"Sugar Skulls" at Podcastle
My take on a Day of the Dead story (first published in the Hallowe'en -themed anthology Jack-o'-Spec from Raven Electrick), "Sugar Skulls," is now a Miniature (won't take long to listen!) at Podcastle.
The story is beneath the cut if you'd like to read along.
My Abuela is making sugar skulls, and Tia Bibiana is helping her.
Yesterday was the first of November, the Día de los Angelitos, and Abuela and Ramon and the neighborhood kids made the altar for the children. I said I was too old to help, like I’m too old to go from house to house, but I stayed in the kitchen and watched. The last two years it was Lilia’s alone, with a plate of mac and cheese, and sugar-crusted tamarind candy, and the Clementine tangerines Lilia loved, and would steal from the wooden box and get in trouble because she ate them all. She used to peel the loose skin so it made an empty tangerine and would give it to me laughing when it collapsed under my eager thumb. We put her stuffed animals around the legs of the card table where the altar was set. Abuela wrote her name on the skull with pink icing.
This year other skulls joined Lilia’s - the baby my cousin Bernice lost, and the children’s names Tia Bibiana circled in the newspaper all year when she found them. Hallowe’en morning tia helped the children mold the soft, grainy sugar to the skull-shapes, pressing the sandy stuff in as tight as we could and letting it dry overnight. They did the delicate work solemnly, as if taking part in an ancient rite, perhaps because it was the first time they were allowed. No one licked their fingers, after - although the next day, still craving sweet on their tongues after the orgy of trick-or-treating, they tasted the chalky icing as they named the skulls: Hannah; Nathan; Janita.
I stayed home with the bowl of candy on Hallowe’en; mama got a call just before sunset and swore, but went to fetch her big coat anyway. I told her I would not go out, since I was too old for costumes now. She hugged me hard and kissed the part in my hair, rough, so it hurt. The oversized pockets of her coat swung empty against my hips. When they are full of the square, hard packages, wrapped in brown paper and tied with rough twine, she stands apart and touches no one.
She got home late, her pockets heavy like she carried bricks. She thought I was in bed and argued, soft and intense, with my grandmother in the kitchen over the gritty skull-molds until Abuelita’s voice rose and got sharp.
“You were out, and they wanted you in, and when you said no was when Lilia was taken,” said Abuela, her voice slow and angry. “I know you’re playing their mule again. And I don’t judge you, because you’ve got Ramon and Nia over there. You knew before I knew. But I will find them out, one by one. Every day they eat out the heart of our joy. I will eat them from the inside out, with whatever weapons la Madre will give me.”
There’s a terrible beauty to my grandmother in her anger, like the Saints have held her to a fire and burned away everything impure; she is ice beneath the ashes. There is a terrible pity in her voice when she talks to my mother. She raised her head and saw me spying from the shadowed hallway, said nothing but her eyes glittered in the dark like a cat’s.
For the Día de los Difuntos, for the altar that stands today, my grandmother and aunt will allow no one else to make the skulls, to place the fruit and the marigolds and cigarettes on the table just so, just the way they decide it should be.
The morning of All Saint’s, before we went to Mass, Tio Carlo came into the kitchen. I smelled his cologne before I saw him. He carried a mound of fruit: mangos, the little sweet ones, with the seeds like blades, and round Japanese melons. Ramon and I call him tio although he was never married to Bibiana, and Carlo although that’s not his name, he’s a white man, with red hair and freckles and almost invisible eyebrows. He and tia don’t see each other that much anymore but he still comes ‘round sometimes, on holidays. When mom sees him her face goes tight and hidden, although her mouth smiles.
That was strange. She used to smile wide and free at him. But that’s before she quit the night classes and went back to cleaning houses, after Lilia was killed. And then I remembered: yesterday at dusk, the man’s voice on the phone, asking for my mother. It could have been Tio Carlo.
I watch grandmother as she stirs the damp sugar for the Día de los Difuntos skulls, the mass making whisket, whisket sound around her old spotted wrist. She withdraws her right hand from the bowl and looks at it a moment, then makes a quick stabbing motion at her forefinger with her left hand. It’s so startling I almost squeak and she stiffens, as if she hears the sound I do not make. A red drop blossoms on the pad of her finger and she returns to her stirring. The sugar looks white but later, when she pops the skull out, it has a faint pink tinge.
Not all the candy was eaten - I am crouching in the hallway, the battered brass bowl is on the table besides me. I reach up and find a fun-size Milky Way, and nibble away the sides and the bottom, leaving the caramel for last.
Last year my grandmother wrote San Diego in a sickly green cursive icing on a sugar skull on Día de los Difuntos and a month later Diego Inez, who manages his father’s grocery store but who everybody knows runs girls, mules and hookers, out of Tijuana past the border controls at San Ysidro and into the heart of the East LA Barrio - he got the stomach cancer and died in three months, yellow and wasted.
Tia Bibiana says something low and my Abuela’s voice is like a whipcrack.
“If he didn’t do it, he knew. Stop acting a whore for the cavacho.”
Bibiana cries; it’s a dry sound in the hot night.
Tomorrow is November 3, and my tia will go to the new Cathedral, all gold and gleaming in the November heat, with its great glass sound barriers sheltering the worshipers from the pagan, serpentine hiss of the freeway, like she did last year. She doesn’t like the new building, says it’s soulless and doesn’t smell right. But this day she’ll go and cross herself with the holy water pouring out of its modern font, and with her own fingerprints still wet on her forehead she’ll go downstairs to the catacombs, to where they’ve stowed St. Vibiana in her stone coffin, and there in the quiet and the incense she’ll beg her name-saint for forgiveness.
I peek around the corner. Bibiana slabs her mother’s hand away from the sugar skull and grabs the plastic bag with the icing, the corner snipped out. She looks angry. I see that San is already written across the grainy forehead.
“I’ll do it,” she says. The icing is blue, and the letters unsteady when she pipes them. A wobbly “C,” “A,” and an “R."
"I'll do it, I'll do it," she mutters, over and over again, and a tear slips out of the corner of her eye and falls onto the linoleum, onto a little spill of sugar.
Cross-posted to Samantha Henderson's Blog
The story is beneath the cut if you'd like to read along.
My Abuela is making sugar skulls, and Tia Bibiana is helping her.
Yesterday was the first of November, the Día de los Angelitos, and Abuela and Ramon and the neighborhood kids made the altar for the children. I said I was too old to help, like I’m too old to go from house to house, but I stayed in the kitchen and watched. The last two years it was Lilia’s alone, with a plate of mac and cheese, and sugar-crusted tamarind candy, and the Clementine tangerines Lilia loved, and would steal from the wooden box and get in trouble because she ate them all. She used to peel the loose skin so it made an empty tangerine and would give it to me laughing when it collapsed under my eager thumb. We put her stuffed animals around the legs of the card table where the altar was set. Abuela wrote her name on the skull with pink icing.
This year other skulls joined Lilia’s - the baby my cousin Bernice lost, and the children’s names Tia Bibiana circled in the newspaper all year when she found them. Hallowe’en morning tia helped the children mold the soft, grainy sugar to the skull-shapes, pressing the sandy stuff in as tight as we could and letting it dry overnight. They did the delicate work solemnly, as if taking part in an ancient rite, perhaps because it was the first time they were allowed. No one licked their fingers, after - although the next day, still craving sweet on their tongues after the orgy of trick-or-treating, they tasted the chalky icing as they named the skulls: Hannah; Nathan; Janita.
I stayed home with the bowl of candy on Hallowe’en; mama got a call just before sunset and swore, but went to fetch her big coat anyway. I told her I would not go out, since I was too old for costumes now. She hugged me hard and kissed the part in my hair, rough, so it hurt. The oversized pockets of her coat swung empty against my hips. When they are full of the square, hard packages, wrapped in brown paper and tied with rough twine, she stands apart and touches no one.
She got home late, her pockets heavy like she carried bricks. She thought I was in bed and argued, soft and intense, with my grandmother in the kitchen over the gritty skull-molds until Abuelita’s voice rose and got sharp.
“You were out, and they wanted you in, and when you said no was when Lilia was taken,” said Abuela, her voice slow and angry. “I know you’re playing their mule again. And I don’t judge you, because you’ve got Ramon and Nia over there. You knew before I knew. But I will find them out, one by one. Every day they eat out the heart of our joy. I will eat them from the inside out, with whatever weapons la Madre will give me.”
There’s a terrible beauty to my grandmother in her anger, like the Saints have held her to a fire and burned away everything impure; she is ice beneath the ashes. There is a terrible pity in her voice when she talks to my mother. She raised her head and saw me spying from the shadowed hallway, said nothing but her eyes glittered in the dark like a cat’s.
For the Día de los Difuntos, for the altar that stands today, my grandmother and aunt will allow no one else to make the skulls, to place the fruit and the marigolds and cigarettes on the table just so, just the way they decide it should be.
The morning of All Saint’s, before we went to Mass, Tio Carlo came into the kitchen. I smelled his cologne before I saw him. He carried a mound of fruit: mangos, the little sweet ones, with the seeds like blades, and round Japanese melons. Ramon and I call him tio although he was never married to Bibiana, and Carlo although that’s not his name, he’s a white man, with red hair and freckles and almost invisible eyebrows. He and tia don’t see each other that much anymore but he still comes ‘round sometimes, on holidays. When mom sees him her face goes tight and hidden, although her mouth smiles.
That was strange. She used to smile wide and free at him. But that’s before she quit the night classes and went back to cleaning houses, after Lilia was killed. And then I remembered: yesterday at dusk, the man’s voice on the phone, asking for my mother. It could have been Tio Carlo.
I watch grandmother as she stirs the damp sugar for the Día de los Difuntos skulls, the mass making whisket, whisket sound around her old spotted wrist. She withdraws her right hand from the bowl and looks at it a moment, then makes a quick stabbing motion at her forefinger with her left hand. It’s so startling I almost squeak and she stiffens, as if she hears the sound I do not make. A red drop blossoms on the pad of her finger and she returns to her stirring. The sugar looks white but later, when she pops the skull out, it has a faint pink tinge.
Not all the candy was eaten - I am crouching in the hallway, the battered brass bowl is on the table besides me. I reach up and find a fun-size Milky Way, and nibble away the sides and the bottom, leaving the caramel for last.
Last year my grandmother wrote San Diego in a sickly green cursive icing on a sugar skull on Día de los Difuntos and a month later Diego Inez, who manages his father’s grocery store but who everybody knows runs girls, mules and hookers, out of Tijuana past the border controls at San Ysidro and into the heart of the East LA Barrio - he got the stomach cancer and died in three months, yellow and wasted.
Tia Bibiana says something low and my Abuela’s voice is like a whipcrack.
“If he didn’t do it, he knew. Stop acting a whore for the cavacho.”
Bibiana cries; it’s a dry sound in the hot night.
Tomorrow is November 3, and my tia will go to the new Cathedral, all gold and gleaming in the November heat, with its great glass sound barriers sheltering the worshipers from the pagan, serpentine hiss of the freeway, like she did last year. She doesn’t like the new building, says it’s soulless and doesn’t smell right. But this day she’ll go and cross herself with the holy water pouring out of its modern font, and with her own fingerprints still wet on her forehead she’ll go downstairs to the catacombs, to where they’ve stowed St. Vibiana in her stone coffin, and there in the quiet and the incense she’ll beg her name-saint for forgiveness.
I peek around the corner. Bibiana slabs her mother’s hand away from the sugar skull and grabs the plastic bag with the icing, the corner snipped out. She looks angry. I see that San is already written across the grainy forehead.
“I’ll do it,” she says. The icing is blue, and the letters unsteady when she pipes them. A wobbly “C,” “A,” and an “R."
"I'll do it, I'll do it," she mutters, over and over again, and a tear slips out of the corner of her eye and falls onto the linoleum, onto a little spill of sugar.
Cross-posted to Samantha Henderson's Blog