Page 1 of Daughter of Rot

OLIVIA

Like all babies, Olivia Velasquez had no choice in selecting her mother. Alone in the fluorescent hospital room, bundled in pastel pink, Olivia’s past life flashed behind the opalescent film of newborn eyes.

It starts with a guttural scream and then whispers fluttering above her. A body thuds onto the desert floor, bones crack, and the body goes soft. Breathing in desperate gulps of hot air aids nothing. It’s fast, almost invasive, almost like a glimpse of what a rapture or abduction could feel like. White light, harsh inhalations of dirt, a smoldering sun, one last exhalation, and then the aftermath.

Coyotes yelped at each other as they tore at her flesh in delight under the blazing blue desert sky. Surrounded by sagebrush and yucca, fire ants crawled up her legs and found themselves inside a small red backpack filled with candy and a lone water bottle. Some of the ants got into the toothpaste and torn up bible pages. Turkey vultures sunned themselves around her. They picked at the scripture. They lifted off when they caught the signal of another body. A prairie rattlesnake burrowed into her belly and vibrated as it slithered in the viscera. Crows called one another and landed around her head, playfully hopping on her body as they burst her eyes and pecked inside her nose, ears, and mouth. With her mouth open to the sky, they pierced her tongue, peck by peck. They prodded at the red bracelet around her left wrist and the rosary in her pocket. They carried the rosary to a nest much further north. She was an ecosystem, a splatter, and then, a shimmering skeleton, night after night.

Those were her last memories. That was before.

Now, she’s alone in a hospital room and her blood type is O. Words sound like smudges. She feels an eruption in her chest. Her voice pierces into an echo. Sharp and wild. She takes in a raspy breath and wails. Her first song. A melody of sorrow and hunger. In a sudden flash of blurs and whispers, she’s cradled by soft arms. The oval shape of her mother’s face is radiating beams of light. A warmth. A resplendence. Her scent is sweet and rich. Olivia understands.

Mother.

A floating trail of pink, cerulean, and lilac spirals into the air as her mother sings. The colors hover over their heads. Olivia forgets her past life. The nebulous lights and sounds from this curious place feel familiar. Maybe violence. Maybe tenderness.

The burst of colors appear again and then drift off into the corners of the room. Olivia’s alone. Her cries puncture the room and no one answers. She waits for the warmth to come back. She’s in her clear hard-shelled basinet surrounded by pink vases overflowing with white daisies and light pink roses. The room smells like musk and blood. Transparent balloons filled with circular golden confetti have settled under the gray and white splotched ceiling. The lights buzz. Olivia listens for her mother’s voice.

Blood trails from the hospital bed into the shower where her mother had limped and then went silent under the rush of the water. An entire universe gone. Olivia wails again until she falls asleep and her dreams are filled with dark waters. Gray waves crash. Heavy rain clashes with the deep blue ocean. The stars in the sky look like twinkling capsules of neon lights. The stars burst and then the world is illuminated.

Olivia opens her eyes again. She smacks her lips with hunger in her belly. She has no choice but to love this version of her mother. Her first home. She waits between ruptures of wailing. Her reality composed of instinct and helplessness.

She waits on her mother.

She waits on warm waters. It’s all she can do.

She’s a tiny pink stranger to the planet with ghosts built into her blood.

ISELA IS A DREAMER

Isela’s passion was meticulous, but that didn’t mean she was picky about finding a man. He could be a drinker, as long as his hair shined like an obsidian stone and his cologne smelled like the depths of the forest. He could have no money, as long as he could hold a conversation, make her laugh and give her multiple orgasms. She enjoyed men who were good with their hands and the earth. She enjoyed the bravado of a man who insisted on dancing close enough to inhale each other.

Isela lived inside her head. In this luminous landscape, she was given the treatment of an ancient goddess. Devotions and offerings and songs were conducted in her honor. The crown on her head erupted upwards in bundles of bright pink camellias and round purple allium bulbs.

Isela didn’t know how to love herself but she carried theories. She knew how to mold herself in order to make a man fall for her. She knew how to use her hands, the sweetness of her tongue, and the poignant stories about her childhood, as a wild little thing. Isela alleged no desire for attention, but disclosed endless stories that she knew weren’t true. There was a tingle between her legs and at the tips of her fingers when she lied. Her mouth salivated. She became wet. In truth, she wanted the responses. The questions after. People with their mouths wide, spouting how courageous she was, asking her how anyone could survive such a life.

When she was five, she went missing in the middle of a tourist town. On a September road trip at a gas station stop, Isela found herself compelled to climb a southern live oak tree across the street. Her mother, Rita, found her hours later wandering along the edge of a riverbend where cottonwood trees ignited in bursts of yellows and oranges. Isela could not remember what happened during that lost time, but she happily filled in the blanks for anyone who asked.

In Isela’s version of the story, she was kidnapped at the hands of a beautiful and mysterious woman with honey eyes, red lips, and floral perfume. The mystery woman dragged her by the hair and then attempted to drown her in the river. Isela opened her eyes underwater as small bluegills tried to nibble at her hair and her eyebrows. The beautiful woman became distracted by a screeching baby in the distance and let Isela go. She was lucky to be alive. She proclaimed this with tears in her eyes.

When Isela was a teenager, her mother slapped her across the face because Isela insisted on getting married to an unnamed man who was twenty-one years her senior. This “elder,” as Rita put it, was a creep and a pervert. The unnamed man brought Isela fresh flowers every morning; he left them on the porch like a lovestruck fool. On Sunday nights, he snuck into Isela’s room, stood in the corner like a demonic entity and watched her sleep. Rita caught onto the peeping and beat the shit out of the elder with a baseball bat, promising she would meet him in hell.

In Isela’s version of the story, her admirer wasn’t that old. The fact was simple: her mother never wanted her to be happy, as Rita was unlucky in love. So, she locked Isela in an unfinished dusty basement with a candlestick, a loaf of bread, and a bible until she finally agreed not to marry the older man.

Isela’s breakup stories were typical. Men left her for wars. Men left her for alcohol. Men left her because they could.

Isela considered herself a dreamer. A woman of the imagined arts. When Isela met Alfonso days after she turned thirty-three, her dreams overflowed. They dated for four months and became official. Isela beamed. He was kind, handsome, and wore his heart on his sleeve. Isela indulged herself and she lied to Alfonso. She told him that her two daughters were her younger sisters. She allowed her dreams to become bigger than herself. Her daughters were not going to get in the way.

She envisioned a future with the family she always wanted. In a small house with a wild garden out front. The backyard, nothing but forest. The smell of pine and mud every morning. The migration of small winter birds looking out for each other overhead. An enchanting little life.

Isela could not imagine giving up her dream life. Bile bloomed in her chest from anxiety. She wasn’t going to let go of Alfonso. She was manifesting a life around him. He was the key. She needed alignment. An aura cleanse. A fresh start. So, she sent her daughters away. Lucia and Isabel. They were fourteen and twelve at the time. She handed them their birth certificates and an envelope filled with 213 one-dollar bills. She didn’t kiss them goodbye or feel an ache swell in the back of her throat as she shut the door on them. She was ready to start over. She was ready for a new life.

PREGNANCY DREAMS

In the dreamscapes she could never remember, Isela’s daughters trailed behind her as she wandered paths into cave systems filled with petroglyphs of ancient mythology explaining her lineage. Isela was lost and disoriented. Her body quivered from the cold. A phosphorescent halo of light erupted around her entire body. Her stomach squelched and growled. Her daughters watched as murky river water exploded from her mouth, centipedes flooding out and scuttling into the darkness of the caverns. Under speckles of sunlight, patches of cloak ferns reached up at Isela’s legs and held her in place. Her legs tingled in sharp prickles of pain. A bulbous meaty lump squirmed beneath her skin and traveled from her belly to her throat. Her daughters, who were glowing neon green, got down on their knees and prayed for her. Their words bioluminescent as they spoke. The cavern’s crescent skylight cracked open into a perfect circle and round stones fell from above. A slimy and shining umbilical cord with tiny writhing fingers wriggled down the opening and wrapped itself around her head, ripping her face open, unraveling her skin like a ribbon in a spiral from her forehead down to her chin, until the sticky cord gripped at her brain. Her daughters looked up from their praying hands. They embraced Isela and then pulled at her arms with vigorous precision. Her arms slid out of their sockets and each daughter wandered off in a different direction with her appendages.

In one of the dreams Isela could remember, her belly was round and bloated with earthworms. Small house sparrows swarmed her, overwhelmed her, puncturing her belly to get to the worms. She winced as the trails of blood on her belly flooded the room in the yellow house which she only ever saw in her dreams. She was embarrassed by the mess and this unexplained phenomenon within her. How could she be the perfect wife with a belly full of worms?

The next morning, groggy and filled with dread, she found out she was pregnant with Alfonso’s baby.