Tess Almendarez Lojacono

Dear Readers,

Please welcome a new contributor to the International Family Latin Families Column:  Shira Naharit.

Shira Naharit was born in Minneapolis, and is an alumna of the University of St. Thomas. She is currently a student in the MFA program at Hamline University. Working in multiple genres, she uses the written word to explore, record, and seek. When not at her writing desk, she can be found fighting for animal rights, dreaming of equality, and wandering the magical landscapes of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. 

Amelyalli

“Imagine a sky as dark as if stars had never existed. Think of black in its purest form, a sky made of licorice. Woven into this black expanse are purple clouds that brighten the dark like warm breath on a winter’s night. Focus. See Ameyalli, the sacred mother and protector of all indigenous peoples. She holds her brown hands in front of your eyes as she turns them over to show you her palms.
            Her palms are not like yours and mine with lines that start and end, as she knows no end, no lines, or boundaries. Her fate spirals, as the lines eddy in her hands like water. This was, in fact, when she decided to create the earth, while she sat staring at her palms, the universe only decorated with a black sky and a few violet clouds. But you and me, and everyone before us, would be born with the beginning and end of our lives seared into our palms like roadmaps.
            Once, many years ago, before Ameyalli stepped onto the earth, and quaked it, separating the land into continents, and people into separate countries, we had all been connected. There was a constant light surrounding us, and that brightness exposed us. Even the stars at night uncovered every part of the earth, and every part of humanity. No human or animal, plant or rock, could hide or even cast a shadow on anything else. The earth was all lit up back in those days, but we were lit, too, on our insides and we shined on the outside like walking novas.
            There were no continents or seas, and the world was divided evenly, one part water, one part land, and the last part sky. The people on the earth, our ancestors, came in colors as warm as brown, but as rich as black too. And they lived much closer to the sky, with heaven being only eight feet above the soil, and our family could ascend into heaven to speak with their ancestors and pray at the feet of the mother herself. It was the only time, since time began, that the spirits of the soil, water, and sky were the same.
            But even with heaven that close to earth, things surfaced that made the people uneasy. There would be days that people stayed inside their homes, because silhouettes moved across the earth like flickers. Ameyalli would tell the people on earth that the silhouettes were only echoes, although of what she would never say. And there were those cold times in heaven too, when she would step over the people as they prayed to her, and instead watched other parts of the earth, silent and unmoving. To the people it seemed that there was always something else going on at the end of the earth, the part where they were forbidden to go.
As Ameyalli sat in heaven, she often felt misunderstood. She watched over the world, and the lives of people, but started and ended each day alone. And looking around at the families on earth, and the ancestors in heaven, created an ache in her lower stomach that throbbed with equal parts pain and equal parts love.
She worked hard to create an image that people would love and trust. Ameyalli aged her body to 45 so that her face showed traces of wisdom. The gray threads she added to her black hair that hung long below her waist made her appear older. Still, she’d always felt mislabeled when people prayed to her as mother. And the loneliness that wouldn’t let her go, forced her to begin thinking about having a child. She looked up to the sky of heaven, and considered praying.
‘Praying to who?’ she thought and laughed. Night was coming.
Elder, she thought standing.
Elder.
Elder was the man who was responsible for the sun and the moon. He’d been doing that at least as long as she could remember, and the one thing that Ameyalli knew about him was that he was the oldest spirit in heaven. Sometimes she wondered if he came from the underside, below the earth. But there hadn’t been anything down there for years. Now there was only warm stale air, stuck in perpetual movement.
Still, she thought as she saddled up her Appaloosa, riding across the sky to the end of the horizon, she never saw any humans coming up from earth to see him. Elder sat alone all day making clay vases that held the stars.
Ameyalli wanted to reach the horizon at the right time. This was one of her favorite parts of the earth. The light was so bright here, that color was almost indistinguishable to the eye. The appearance of this land, and sky, was one of an unfinished palette. Ameyalli let her horse roam free as she sat on the beach, and looked out on the clear water. She could see Elder rowing his canoe towards the end of the earth, the place where the sky and the water collided to create a finite end.
Although this was the place Ameyalli had come to end life on the earth, twice before, there was still something soothing about it. There were no flickers of silhouettes out here. Seeing Elder on this evening helped her to remember that this land had once been as smooth and untainted as a baby.
A baby.
There was that familiar ache again.
Elder was almost to the horizon now and Ameyalli remembered why she always felt so captivated by him. There was something intoxicating about watching Elder retire the day and create the night. He was so different than Ameyalli, so black that he himself became an animated figure against the bright screen of the blank sky. She sat and stared at the water and at Elder’s agile body. He reached up to the sun and pulled it from the atmosphere down into the water. As the sun sunk beneath the waves, smoke rose against the horizon. Elder looked like the cave paintings from the failed civilizations that Ameyalli wiped off the walls when she was ready to try again.
She swam out in the water to meet him, just as he was reaching down for the vases of stars. He reached a warm hand out to Ameyalli and helped her into his canoe.
“Hi,” he said, as Ameyalli sat down.
“Hi,” she replied. Elder sat down across from God and picked up a vase. He cracked it open like an egg, and poured stars into Ameyalli’s hands.
They both laughed as they threw the stars into the sky, each one sticking into the darkness like sparkling prayers.
Ameyalli was excited when her baby turned six months old. He was everything she wanted. His skin was a mahogany brown, with hair that was much curlier than her own, yet not as coarse as Elder’s. Her son River was the perfect mix between the two of them, and when Ameyalli looked at him, she relaxed and believed in the future again.
From the day that River was born, Elder began pestering her to take River out on the water. But she had saved so many babies that fell into the water each year that she thought it would be less dangerous for River to help his father change the night into day.
Elder held the baby up to the ceiling of the sky, showing him how to blow out the stars like candles. River slipped out of his father’s arms. The baby fell down through the sky, and towards the land. Ameyalli, had first reached for the boy, before tumbling after him, out of the sky and down towards the land. The sound of his cry became a prehistoric reverberation, as if he was already a memory before he hit the earth. As Ameyalli chased after her son, their shadows spread over the earth like a disease. Ameyalli hit the earth shortly after her baby did and the humans looked down to see that the shadows of Ameyalli and River had broken into pieces and attached to their feet.
Ameyalli shook River lightly, then harder as he lay unmoving.
“Help me,” she said as the people ran away from what they deemed to be silhouettes following them.
Ameyalli picked her child up, and held him, protectively in one arm. She pounded the earth with her free fist. The first blow cracked the land and created rivers and streams. The second broke the land into separate masses, each floating in opposite directions on the water.  Families were separated as the land broke apart, and both parents and children drowned as they tried to swim to each other.
Ameyalli cried and no one reached out to her. She retreated into heaven clutching River, and pushed the earth and the heavens further apart from each other.  This distance made it impossible for people to remember that God had once believed in humans, the way we still try to believe in her.”


photo source: wikipedia