up.

Someone needs your last hiding place more than you do: a fugitive, a cold family, an animal too old to hunt. You show them where the floor creaks, where the useful things are kept, how it locks from inside. You leave without looking back, because looking back means staying. What do you leave behind unexplained? The shelter goes on sheltering, just not you: surrender that Tether.

The linekeeper's hut lasted me forty years and I do not need it the way Chana Zúñiga needs it with her two children in January. I showed them where the floor creaks, which board lifts, how you bar it from inside with the piece of rail iron. I left them the matches, the good blanket, and the salt tin full to the brim on the top shelf, and I did not explain why it is full if I never once cooked in there. I left by daylight, the sack over my shoulder, without turning around. Turning around is staying.

I left them the salt tin full and explained nothing.

Someone takes your arm in the street and calls you by a name that isn't yours: their father's, their grandmother's, their dead love's. You could correct her. Instead you play along for a whole afternoon — the walk, the tea, the same old questions. You both know. Neither says it. What do you give her that the dead one never could? Give her her true name: create that mortal Face.

She caught my arm outside the Jamaica market: tiny, ninety years old, her nails painted pink. She called me Soledad. She asked me where I had got to all this time. I went along with her the whole afternoon: sweet bread, a bench in the sun, the wedding of '26 that was really '24 and that I let stand eleven times. Amparo Nájera is her name. Her sister has been dead sixty years. What I gave her was not comfort, it was time: not being in a hurry, not correcting her, letting her win the conversation. At six she let go of my arm and said: «Off you go now, it is getting dark.»

She called me Soledad eleven times and eleven times I said yes.

There is still one who hunts you. The last hunter is as old in his trade as you are in years; he inherited your file the way one inherits a debt. Today he comes too close — more your own habit's fault than his cunning — and you decide to gift him a false trail, a beautiful one, worthy of his decades. Where do you send him? Kindle a Gift to weave the deception.

Rutilio Cárdenas inherited from his father a folder with my name misspelled on it. Today he came too close, and not because he is clever: I have been coming down the same side of the stream for two hundred years. I smelled him at the shop counter. Old coin, wet bone. He had a year left, and I kept quiet. I left him, in exchange, a trail worthy of his decades: a track toward the sierra in Hidalgo, a village with sick dogs and two women who take turns wearing the same face. He set off on Thursday, happy. I never smelled sickness coming on anyone again. Not even my own.

He smelled of old coin: a year left, and I kept quiet.

They give the hills a new name, a green sign, and opening hours: a reserve, they say, protected. Your home has a ticket booth now and closes at six. The park rangers find what no dog found in two centuries — a cache, an altar, a path of yours — and they catalogue it, fence it, make it an exhibit with a plaque. Surrender that Tether along the way.

It is a reserve now. Green sign, ticket booth, closes at six. The rangers found what no dog turned up in two centuries: the third stone, the tin, the wax unbroken. It is in the visitor center, in a case, with its little card: «Votive deposit, 19th century.» Underneath, my paper, my handwriting, with an English translation. Nobody counted the stones. Nobody asked who I was writing to.

My handwriting in a display case, with an English translation beneath it.

There was a rule that kept you alive all these centuries — the first one you learned, the one about your weakness —salt crossed over the threshold—. One day you notice you no longer remember learning it: the scene of the lesson is gone, and without the scene the rule is just a slack sentence. You repeat it without faith, like an inherited prayer. What remains of that terrible day? Fade one Trace from an Echo.

The rule holds: salt crossed, do not cross. I repeat it like an inherited prayer, without knowing who I inherited it from. There was a door and there was a terrible day. There is no door anymore. What is left is the white line on my mouth, and that nothing tastes of anything.

The white line is left; the door is not.

You reach for a memory and find the swept-clean place where it used to be. You wait for the usual ache — it does not come. You probe yourself inside like someone searching for a pulled tooth: nothing. That painlessness is what freezes you. How do you even know what was there, when not even the lack remains? A whole Echo slips away: surrender it.

I went looking for her the way you go to a wardrobe: my mother in the corner by the water jar, something folded between her hands. I know it happened. I know there was a woman. The face is not there, and the place where the face was has been swept, clean, without even the dust of the hollow. I felt around inside myself waiting for the usual pull, the pulled-tooth one. Nothing. That was what froze me: that it did not hurt.

I looked for my mother's face and found the floor swept.

You pass at a distance, years on, just to know. Smoke in the chimney, washing on the line, a light someone turns on without fear. The hiding place has learned other footsteps, other suppers, another way of keeping quiet. Nothing there remembers you, and that, you discover, was what you meant to give. What do you see through the window that is enough? Write the Trace of that moment.

I passed at a distance, in March, only to know. Smoke in the chimney. Children's washing on the linekeeper's wire. A light someone turned on at seven without leaning out to see who was about. And on the top shelf, through the window, the salt tin half used, with a spoon standing in it. They took it down for the soup. They have forgotten what I left it there for. That was the gift.

Children's washing hung out on the linekeeper's wire.

One year you find your own face at the feast: a boy dances in a mask of your animal, and the old men correct his steps — not like that, this is how it ran. They are right. You have become a dance, a warning that sends children home before dark. You decide not to contradict them: quite the opposite. Each year you tune the legend, leave a fresh track on the eve, one howl at the exact hour. And one night you step into the story completely, the way one steps into water, and you do not come out. In folklore no one ages and nobody dies. Write your final Leaf: tell your legend the way the village will tell it, beautiful lies and all.

They say that in San Mateo there was a woman with a sleeping hand who used to hang her name behind the door so she could go out. They say she did not kill: that she would slip into houses where somebody was sleeping soundly and take a little of that warmth, and that is why here you wake up cold and lucky. They say two lines of salt on the threshold stop her dead, and there are still people who cross them on the eve. They say she ran from the mouth of the hill to the ahuehuetes in a single breath, and about that they are not lying. The boy in the mask dances badly on purpose, because he likes the old men to correct him: not like that, this is how she ran. I am the one who leaves the fresh track in the mud the night before. I am the one who howls at eleven sharp, up above, where the ticket booth does not reach. Nobody knows my baptismal name anymore. Not even me. And so, for the first time, the whole night is mine.