By Bessie F. Zaldívar

If your count is right (it is), the world has ended for us three times now. You want to mean something big by us, like all millennials or something. But thanks to all the infographics that keep coming up on your Twitter feed saying who is doing what in all this, you now know you’re not even a millennial but a Gen-Z. You feel weirdly betrayed by this fact. From what you gather, Gen-Z say like a lot in and eat tide pods. You do say “like” a lot. “Us” can only exist within your life frame, 1997-2020, within your reality, within your country, family, etc. Some us are bigger than others and you’re not sure that means anything.

The first time the world ended, you were too young to understand it. It rained for days. You slept with your 19-year-old mother and 1-year-old brother and many other families in a church, on the floor, wrapped tightly with grown-up’s jackets and sweaters that smelled like sweat and sun. In candle-light, the older women tell stories, scary stories, from their own piece of floor or mattress. You will grow to know these stories and people who have sighted the characters in them, La Sucia and La Llorona and La Lechuza.

Your father and other men had to stay behind, looking after the flooded vacant houses in case los ladrones came in the night to steal, taking advantage of the hurricane. Military helicopters dropped supplies every other day. One of them crashed down. The mayor of the city was in it. He died. The world was brown and underwater and murky. And then it wasn’t. Ten-thousand people died, faceless, drowned by a hurricane with an English name, Mitch. Killed by something they couldn’t even pronounce or spell. You are glad it wasn’t named Maria or Pedro or Juan. Many more would’ve died if the beast had been namesakes with our cousins, our mothers, ourselves. We wouldn’t have been afraid. But Mitch? Mitch sounds like any gringo motherfucker ready to spit on your face. Spit until you and yours drown.

The second time, on June 28, 2009, you were still too young to understand but old enough to be afraid. You wake up that Sunday and there is no power, where the incessant drone of the old fridge and the voices from your grandmother’s telenovela usually are, there is nothing. Silence. Maybe a rooster or a bird. And then, suddenly, a helicopter, far away. Your mother’s and grandmother’s voices. An explosion, another one, and then a ring. A ring so high-pitched it must have cut all the trees in the mountain you live in half, with the precision of a saw. For weeks, everyone stays home. At first, we use the time to clean the house over and over. To open drawers that we haven’t in years, to throw out shoes and hats older than you. At night, your family, like many others across the country, uses a battery-powered radio to listen out for the name of those that have been killed and, at 9 PM, tune in for Cuentos y Leyendas de Honduras, a 90-minute long radio show in which Jorge Montenegro narrates the stories you heard all those years ago, at night, in a church full of people. There are sound-effects this time, whistles that stand in for wind and thunder for the most dramatic moments.

But this deteriorates quickly. Soon, everyone’s hair starts to look like an old toothbrush. There really isn’t any food or water, but not because people rushed to the stores and took it all. The stores were burnt. The fast-food American-chain restaurants too. When you finally leave your house again, all that remain are the bones of these places. Half of a McDonalds arch, a vandalized Burger King wall, a broken yellow slide from a Wendy’s playground. Vaguely, you understand your country doesn’t have a president anymore and people are being killed and many are missing. Vaguely, you remember throwing up in that same yellow slide once, during a birthday party.

The last time is now, of course. Old enough to understand and be afraid. It reminds you of both last times and it’s also bigger, global. And this time, you tell the stories. La Lechuza, La Llorona, La Sucia. But the people reading this could google those stories if they cared for them, so instead you tell them like this.

Trade these like playing cards, lotería cards, que se yo. It doesn’t matter.

La Llorona, the woman who caught her husband cheating, drowned their two children, and then herself. Denied entry to heaven until finding her sons’ souls, she stalks children near rivers, ready to drown them and steal their souls. She cries for them, for the children souls she lost. “The Weeper”

I’ve had three surgeries. For my age, I don’t know if that’s a lot or very few or what. But what strikes me about these is that, in paper, they were all considered aesthetic surgeries. I’m not not-vain, but this still sounds weird to me. I’ve also paid for them all out-of-pocket, myself. The first was the removal of a dark, somewhat hairy mole. It was the size of a Coca-Cola bottle cap. It rested, unbothered, on the right side of my chin. It was carved out of my face using local anesthesia. Years later, I forget I ever had it, and I also, unconsciously, will rub with my thumb the space where it used to be, up and down, sometimes in slow circles. Hey, I know. Very sexual. By the time other women’s clitorises came around to my life, my phantom mole had given me all the training I needed.

The second time was not aesthetic at all. I contracted HPV from a lover. By the time it was detected, my only treatment option was to have a sort of “cone” carved on my cervix using a laser. I’m doing a poor job explaining this. Yes, because of the laser, it was considered aesthetic. It burned the HPV-cells in me. No anesthesia could be used. I bled for days. I told no one. I was 19. Every so often, close to my days of ovulation, I will feel the faintest pull under my belly-button, deep inside me. I can feel the doctor pulling and burning those cells in me.

The third, and last, was a few days ago. Eye-muscle surgery. Local anesthesia and some sedation. I woke up in the middle of it all as the doctor cut and snipped the muscles behind my left eye. The nurse said, “her blood pressure is rising.” Both my eyes were shut. Days after it, my eye is blood-red. I cry bloody tears. I’ve never known a greater physical pain as the muscles inside my eye socket heal and turn and adjust. My eye leaks, and leaks, and leaks. I carry a tissue under it, permanently. I’m a weeper and I’m also missing some things, while not children, parts of my body. Parts of me.

La Lechuza, the shape-shifting owl-woman who clings to the ceilings over babies’ cribs, ready to suck their life out through their navel the moment parents close the door, turn off the light. “The Owl”

I’m young, so young I still haven’t run away from this house. My mother holds a large, fabric-cutting scissor to my belly. Slowly and meticulously, she snips the air above by belly-button, three times. It is as if she could really see an umbilical cord growing from me, like an immature lemon tree.

“This way,” she says, raising her index finger, her perfectly manicured nail, “La Lechuza can’t pull you up. But if she does come, don’t look at her.” 

Have you ever read those fake-psychology facts that plague Twitter and Instagram? Like, “if you wake up in the middle of the night for no reason it is because someone was looking at you” or “the average person only uses 10% of their brain.” To this day, when I wake up in the middle of the night, alone, I look up immediately, convinced La Lechuza is up there, staring at me. Convinced she must be the reason I wake up so much at night. And wouldn’t that be very on-brand? For a woman to be the reason I cannot sleep?

The world has ended three times, but in between those times, it has also exploded several more. Like when, months after I do run away, my mother shows up at my door, her eye swollen shut, her beautiful face bleeding. Or months after I move to the United States, four men shoot her, missing barely. Or when she gets Dengue, another plague, and when doctors try to draw blood from her veins, it comes out in cubes, like a popped-out ice tray.

It’s not a fictional owl-woman that wakes me. It is my mother. Even three countries apart, the lemon tree that once grew from her navel to mine, tugs me awake. It whispers, Bessie, only you can take care of your mamí. Bessie, your mami never made it home. Her body will be found in a ditch tomorrow morning. Bessie, your siblings will call you anytime now, crying. Pick up. Bessie.

If anyone knows how to cut this haunted cord, please let me know.

La Sucia, the woman who couldn’t get married to her lover because she had never been baptized, so she lost her mind, especially after he found someone else and forgot her, quickly. She never took off her wedding dress, and now she roams the streets looking for him, dressed all in white. She haunts drunk men, luring them as a beautiful woman and then transforming into a monster, at the very last moment. “The Dirty”

Two weeks ago, I woke up in San Antonio. But, for a brief moment, before I opened my eyes even though my ears were already alive, I thought I was somewhere else. I thought I was home. I thought I was on the bed I slept ages 11-19. In my house, which is in another city that also is named after a Saint. A she-saint, Santa Lucia.

It was the rooster. The rooster tricked me for a moment, and I was home. Later that first night, I would be tricked again. As I tried to fall asleep, and the neighbors of my Airbnb played Ozuna and Daddy Yankee and some rancheras. I slept like I hadn’t in a very long time, huddled by the familiar umps-umps-umps and the clinking of beer bottles. The parallels between these Saint-named cities were many. San Antonio is the city of the United States with the largest majority-Hispanic population, I learned later. But, at the time, I swear I could feel it in the air. I ate tacos every day. My traveling mates stopped asking me what did I feel like eating.

And then, one morning, I decided to have breakfast by myself at a Honduran restaurant called Geneses. I ordered un desayuno tipico, with eggs and beans and corn tortillas and plantains and chorizo and aguacate. I ate slowly. A flat-screen T.V hung on a corner. It periodically went out, freezing, and then came back again to a new image. The lost image forever gone. An old couple next to me seemed to know the owners. We had the same accent.

My uber picked me up at the front of the restaurant. “Why this place?” he said. “Is it like Puerto Rican?” “Is it like Mexican?” “Is it like Argentinian?” “I was so humbled when I was sent to Argentina, all those poor families that can’t even feed their children and still choose to feed you.” “I mean, most parts are shitholes, I’m sure you know, but there are some sights.”

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Bessie F. Zaldívar is a Honduran writer and poet. She is currently getting
her MFA in Fiction at Virginia Tech. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in F(r)iction, On the Seawall, Salt Hill, The Acentos Review
and elsewhere. To read more of her work visit bessiefzaldivar.com