Rose

It burns. That's all I can think about is the burning. My skin feels like someone has punctured it with an awl until I am shredded. I feel like my face is not my own. The rocoto peppers melt in my hands as I wash my face with their red skin. I can feel my flesh start to glow. I shake my head so that the pain spreads evenly like seeds in a pan. The pain feels better on my face than the eyes. There are so many eyes that follow me whenever I walk wherever they are. It doesn't matter the age of the eyes, I can feel them covering me like a potato sack. I wash my face in the fire of this chili so that I might not be what they seem to covet so dearly. There are no motors in our town, but I can hear them churning inside of the men. I hear the ignition. Their lights find me again and again. From across the plaza to the bakery or the butcher's, even from the other side of the confessional. I want to destroy my face. I do not care to be beautiful. Only one face is beautiful, and it is his face that I focus on. There was one who caught me in his headlight and took me to a dark place that felt like I was at the bottom of a well. The bucket. It was as if the bucket was hitting me. I could feel it beat against my small body. Then I could not fight it. And then the well was wet with my blood. And he had stolen my promise. Who could I tell? I could not tell my parents. I could not speak to the Padre. For all I know it was him. Because I did not see the man who stole me. I did not see the man who beat me with the bucket. Only there was no bucket. And there was no well. I was in a deep hole, but it was his body that beat me. He hurt me with his sin, and he gave me his sin. And now I have his sin inside of me. And so I am scraping off the beauty that I was cursed with by the devil himself. Because I know that I was meant to be a vessel. I was meant to pour and not to be filled. And I would spend my days trying to empty him from me. I would spend that summer trying to reclaim myself.

Even though he used me as something you might find commonly on a kitchen table, he gave me something else. I cut it from me just as many others had done in the cold dirty waters of the river at night. And when I came back to my home with my disfigured violet face and the dead space in my stomach, I took the dull knife from the kitchen counter and I hacked the hair from my head. I filled the basin with water and looked at my reflection. I was a carrot. I was a bloody knee. I was not the girl I was only a few months earlier when he threw me into that well of sin. He would not recognize me now. And the pain I felt in my face and on my head became the voiceless prayers that I sent into the universe. Prayers that I would send that way everyday for the rest of my life. And years later I would fashion a crown made from the scraps at my father's blacksmith shop, but instead of showing off my nobility, I would fill the crown with spikes. They would burrow into me like the worms that make holes in the earth. And one day when I was much older, they would not relent, these spikes. There was no way to remove the crown from my living head. They will have to wait until my death and hack the crown from my body. This is my penitence. This is the price I pay for the sin I did not commit and for sin I did. My hands were always finding their way into the fire. I would burn them until they were useless. Until the sisters at the nunnery would have to pull them out and wrap them carefully in the leaves of the palm trees that grow everywhere around us. And when I was in the most pain, I would tell them the date of my death. It was foretold to me, and I would want them to know so that they could make my bed and give it to another. Bring another useless girl into this abby so that should she be as infected with sin as I was she might find her own ways to push herself into the well.

Because I am finished. I will disappear into the Earth. There will be no more. No need to mutilate. No need to hide. No need to fear the hands and the fingers that approach me so grotesquely. I will become paper thin. I will be white. I will be the shell of an onion. I'll be no one and no one will be me.

Was i named for a flower? Or was I named for a savior? I will rise. I have risen. I am Rose. Saint. Hardly. I don't deserve the title. But I made my way out of the well. Life is a well. If you drink it you live, but if you fall into it you die. You drown in the life that you give. The bucket hits you again and again. And then you are gone. I am gone. Pray for me. Don't pray for me. I can give you no other instruction. I can give you no other hope.

When the nuns discover me and they will have discovered an empty body. I emptied myself long ago. I climbed out of the well dry. I left the wettest parts of myself down there in that well. I was like a leaf and Autumn. I was like a stone in the cold dead Earth. I was dry. I was dead and dry.