fiction by dani herrera

Genesis II

Magdalena has a thumping box of his bones.

She spins one of the humerus bones around till she finds the fading mark on the inside. It is a tattoo of an orange slice with her initials on it, transcribed from when it was on his skin. She knows that deep down it’s an orange as their declaration of love—she can see the sketched slice with the flourish of her initials—even though right now it just looks like a semicircle with spotted letters. 

When Magdalena and Amador got them, in the tattoo parlor with no empty wall space and blasting rock music, Magdalena had told the tattoo artist, “Push the needle in deep.”

Amador corrected, “Deeper than the first and second layer of skin.” 

They said, together, “We need this to last for all our lifetimes.”

She whispered, through the buzz and thrum of the needle, “Mark it on our bones, onto our souls.”

And when she gasped at the needle spike near her elbow, Amador gripped her hand and kissed her most prominent knuckle. “My main squeeze,” he said as the tattoo of the orange slice was nearly done. 

The tattoos ended up on their bones. Well, his, at least. 

But since she holds these bones every day, after two years the tattoo has faded.

Magdalena is telling herself she wasn’t going to do it this time. She really wasn’t. 

Maybe it was seeing the decay, the rot, of their matching tattoos. Hers still shines bright, just another lopsided promise. 

Or maybe it’s just that today is November 30th, the day she usually brings him back. And now that the day is here, the day she waits all year for, she couldn’t imagine continuing on without him.

*

Magdalena grabs the old, labeled, crumpled papers she keeps in the box with his bones.

Femur:

The way you wrap your legs around me in bed

Vertebral Column:

Can you feel my fingers brushing up and down, playing your xylophone tune?

Clavicle:

I never once got the chance to give you a hickey

Metacarpals:

Where your wedding ring would have burrowed deep

She continues this, straightening out the papers with care and resting the matching bone on top. There is no reverence this time. She used to kiss each bone, binding the joints together with her strands of hair and love alone. Now she is crying and smearing tears down her face, pasting the bones together with her skin cells, make up, and frustration.

The whole time she is telling herself it won’t work, not this time, that even bones have to break. 

The bones are brittle and the bone’s heart, the tattoo, is nearly the dust from which it was created. The papers are worn smooth, with none of the new scratch of fresh parchment. Even the back of the papers have stopped holding the braille ghosts of her handwriting. 

Still, Magdalena wraps the bones; maybe not with love, but with something deep that she has replaced love with.

Finally, she holds his teeth in his hands—teeth, the forgotten bones—and shakes them. 

His teeth are destiny’s dice, and they will decide.

She tosses the dice on the nightstand and watches their crooked rumble of roots and ridges.

Then Magdalena walks away because all the greatest magic tricks cannot be seen.

*

Magdalena sits with her back against the front door. She’s brought a blanket because the sun is going down, and even in California, November evenings bring a chill. 

She is there because she wants more. 

But doesn’t everyone? That’s what happened when people died, their loved ones wanted more. 

So as Magdalena is thinking about how of course she wants more, she wonders why she is the only one outside, waiting for their deceased to come back to life. 

*

When they first fell in love, Magdalena and Amador, she did the calculations. 

“Let’s say we live to eighty-five,” she told him, “that’s sixty-five years together.”

“Add two years, because we go on bike rides in the evenings,” he said.

Magdalena waved her hand to brush off the words, “I’m not adding anything. Because if I add then I have to subtract. And I’m not doing that.”

“You’re too stubborn. Don’t you believe that we’ll always find each other?” Amador asked, baiting her. 

“Don’t use my words against me. There is always subtraction somewhere.”

He attempted to turn her neutral face into a smile, but she swatted his hands away.

“Ok, so I’ll love you for fifty-nine years then.”

Magdalena kissed him. “I’ll love you for all fifty-nine years of this lifetime.”

*

She is still sitting, tuning her ears for noise coming from the apartment, half waiting, half ready to just go back inside and try to forget. The sun has fallen past the roofs of houses and the moon is starting to get colored in. 

There are scattered houses with their Christmas decorations already out. 

Magdalena loved—loves—Christmas. 

Her and Amador used to drive around, finding the best-decorated houses while sipping hot chocolate made special with Ibarra. 

She tells herself that maybe if she sits here all night and goes inside to an empty apartment, she will continue their tradition that she’s missed out on for three years. 

Three years is nothing though. It wasn’t as long as they were together. It wasn’t as long as how many years they were supposed to spend together. 

And just as she was wondering how to forget about fifty-nine years that never happened and could never happen,

The door opens.

“My Magdalena, what are you doing outside in the cold?” Amador asks.

She rushes to hug him, knocking him inside, and locks the door.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she says.

She tells herself this is not a lie.

*

Magdalena makes them tea in their small kitchen.

Their movements are unrehearsed, and they keep bumping into each other, giving small apologies. 

Amador stares at her the whole time.

“What?” she asks.

He puts his hands on both sides of her face and sweeps his thumbs across her cheeks. He flays the ends of her hair.

“You’re different.”

Magdalena rolls her eyes and hands him his mug that she had to rinse the dust off of, “Maybe you just missed me.”

She means it as a joke, but Amador looks at her and says, “I feel like I did. I feel like I did miss you. I feel like I missed things happening.”

“No, baby, no. You just had a headache and said you needed to lie down. You want to go to bed?”

Before he can say yes or no or anything at all, Magdalena is checking the lock on the front door and slipping a towel in front of the gap and pressing down on all the windows, double checking that everything is locked in place. 

Maybe she wasn’t sure about him returning again, but now that he’s here, she can’t bear the thought of him slipping out into the fresh air and disappearing. 

In their room, Amador digs and eventually finds his clothes crushed into the back of the drawers. He studies the deep creases, trying to figure out, how long had the clothes been back there, if he was just asleep for a few hours?

Magdalena is watching him in the wayward places of the mirror.

As she lifts her shirt up his breathing stops and he hurries over, tracing the scar on the back of her shoulder blade.

The skin had opened, bled, healed, and then etched into her. All while he was away.

“What happened? When did you get this?” he asks.

Magdalena stretches to place her hand over it. It happened this past June, when she stood up while the bathroom cabinet was open, and the corner sliced into her back.

“I don’t know,” she lies, “Probably just a scratch. It’s like bruises when you’re sleeping.”

Amador’s eyes don’t change to understanding, he stays there, trying to move her hand away so he can get a proper look. The only change in his expression comes from his eyebrows, twitching between emotions. 

Her eyes tear up as she realizes she can’t remember what those eyebrow twitches mean. Since she’s never had this reaction—because she never had to because Amador is now gone more than he’s here and because she can’t explain this because Amador doesn’t know Amador is dead—he doesn’t know what to do.

So, he stands by while she clutches the sink in silence and neither of them make any moves toward each other, these near strangers. 

*

Their new days are spent saying, “please” and “thank you” and “excuse me”. A regression instead of a continuation from their marked point.

These words were long banned from their conversations and converted to “with cherries on top”, and  “I love you”, and their joking, “move, bitch, get out the way!”

Magdalena goes to the back of the closet and looks through the box that held everything, that held him.

Nothing is missing. 

She wishes there was something she could lick and stick to him while he wasn’t looking. Something fast and tiny, yet meaningful.

But everything she remembers of him seems to have been coated by his flesh, napping on the living room sofa. 

So, she thinks, maybe this is how it’s always been. And if she’s to keep him, to preserve him and bring him back to life every winter, this is what they will be from now on.

Magdalena goes to the living room and makes room for herself next to Amador. She wedges herself between his back and the sofa cushions, wrapping her arm around him.

Her body starts to go numb, and she cranes her neck to be able to breathe, but she stays and kisses the back of his neck. 

There is moisture and Magdalena isn’t sure if it’s the heat of her breath or the tears swigling down her cheeks. 

She opens her lips wide and latches onto his neck until he wakes up with a smile that is still sleeping.

Magdalena wipes the spit, the tears, the condensation from their contact, and kisses the round and cratered hickey now on his neck. 

*

When Amador showers in the morning, Magdalena sits in the bathroom.

She is comforted by the shield of the steam swirling around them. 

Sometimes she peeks in, just to look at him.

His body is strong. His spine is straight. His ribs are hidden. His hair is thick and too long. Magdalena drinks in this image of Amador, one where he is strong and strong enough to fight off anything, any sickness or disease. 

Toward the end—of his life and, therefore, of them—his head was shaved so it didn’t grease from lack of showering, and he was so thin Magdalena was convinced he wasn’t pale and it was just his bones trying to burst through that colored his skin white. 

Magdalena remembered both versions so perfect, she knew what parts were Amador and what part was the sickness. She had even stared at his X-Rays and MRIs so much she could create his inner workings and erase the ever-present fluid in his lungs, making this Amador the Amador, and the healthiest one. Despite his seasonal lifespan. 

She shuts her eyes, wipes her mind of those memories because they are not needed now, and stares at the soap-covered Amador through the fog-crept, glass stall. 

The hickey shines bright and so does his tattoo, looking newly drawn. 

But when she turns her head, she sees a wisp of his eyes circling her shoulders and his mouth floating in the air. 

When she opens the shower door Amador is slumped over, his skin expanding and floating away and little pieces of him drift in the steam. In a second, his features come back to him, and he comes back to life.

Magdalena goes into the shower fully clothed. She wipes the residual soap from his body to try to find openings in his flesh and being. 

But everything is as it should be. Magdalena hugs him, wrapping her whole body around him, trying to protect him from persistent death. She had the same feeling when he was dying in the hospital, that he is slipping away in an important way her hands aren’t meant to catch.

*

For the first time ever, Amador is sweating.

The heater has long been switched off, a week or two ago, but the windows have stayed locked, and the front door has stayed shut.

“Let’s go for a walk, my Magdalena. Get some fresh air.”

She goes to stand in front of the door and blocks him while her responses spiral.

He has never asked to leave before. He has always been content staying here with her. 

In fairness—in the fairness Magdalena always gives Amador—he died in July. 

When she put his bones back together the first time, it had only been four months. She was still crying every day. People were still checking in on her and giving her food or taking her out to lunch to talk.

Magdalena was still grieving when she laid on his grave plot, yearning for him in such an animalistic way that her fingernails dug into the dirt. She kept digging through the night and at dawn she was triumphant, having gathered his bones and pieces of flesh and hair from the cemetery. She wrapped them in the bottom of her shirt, not even willing to let the dirt from his plot fall. 

Magdalena was half delirious when she put them, him, back together. She had just wanted to see him, even if it meant pieces.

She looked up diagrams and wrote up labels and matched them to bones. It took two days. And when the bones looked like his sleeping body, the way he always slept on his back so she could rest her head on his chest, she took strands of her hair and tied the bones together with a crisscrossing pattern she learned in Girl Scouts to weave baskets. It was a necromantic yin and yang, her black hair wrapping his pristine, white bones. 

When Magdalena’s work was done, she rested her head on his hardened clavicle and fell asleep. 

And she woke up with him, alive and snoring. He had gasped himself alive during the night. 

Magdalena hadn’t known any better. She was sure forever wouldn’t be cut away twice. But in March, when the sun came out, she opened the windows to try to share him with the breeze and sun, she instead watched his skin disintegrate and go out the window in the breeze. Once again leaving Magdalena with grief and a pile of bones.

By summer, it wasn’t her time with Amador that was a fogged, haunted section of her brain, but the rest of her life that was the purgatory before he returned from the dead, again and again. 

So, as she put together his bones the second time, she was already planning out forever in staccato and paused calendars. 

She was already giving up a bigger piece of her life for steamed and humid winter days, cutting a year into four months. Magdalena wonders if these warped years have aged her and that is the difference Amador sees. 

Amador is still waiting for her answer, trying to clear her panic.

“Magdalena? Let’s go for a walk.”

She crumbles under the words she can’t say. Magic words are meant to be spoken, to manifest the ethereal. But here, in this apartment, the magic words must be kept unsaid, must be kept a secret so no one knows that magic is even working. 

Magdalena hunches against the front door and Amador kneels in front of her.

“Amador, mí amor. I want to marry you,” she says, having to clear her throat through the tension of the tears trying to break free. 

“I want to marry you too,” he says.

“Then let’s get married. We always said we were meant to be together forever. I want that forever now.”

They kiss and Magdalena runs to the room, leaving Amador by the locked, front door.

Back in their happy days, they went to vintage markets. Magdalena always studied each case of jewelry, carefully picking rings to adorn her fingers on even the most mundane days.

She picks out a pearl ring and then goes to the ring that she wears on her thumb. It was real gold, carefully engraved in a woven pattern. The only reason she has it is because they split the cost, the two of them, because it fit Amador’s middle finger and it fit Magdalena’s thumb. It was a ring for both of them.

She goes back to the living room and Amador is waiting in the hallway. 

He stands up when he sees her wearing a white summer dress.

Magdalena opens her hand, and he grabs the pearl ring. She twists the gold ring off her thumb. They rest their foreheads together and say vows so quiet it’s clear they aren’t meant for anyone else but them in this brief moment. Magdalena whispers each word, less pronouncing the words and more breathing, whistling, the oxygen that keeps her alive into Amador’s mouth.

She used to imagine this moment with excitement and peace, surrounded by flowers. But now, it is a sickening moment for Magdalena. This is what she was supposed to have. She is settling for now instead of forever.  

Though they were meant to be, they will never be. 

Magdalena nearly falls to her knees but hides it by clutching and kissing Amador. She is crumbling, just the way he has. They can never seem to fall apart together. 

Amador puts on instrumental music, all violins and cellos, just how Magdalena likes it. 

And Amador has a first dance while Magdalena has a last dance. She is letting go of them, of their dreams of marriage, children, careers, and mortgage payments. 

Magdalena, if she ever wants those things, will have to leave Amador behind. So, she holds tight to him, while she can. 

With her on tiptoe and him leading with strong steps, they dance down the hallway to their room. 

Sex between them began—begins—with notions.

They don’t have to start.

They just have to let their bodies stop stopping.

Magdalena and Amador roll together, their bodies on opposing inclines, racing toward each other.

It can be just a flinch, a toe moving, a hand slipping, a single sigh an octave lower.

Then,

Cacophony.

It is them,

Pushing each other deeper,

Pulling the other till their skin can meld and melt.

At least, for this moment, things are back to normal, because this primal love is still in the marrow. It’s something Magdalena didn’t have to recreate. 

*

“My Magdalena, I have something to ask you,” Amador says somewhere in the crowding days. 

She lifts her head from her book and watches him pace.

The pacing is something new that she could never have written into him. He was never a nervous person. 

“What is it, amor?” She stands up and hugs him, trying to calm him. Watching him like this makes her think of his bones rattling in the box.

“Why do we never leave?” 

“Why do we need to? Everything is here. Me. You. That’s all we need,” Magdalena tells him.

“I feel like I’m in a cell. I feel trapped,” he says.

“You feel trapped? By me?”

“No. I feel trapped here,” Amador taps his chest. “At night, when I dream, I don’t dream of this apartment. I’m everywhere else. I’m in the whole world at the same time. I feel the height of the mountains, the mist of the ocean, the beating sun of the desert. I’m over kids’ soccer fields and city subway lines.”

“I don’t know what that means,” she says.

“It’s not something you learn or know. It just is. And I miss that feeling. I miss it the way I felt I missed you when you were sitting outside three weeks ago. So, tell me, what is happening to me?”

Magdalena is crying. She lets go of him, steps away, and says, “We can’t leave here.”

“You know, I know I’m wrong about stuff. Movie times, if it’ll be cold in restaurants, if I say something and you get mad. But you’re greedy, Magdalena. You’re greedy with parking spaces and your half of the desserts and blankets and you’re being greedy with what you know. I think you can leave. But I can’t.”

“What does that even mean!”

“Stop keeping me here! Stop keeping yourself here!” Amador is yelling and half of Magdalena is wondering if the neighbors hear him, or if they’ll just hear her and his voice will disappear in the wind. 

“I know I want to leave this place, but do you?” he asks.

“I just want to be with you.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

Amador hugs Magdalena and kisses the top of her head. That was—is— his signal that he still loves her. 

“Do you want to leave me?” she asks.

“No, never. But, amor, mí corazon, where is my family?”

Magdalena had never had to think about him asking about his family. His parents, his sister, his brother. 

They still call or text her so much that she had to turn off her phone so he wouldn’t see. She assumed that she was the only one in his mind. Even if that wasn’t true, she was now the only one in his world. 

Magdalena looks up to see his reaction, but all Amador is looking at is the cars passing through the street out their window. 

*

The apartment has gotten so hot they are dressed for summer in December. It reaches a nearly hell-like temperature when they turn on the stovetop or oven to make dinner. 

Magdalena didn’t have time to get a Christmas tree or get bows or lights before Amador came. He usually studies and compares the blank apartment with the Christmas winter.

The windows and mirrors are sweating with condensation. Magdalena has taken the outside cacti and brought them to the living room and kitchen to shield them from the brewing winter.  They add an extra caution to Magdalena’s and Amador’s movements. 

But when Magdalena bumps Amador’s arm while he’s cutting vegetables, it is clear there was not enough caution, could never be enough caution. 

“Shit! Oh, shit. Oh no. I’m sorry,” Magdalena tries to amend.

Blood starts to pool at the base of his thumb. She wraps it with a dish towel and presses.

Amador’s elbow cracks, then falls out of place. His eyes widen and he yells.

“Shhh, mi amor, shhh, it’s okay. Just, just, lay down.”

In his shock, Magdalena pushes him down to the ground and tries to splay out his limbs like when she’s making him.

Cracks are appearing in Amador’s skin. She can hear the bones unlocking from each other. 

“What is happening?” he finally asks, with eyes wide and body convulsing. 

“I can bring you back,” Magdalena says, and she presses the dishtowel, her leggings, and her sweater over all the cracks.

“What did you do?” 

Magdalena starts to pop his bones back in place and his body quiets. 

“Amador, I couldn’t let you go.”

As the blood stops and the dinner burns and creates a mist then a gray smoke and his body is put back together, not by kings and horses but by a person that has loved him so, Magdalena says, “Amor, you got sick three years ago. You got really sick in a way that people don’t get better. And I had to watch it all happen and I loved you through it all. But I couldn’t—can’t—let you go.”

*

Amador is told to wait in the room. Magdalena opens the windows to let the smoke out.

She hurries back to the room and shuts the door and blocks the gap with the bloody dishtowel, just to buy more time.

Amador is fading. His grip on her face is loosening. 

The ghosts of the cracks at the joints come back to haunt his skin, then mutate. The apartment sighs out the waiting, hot air that had been accumulating and swirling.

“I want more for you than this,” Amador says as he walks to the door.

And Magdalena thinks back, to before that, back to her Catholic school sex-education. 

The teacher explained how sex was like gum or tape. And that once you stick it to something and take it off, it’s less than what it was before. The gum has leftover residue, the tape won’t stick as well.

The teacher said, that’s why you have to wait till marriage, so that you can stick, forever, to your spouse. 

Otherwise, you’re just giving that person a half-self filled with all the others.

Magdalena doesn’t agree with that, but she likes this explanation. 

And she hopes that he has stuck to her, stuck to her in a way that she can pass out to people, throwing him around as ashes. 

That everywhere she goes she will carry him now that he won’t be trapped in this terrarium of hers. That is the only more they are ever going to get.

They hold hands and walk into the vortex of cold, winter air, kitchen smoke fogging up the windows, and the smoke alarm’s rhythmic blaring, counting down the seconds.

They stand at the front door and Amador’s eyes reflect the outside Christmas lights and he smiles.

He smiles and holds Magdalena, and Magdalena holds him tight until her arms squeeze his clothes and his skin, then just air as he swirls around her, kissing the strands of her hair and her cheeks and her shoulders. 

Now at the end, Magdalena thinks back to the beginning and through to the middle, and everything flashes forward until it’s now, and she can see her eyes flipping this image to her brain so she can see him, his dark eyes looking at her dark eyes and they should match but they don’t. All Amador’s eyes are what she pictured in her head when she thinks of his name. But her eyes, her eyes are still being created, by every single person she sees and that sees her.

Magdalena doesn’t tell him goodbye, because that’s what she’s been doing this whole time, wrapping up his bones and making them dance in her terrarium and calling it beautiful and calling it a life. 

Dani Herrera lives in the simmering Central Valley of California with her husband and cat, Muse. She received her MFA from Saint Mary's College of California last year, shoutout to her ladies of luscious lips. Visit her site danidherrera.com to read her other publications from Not Deer Magazine, Goat's Milk Magazine, Silent Mayhem, and others.