Bessie Flores Zaldívar
big mouth
Temporada de Fuego
There’s a story about her face I can’t forget. It’s about the small and shallow line a little below her left eye. With enough time, it will seem like a wrinkle more than a scar.
“What happened?” I asked her, one of those afternoons during fire season we spent at the lake making rocks bounce in the water, letting the sun burn our faces, lying to everyone else about where we were.
“My brother stabbed me with a fork,” she said.
“In the face?!”
“Right in the face.”
“Why?”
“I ate one of his pancakes. He was six, I was four,” she said, shrugging, raising both eyebrows with her whole body. She had just splashed water on her face. Drops of sweat combined with fresh water were making their way down her neck, below her ears, under her chin. Two or three of them would merge into a bigger drop, sliding faster on her skin. It reminded me of driving home in the rain as a child, pressing my face against the cold window, believing the moon was following my family to our house. There is something in that—pitting rain drops against each other, believing the moon has a special interest in you—that returned to me when I was with her near the volcano. Something almost primal, like stabbing your sibling in the face with a fork over a minor inconvenience.
If I think I might forget any of it, like the small scar under her left eye, or if she really does sneeze like five times every single day, I go to the volcano.
I’ve never had a single nightmare about it, unlike 90% of the population. My mom does almost every month. The details around it change, like which of her children she can’t get a hold of or which of the dogs she sees burn first, the smell of scorched fur impregnated in her nose even after she wakes up. But the premise is the same—the volcano finally erupts, and as predicted by scientists for hundreds of years, it kills over half of the city.
The nightmares get worse and more frequent during fire season, of course. It is known that the human brain is capable of integrating water into dreams—meaning, if you splash a few drops on someone sleeping, the chances it rains in their dream increase. I don’t know if any studies have been done about fire, but one needs to just talk to anyone in this city to see it.
From the months of March to August, the city, the mountain, all of it burns. Some say its people doing it on purpose—pyromaniacs. Others say it’s all the glass beer and soda bottles not disposed of, left in the mountain. Combine that with dry grass and our sun, of course there are fires. But most are certain it’s just the volcano setting fires everywhere, as if this is how it makes up for not killing us all in a single eruption. Instead of a single crater at the peak, they say, the mountain is covered with secret fire releasing holes all over like the suckers in an octopus’s tentacle.
It doesn’t matter what’s causing the fires. For months we go to sleep every other week with wet clothes pressed to our mouths. When it gets really bad, I vomit as soon as I wake up. The greasy, lumpy black pudding glob in the toilet takes multiple flushes to disappear.
In grade school, we learned it was between the years 535 and 536 that it first happened, the big eruption. And then again every hundred years or so, but never to the same degree. To this day, the first time is still considered the most catastrophic volcanic disaster to ever take place in the planet’s history. And yet our people went ahead and built the capital city of the country around it. As if saying: let us burn when the mountain decides it’s time. Let us burn every time the mountain deems it just.
During junior year, I heard one of our teachers say that fire is the ultimate way to ensure power is balanced. I’m unsure about how this relates to this very poor city planning decision, but it does. It does.
“Any day now,” the girl with the scar under her eye would say. “Every hundred years and we’re already a few overdue.” I didn’t believe her when, the first time we sat down to listen to each other talk without glancing at our phones or trying to keep someone else in the mix, at the very beginning of this year’s fire season, she said, quite clearly, almost as if rehearsed. “The volcano keeps me in the city. I’ve tried leaving, to live with my dad in Santa Ana or for a year abroad. The volcano finds a way to stop me. I’m tied to it, it’s tied to me.”
It seemed like the sort of thing she had heard someone else say, or copied from a version in some book. It was the same night that she told me it is true, almost everyone in the city reports having had at least one nightmare about it in their life time. And yes, still almost everyone has bathed in the lake—yes, that same lake at the peak of the volcano where if you stayed long enough, you felt the warm currents underneath. She had learned these things from her mom, a foreign archeologist who had been living in the country for over 25 years, conducting research on volcanological communities. And so, we went to the lake right there and then, in an alcohol-induced impulse, in a the night is beautiful and we’re here compulsion. We were already close by, in one of those restaurants on the way up where every item in the menu has the word volcán or erupción or lava in it. Her mom would pick us back up at the restaurant in two hours. Two hours seem like forever when we were not familiar with each other’s birthmarks and life marks.
There weren’t many people there. Most kept their distance and seemed a little drunk like us, breaking into sudden outburst of laughter and then shushing themselves up. She took off her clothes in such a swift motion it made me pause. I thought I had heard a saying once about people who undress quickly, but I couldn’t remember it, at least not clearly enough to recite it back. I followed her, slowly, folding my clothes in a neat pile.
We never found her left sock. I have often daydreamed about coming across it all this time later. I see myself walking by the shore, maybe with someone else, drinking a fresh drink—an horchata or tangerine-lime juice—her a forgotten speck, a dust mote falling in a sunbeam, indistinguishable from many other events of my life, and then there’s her sock, dirty, ripped, between wrappers and bottles. I say to myself, could it be? I look at it for a second. No way. And move on, go back to whatever funny thing the girl—I’ve decided it’s a girl—next to me says. I forget about it. Never even bring it up. But that’s not how it goes. I’m always keeping an eye out for her sock. I always might. She is tied to the volcano and I’m tied to her. This almost sounds like one of those syllogisms, but it isn’t. Nothing about it makes sense. Like building a city around the most dangerous volcano on earth.
Such her tethering to the volcano, that the night we both welcomed the other’s body inside our own—a first for her—as she bled, I half expected the thin red beads between her legs to turn into lava rocks, to burn like volcanic ash. But they didn’t. Afterwards, her hand rested on the small red spot of her blood that remained on my white sheets. Her fingers seemed so long then, like mango tree leaves. She traced the outline of her blood over and over, until finally saying, “kind of has the shape of the lake.” I thought of all the times they would make us trace the political map of the country on onion paper in school, painting the lake in blue, labeling it the volcano’s: El Boquerón, the big mouth. “Make sure to wash this with warm water, soon,” she added, turning on her stomach and falling asleep.
Q: What is sex between two women in this country, in this city, in this mountain?
I haven’t been messing up my tenses. She does have a small scar under her left eye and sneezes many times a day, that’s present tense. She was tethered to El Boquerón. Was. She was able to leave it, after all. Not even a month later and there has been a small volcanic earthquake, no deaths nor damage to property. Of course I think it’s his way of begging her to come back.
She always said I have a tendency of making everything a competition, but I swear that last Tuesday—as my bed and the frames on my walls shook— I heard the volcano say, very clearly, I’m hurting like this. I miss her more. I’ve known her longer.
A. Better than volcanic-rich mineral soil.
Her mom tells a mutual friend from school’s mom, who tells my mom, that she has begun classes. That there’s a blond, tall boy who is always there when she calls her on FaceTime, that if she plays her cards just right, she could score a green card, change her family’s life. I think of so many other ways your family’s life could be changed—like the truth about who you can love.
Q. Is that so?
A.
* * *
Temporada de Lluvia
Mom brings us to our aunt’s house the day before new year. She lives by herself near the southmost point of the lake. It’s the best spot in the mountain with the best view both up and down. Up: the canopies of pines and oaks so dense and near each other they become indistinguishable to the untrained eye, a mass of alive greens. Down: the city, thousands of blinking eyes of light, some in place and some in motion. When I stand outside as quiet as possible, I can hear noises from both worlds. Through one ear—chirping, rustling of animal bodies slithering through vegetation, the skeletons of dead leaves breaking under boots. And through the other, gravel displaced by tires of cars, radios playing reggaeton sliced by ads for coffee and milk brands, barking. Here, I believe Big Mouth is actually the mouth of the planet, that we live in its lips, that everything starts and ends here i n this small fragment of Central America.
We’re supposed to be helping our aunt clean before her Año Nuevo dinner, when the rest of the family will come up. I collect the dried clothes hanging on the wire she’s set up, tied from one of the iron bars on her front window to a near-by tree trunk, and put them in a basket. It is rare for her, for anyone, to find a window of time to do this during rain season. During these months, most of us accept we’ll all smell like moist fabric a little.
When we came up here for fire season earlier this year, during Easter, the girl came with us. She helped me take the clothes in, too. We haven’t talked since July, when she boarded a plane for the first time in her life and left for another country. There were a few more small quakes after she left, but the volcano has been silent since early October. I know she’s been back since before Christmas. I wonder if El Boquerón can feel her return or if it has moved on. If her weight on its ground is just another pair of feet, inconsequential, nothing but a transport of dirt and seeds and insect corpses. Maybe the volcano’s octopus arms are asleep during the rainy season and can’t reach for her.
Temporada de Lluvia is deadly in its own way. The city floods, several areas remain submerged in brown water that will sometimes reach our necks. Some blame the poor colonial infrastructure. Others say it’s all the garbage—the chips wrappers and plastic and paper— blocking all the drains. And some think it’s the mountain again. I don’t know how.
The smell of fried yucca coming from a nearby house stirs something in me. I’m about to go inside and ask mom or my aunt to make some, when my brother comes out.
“Want to get out of here?” he says. As he has gotten older, it seems like he’s less and less likely to stay more than a few hours at any of our relative’s houses. His grey shirt is darkened by sweat around his armpits and neck. I can tell mom must’ve asked him for help reaching this, hanging that.
We end up at one of his friend’s girlfriend’s house. She’s having her own new year thing, and the way her eyes roll every time someone knocks or calls her tells me it wasn’t in her plans for the thing to turn bigger than a few people. I remind him too many times during the drive that we do have to come back early, before midnight. For mom. He says yes, yes, yes, okay. I lose him almost as soon as we go in. This is a small city. There are so many people I know already here, I know it’s just a matter of time before.
Q. Before what?
She’s changed in obvious ways—her hair is shorter, her body fuller, her Spanglish more pronounced. For a brief moment I imagine avoiding her altogether. Never learning the nonobvious ways change might’ve happened. The thought is so brief it never stood a chance.
We exchange the pleasantries and questions people who have either too much or too little to say to each other do. At some point someone turned the volume all the way up, so we shout almost every word. Even after we run out of inconsequential questions, we both linger.
“Want. To. Go. Outside?” she yells.
“I have my brother’s car keys,” I say.
“What?”
“I have my brother’s car keys,” I say, louder. She still can’t hear me, so I get them from my pocket.
She nods.
I get in the driver’s side and she in the passenger’s. We sit in silence for a minute or ten. I think of breaking the silence with so many remember when. I don’t.
Something inside makes me reach for the buckle of her seatbelt. I’ve never said this to anyone, but I map the changing of the seasons with it, especially if the car is left outside all day. At the peak of fire season, to touch it is like putting my hand in a searing pan of oil. The cooler I begin to find it as days go by, the closer we are to Temporada de Lluvia. Tonight, it’s cold, almost unbearably so. I reach for it and move it across the line of skin exposed between her jeans waistband and shirt. She hums.
“Your scar is under the wrong eye.”
“Huh?”
“Your scar. The one from when your brother stabbed you. It’s under the wrong eye. It should be the left one, right?”
“Uh, no. No,” she says, and it dawns on me how weird this is all coming out. “It’s always been under my right eye.”
“Oh,” I say. I don’t want to keep at it but I’m still so bothered. “Are you sure, though?”
“Uhm. I’m sure. It’s not like you can move scars.”
“Right, right,” I say, with a half-laugh, shaking my head. “I’m just, yeah. You know,” I point to the cup in my hand, full of seltzer water and nothing else. “I’ve drunk too much midnight.” She smiles and laughs a little too, “same.”
I lean in and trace the line of healed skin under her eye with my finger. It reminds me of the lake she traced all those months ago. Of everything I won’t remember accurately when the seasons change again. From the ground comes a deep hum, a noise I can only describe as dirty, dirt-ish, dirtful. I stop moving my fingers to see if she can hear it too. “It’s the music from the party,” she says, “or an animal.” I think it’s the mountain, but I don’t say it. I think it’s time. I lean into big mouth.
Bessie Flores Zaldívar is a queer writer from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Virginia Tech and a Tin House YA’21 alumni. Her work has appeared in CRAFT, PANK, F(r)iction, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been selected for Best of the Net 2020 and her poetry has received nominations for Best New Poets. Bessie’s fiction chapbook, Rain Revolutions, is now out with Long Day Press. Twitter: bessieflores website: bessiefzaldivar.org