Ysidro

···

Corrales, New Mexico

1860

__________________________

To my son, ah, to my son! My only one, the one who makes the morning come and go, the one who makes the stars come out with glinted smiles just, if only, to take a peek. The greatest miracle of all, my son, and least of all my miracle, though I bore you. It is Love that made you a miracle, made you my boy, and brought upon you the ultimate blessing of innocence. It is Love that made me see and feel you, made me patient, and made me whole through you in ways unknowable. The state, the country, and my Lord all ceased to be important when you were delivered unto the world, at the ready for me, and me ready at the expense and debt of Love, ceaselessly it was given and taken. My purpose on this earth is you, in the manner which I give in joyous fruitlessness because it is for you. I will hold you for ever.

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He was born in a grape field only footsteps away from the ford which would dictate the course of life beyond his own. It was a dreary day: the sky was then sullen from the aftermaths of a particularly vengeful monsoon, and the topsoil was soaked. Each trudge was a labor on top of the already strenuous pruning that took place over a weeks-long cycle; it needed to be done before budswell, or it would never get done at all. Everything blended into an altogether alien swamp that was riddled with worms and frogs, along with scores of jumping, frightful creatures and pigments that nobody could anticipate. Budswell would come, but not before long.

That morning, along the ridged lines of vine stretching silently, Marisol attempted a meticulous job with a puny, curved blade amongst the branches. Ankle-deep in the rain-conceived world, she could not reach its highest points in vain of all her efforts, not the least constrained by the pregnant womb that forced great difficulty upon all tasks. Over several seasons she had grown to hate the burden because, in her mind, it was not yet alive, but simply in the process of being borne, and thus not human: for the moment, it acted only as an extra weight, another sack atop the fallible and inevitably spilling wagon of responsibility. And there she stood. He was born in the field, in the mud—his first known embrace was atop the muck. He didn’t see his father until both he and her were carried into the house, wherein she first held him with reemerging strength. Her touch was hesitant and cautious. She was worried about crushing him, always worried about his accidental death when he was still in the womb; such was one reason she grew to despise him in his not-yet-worldly form, sheltered by her skin and nurtured by food for one, now taken in half. Caked in the muck and her own blood, however, she additionally bore witness to the life she had created, careless in the way which is admired in the young and despised in the old. 

Lying on the cooled, solid floor made of splintered wood, her body was curled. She wore cheap fabrics imported from the newly Alto California by an elder mule: with every tear she only more admired its struggle. Her skin was worn down by stress to the extent that every harvest wrought another five years of age. Every day the getting up was harder, the moving on was slower, and the posturing proved final. She watched this accelerated process with dismay and intense rheumatism. And yet, every squallored joint, every wretched bone, ceased to matter when his eyes opened, untainted and blissfully ignorant to every pantheon of struggle across that cursed thing they called history. Forsaking it all, he was her son, and she was his mother: so be it. 

It was not just cleanliness that marked him, for that was indistinct, but its immovable permanence. He was no cupid, but anybody could have seen that he would peer at the earth and its people differently. This difference would be upon him for all time. She ran it through: he would be a man with the mind of a child. His body would outgrow him quickly. Her worry shifted from his death to his prolonged life: If she erred in course then her child would be an idiot, insane and childlike, far from God, beyond the life he had been condemned to simply by being born to toil and sell. His eyes were the color of hazel: it didn’t matter. Not now—she was his mother, and she would do what she could for him, and what she could do was hold him with her pale, bone-thin arms covered in matters of ichor. Looking up to the sky, away from the boy’s father, she called out Ysidro, and so was his name. It was out of hope, hope for something to come out of his life that could turn him into a worthy man—but that was not what she needed from him. All she required was that he stay alive.

***

Ysidro grew to nine years old; an age that brought about the first renascence from his infant youth: an all-consuming obsession with all myriads of twigs and otherwise discarded tree matter that lay at the base of the verdant Rio Grande. ‘Twas a forest beyond all attempts at quantifying that ran alongside the shallow, dried river. From each drought came a reincarnated shower of fragmented sticks from the towering branches that he could only just reach. Out of them he first built an epitaph to his memory outside the curve: a teepee with no skin or fabric façade, made of aggregate branches tied together by a belt which he begged for to his father, made of cheap leather sourced from crowded buffalo leather along the plains. At night he would sit in it and imagine what it would be like to live with sticks for a house, below grated nebulae like some sort of prisoner that did it for fun; he wanted it to be fun for himself. It was a game: the houses, the river, the sticks—one that he did not want to end, for if it ended he would sneak in a bore, and a bore could not do. Something interesting must be going on.

Trying with precaution not to give out his structure, he carved a make-believe story with his nails: great heroes of his own figment running through the ages of wood and piercing the hundredth bison, powered by coughing engines billowing with steam and splintered scribbles. He carved one pillar out to the point of hollowing.

On nights when it was too pitched to draw and he did not want to indulge in the suffocating comforts of home, Ysidro bumbled into the Bosque and collected bundles tied together by his rope-thin arms and held them tight until he reached the teepee, piling them up in the center for reasons unknown even to himself.

Please, work, for me it should work. Anything I make should work, right by here in my house because I am a right-bound man like she says. He thought to himself while collecting his loads because boredom, after all, was no good. The worst of it came when he was called back to the house for harvests and pruning, which he didn’t understand no matter how many times he asked. All his mother would say amounted to:

“We prune because we must. We walk because we must. You are here because you must be.”

He was given that little blade and told not to cut himself, and instead all he could go to was what wonders he could create with a real blade outside of his own flesh, so precise and intricate as this one. It was curved like a crescent poking into the clouds, the blade in one direction and the hard handle another. He imagined slumping it down and up, down and up to finally complete the scenery of his right killed arborglyph with a big, pale moon to light the way for the hunter he had pictured: it did not make sense without it. How can the man with the tomahawk see the bison at night, with trees in all parts, if there’s no moon. We need the moon, and I want it for my picture. He would talk to himself while pruning the branches, stuffing a few in his pocket at random intervals.

His mother watched him work from a chair off to the side where the ground was more even, for the only legs that ever treaded it were those of her and the hickory place of rest she took. Ysidro had not seen her stand up, without some look in her eyes he could only identify as fear, since he had first walked on his own two legs; she sat when he rose.

His father had the Fever, a bad case of the hazes. The house was to himself, his mother said—the miasma gave it to him and made it his, and thus the two of them must find a way to sleep in the comfort beneath the sinking and swallowing earth. He bundled more sticks.

Please find me, mama, I need you to find it.

When the bundles, night after night, were piled to the circumscribed peak of his marked home, he began building his second creation. It took shape over the tides in a more rectangular shed. He wanted it to be comfortable, and so he carefully spun pillows out of leaves and put them in quaint patterns across the floor, so she would not know sand and the abrasive intrusions of pebbles in all hours of the day. Epitaphs to the living, that is what his mother called him. He bounced the word around in his head for a long while: Epitaph. Running, running, round and round: a trialed mark on the long path into the veil, the walk that she talked about making with her ailing ankles and rapidly dwindling limbs. He understood the word less the more he attempted to figure it out, and elected to draw it instead: a square, perfect in shape and dimension. He put it where he wanted the moon to be, someday. That was an Epitaph, the place where something more should be, something to want and to picture, but not to be materialized.

O’er the first mound of trees he went again, and in its valley he searched in want of an even greater pool of scions, all that he needed. It would be the ultimate empty space for something to be, unfulfilled—he could make his mother proud. In her new shed she lay and gaze through its intermittent gaps which the río, creeping closer, ran between and tapered out like some unnatural tailrace. Along its resting precipice she watched her son go to and fro with new burdens, sometimes his hands cupped with sap. At night when the river only seemed an obtuse stream of black, underground oil, her sole indication of Ysidro’s wellbeing was his small, playhouse silhouette passing along the minutely-shaded rocks. When she saw its contorted, splintered form coming up the bend, she knew all was well, and could rest for but a few moments across the lush mattress made out of her boy’s labour.

You will love it, ma, I promise—it will be ready for you, so ready you can hold it, and I will know the word. I will be smart, just the way you want, and then we can go live at home again and someday I can be a teepee-man down by the river like in the storybooks. Get it from me.

For three days and nights he did not leave his own dwelling, except when he pricked a finger or incurred a splinter, and went for his mother to take a look. When it was nursed, he went back to his work, what it was she did not know, and left him to toil in a way much less akin to what she had envisioned.

Finally, he emerged—rent with sawdust and the interspaced, spotting bruises hanging like small polyps from his trembling elbows. He was holding it, digging his fragmented nails into its edges and looking for crevices: a perfect square on all sides glued together subsequently with globs of sap. He did not know how to wrap his palms around it, so he shifted and scraped them around. He could not drop it. Its reach extended from his chin to his ankles, and far past his shoulders; it almost obscured his form entirely. His mother lay there, covered in rags she had sent herself home to retrieve, protected from below by a floor made of both parts reverie and necessity, and watched him handle it in astonishment. The greatest creation beyond the Lord she had ever laid eyes on stood before her, made by her son because he could not stand to build something for the sake of usefulness, but for joy. To the sound of upright and reputed whippowills he trotted like a general to the trumpet o’er right the shed. It’s for you, mama, I made it for you. The eppytaff goes for you because it’s perfect and so are you. Please like it, please like it. I made it just right, just perfect.

She didn’t understand it.

***

Ysidro sat alone in the near-fermented kurnamesence dusk which welted clouds out of its surface like pustules, in the hour right before the trees turned downwards and for one final time gazed at the fires of its creator, moved in a current with his neck on a swivel. He sat with the epitaph, lying on top of it and embedding some of its ridges with particles of fine sand. The water had receded, and he lay on a briefly visible island that formed around the benevolence of gravity. Some flow pushed past around the isle, even it turned to some sweet putrescence. All around the world moved drunk, or at least in his mind what appeared to look drunk from the occasional bug-walkers that would lumber on past the house during less confusing times. Remember.

I thought she would like it, mama, I thought she would like it. I made it perfect just like she wanted but it was just a square and squares are no good in a world without shape is what she said. What does that mean? Remember? I don’t remember her telling me that. I don’t wanna go home anymore, mama.

And so Ysidro sat alone on the mound of eroded and passed over sand, waiting for something to happen—something that would take him away from home. His father hadn’t had a tooth in his head for years; his mother, a bone in her legs for even longer. Home was a bad place and bad places are no place for perfect things.

He had an additional stick with him that found no use, but he never knew most of the time. Nobody could reach the isle and take it from him; it was safe. But he knew there would be some application for it, some reason to carry it around and make the task of holding his Epitaph all the worse. But he didn’t need to carry it: it was dry season. He could sleep on it. Remember.

The skies got dark, and Ysidro was alone. There was no light in the structures he built, and though he could feel the shed and the teepee and who lived inside of it, just as much evidence was present before him that either never existed.  He wanted to remember where it would be tomorrow but the passing current before him made it difficult to see, and he resided himself to sleeping in the sensory cosmos, a vacuum in which nothing but himself and his creation resided. Aye, and a single willow, now weeping, dipping its extremities into the río as if to wash itself from the day’s hardships. Thus the three players in his void took their places. Ysidro put his forearms as a pillow and dug his face in it, invariably. It was the pride of his family that they could get their child to bed so quickly, nonetheless of his own volition.

He rapidly fell into sweet dreams. His mother, who watched him from inside her shelter, then did the same. 

The river began to rise, slowly at first, then all at once; not with ferocity but with an unassuming invincibility that swallowed up everything around, save the shore and earth itself. It was not an especially violent or malicious flood—the world had no interest in hurting Ysidro—but it consumed all tangible things. 

First, the mound disappeared, taken up by its surrounding ocean and once again resigning itself to erosion and sculpting by its pageless vectors. Along its surface rocks and logs ran silently, passing through like city traffic, leaning high and crooked like bobcats walking alone between meals, fattened and slow. The epitaph, embedded in the now-encircled surface, held fast and carried Ysidro dutifully, though he twitched as if to grab.

I am looking into my old house and I can see my father, having taken it all for himself, putting down and with a blanket on the center floor. Why is he using my blanket, mama, it’s mine. Don’t let him use it, he’s sick. He turns to me, he does, and I see his gummed smile, trying its best but failing to look like anything more than puffed up, profuse skin. I’m scared. Is this a nightmare? I thought I made the thing to end all nightmares. I don’t want the humors to be angry with me anymore.

The tide rose along the shoreline and even the tailrace widened into a fattened cornflower near rupturing. Faster, faster now, down and down. When all lay wrenched and strained in the newfound turmoil, the epitaph at last broke free of its holding and went undulating among the ceaseless turns of water.

Ysidro woke up at dawn amongst whispering, mourning trees, each starkly hanging like cracks into a painted-blue vase from which one could peer into the unlit, hollowed interior.  He lay soundly atop his piece, now having become a raft; his body, nestled and arched into a spiral. The river moved him to somewhere he couldn’t recognize—there were no signs of man, either, and so all was lost. Too drunk off fatigue to realize his situation, he worked his fingers in the grooves of his pants. The epitaph felt equal in weight as with a counterbalance.

“Hi.”

There was another boy on the raft when he turned to look back. Crossing his legs in a meditative fashion, he sat as if in tune to some otherworldly cadence. He wore moccasins and wrapped flesh with wool around his shins, tied and drooping down, topped with a hassled sash. Around his neck were speckled pebbles that seemed to reflect his skin: a complexion of albinism, milk-white, moving in the air like a sail. His ocular pigment was entirely absent, his chest bare. 

“¿Cómo te llamas?”

The boy, in his pallor, responded, “Tusa.”

They stared at each other, for a moment.

“¿Qué haces aquí?”

Tusa said nothing, lightly shrugging his shoulders in the method of normalcy. 

“Hi.”

Tusa pointed at the vestigial stick which Ysidro carried; he didn’t understand. Tusa pointed again. Ysidro threw him the damn twig and the boy began digging with a small metal garnish he had attached to his left moccasin, digging into the center of the boat.

Ysidro cried out as if the boy were stabbing him: it was his design he was shredding. Please don’t Tusa please you don’t understand I can’t tell you how much you don’t get it. It’s my mother you’re caving in a divot, my mama. Please—

Tusa removed a spot of sap from the filling and placed it in the crater, then planted the scion on top. He looked at Ysidro again: he wanted something else.

Good as swept up we are and he wants more.

Tusa put his arms in the air, one straight and the other angled like a smile or semicircle, moving them back and forth with a whooshing sound between his gasps for air.

He’s building a sail, that’s what he wants. Turning my only eppytaph into a sailboat…where are we going?

Ysidro removed his tattered shirt; it nearly ripped itself at the motion, its translucent hue of bone shining through the now emerging sun. All of the buttons were meticulously picked out. He handed it to Tusa, who took it by the sleeves, themselves stretched out and worn, and tied both extremities to the nascent mass, top and bottom. The base of the shirt was next, reached around to the top and contrived there so as to fashion a quasi-parachute. 

Upon seeing what his monument had been turned into, Ysidro turned stricken, knotted and churned before what was left of it. Where are we going, oh my God, where do we go—the river took me the river took me and it knowed I can’t swim. He burst into tears, groveling at the base of the turned-boat. His sobbing was rhythmic and practiced, each surfeit nostril clearing subsequently between his groans of placed agony. His mother couldn’t stand and his father couldn’t eat. Remember.

Ysidro looked up, his counterpart not meeting his gaze. The sun was beginning to rise, now, in the riverrun depths of smoothed over stone which knew no name or country, met by the petrified dirt. Calcified trees meant for cross obelisks were all around, lit in great fire by all the sanctity of the sun. Emulsified seas of mud and plant matter clearly separated with interspersed linings of smog and dew hung about in the morning air, laden with bogs and flattened honeysuckle.

Tusa did not fear, nor did he suffer. He tightened the masts and ran his digits among the fabric tied to it like imagined lattices coursing with electricity. The sky turned an evanescent citrus, choked by rapidly dispersing clouds. Off to the left, while they hung to the right, a large beam of metal came into view, laid with sheets and pointing into the raised surface. They’d reached an Acequia, the ditch, the vein connected to the heart, being the confined aquifer. Atop it a man stood with a towel dirtier than the surface he was attempting to clean, scrubbing back and forth. From his slight lean and angle about the knee Ysidro could identify him as an American—a yankee. The man first paid no mind to the craft, thinking it driftwood or some aquatic creature so far removed from civilization that it didn’t matter, but then he saw hands, and looking over he gazed at human forms. 

He waved wildly at the two boys: “By God, git up and swim here, damnt it all, you’ll drown! Boys, Matty, boys on the river! Durn mongrels, letting their kid go off in a boat like that to God knows where…” He said, chasing after the raft along the divide while swinging around his supplies and tools wildly. They paid little attention to him, though he tried in vain to throw and holler.

Aye, it is that which is lost that often does not want to be found; remember.

They passed through a ridge on the highway of the river, and Ysidro fell silent from all tears and thought as the sun further rose above the trees to look at them from higher, that eye that puts watchful surveillance among all the earth’s sins and peoples, being one and the same. In the water his mother’s shed floated, the loving tufts of leaves made as rafts, all tools for the sea. A sailor he now was, far from home and dreaming of it as they all do in the stories she recalled to him, for she could not read.

***

Through the deep they passed, and once again Ysidro began to cry. He wouldn’t hush down. Across from him Tusa sat and looked on, unflinching at the mouth of the river. The sail kept going and it would take them to El Paso if it had to, because it was a right good contraption that Tusa made. Neither of them dared to hit the shore, for they would certainly drown. 

Why can’t I hit the shore, why can’t I walk. I need to go home because I don’t wanna go home, and it has to happen. Please let me hit the shore Tusa, please. I made it just perfect and you’re ruining it. I don’t want to cry again. I need to go home, I love my mother because I need to go home.

Ysidro bent down and continued to heave and sob, almost for the sole purpose of doing so. It was his mission to be scared. The sun stayed high and watchful, watching the boy cry in the solemn and forceful moving current. The wind grew quelled in the midday stasis and the boat began to spin, twirling all around—solely at the mercy of water. The sail went limp as if it were hanging to be washed, and they began to tip a little, covering some of his craft’s top.

Tusa grabbed the mast and pointed it towards the rapidly oncoming shore: Please reach it, I can’t swim. His epitaph seemed as if it would capsize and they would get swept away, truly, and dashed against the bottom of the river and spit out into the Gulf: it was not so. They hit and scraped along the shoreline made of swamped dirt, and soon enough they came to a stop. Tusa got out and pulled it further to land, dragging Ysidro along, too paralyzed to act. His moccasins were drenched, but the earth that clung to them had now washed off and Ysidro thought them to be very pretty, like varnish. He crawled off the epitaph and finally looked up; Tusa was standing, for a while.

The sky was tangled in blue between the thick bosque and the now empty firmament, save for a band of cuckoos that passed overhead with yellow bills like early stars. One of them soared out of place, rocking back and forth like a hang glider, for there was nothing to stand on. It kept going down, each flap of the right wing only driving it further. It sang helplessly, the band leaving it behind, and in no long duration it hit the ground in weakness. For the first time in hours, Ysidro moved with purpose: he reached out to it, the form crying in exasperated wheezes. It was so yellow, so bright.

Tusa came down, too, while Ysidro cupped the fledgling in his hands: it was young.

Please don’t die, not here—you can’t. I want you to stay a while for me, stand up at least. You are so much delighted, I delight you. Don’t go away.

It tweeted weakly.

“Hi,” croaked Tusa, trying to get its attention. He poked its head and felt what he knew was its hair. The cuckoo pressed into his finger, as if to snuggle, its eyes closing in assurance; it was alive. The knotted bushes and their roots nodded along. The earth moved. Ysidro’s cupped hands began to falter, and he moved it back with the support of the ground, gently, and the cuckoo stayed with him and whispered softly. Ysidro went far with his head, filthing what was left of his hair: he wanted to hear it. It took deep breaths and exhaled songs into his drums, each one with labor and containing more wealth than all the music known to him, one note more multitudinous than the chorus of trumpets and angels and every other monument to brass which he thought orange. Another breath, and then another song, Yes, I like that, he turned. Tusa looked at him, his monochrome eyes piercing through his snaked back.

Ysidro managed to pull himself away and gaze up at the boy in front of him, utterly stranded and isolated by language. He didn’t understand much of anything about him, even when bent to his level. In his spectacle there was a message: He tells me to go on and set it down, he’s got it, I think.

Ysidro removed himself but left his arms outstretched, cupping the cuckoo: it was too fragile for the ground. Tusa plucked it up and moved himself to the ground. It would be okay, the bird, and so would they. Just rest, just rest they needed. Ysidro watched as Tusa laid himself down with the bird on his chest like sand. It slept atop him on its side, slowly, whistling out with each breath. The boy’s neck turned to watch Ysidro, the water just grazing his toes. The río was closing right up, and just passed by the raft was a school of minnows.

It was all teeming with wisps of burgeoning, overwhelming life, passing in and out of view like the shadows of great buildings along the back of some wagon driver plowing through. A dungeon beautiful, the glints off the surface only lighting more like them, ready please, yes it will. Flashes of jumping mice in the shade of golden brown hopped from stones and splashed in the water, careful not to tempt it into swallowing them. Like flowing lilies they teemed and moved, and in his Somnus-enchanted state with half his eyes Ysidro rocked back from Tusa to the scene, the boy like a white vein of quartz jutting out of a canyon, so envigored by the light he was. Go to bed, now, yes, get ready for bed.

His half-clothed body would have to do for pajamas, though there was nobody to bring him to bed or nestle him in it—she was far away. He would go home, yes, but not so soon. It was magnificently bright out.

Aye, and so they slept in peace through the afternoon.

***

Ysidro rose before, waking to candied pink all above and around. The surrounding fauna had diminished silently; there were now only the buzzings of darners and the squirming frogs which together stirred like organic windchimes to a harp melody. Bouts of mist skipped across the water like solid stone, rising up from the diminisher. 

From above the line peeked the Mountain, its soft form aglow in a blouse made of crystalized granite—a lonely tooth which was to be followed. He met a settler that called it garapiñó, back with his Father up North.

Tusa lay still, the cuckoo still resting on his chest. Ysidro poked him, hesitant to move; he could stay here for a century in bodies that don’t keep, but that’s okay, yes, yes it is. The colorless boy stirred, his own flesh refracting the melon-colored welkin and bouncing it off. He realized his weight and tried to yet keep the creature hushed, though it couldn’t hush, that alone was true.

Give me the name, Tusa, yet give me the name. It is a friend and friends have names.

“Tithu.” He spoke, turning to Ysidro, “Hi.” 

Like kindling they curled away from each other at the utterance. The epitaph sunk a little more into the sand with time, some points of it now filled with grains. He was hungry—he wanted to trust the boy who had shown without explanation or cause, simply there out of self-propellence, so unnatural he was that to question became futile. The cuckoo slid off his rising chest: its legs had gone dull. They could carry it home, yes they could, to the parts of medicine, where consumption was eradicated by air, and the leg would be alright. The mountain was roaring in the final light, and the peak of black shadow would soon come along to the sound.

Tusa took it best to place Tithu on the boy’s craft. It swiveled its neck, but otherwise sat alone.

Is it time to go home, please, is it time? My mother is legless and my father toothless but I need to get her back to health, off my pillows I made. Tusa, get to my eyes, put with colour unlike yours.

He made a funny breath in reaction to this thought, to the effect of the starting and stopping train car. Tusa turned ‘round and looked down at Ysidro, still prone, and threw his chin to the raft. They were going home.

The wind blew Up along the stream, back to the vines, pulling the sail with it. ‘Twas time, then, to go home. They were not lost.

With each push into the now still water, the sky turned from sweet to bitter. Among the dark there was yet little, save for the watching bird and its companions. Everything rustled like pounding droplets on tin, rusting by the minute. With one final struggle their raft now floated, Ysidro jumping on first, followed by Tusa.

Tithu harked rhythmically like a controlled loom with each swell and passing, the sky now blacker than coal behind shut eyelids. Above, the cosmos came out of hiding: he was up late, and all the reflections of the rainbow swirled through his mind like the bubbles of light went elliptically around the Milky Way, like he went around the río. 

Beneath the sleeping world, tossing and turning in beds sorely missed, Ysidro pretended to be on top of a great feather mattress, like before, when they had the house.

On nights like this one, he would find a place on the deck outside, painted black, and turn around to see the unpolluted, bedazzled firmament gazing back at him with opulent teeth smiling back, and it made him feel sweet and warm.

Tusa counted the specks and found them each a name.

Floating upstream Ysidro realized that the night would end and that the day would come, and what it would bring, who it would bring—I don’t know how to help failed legs, please. He wanted to count stars in his expired, yet so frail, body until the river would go up and up into the clouds itself and they could ride those seas. Tithu slept and his dreams were of rehearsal, because that is what bards do when they cannot move, only rolling slightly in the middle of drowning. 

The crickets and hoppers, too, found the rhythm, and it was all a song, every color and heart and brain: all of it to the drum of Tusa’s specks and Ysidro’s counting, the greatest labor. Dawn was not yet approaching but it was in his mind and it made him fear more than any beast of obscured light could, for it would evaporate in the drought and Tusa, too, would not make it.

It can’t disappear, no it can’t; I will grow wings like Tithu and go away to the other side of the world where the sun is always setting—I want it with sugar.

They rode on a perfect square made of imperfect materials, and Ysidro remembered the chasing hunter running through trees to get to the bull, lit by nothing. It was the moon they rode on, the missing part of the picture. It was always balanced and yet slightly waning below the surface in phases. They flew on the moon, gripping its craters for safety; they could breathe.

The triune raft flew on, and morning came with the drift.

**

Tusa lay like an arched bridge, cradling the cuckoo in his arms, the dried whispers of the preceding night resting on his tongue.

We are coming up the bend and I can see my teepee, cone shaped, ready for me. It is draped in fallen leaves because I was not there to rustle them out from the sticks. They smell roasted. Tusa, wake up, Tusa.

But he did not—he was too fatigued after outlasting Ysidro in the night. They were on the epitaph to his mother, and she was still alive. They came up on the rectangular shape of the shelter he had built for her: she was still alive.

For the first time, he touched the mast and angled it to the shoreline: he made landfall, and Tusa remained. He crawled onto shore.

She sat on the pillows, looking at her son with ambivalence.

Stand up, mama, stand up. We need to stand up or father will worry. Please, the pillows are so soft, but the house is so warm. Just one more time.

She stared.

She wrapped her arms around Ysidro’s back and pulled up, allowing her weight to press on him. It would be warm inside. 

The epitaph, now just a raft, detached itself from the sand and went back into the current. Tusa held the bird, both asleep, drifting, drifting down.

He walked for her, up the path and to the grapes.