By Hannah Lavin
I was ten when the Spirit first came to me—the spirit of my mother, her mother, my abuelita, and her mother before her, Mama Berta. It was the amalgamation of centuries of women, bundled up and pressed into my being. This Spirit lives in my gut, my throat, and always my mind.
The Spirit flew into me through my mouth, flooding past my lips and settling into all my folds and creases. It told me I would not have children of my own, that my burden would be to bear these women of the past instead of those of the future.
My mother appeared first, filling me wholly—darkening my eyes, stretching my shoulders, edging around my heart, careful and fragile as she consumed me. She spread her arms along the length of mine and twined her fingers through my hands.
My abuelita appeared next and set right to work in my stomach. She threatened me when I tried to feed myself, even as she complained about her aching feet. At ten, I choked on the cinnamon sticks in her mushy oatmeal. I ignored her scowls, eating around the raisins in her arroz con leche and dipping her crispy champuradas in milk. For special occasions, she made horchata, its ground rice sinking like sand to the ocean floor.
When I turned thirteen, and my friends began to bleed, she kneaded masa and pressed tortillas in my stomach to help me feel included. At sixteen, she demanded more salt and lard for cooking, my stomach always hungry. She was a force to keep up with, the number of olives topping the tamales changing by the year depending on her mood. Beans simmered endlessly, waiting to be paired with a healthy serving of queso fresco or cotija, washed down by sweet guava or tangy drinks. For years she fed me—with food and cautionary tales—while the other women stayed quiet.
When I was intimate for the first time, the spirit of Mama Berta screamed. She mourned a youth she thought stolen from me, blind to how that loss was a theft of her own making. She dared me to open my mouth and let her escape, but I kept her locked within, as was my duty. I cried the next day, though it wasn’t my own pain that I felt. Mama Berta called me sinful, shaking her head and filling my mind with whispers of lost virtue. She joined my abuelita in my stomach, but they did not embrace. They squabbled instead, over oils and crusts and butters.
At twenty, my mother released my hands and sank into my feet, speeding my pace and pushing me onward. I woke groaning, my feet awake before the birds, moving throughout the house. Jeans appeared in the oven, a hairbrush in the microwave, cosmetics in the fridge. I could not touch a pan without feeling the sting of a wooden spoon against my hand. In my stomach, Mama Berta chopped onions that stung my eyes while my mother dragged me outside—to trails, my ankles splashing through streams, my fingers grabbing shiny rocks like I was a raven nesting. She took me someplace new every day, letting me drive to Sears and play kitchen with the stainless steel stovetops, slamming doors in Home Depot to play house. She showed me the world the best she could, trying, in her way, to take care of me.
As I aged, my pace slowed. My mother traveled up to my knees, kneeling often in the garden and, to my frustration, in church. I wanted to shake the women, busy at the stove of my stomach, and tell them to let me breathe, but they only chattered amongst themselves.
We knew, all of us, that there was no life for me outside of this. That the pain of meeting a man would be too much, the questions too loud. These women were my burden.
When I reached the age my mother had been when she died, she joined the others in my stomach. The other women made room for her as she made buttered tortillas and cinnamon toast on the stove. They let her dye the milk green on St. Patrick’s Day, feed me chocolate on Easter, and make garlic bread on Thanksgiving. She sat with the women on December 23rd, laughing, topping the tamales with capers and red peppers before wrapping them in banana leaves and steaming them. It’s the closest I ever felt to them.
I’m close now to leaving this place. I dream of the four of us beneath a pomegranate tree, its fruit splitting open as it hits the ground, seeds spilling across the earth. I wonder what will happen to us all when I go. Perhaps we will grow into the soil, our branches tangling with one another as if to hold in an embrace, and we will, at last, breathe into the safety of each other’s touch.
About the Author:
Hannah Lavin is a biracial Guatemalan American writer based in California. She holds a B.S. in Marine Science from California Polytechnic State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Oregon University. Her work has previously been featured in The Acentos Review.