It was long time since anybody put a step on “El ocotillo”. For centuries, the ranch remained dry and cracked, unable to sustain life. Hiding almost completely under its dunes, barbed wire and wood fence surrounded its perimeter. The deep underground, the fissures on its valleys, showed when looking for them.
One could find a sandy landscape in Tendencia’s yellow, bright hair too. She was a warrior in the sleepless world where no true darkness existed. The brightness of the suns would cost people thier sleep for days, making them do all kinds of wicked acts, desperate to get some rest. Some chose to take their eyes away and make their children go blind too. Others would hide their homes under huge blankets, dying for the lack of air inside. There were ones that poisoned themselves to lose consciousness, but sometimes would not wake up.
One day the shine of the stars faded away as they died and everything merged in the shadows. Everyone fell into a deep sleep, with such strong dreams that opened doors from their unconscious to the real world.
She went through one of her mother’s dreams, inside a landscape from a photograph she saw in her grandmother’s relics: a fire illuminated only a few of the endless tall plants that elevated their thorny branches up on the sky, so many that the horizon was invisible and all the surroundings fused in the darkness. Tendencia walked around, blind but trustful from her listening since sound could travel well through the plants, but not through a wall. That is how she found a house with no roof with a big thorny plant that grew in the middle and was too tall for it to be there. Within its branches there was a book she took, and while stretching her arm to reach it she felt the warmth and breath of the tree, who smoothened its thorns so Tendencia’s hands would not to get scratched. She wandered at how gentle the plant was, and felt the need to say thank you. As she was leaving, she heard once again the whisper of the wind traveling through the dense landscape. She brought the book back to the physical realm, but there was no light to read it.
So she searched in the home she knew so well for some dusty matches and burning small wood chips and splinters, she and her mother kept a small light to remain awake and looked into the book.
As soon as they opened it, they realized it was written in a foreign language.
With the fire they started a stove and put the journal in a pot with:
-Water to cover
-2tsp of salt
-1tsp of pepper
-2 Tomatoes, diced
-1 onion, diced
-Cilantro
-2 limes juice
-1 cube of Consome Knorr
-3 tears from each
Boil for 20 minutes
Then they left it to dry and cool, only a few pages remained of what seemed to be a journal, and they read them together:
Long before I was even born, thorns grew from my skin.
My grandfather from my mother’s side had it
My grandmother from my father’s side too
They fell in love inside by blood vessels, I’m sure
The first time I fell from a horse they knew
So they had more, and more, and more.
And I pushed them back inside, picked them with tweezers in the bathroom sink.
Hugs would give sores, scratch the bed sheets
I asked them one day why, what caused them to grow, said that I wanted to know
They told me to go, up the stairs to the 308th floor
to open a door.
So up I went to see, took 18 years to get there
tripping and stumbling when exhausted
On the bruises of my knees they made a home
Trusting they would go, Inheld on the railing, looking to the floor
When I finally got there my hands were full of thorns
grabbing the knob, opening the drawer gave me three more.
My eyes could not rest on the gruesome amount of candy inside
Rotten, hardened, with ants and moths I ate it
As I searched between the paper sheets,
Documents and the receipts
Remedies and recipes
The voices of the insects in my stomach laughing and chatting
They became good friends with the thorns
I heard them sharing about the words on the papers they ate too
the debts, the coats, the shoes.
A rifle hiding in the very back of a closet
A shoe box taped on the outside, resting on a stool.
Looking like a treasure quest, a movie set
By the time I asked again I was feeling upset.
The moths told me to take a zip or two from a jar and get in the bed
And there I layed, I slept
The thorns on my back took a further step
on my spine they set.
Months later the rifle woke me up
Dreaming about dessert, I heard thunder from the distance
At night the silhouette of the Fouquieria splendens
Cast the shadows of the rays, trying to go back to the clouds.
So I had my doubts that it really happened, that it fired
But suddenly I realized I was at the top, the ceiling cried
I got up, like hungover, feeling drained from the sugar
The insects had been deformed, digested, dissolved
A hole facing upwards, it showed
The stars, the burning suns
In agony and from the distance shaped like rays, their thorns.
Tendencia could not get it at first, but something in her stomach made it growl, and her mother’s hands began to shake when she told her the story that her grandmother would tell her to keep her away from the sun, thinking it was a metaphor, a legend: but long ago there was people who instead of running away from the bright suns, turned into desert plants, not knowing about the curse it meant.