Little Tail of the Frog

by

Ami knew his twelfth summer would be his last as a child. One by one his school friends returned to class with new, restrained personalities. Angry whiteheads spattered on their cheeks and chins. He saw their vacant looks when holding once-beloved toys. Unlike him, they could no longer animate the world with their imaginations so that everything glittered with the possibility of a secret life.

First it was Yesenia, who began preferring her lunches with Maureen and Anna in the cafeteria. They used to turn alder cones to bumble bees with cellophane, scraps of her abuela’s yarn, and make-belief. This was after she informed him, in scurrying pen on folded notebook paper, that she’d bled for the first time Saturday, so her mother was taking her to town after school for ice cream and cotton pads.

Ami had nodded with solemn understanding. He came from a home of women with supersized personalities, and even if his mother—or la jefa, as his father deferred to her with brown butter smiles—hid her cycle with the composure of a cat, his eldest sister Marina spoke of it freely, taking creative liberties with its supposed frequency to argue her dominion over the television remote, the bathroom, and the salty bits at the bottom of the potato chip bag.

Then it was Ben. Ami and Ben once played fox and hound in the woods around Ami’s home, as deep as where a stand of andesite boulders marked the edge of their property. But Ben became self-conscious running on all fours, especially when Marina watched them from the porch with her possum eyes and long, black hair. Soon they were relegated to sitting silently on the floor in Ami’s room, once the mudroom but recommissioned long ago so his abuelo could live down the hall, Ami stacking Pokémon cards in brittle polyhedrons as Ben thumbed through the newest Incredible Hulk comic Ami had checked out from the library.

“You’re so lucky.” Ben indicated the back door opposite Ami’s bed. “My parents would never.” Ami glanced toward the door himself, which, until then, he’d regarded as no different than the wall.

Maturity approached like a dark front of inclement weather. Ami plucked the first black hairs he found at the top of his pajarito with the same tweezers Marina used on her eyebrows. He watched them disappear in the gyre of the toilet with a sort of vacant disbelief. Everything was ending in a glut of first times, and he sought solace squeezed between his mother and father in their bed, where he remained his mother’s tesorito, and his father’s heavy arm across his shoulders reminded him he was still small.

*

When Ami Martinez drew his family tree in third grade, he wanted to draw it like the sweeping red cedar where he built lean-to forts, but his teacher had handed him a worksheet with the tree prescripted: an apple tree where each fruit was a different family member, equal in size, shape, and intended color.

Seeing her son was disappointed, Sofía, who’d grown up in Yakima, sat beside him at the kitchen table, “Even if it’s not the tree you wanted, there’s lots of different apples,” she spread the crayons in front of him, “Let’s say I’m a Braeburn—that’s red and green. Papá is a red delicious—that’s red and maybe a little purple, too. You could be an ambrosia, so yellow and orange.”

Ami giggled. “What about Marina and Abuelo?”

Sofía leaned back in her seat, thinking, “Those two?” Her face acquired the mischief her husband loved, “Granny Smiths!”

At school, his tree was more colorful than anyone else’s, who’d filled all their apples in with crimson.

*

If it was to be his last real summer, Ami vowed he’d make the most of it. He was at an age where he still looked upward for adventure; how high could he explore, jump, or climb?

It was Ami’s abuelo who found him in the tree at dusk. Ami had been too ashamed to answer when he heard his mother and father call his name with mounting sharpness past dinnertime. Don Pascual had coarse, burnished skin spattered in solar comedones like flecks of hot cinnamon. Hooded eyes that winked light. When he was angry or when he laughed his whole body shook.

“¿Te quedaste atrapado, Ranito?” The old man called up the tree, but offered no assistance. You stuck, Boy Frog?

Ami was too afraid to look down.

He remembered the expression on Don Pascual’s face when he’d been discovered feeding fairies, las hadas, in the kitchen at six years old. Pinches of bread from the pith of the loaf with smears of raspberry jam. And out las hadas came, from the crack where the weathered linoleum crazed like porcelain, without wings but nonetheless politely queued, pausing to murmur their graces at the edge of his banquet before tucking in.

“¿Qué demonios haces?” Abuelo’s voice like the crack of a palm. What the hell are you doing?

“Fairies, Abuelo! It’s a tea party for the fairies!”

“¿Hadas? ¡Esas son hormigas! Escuincle mugroso.” White spit gathered in the creases along the burl of Don Pascual’s mouth, “What’s the matter with you? What sort of idiot feeds pests?”

He bent beneath the sink and withdrew a bottle of Pine-Sol. “Límpialo, muchacho.” Clean it up, boy.

Ami was forced to spray the fairies down with cleaning fluid, betraying their good meal and their trust in him. The fantasy fizzled out, and their bodies shriveled back into sugar ants.

Now Ami clung to the tree. He heard the heavy steps of his abuelo moving away stiffly and began to cry. The sun slipped beneath the shoulders of the hillside and night crawled closer. Frogs rehearsed their midnight songs at the creek. Eventually, flashlight beams bobbed nearby.

“Ami? Ami?” It was Marina, now, sounding worried. Marina! Worried about him? Just this morning she’d driven him from her bedroom like a brush fire.

She found him by his whimpering.

Sofía had some choice words for her father-in-law, who retreated into his room, but it was Ami’s father who sat beside his trembling son in bed, stroking his hair as he hummed brightly: sana sana colita de rana, si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. Ami refused to be cheered up.

“Your abuelo, Ami—” Pascual hovered over the words like a hand selecting fruit, “—your abuelo is a hard man, but he’s been through a lot. You must forgive him, mijo. He’s doing his best.”

Ami flipped to his side and covered his face with his hands.

“No! I won’t forgive him! He left me there! I hate him!” Ami yelled as loudly as he had the courage.

Sofía looked in from the door, but Pascual waved her away. He studied the homely geometry of the coverlet that warmed his youngest’s bed. Pulled vacantly on a loose thread, behind which batting puckered.

“It’s all right to be angry, Ami. Don’t confuse forgiveness for not letting yourself be upset.” He sighed, “When your abuelo was just a little older than Marina, he was already out in the world. Life was hard on him. He thinks when he’s hard, it prepares you. But you know he loves you. If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t—”

“I don’t care,” Ami growled, tasting the brine of his angry tears and thinking how hungry he was.

He was familiar with the lore of his abuelo. The scrimping and saving for the family land. More scrimping and saving so Sofía and Pascual could afford the manufactured home they’d seen on some big asphalt lot in far-off Salem. What did it say about someone that their best quality was their ability to pinch pennies?

“Okay, Ranito, okay,” his father rubbed his back, “If you change your mind and decide to care someday, maybe ask your abuelo to share his stories with you. It’s hard to hate people when you understand them better. Te quiero mucho, mijo. Don’t stay up too late.”

His father kissed the temple of Ami’s head, and his lips left a star of warmth that glowed there long after he’d risen from the bed and closed the door.

*

Ami hunched to conceal his growth spurts, but there were times he forgot and faced the consequences like the first dahlia to bloom in his mother’s garden.

“Ami! You’re taller!” Sofía’s eyes widened when her son dragged into the kitchen, still wiping dreams from his eyes.

“No, I’m not!” He stared down at himself.

In the living room, Don Pascual whetted his hatred for Cruz Azul in front of the thick television, rubbing the same spot he always did on the brim of his Club Puebla cap, long eroded to the plastic underlay. From behind, there was a fold on the back of his bald head that looked to Ami like a grumpy frown.

“Yes, you are!” Sofía crossed the room to stand beside him, holding him fast by the hand when he attempted to squirm away, “What do you think, Ranita?”

Marina, who scoured the internet for a summer job, ignored her mother until Sofía repeated the question without her childhood nickname. She looked up from her laptop and surmised the landscape of her younger brother’s distress. Her eyes narrowed.

“He’s huge, Mom.” She closed her laptop, smirking. “I think he’s taller thanyou!”

Ami’s cheeks flamed. “No, I’m not! I’m the same size I was yesterday!”

“Mom, is that stubble?” Marina snickered, and Ami opened his mouth to refute her. Don Pascual told Sofía and Marina to leave Ami alone. “Ven a ver el juego conmigo, muchacho,” he waved his hand at Ami to join him and patted around for the remote.

“Ah, suegro. Es solo una broma,” Sofía called back at her father-in-law, then turned to her son. “Sweetie, it’s okay! You’re just turning into a man.” She kissed him. “When we get back from town, I’ll get your new height on the door. Come help me with breakfast.”

Ami glanced at his abuelo, who was always trying to get him interested in soccer. A little guiltily, he chose to join his mother at her scarred cutting board. Ami stared at the door frame of the utility closet where rising dashes and their corresponding dates counted down the end of his childhood.

He would run away, he thought, and feed himself with what he foraged from the woods around his home. Drink boiled water from the creek filtered through the veins of last year’s autumn leaves.

Or maybe he’d climb to the top of the tallest tree and jump off. Fly across the clouds to the ocean where he’d swim like a frog to the very bottom. Where the creatures made their own meager light from lanterns on their heads that glowed blue like mosquito zappers. Where the depth and the cold and his aloneness would preserve him so that everything would remain as it was forever.

*

After the excitement of the school year’s end, the summer days drizzled indolently like water from a swimsuit hung to dry. Ben answered his calls but gave courteous excuses; Yesenia’s phone just rang and rang until Ami hung up, dejected. Their rejection tingled like a lingering rash of stinging nettle, and Ami plumbed the woods for banana slugs and fresh bracken fronds, scouring the hem of the forest where it met the road that traced his family’s land.

It hadn’t rained since the beginning of June, and the creek was reduced to a paltry ribbon. The frogs—buried in the mud—were now outsung by the crickets, who belted campfire songs and erupted like sparks from the path Ami cut through the meadow. Their small house had no air conditioning, so Sofía pulled the blinds and plunged the home into perpetual darkness. She fixed wet towels to the backsides of box fans. Still, they sweated, and Ami gave his abuelo, who hated the stuffy Oregon heat, an even wider berth.

Marina was gone most days with her friends, who parked their cars, on her instruction, at the very bottom of the drive so they couldn’t be seen from the house. She’d rush down to them, these friends with interchangeable names, a tapestry shoulder bag bouncing against her hip, and disappear with the crack of a car door and a salute of parched dust.

In the shade, Ami pretended he was marooned. He peeled sheets of moss from boulders to watch roly-polies scatter like black beans. Against his jeans he wiped grit from licorice root, chewed it, and spit out the bitter pulp. He noticed himself being a little bored and strained his imagination. Decided ultimately he was a little too hungry and a little too warm to play pretend.

Thinking of the paletas his mother had made earlier that were now certainly frozen, Ami picked ragwort in handfuls and retreated home. He heard yelling from outside, Marina’s defiant voice strung above the others. By the time he’d removed his sandals in the entry, her door had slammed shut. Sofía emerged from the hall, stressed and gray-faced, running her hands through her hair.

“Ami!” She brought a palm to her chest, startled by him, “I didn’t hear you. Are those for me? Aww, my sweet Ami. Give them to me before they dry out. I’ll get them in some water.”

She collected the stems of wildflowers and retreated into the kitchen where she’d put them in the porcelain vase passed down to her by her mother. As Ami followed her, Don Pascual, with a wet rag wrapped around his neck, leaned over.

“Ey, tu hermana es una tortillera, Ranito.” His eyes glittered with good gossip. Your sister’s a dyke, Boy Frog.

On the television, footage of Hell burned furiously.

The next morning, Marina emerged from her room, chin lifted proudly, expression goading. Her hair was shaved down to the skin. Ami’s mouth fell open.

Sofía winced seeing her daughter but forced a smile, “It will grow in, Marina. Until then, I’ll get used to it. There are scarves and hats and—you don’t look so bad.”

Don Pascual laughed raucously, “¡No la mientas, Sofía! The girl looks like my balls!”

“Papá!” Ami’s father looked up from where he was bent over at the kitchen table, still in the clothes he’d worn to his night shift, heavy work boots kicked off at his feet. He smelt powerfully of sweat and paving tar.

Don Pascual ignored his son and turned back to the screen. The sky was stained red in San Francisco, where California burned.

“Me vale madres.” The old man redirected his feeling with a wave to the television. “Todo se está yendo a la mierda. No me importa.” Everything is going to shit. Hair didn’t place high on his list of concerns.

Ami’s father rose like a zombie and stumbled to the bathroom where he’d wash off the new highway before falling into bed.

*

“Look, it’s not my fault we live in the middle of nowhere.” Marina had wrapped a bandana around her head to appease her mother, whose gaze would otherwise linger on her daughter’s shorn scalp.

“We’re not saying no,” Pascual diffused her, adjusting his hi-vis vest. “We just need to think about it…”

“If we can’t afford it, just say we can’t afford it, Dad.”

“It isn’t just the car.” Sofía leaned forward. “It’s insurance, it’s—”

“Well, if I had a job, I could help pay for all that,” Marina reasoned. She was unusually calm, hands steepled on the kitchen table around which they all sat. “But I need a car to get a job.”

Ami had noticed a recent change in his sister. The other night, for no apparent reason, she’d pulled up her pant leg and showed Ami the place where she’d pressed her pen until the ink left a permanent dot of black. ‘It’ll last forever,’ she’d whispered, smiling, evoking to her younger brother a forest of worldly experiences.

Ami’s father looked at his wife, “Well, jefa, what do you think?”

Sofía stared at her mug of tea and sighed heavily. Seeing her youngest edge toward the door, she called, “Don’t even think about it, Ami! Remember the advisory?”

Ami, clasping the doorknob, sank despondently to the floor, feeling like a prisoner. Pascual consulted the clock on the oven and wiped his eyes. “Speaking of leaving—” When he bent to kiss his wife goodbye, Ami feigned disgust and dove onto the sofa.

Secretly, though, he was comforted by his parents’ steady affection.

*

Ami woke with a swollen tongue and a heavy chest. He tasted the char in the air and sat up. Marina had tripped on a stack of comics at the end of his bed and caught herself along the metal frame.

“Rani—Marina? What time is it?”

“Shh!” she hissed, glancing towards the hallway, then in the direction of the back door. “It’s really late, okay? Everyone’s asleep. I have friends waiting outside for me.”

Ami blinked, uncomprehending, “Does Mom know?”

“No, Mom doesn’t know, okay?” She paused, examining him, “Are you going to tell her?”

Ami looked at his lap sheepishly. She huffed, considering her options.

“Fine, then come with.” Marina bent over and tossed her younger brother’s discarded socks into his lap, “You can’t tell on me if you come too, okay? Then we’re both in trouble.”

A trickle of thrill traveled the length of Ami’s back, and he eagerly pulled on his socks and a pair of wadded jeans. Marina leaned beside the door, her leg bouncing impatiently.

“Why are you so slow?”

When Ami stood, dressed, she shoved a zip-up fleece into his arms.

“I’ll never hear the end of it if you catch a cold,” she explained, and opened the door slowly so as to avoid it squealing.

The smoke scratched at Ami’s throat. Through the trees he saw the hot color of the horizon. There was no moon, only a smudge of milk in the cacao sky. Marina’s hand found his, and she pulled him across the empty space where their father parked his truck during the day, down the driveway toward the road where Ami could make out headlights piercing lucent arrows in the dark.

Marina rapped the window with her knuckles.

“What took you so long, Mari?” someone whispered. “We were gonna leave.”

“Who’s that?”

Marina shepherded Ami in front of her then squeezed herself alongside him, shutting the door behind them both.

“This is my brother, Ami. Ami, this is everyone.”

Ami looked around. Four narrow faces peered at him, two to his left and two in the front.

All girls of his sister’s age or slightly older, noses glittering with daring piercings, eyes accentuated by sharp angles of black pencil. Realizing he could be ignored, they calibrated themselves to his unexpected company and lost interest, growing reabsorbed in the music someone piped through a tangled aux cord, quibbling over the directions to their unknown destination.

The world whizzed past, distorted by the smoke. The road became the freeway, and when the car slowed precipitously, Ami stared across his sister toward the neon bodies of a work crew laboring beside and then behind him.

“Do you think that was Dad?” he asked Marina, and was ignored. She was angled forward, her arm fed through the gap between the seat in front of her and the door, hand resting on the shoulder of the girl who sat there.

Out the back window, he stared until the men were swallowed by the distance.

The car climbed a hill in tight switchbacks that rocked everyone in the back seat into one another. Beyond the lurching nose of the sedan, Ami watched the sky redden. Once parked, the girls climbed from the car, giggling and murmuring amongst themselves. With their arms slung about each other’s shoulders, they faded into the thick woods.

“Don’t be a wuss,” Marina waved to Ami, who lingered beside the car.

Reluctantly, he followed her into the brush. At first it all was dark, but light bled through where the firs thinned, and he began making sense of the panorama before him: the other side of the mountain, ablaze. The girls had settled themselves on rocks along the cliff, arms wrapped around their exposed knees. Each seeing the wildfire as a private augury, skin warm and tickling. The burning forest before them whistled and crackled, the largest sound Ami had ever heard.

Frightened, Ami looked to his sister and saw that she was pressed closely to her friend, the one who’d sat in front of her on their way. The girl had wound her arm through Marina’s, whose fingers caressed the indent where the girl’s waist met her hip, like two fruits growing off the same spear of branch.

How simply they took comfort in one another’s closeness. He’d never say a thing.

*

The way to town was down the hill, and Pascual’s truck made easy work of the road.

Even if the sky still drooped with ash, the weekend buzzed with possibilities. Ami sat behind his father, who drove. Abuelo reclined in the front passenger seat. With her legs cramped by Don Pascual’s chair, Marina looked out her window, tapping SOS codes into the door.

Ami’s father addressed his children.

“So,” he mused, as though the plan were not sanctioned by Sofía, who was at home on the phone with their insurance company, “I was talking to Carl. He’s got an old car his great-aunt can’t use anymore. Marina, what do you say we take a look at it?”

Marina’s face adjusted to the news, and then she was bouncing up and down and grinning, thanking her father.

“That means Ami—” Pascual looked at his son through the rearview mirror, “Ami, you’re going to hang out with your abuelo for a bit in town. We don’t know how long we’re going to be.”

Ami’s good mood capsized. He hadn’t seen his father in weeks without a caul of dust and exhaustion on his face, a five-minute’s collapse at the dining table from disappearing to bed.

“No!” He yelled, “No! I want to go with you!”

“Ami, be serious. You’ll be bored to death.”

Ami kicked the backside of his father’s seat. “I don’t want to be with Abuelo! I want to go with you!”

Pascual’s voice rose. His arm darted around the seat to secure Ami’s flailing feet. “Cut that out right now, Ami. You’re too big for this.”

Marina scowled at him. “Do you realize how rude you’re being? Abuelo’s right there—”

“Tú te calmas o yo te calmo, niño,” Don Pascual growled, eyes like fire. You calm down or I’ll calm you down.

“You’re not helping, Papá…”

They drove the rest of the way in silence. The day that before had swelled with happiness now drooped like an airless balloon. When Pascual pulled away, leaving Ami with his abuelo on the sidewalk, Ami watched the truck shrink smaller and smaller until it disappeared.

*

Don Pascual registered his grandson’s deflated chest, the subtle tremble of his bottom lip. He was frugal with his warmth—if you water too much, the weeds will take advantage—but was compelled to make things up to Ami. He was the first to admit that he’d always bounced off his grandson’s temperament. While he could readily recognize himself in Marina’s bombastic temper, her unpredictable choreography of secrecy and disclosure, Ami’s expressiveness perplexed the old man like an indecipherable code.

“¿Helado?” he offered his grandson brusquely, who sniffed wetly but nodded.

They walked at a formal distance to the ice cream shop down the street.

The store conferred their arrival with tinkling bells dangling from the door handle. Ami straightened, and Don Pascual followed him to the counter, his Club Puebla hat balled between his thick fingers.

“Know what you want?” The girl behind the counter was only a couple of years older than Marina. She leaned across the glass with languorous grace.

Ami considered the containers of ice cream. Besides the regular flavors, there were tens of new ones. Strawberry and basil. Chocolate and praline. A white one with flecks that claimed to be horchata.

“What flavor is this?” His abuelo pointed to a bucket called Mudslide.

“Sorry?” the woman blushed, leaning forward. “I don’t—”

“What flavor is this one?” He tapped a finger against the glass, and Ami winced.

“Yeah, I didn’t catch that—” The girl’s placid smile flickered like static. Her expression acquired a hint of exasperation.

Ami intervened to ask the girl for a sample, and she obliged, using a spoon to extract a dark rosette. Ami handed it to his abuelo, who buried the ice cream beneath the frown of his mustache and shrugged ambivalently.

“Mudslide? Pinches gringos…” he muttered, then said louder to Ami, “Es sólo chocolate. Dame el chocolate.”

Ami nodded and ordered for his abuelo, who plodded to a table and pulled napkins from the dispenser, dabbing at his mouth.

When the woman handed over the cones, Ami paid from Don Pascual’s wallet. He laid out the dollars as if each crumpled rectangle were a crisp invitation he returned to the register. The sounds of other diners in the shop lilted, all nasal and tang.

The two sat on bistro chairs on the sidewalk. The metal seats were hot, and the sky was scummy with smoke. They attended to their ice cream in silence, and Ami thought about what his father had suggested regarding his abuelo.

“Abuelo,” he asked, when his cone was bitten down to a nub, “What was it like when you worked in the mountains?”

Don Pascual furrowed his silvering brows.

“¿Cuando plantaba árboles?” He sighed and looked around, leaning backwards in his chair, “It was hell, Boy Frog. I almost died.”

Don Pascual finished his ice cream slowly, making no effort to hurry, though Ami wiggled impatiently in his seat. Ami’s fingers were sticky, and he wiped them against the underside of his chair. At last his abuelo spoke.

“For every tree, there’s a friend I remember,” Don Pascual continued, “but all of them have left now. My memory of that time is not so good. There are things I forgot that they used to remember for me.”

“You said you almost died?” Ami leaned forward, solicitous.

Don Pascual laughed humorlessly. “We all died, my grandson, many times, in different ways. But we were indocumentado, so it didn’t matter. If a bracero dies in the woods, and no gringos are around to see it, who can say he was ever in America, eh?”

Ami watched his abuelo’s face, which seemed to ebb, as if a part of him seeped elsewhere.

Don Pascual still remembered the rote motion of the hoedad, the burden of green saplings on his back as he trudged up the hill with miles yet to go. The drab gray of the clearcuts and then the faceless white when they cleared the snowline.

Ami tried to imagine it for himself. What would it have been like to sleep in a camp thrown up in the last sunlight of a fifteen-hour day?

Don Pascual was very quiet. Things moved beneath his capacious eyes, a water Ami knew better than to disturb. When Ami reached to hold his abuelo’s hand, he mimicked the expression his mother used when she comforted tearful friends at their kitchen table.

Don Pascual was incapacitated with the past. Someday he’d tell his grandson about his final contract with a forest crew. When the sky went paler with soot than it looked even now. Ash—like falling snow. He’d heard Saint Helens blew. Twenty-three braceros lost up there, gone without a trace—at least that’s what the other men whispered. Don Pascual, then in his early thirties, with a son bearing his name at home, had privately vowed that the slope he planted would be his last.

A car whizzed by them, disrupting the hot air, and the old man blinked. He squeezed his grandson’s hand and pulled away, but then reached over to tug Ami’s ear affectionately.

“Ay, Ranito. Planté toda la hoguera y ahora se prendió,” he murmured, leaning back in the bistro chair. Watching where the smoke still billowed in the mountains. Ay, Boy Frog. I planted the whole bonfire and now it’s been lit.

*

When Marina and Pascual arrived to pick them up, Marina was gabby and happy.

“The steering wheel has fur,” she whispered to Ami, having conceded the front seat to Don Pascual, whom she could see was now nodding off in the oval of the side mirror.

“We still have to talk to your mom, okay, Ranita?” their father reminded her, but she only laughed, in too good a mood to dispute the invocation of her pet name.

To Marina, the particular car didn’t matter. Life was a road she ached to merge onto, a flume of black asphalt stretching straight and unyielding. If the car was ugly, squat, or unfashionably colored, what counted was that it had wheels that turned, wheels that would get her out there and far away, away, away.

*

At home, Sofía pulled Pascual into the bedroom, gripping the steno pad where she’d jotted the main notes of her call. He looked them over and rubbed the inked notes with a finger like it would change things.

“They brought it up when I called about Marina,” she whispered, “We were meant to renew next month—”

“How’s this possible?”

She shook her head helplessly in reply. “They say everyone’s doing this now. Or they’re dropping people.”

“Who can afford this? What are people supposed to do?”

Sofía moistened her dry lips. She’d spent the day imprisoned by the phone on her shoulder, pacing the length of the garden with the kinked hose. The colorful blossoms bobbed their lion heads, by turns in accusation and then commiseration.

“It’s the fires, Pascual. They’re doing the same thing in Florida. Because of the hurricanes.”

“…But what do they expect us to do?” Pascual searched his wife’s eyes. She was his fulcrum—what happened when she was handed an armful she couldn’t balance? “Are people just supposed to sell?”

Sofía whispered the worst to him. “Who’d buy it from us, Pascual? Who’d buy this tinderbox? Even if we sold it, it’s the land that was worth anything. What’s it worth now?”

Her words fibrillated in the warm room. Motes of thought revolving like unsettled dust, an equation that seemed impossible and wrong. Nothing. Nothing.

What inhuman algebra reduced everything to nothing, just like that?

*

“Where’d she go?”

Marina had fled the house on foot after being summoned into their parent’s bedroom and emerged dazed. Before Ami could realize what was happening, she’d disappeared from view into a shimmering band of late-afternoon heat.

“What did you tell her?” The adults ignored him. They huddled in the kitchen where they deliberated in hushed, urgent tones. “¡Díganme!” Tell me!

“Ami!” Sofía snapped, unlike herself, then caught herself and sighed, “This is not something you can help with right now. Be useful, okay? Go out and look for your sister.”

Ami turned to his father, who leaned against the countertop, holding an exhale in his cheeks like breath was a thing he could get around to later.

It was Don Pascual who threw up his hands, exasperated. “¿Por qué no le cuentas lo que pasa?” He pointed emphatically at his grandson, “You coddle him! The boy deserves to live in reality. He isn’t a baby.”

Pascual looked at his father gravely, “Papá, con todo respeto, Sofía and I can still afford for our son to have his childhood.”

The old man scoffed and retreated to his room down the hall.

Ami ran out the front door himself, bare feet tearing across the parched front yard, soles seeking the cool needles of evergreen trees.

*

While Sofía was in labor, Marina waited at home. Restless. Thinking of everything a younger sibling could be. A toady, an interpreter, a swing vote.

Babies’ bones were soft, or so she was informed, which meant they must be held carefully, but which also meant they emerged from their mother’s damp clay still made of clay themselves. What would she make of her younger brother? In her first significant act as a big sister, she’d touched the dome of his forehead with a finger. Felt the peach fuzz of his newborn skin and reveled at his formlessness.

“He’s like a tadpole,” she’d murmured, and so she’d named them both.

*

Ami knew he’d find her at the boulders in the woods. He discarded his shoes where hers were lined at the meeting place of rock and forest floor, and hauled himself upwards. Marina sat with her legs hanging over the side of the boulder, bare heels softly kicking the air.

“Hey, Ranita,” Ami murmured, lowering himself beside her. Hey, Girl Frog.

She attempted a smile, but started crying.

Ami patted her back and watched the open space beneath them. The thick muddle of ferns and understory growth where living creatures skittered anonymously. Why did they never play past the rocks? Oh, it was something their mother had said, now ages ago in kid’s years. But they’d listened.

“Sana sana colita de rana, si no sana hoy, sanará mañana.” As Ami sang, he rocked side to side with the beat, gently bumping Marina’s shoulder with his. He sang in silly voices, trying to make her laugh.

Heal, heal, little tail of the frog. If you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow.

Therhymerepeatedlikeaprayer,upanddownandupanddownlikeaneedleweavinginandoutof fabric, rendering harmony to the tear. Marina dried her tears and rolled her eyes, smiling. Impulsively, she reached for Ami and hugged him tight, planting a kiss on his forehead.

“Ew!” He wiped the spot.

They were quiet for a moment.

“Settle something for me. You see anything in the bark of that tree?” Marina pointed at a thick Douglas fir.

Ami canted his head and squinted, conjuring something from the relief of wood. “I see Abuelo’s face when Cruz Azul wins,” he giggled and mimicked the expression.

“I’m serious, Ami. Look again.”

He indulged her. Tilted his head the other way. “From this angle, it sort of looks like someone laughing. Like, those are the eyes, and that part is the smile. With lots of chins!”

Marina nodded. “Huh,” she murmured.

“That’s a good thing, right?” Ami looked at her, frowning, “Right, Ranita? The tree’s happy.”

Marina chuckled. “No, Ami,” she looked at her younger brother gravely, “Can’t you see? The tree is laughing at us.” She lay so that her bare head was pressed into the boulder. She closed her eyes. “Listen.”

A gust of wind blew mayhemically through the canopy.

“That’s the forest, Ranito,” she turned to him, only one eye open. “The whole forest is laughing at us.”

*

The following weekend, heavy rainfall stained the blackened mountains fireweed pink.

The frogs, interred in the soggy mud of the creek bed, emerged unscathed, same as they’d always been. Ami felt different, somehow, but his differences seemed less important than those he saw around him. Perhaps that’s how growing up occurs? By looking at other people and noticing them change.

Sometimes, for the hell of it, he’d sneak out on his own through the back door in his room. Sit where the water ran clear and quick, so shadowy you’d be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t there, save for the oval of moon. He drank in the sacred purposelessness of these excursions. These slivers of time he kept to himself and shared only with the forest.

There wasn’t a car for Marina, not yet, but a cherry red bicycle with handlebars set high so she could glide proudly on it, wind unsettling the shock of hair she was growing out at her mother’s insistence. A violation of her autonomy, sure, and annoying besides, but those grievances streamed away as she and her bike tore down the road to town in a ceaseless acceleration. She didn’t need to worry about climbing the hill later. Time was finite, but summer was endless.

***

I’d like to thank Marco Olivares Aguilar for their help with this story’s Spanish dialogue. My own Spanish is limited, and they were an invaluable resource to me. 

Author: A.N. Verschuyl was born in the Netherlands and now shares a home with their beloved menagerie of four dogs, a puffer fish named Sea Biscuit, and their long-suffering partner in Washington. They hold an undergraduate degree in American Indian Studies and are making progress on their first novel while juggling a small business.

Judge: Emily Withnall is a writer and editor from New Mexico. She is the recipient of the AWP Kurt Brown Award for nonfiction, the John A. Anson Kittredge Grant, and The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and she has received fellowships from Under the Volcano, Fishtrap Summer Workshop, and The Women’s International Study Center. Emily’s work has been published in Al Jazeera, The Progressive Magazine, High Country News, Tin House, Gay Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, OrionMagazine, Ms. Magazine, Indiana Review, River Teeth, and Fourth River, among other publications. Her work can be read at emilywithnall.com.