Bone Fruit

A Novel Excerpt

BONE FRUIT is a speculative novel of magical realism. You can read what it’s about here or dive in below.

Photo by Anna Popović on Unsplash

Chapter One:

I watched the arms of smoke, cinders bailando, reach toward the clouds, their weighted shapes like the boughs of full-fruited trees above us. I would have plucked hope from the very skies had they deigned to offer me more than that gray ambivalence they’d worn all my life. I knew, if I was to find hope in this mundo, it wouldn’t come from above.

So, I lowered my gaze and kept my eyes on what was before me: the revelry in the light of the bonfires, the streets, glowing rojo, thronging with bodies. The commemoration of the Ash and of las leyendas: Of an earth so hospitable it was like a paradise, so bountiful our ancestors had imagined its resources would never succumb to ash and ice. And yet here we were, now, the inheritors of una historia broken as the world.

The music shrouded us like the smoke, like the scent of burning driftwood and the never-ending stench of the gulf. It was a throbbing that demanded our homage, our embrace of oblivious celebration in the center of la Isla. This year—the year mi madre had brought a gun to her head and mis hermanos had left la Isla in hopes of a different life—this year, I wanted nothing more than to be swallowed by the debauchery of Ash Day, to forget my loneliness in the pounding drumbeats and the bitter, burning masa drink.

We dressed in ashes, not to mourn or repent this spoiled earth but to taunt the God or gods who’d abandoned us to un mundo so crumbling. As shadow and light played over my soot-blackened dress, I willed my body—the skin and bones of it—to be something beautiful and sensual, not merely a thing always hungry. There was never enough food on la Isla, not for common workers like us. But el hambre reached further than our stomachs: it was a longing for a fullness this world seemed incapable of offering us.

Lydia, dancing beside me, was to marry in less than a week, and she’d leave me—a laundress in the inner barrios—to join Tomás as a dock worker. Less than a mile would separate us. But my oldest friend’s happiness with a man seemed to solidify my own loneliness. Tonight, I wanted nothing more than to forget my isolation.

If the men vibrating near us eyed us lustfully, Tomás kept them at bay, his body pressed hard against Lydia’s, his mouth at her neck. Soon, they would find their way to our yurt where they would make love under the dark, mud-crusted tent canopy, their noises hushed by the carousing a few streets away. As I swayed and threw back another drink, I watched the festivities around me: los niños, the last of them still awake, most of them too young to understand what they were celebrating, on their mamá’s shoulders; men growing louder with every drink, hurling more wood and more munition into the fires; the streetwalkers, putas barely dressed in the cold, pacing the peripheries of the courtyard, dark rimmed eyes scanning the crowd for easy gain.

On this night, the Viewer policia were nowhere to be seen, abandoning us workers to whatever lechery and drunkenness we chose, so long as we arrived at work tomorrow. Frayed lanterns and ribbons were strewn between buildings, their facades graffitied with age and grime, half the windows boarded over because the glass had shattered long ago—most buildings were oscuro and quiet, their inhabitants cavorting around me, or barricading themselves inside in fear the celebration would turn riotous as it so often did. The pock-marked pavement at my feet was sticky with la masa drink and sweat and other human liquids. The fires panted and popped as they licked at the humidity of the air.

Looking at us in our crowded streets, in our toilsome poverty sprouted from the opulent convenience of the past—buildings and caminos and artifacts so clearly made for an easier world—anyone could see we lived like shadows: the darkened, unshapely outlines of a reality stretched too late. We could only be the world our ancestors imagined they’d leave behind, the dystopia of their fantasies, as if in predicting us they’d made us what we were.

The bonfire at the center of the courtyard, el fuego grande, was growing larger with each new song, la musica turning wilder as the players succumbed to the drink and festivities.

Lydia tugged at my arm.

“Rebecca Xochitl, let’s get out of here.”

Xochitl. The name Mamá had stopped calling me long before she took her life. Her flower. Because flowers grew scarce across la Isla’s shores, small yellow petals sprouted in sand and the plastic waste of the past.

“You go,” I told Lydia. “I want to stay a little longer.”

Tomás leaned his arm around Lydia’s shoulder, and his hair fell in strings down his forehead. “They’re building the pyre,” he said, pointing to the center bonfire.

Most of the revelers were beginning to draw back, retreating to the quieter streets or to their casas and yurts as the drunkest of the men began to draw torches from the smaller fires to feed the larger one.

“You don’t want to be their choice.” He spoke like mis hermanos might have, authoritatively and a little dismissively. I waved him off as I might have them.

Still, I knew, as Tomás and Lydia traipsed back through the barrios, that I was testing my luck. Los hombres brushed by me with violent indifference, and I soon found myself in a circle of women as drunk as the men, mujeres like myself who had decided to stay as the night took a more desperate turn. One of them handed me a half empty bottle of the masa drink, and I managed several more swigs before it was ripped away. I couldn’t feel the buzz, but I imagined it, swaying to make my head sway, concentrating on the beating drums to awaken a pounding in my temples. I needed the drink to overpower me.

I lifted my hands, twirling them in the speckled smoke that grew wilder as el fuego rose. It’s tallest flames were beginning to reach above the lowest buildings. Never before had I stayed to watch the pyre ritual, the drunken erection of the fire that rose from the streets of la Isla like un vulcan. Always before, Mamá had forbidden my participation in the ritual, and I feared too much her wrath to succumb to my curiosity.

“It’s un inferno,” she’d told me once when, as una niña, I’d begged to stay in the streets past midnight.

“But I want to see them choose la señora, the Lady Tonatzin!”

“You want to see them burn an innocent mujer? That’s all it is. A ritual demente! That’s not a religion.” She’d ended by slapping my mouth, even as she let mis hermanos join the revelries.

Mi madre, her rules that guarded my life so arbitrary and yet, I knew, all she could muster, especially as she succumbed to the masa drink. In her final years, she’d worshipped the Lady Tonatzin—Mujer del Sol, the Virgin-Mother, Señora de la Xóchitl, Quatsalupe, Earth Mother. The woman who bore a dozen names to signify her mythic importance, the one who was said to have caused the Ash to fall long ago.

I did not believe in the Lady. But I wanted to see the ritual.

How I wanted the music, the wildness, the manic religious impulse to mean more than me.

How I wanted it to mean nothing at all.

The emptiness in me was voracious.