Salamander

It started out between my fingers.

I was down by the brook, swimming naked, because the bruises on my bones sang softer on water than land. I liked to swim. I liked the wet, so I didn’t think much of the moisture under my nails as I tugged on my shift. My toes squished in mud all the way up to the pens, so how was I to know that a thin, tender web of my own skin had sewed them together?

There was already a bucket full of milk by the cow’s pen, and an empty milking stool by the cow. 

I jumped over the fence and untied the cow’s legs, then untied it from the post-I opened the gate to the calf’s little quarter and crossed back over. 

I drank the milk for breakfast. Then I scooped up the leftover and scrubbed my face and hands. I talked softly to the calf as it suckled. 

“It’s getting colder outside. A bit more and the dew will freeze on the pine needles. You’re lucky to be here, safe and warm, with your mother...”

I liked the morning chill. But this chill was growing testy, and fierce. 

Though this morning, my hands and feet didn’t feel so cold as they should have. 

I’d missed Lucero, the woman who came to do the milking. Perhaps only by a minute or two. I couldn’t speak to her. She was not allowed to speak to me, and she spoke another language, the language of the region. But still, seeing her meant seeing someone. 

I’d missed her. Lucero, and Mirna and Lupita, the two women who make house up on the hill, are as the sight of my own mother and brothers would have been four years ago. 

“Why are you not in bed with me?” His arms circled my waist and his mouth kissed my milk-white chin. “It’s cold out.”

I nodded. At the sight of my bruises he became sad and solemn, but he was getting used to them. 

I followed him to his house on the hill, the house I’ve slept in for two years now. 

-

The next day I left the brook and stalked up to the hill-house willingly, shut myself up in the bathroom and glared at myself in the mirror. 

Just as I’d glimpsed in the brook, there were circle-shaped notches on my spine, the color of bruises but evenly spaced and sitting neat from my hips to the back of my head. 

I got dressed and took one of the books outside, a big fat one with strange drawings inside it. I sat by the brook and tried to draw the pictures in the mud. It was hard, but I was stubborn and getting better.

I talked to the dragonflies dancing in the water.

“Back home I used to dance, just like you. I danced with my two-legged friends. We all dreamed we were models…I even had a sweetheart. I have a man now. He is handsomer than my sweetheart. And I don´t want to be a model anymore…” I shivered. “Say, can you teach me those pretty six-legged dances you’re doing?”

I drew until he came to get me. It was late, the sun had already toasted my skin and curled up like a fat cat on the horizon. I drew so much because he didn’t want me to work. He wanted me to enjoy myself.

“Hello, love.” He smiled, kissed my muddy hands and cold mouth. “Sorry I’m late.”

It was later still when we lay quiet in his big, warm bed. He’d counted all the bruises I’d drawn on myself and scolded me gently for each one of them. He’d had me to himself for as long as he wanted.

I kissed and held him in the way he liked. Then I said,

“Can I go see my family?”

He seemed to grow cold and small in my arms.

“I can’t let you do that.” He said, like he always does. “Not right now.”

He looked away. So I rolled to one side and fell asleep.

-

The next morning I danced in the brook with the dragonflies. I jumped and twirled and bumped into things that gave me my daily scrapes and bruises. I used a rock for a drum and bruised my hands.

When I climbed out, the wetness clung to me like a light summer dress. I looked at my hands, and the tips of my fingers looked rounded, bigger, and my nails had begun to sink into the soft, wet skin around them.

I climbed the brook up to its source on the mountain. Yes, he was rich enough to own a mountain, my man. And I knew better than anyone, why.

I liked this fresh, pine-clouded wood country, this piece of vastness in México. I liked how the sun toasted during the day and how, at night, the moon watched over woods cold enough to freeze under the dew. Winter was coming. Winter could cut even my breath short after a few minutes.

But the woods would stay golden-green.

Back home, in the summer, the air got so hot you could choke on it. At home I climbed trees and stole every fresh fruit I could find on them. Back home I hated walking. I thought it would make me too skinny to be a model.

But I didn’t have to walk far, in fact I only walked to the nearest bus station to pay the fare, and meet two towns over with the man who’d offered me an audition.

I crossed the border with him a month later, on my way to a modeling agency in LA.

I never found out if he did take me to LA. But he didn’t make me a model.

He started me in the business.

“You wear such pretty colors, miss.” I smiled at a dragonfly. “You’re so small and bright…so easy for the frogs and things to catch. Run away. Run away, now.”

I blew on it lightly, but I knew it would just keep skidding further down the brook. Its chances were slim. I skidded too, barefoot and naked, but no cold or sharp rock, no scratch of pine could make me forget that I was a frog too, fattened up on the riches that my friends had paid for.

Fifty dollars for every man, twenty men every night. Give or take.

The trickling brook caressed my feet consolingly. I touched my face, feeling for tears, but there was only the slick wetness of wood-water.

I reached the bottom of the hill. Darkness was falling like rain. I was too cold and tired to climb up to the house.

I curled up on the drum-rock in the middle of the trickling brook. He had not come to look for me. All day long.

The water, the frogs and the crickets sang me to sleep.

-

I drowsed behind my crusted eyelids as my numb body slowly stung and ached awake. I was bunched up tight in his bed. He’d wrapped himself around me, muttering testily under his breath.

Warm yellow light, the smell of burning mesquite wood and tortillas. I knew he must’ve made chocolate, both the bitter-sharp one and the sugar sweet, all for me.

I blinked until my thick-lidded eyes opened. Everything in the room was blurred and dim-it hurt me to look directly into the fire. He was rubbing life back into my arms, hurting me a lot.

I whimpered, tried to shove away from him.

“Stay still.” He growled. “This is what you get for nearly freezing over.”

So I endured his rough, steady, stinging attentions, endured his scolding.

“You didn’t eat a thing yesterday, did you?” He fretted. “Clara, you do this every time I leave…one more time, and I’ll lock you in. Understand?”

I saw him for the first time four years ago, in the business. He walked in swaggering and insecure. I suppose he chose me because I looked as inexperienced as he was.

I wasn’t. I already had many, many men under my belt. I’d been in the business a little over a month-so three hundred of them. Give or take.

He was the first to take his time with me. The first to hold me. I didn’t know what to make of him.

My friends couldn’t help me with him. They could arm me against the usual-it was easy to escape, after a while, easy to let your mind wander when pinned under an animal. They couldn’t teach me to respond to a man who looked me in the eyes. If I’d refused him, I would’ve been beaten. I could numbly obey an order, but his questions-his caresses-demanded answers. Demanded me.

Every time he came, the quotas didn’t apply to me. The night was his alone, if he wanted it that way. I should’ve guessed he was part of the business.

Look at me, look at me, look at me. I see you, I see you, I see you.

What could I have done? How could I not bare myself to him?

He took me away after two years. He said he was going to marry me. His father, the leader of the business, threatened that I would rot in the hostel if I didn’t obey him.

So he married me. And he took me back to Mèxico, because I asked him to.

What could I have done?

Today I stayed in bed with him, and he read to me and gave me chocolate and tacos de panela. The entire day through, my eyes stayed cloudy and ached at the light.

-

The darkness was complete. The sun had sunk and I lay in bed with him. I enjoyed him, loved him like a fly loves the nectar of the venus, and I had stopped feeling guilt over it long ago.

My eyes had finally stopped aching.

“You’re mine.” He said. “Say you’re mine. Look at me.”

I kissed him into silence. It’s too dark to see, was what I didn’t tell him. I could tell he enjoyed me, too, loved me like a parched man loves the illusion of an oasis, and I had stopped feeling guilt over that, too.

He fell asleep with a hand on my barely swollen belly and an arm over my head. My moist, ringing skin was aware of him in a way I had never been before. I felt my head and knew that my hair was falling out, all at once. I was growing taller and smaller and taller, right there in his arms.

I had been so afraid. So afraid.

So afraid for that little seed in my belly, that creature made of a love too monstrous to name, so afraid that it would become what my man was. So afraid I would have to watch it happen.

I wasn’t afraid anymore. I was small. Too small for him to cling to.

He slept and I crawled over his body, that I knew better than my own. The darkness welcomed me and the woods whispered into my skin as I slipped under the door on four chill, moist little legs, and made for the running brook.

The water closed over me and it felt like his embrace, only purer, clearer, wilder. The brook rushed into me and around me and carried me under the wall and outside, where the brook was wide and the woods were eternal.

I and the little seed ventured into the world.

As it turned out, I was not exactly a frog. I was a salamander.