io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Waru Waru” by Ruth Joffre. Enjoy!
Waru Waru
by Ruth Joffre
Abuelita has been feeding me her memories. Yesterday, it was the time she trudged up the mountain carrying a basketful of offerings for Pachamama (flowers, incense, a llama sculpted out of animal fat and adorned with gold leaf) in hopes the Earth Mother would alleviate the drought ruining the harvest. Today, it’s the time she visited Tío Roberto’s farm in Sapecho, how the smell of the cows made her eyes water and how at her uncle’s urging she coaxed one over to her with a big yellow carrot and let it eat out of her hand while she stroked its ears. “I’ll call you Delia,” she whispered, and liked to think the twitching of its tail was a sign of delight and not just an attempt to swat away a fly. She must have been eight or nine years old then, at that age when the world is still full of wonder, because none of the magic had faded yet. Delia wasn’t a mother yet, the farm wasn’t in trouble, the herd hadn’t been decimated by a nationwide outbreak of screwworm. Some things, I wish I didn’t have to know, like the smell of an open sore or the face a man makes when everything he’s worked for collapses right in front of him, but that isn’t how this works. Once the memory transfer begins, I have to take everything she gives me. It’s my inheritance.
• • • •
We began the process the day after Abuelita had a stroke. Whenever I say that, she insists, “¡No fue un stroke!” and I have to admit, “No, you’re right, Abuelita,” because technically it was a transient ischemic attack, not a stroke. They call it transient because it can strike at random and end just as suddenly. One second, Abuelita was in the living room, dusting the fake ferns, and the next, the feather duster had clattered to the floor and knocked a picture frame over with it. I came running at the sound of breaking glass and found her standing amongst the debris, blinking down at the hand she could no longer control. It was so disturbing I took out my phone in case I needed to explain this to a doctor. In the recording, I ask many times if she can tell me what happened, if she knows my name, my mother’s name, or what year it is, but it’s as if she’s imprisoned inside a statue, and no matter how many times she opens and closes her mouth she can’t find the words to say, I’m scared, Blancita. Even after the attack was over and she could speak again, she wouldn’t say it. Her first words were actually: “Ay, no, tu foto.”
Only it wasn’t my picture that fell. It was a picture of my mother. Her senior class photo.
“Don’t worry about it, Abuelita. I’ll clean that mess up later.” I repeated this several times as she shuffled across the room, her slippers squeaking on the laminate faux-wood floor. Luckily, the heavy metal picture frame had fallen on its face, trapping most of the broken glass beneath it. What little had escaped was easy enough for me to collect in my palm while Abuelita bent down, leaning on the wall for support as she pried the pieces of the broken frame apart to free the photo. It was special in part because it was the only one where my mother was actually smiling. I’m still not sure how the photographer managed it. Even in baby pictures, my mother was frowning, face scrunched into that mask of discomfort I had come to know so well. But this photo was different. It was 1987, and my mother had just gotten her first perm. Her curly black hair was parted on the side and sweeping around her head like a wave. She was wearing hoop earrings. Pink lip gloss. A big smile on her face, like she could not wait to graduate and start her real life.
By the time the picture frame broke, Mom had been gone for nearly nine years. Not dead. Just gone. Abuelita dusted the photo religiously, wiping the wrought iron down with a microfiber cloth to ensure no dust collected in the grooves of its ornate vines and leaves. She doesn’t do that with any of the other forty photos of Mom in the apartment. I think it’s because this is the version of her daughter she wants back: the one I never knew, the free spirit with hair like Gloria Estefan but moves like Selena, not the addict in and out of rehab, running around with a boyfriend named Ángel or Jesús or something equally incongruous. If Mom came back like that, all strung out and in need of cash, Abuelita would probably turn her away. Say, I won’t let you ruin your daughter’s life, too. Who knows—maybe she already has and didn’t tell me. She likes to suffer in silence.
That’s why it scared me when she hissed in pain. I thought maybe she’d cut her fingers or thrown out her back, but when I shot up to check, she was caressing the photo, tracing a long line down the center where the broken glass had scratched it. She whispered, “Lo siento, mija.”
I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me. She had already confused me for Mom once.
“It’s okay, Abuelita. It was an accident. We can fix it,” I said, just as the doorbell rang.
When I greeted the EMTs, two weary-looking men with five o’clock shadows at two p.m. and this air about them like they had already seen everything, their eyes flicked down to the glass piled in my hand, like the jagged peak of a mountain. In my haste, I had forgotten to throw it out. I’d forgotten a lot of things—what I told the 911 operator, how long Abuelita’s attack lasted, how much she hated it when guests wore their outside shoes inside the apartment—and I let the EMTs walk right in without thinking of the cut grass they were tracking onto her nice, clean floors.
In retrospect, it was probably a good sign that Abuelita cried out, “¡Sus zapatos!” because that meant she was herself again. Mobile again. More than capable of grabbing a broom from the kitchen and corralling the beleaguered EMTs back to the door. To their credit, they were happy to indulge her idiosyncrasies, expressions vacillating between personal amusement and professional concern as Abuelita muttered, “Sucios—sucios,” and obsessed over the sweeping. One of them, a broad-shouldered redhead, even went so far as to untie his shoes and hold them at his side so that she could more effectively clean around him. His partner didn’t bother.
The redhead asked, kindly, “Is this behavior typical for your grandmother?”
“Because she seems agitated,” the partner added, stressing the last word like a symptom.
“This is pretty normal, actually. But she wasn’t like this half an hour ago.” I showed them the video, watching their concern give way to a grim understanding. That was when they told me about the transient ischemic attack or TIA, which is often called a “mini-stroke” because it could be a precursor to the real thing. Every minute without treatment increases the risk of stroke in the future, they explained, with a sense of urgency, the redhead lacing up his boots despite Abuelita’s protestations, his partner attempting to guide her toward the ambulance with a gentle hand on her back, even though she refused to budge.
“I’m fine,” she insisted, first in English, then in Spanish, turning to me to beg, “Tell them, Blancita, ya estoy bien,” and then to bargain, “Ay, but the ambulance is so expensive. One thousand dollars just to go two miles. Why pay them when you can drive me?” which was, I must admit, a compelling argument, because our budget was tight, but Medicare would cover a chunk of that, and I knew if I allowed the EMTs to leave Abuelita would start making up excuses not to go (“You haven’t had lunch yet.” “My telenovela is on now.” “It’s getting late. I’ll call my doctor tomorrow.”), so I did the only thing I could think to do: I invoked the ritual.
“What if there’s something wrong? You could have a brain bleed.”
Her face went slack again, her mouth open, her questioning gaze turning to the redheaded EMT in the hope that this wasn’t true, but his rueful nod confirmed it. He rattled off a long list of symptoms to watch out for (aphasia, ataxia, hemiplegia), but the one that concerned us most was: memory loss. Could the TIA have stolen part of my inheritance? And if it had, if there were black pits in Abuelita’s memory, like the cigarette burns my mother left on the couch cover, how would we know? Would it register as a blip, a little glitch warning you that data had gotten corrupted, or would the loss look smooth and continuous, like the sky on a starless night? No one could tell us. What little medical research existed on the memory ritual was in Quechua, which none of the ER docs could read. That was when it clicked for her: the danger, not just to her life, but to our entire lineage, the thousand years of continuous, unbroken memories passed down from parent to child, generation after generation. It all lived inside of Abuelita, and it took a medical emergency for us to realize it could die inside her, too.
• • • •
To prepare us for the ritual, Abuelita bought a special blend of tea, La Flor de Papa, made from the flowers of a varietal of purple potato only found in the Andes, in a narrow microclimate between 3,600 and 3,800 meters above sea level. Both the petals and pollen are harvested at the end of each growing season, freeze-dried in thin sheets, and then meticulously pre-portioned into individual sachets to guarantee the correct dosage based on the drinker’s exact height and weight. Too much pollen and the memories will flow indiscriminately, draining out of Abuelita’s mind as if through a sieve, leaving her a mere shell of herself, with nothing but procedural memories, like how to walk or dress herself. Too little and the memories might get stuck, gumming together like half-melted candy, and even if we did manage to transfer some, they would be impossible to tease apart, the memory of a parade from fifty years ago superimposed onto a massacre that took place on that same street on that same day in 1563. Mistakes like that were dangerous, I knew.
My mother told me a story once about a man who drank La Flor de Papa, and then lost all grip on reality. According to her, he was a businessman—or maybe a politician—the kind of man who wore a crisp, black suit on a Saturday afternoon, when everyone else in town was heading to market. He came running up the street, dress shoes clacking on the cobblestones. He was waving his hands over his head, shouting in Quechua: The conquistadors are coming! On horseback! Ten conquistadors riding into town! When someone finally stopped him in concern, he pointed down the empty road. They’re right there! Can’t you see them? Right there! No matter how many times people told him the conquistadors were dead, just evil memories passed down from his ancestors, he wouldn’t stop screaming. “She said he had this look in his eyes. Like he was the only one who could see the apocalypse racing toward them.”
After a moment’s pause, Abuelita said, “I remember that,” in a tone that meant, Soon, you will remember it, too. And I do. If I close my eyes, I can see him: Alvaro de Cabrera. He wasn’t a businessman, like my mother assumed. He was a mourner. His father, the local butcher, had been buried that morning, only four months after a diagnosis of Stage IV liver cancer. In their family’s haste to pass down ancestral memories, they ignored all the warning signs, the nightmares Alvaro had every night, the fact that he and his father both vomited after every transfer, their eyes rolling back into their skulls, as if possessed by some ancient spirit. “It was a tragedy,” Abuelita told me, “but it was preventable. And in the end, I suppose it worked out for them.”
“Mom said Alvaro was taken away. Never seen again.”
“Did she?” Abuelita’s lips pursed in disapproval, though she tried to hide this from me by reaching for the kettle and pouring boiling water into our cups. Steam shrouded her expression as she explained that Alvaro was hospitalized after the funeral, yes, but not indefinitely. He received specialized treatment from memory workers who could help him sort out his ancestral memories, uncouple them from the grief over his father’s premature death, and cope with the hallucinations, which would never entirely disappear but could offer him a different breed of comfort: the ability to see his father again. “He told me once that his father was always with him. Teaching him.”
I could not keep the incredulity from my voice. “You saw him? Alvaro?”
“Of course. He took over his father’s shop. I bought meat from him every week.”
“My mother never told me this,” I said, watching the flower petals unfurl in the water.
“Your mother was afraid.” Of what, Abuelita did not bother to say, because we both knew what Mom was like. Every time I asked about the ritual, she shivered as if a ghost had drifted by, then lit a cigarette to calm her nerves. She would say, Are you sure you want to know my secrets?
I never did figure out what they were. “Do you think she’ll ever come back?”
Abuelita studied me for a while. “Would you really want her to?”
Some days, I fantasized about it (Mom making dinner, Mom buying a house, Mom taking her rightful place in the ritual so I could go off to college like I always planned), but I knew what it would be like if she returned. She had done it before. Made promises to take me to a concert or the zoo, then disappeared for a weeks-long bender. Came home just long enough to steal the cash Abuelita gave me for my birthday, then vanished again, like she always did. I shook my head and waited for the tea to steep.
We would know it had reached the desired level of potency when it changed color: from a murky ochre to an electric, effervescent purple, with the faint bubbling serving as evidence of the microbes activating to facilitate our memory transfer. I watched the tea slowly darken as Abuelita explained what would happen to my body after I drank. My brain already knew instinctively how to sort and store ancestral memories separate from my individual recollections, but processing all the data within would take patience. For the first month, at least, I should expect headaches, light sensitivity, brain fog, and vivid dreams. “We’ll go slowly so your body can adapt,” Abuelita said. “We’ll only do one transfer this week, then work our way up to four. It’s a long process.”
What she didn’t tell me was that the gradual ramp-up was designed so people could gauge whether or not the transfers were likely to fail. If anything went wrong (if someone miscalculated a dose or the ritual triggered a latent psychosis), then you could stop. Let the tea work its way out of your system. Maybe try again with a different family member or a memory worker, who could archive the memories properly so their knowledge wouldn’t be lost. This assumes, of course, that you have other family members, that your husband didn’t decide to move you to another country, thousands of miles from home, then leave you a widow raising two elementary school children, a boy and a girl. This also assumes that your son is alive, that he didn’t die in a motorcycle crash at the age of twenty-three, and that your daughter didn’t start doing drugs after this accident, that no matter what you did or how you pleaded with her to think of the baby (your precious nieta!) your daughter could not string together more than a few weeks of sobriety, until finally one day she up and left—no call, no note, just gone—and now, here you are, raising your granddaughter alone in a small two-bedroom apartment in Arlington, Virginia. You pray the responsibility doesn’t fall on her. She’s too young. It isn’t her fault, but sometimes there aren’t any good options.
• • • •
For the first week, I dreamed every night of crops. Potatoes. Olluco. Quinoa—the ancient mother grain swaying in a breeze like wheat. I walked down the orderly rows, fingers grazing the fruit as it glowed sometimes gold, sometimes green. Once I reached the end of the row, I realized it was raised, the bed rising a meter off the ground to create irrigation canals between the rows to catch rain. During the day, the sun warmed the captured rainwater, creating a microclimate where crops could survive frost or drought. This agricultural practice predates even the Incas. It’s called waru waru, from the Quechua word for “ridge.” From above, a waru waru looks like a big wheel, with a hub of concentric circles and an outer ring of spokes, where the canals run up to a hundred meters long. I know this because Abuelita worked in these fields once, as a young bride, only just married to her husband, who was originally from Puno, a city on the shores of Lake Titicaca. She moved there with him after his wholesale export business collapsed. Embezzlement, she thought, or maybe tax evasion. He never gave her all the details and she never asked, but she was learning the kind of man he was: impulsive and ambitious, prone to big investments and bigger losses.
He built the waru waru to capitalize on the then-emerging market for quinoa. He hoped to plant a thousand acres, to reseed the Altiplano and transform it into a massive monoculture, as he had seen his American counterparts do, but the land was too arid, the cost of porting water up the mountains too high, so he settled on this design, at Abuelita’s suggestion. She had rediscovered it deep in her ancestral memories and thought it would be a good way for her children to learn from their heritage. She was pregnant then with her first child—my uncle, who died before I was born. In my dreams, he was a fetus, then a baby, then a toddler, his tiny feet clomping through the field on the family’s biannual visit. It was obvious the farm was in trouble (entire beds went unplanted for the season, wild animals drowned in the canals, their carcasses left to contaminate the water), but Abuelita tried to put on a brave face. She was pregnant again—this time with my mother. Her belly was round and heavy, and she had to stop at the end of each row to rest, but she was glad to be there. She wanted her daughter to feel what it was like: to be surrounded by the wisdom of the ancestors, to witness their genius put into practice after centuries of colonial disregard. When she felt the baby kick, she smiled with pride. She called her son over. Waited for him to feel the kick, then said, “That’s your sister.”
My mother. She never wanted to be part of this ritual, but she is.
• • • •
Every afternoon after work, I go to the bodega to pick up ingredients for the night’s ritual. Today, Abuelita gave me a list for ají de lengua: one beef tongue, two tomatoes, four onions, chili peppers, and frozen peas. She simmers everything on low for two hours, longer than most recipes recommend, but as a kid I refused to eat the lengua unless it was melt-in-the-mouth tender, so she adjusted the cook time for me and then liked it so much she never changed it back. She prefers to plate the stew with a side of chuño—a freeze-dried potato naturally preserved in the highlands of the Andes by leaving it outside to frost overnight and dehydrate during the day—but I often have trouble finding it. It was the first thing I asked Elias about at the bodega. Technically, Elias is just a clerk working part-time while taking classes up at NOVA, our local community college, but his parents own the bodega, so he knows the stock by heart—and knows, too, when I’m about to ask for something they don’t have in store.
He shook his head before the words even left my mouth. “Sorry, Blanca. Not today.”
I thrust my head back in an exaggerated groan. “Really? You’ve been out for months.”
“Don’t blame me. I’m not in charge of the weather.” Evidently, it had been a warm winter in the Altiplano, with too much rain and too little frost for real chuño. All the potatoes picked out for traditional preserving methods either rotted out or got infested with Andean potato weevil. He explained all this while restocking their dried goods aisle: yuca flour, toasted barley flour, quinoa in a wide variety of colors. He looked bored as he did this, but I knew it was only because he had done this exact chore a thousand times before and could do it on autopilot. Sometimes, I think he finds it comforting, if only because he grows snappish and fussy once products suddenly become unavailable. “Our supplier said we won’t get more until August at the earliest. That is, unless you want the processed stuff.”
“The stuff they make in a factory? No thanks.”
He flashed me a knowing look. “I didn’t think so.”
“I guess we can substitute purple potatoes for the chuño.”
“We got a fresh shipment just this morning. I already put them out,” he said, pointing left, toward the produce aisle. “Oh, that reminds me.” He rummaged deep in one of the boxes of dried goods, then pulled out a package of peeled and dried peaches called mocochinchi. If you soak the mocochinchi overnight with some cinnamon, then boil them with some sugar, you’ll get the most delicious peach tea. It’s traditionally served cold without ice, which dilutes the flavor and defeats the purpose of the drying process, so Abuelita reserved it for summer, brewing up big batches for the days when the air conditioner struggled to keep up with rising temperatures. We would sit out on our little three-by-six-foot balcony, our glasses sweating almost as much as we did in the heat, and pour refill after refill until the pitcher was empty but for the dozens of peaches huddled at the bottom. We would fish them out one by one, their syrupy flesh dripping with juice. I remembered it so vividly, not just from my perspective but from Abuelita’s, her memories of our summer daze bubbling up as I stared down at the package, its colorful label matching the one she bought in my childhood. In my mind’s eye, I watched her opening the package. I saw it as if they were my own hands tearing through the plastic. And I saw myself, only younger, maybe eight years old, poking my head into the kitchen to ask if it was ready. I had such a light in my eyes. Where did that go?
In my reverie, I was vaguely aware of Elias waving a hand in my face.
“Hello? Earth to Blanca? Do you read me, Blanca? It’s your old friend, Elias.”
It took me a moment to refocus on the present. The color of his hair, the look in his eye. It was pity, primarily, but tempered by the trepidation you feel when someone is already living your future and you realize you’re not even remotely ready for it yet.
He tucked his chin before saying, “That ritual’s really doing a number on you, huh?”
My first instinct was to say no, to shield him from the messier bits of the experience so he wouldn’t be scared off like my mother was, but that wasn’t in the nature of our friendship, which was founded on cynicism and self-effacement, Elias having lost his younger brother to a drive-by shooting around the time my mother abandoned me, leaving us both adrift, just a pair of Bolivian American preteens with years of sublimated rage and nowhere to put it but in the jokes we aimed at ourselves and each other. He bristled at that protective note in my voice, the way I said, “It just takes some getting used to,” as if I had been in his shoes a thousand times before and knew better than anyone that he would be just fine.
He snorted with derision. “Is that you talking or your abuela?”
“Oh, come on. It’s only been a couple weeks,” I said, meaning, I’m still me.
He hoisted a box of dried goods onto his shoulder and said, “You’ve changed, man. Lie to yourself all you want, but I see it plain as day.” He waved one hand up and down my body, as if I had transformed right in front of him, exchanging my beat-up blue jeans for traditional skirts and my trademark backwards cap for a montera—a stiff, upturned hat shaped not unlike a rectangular serving dish—even though they didn’t fit my style. He knew that. He knew I had been hiding my dating life from Abuelita, lying about going to a movie with friends when really I was heading to a gay bar in D.C. to dance to Chappell Roan. That hadn’t changed, but he still looked at me like I was a stranger. “I’ll let you know if we ever get chuño,” he said, stalking off. When he turned the corner into the snacks aisle, I could see him shaking his head in the convex security mirror.
I could see myself, too. My long face. My light skin, passed down to me by a white father I never even knew. My bisabuela wouldn’t have recognized anything of my life as a soft butch in the outskirts of D.C., but she came to me then, her memories unfolding like a bridge. She had my eyes, my nose, that little dimple in my chin. She dressed every morning in front of a small square mirror, standing on her tiptoes in order to see herself. She wore a bright red montera, not because she liked it but because it was expected. Her husband was a major politician, and the white beads on the chin strap of her montera signified that elevated social status. Her best friend used to tease her, Your neck must be sore from carrying all that privilege, and most days she could just laugh it off, because they had been friends forever, since before they could even spell each other’s names; but one time, when her best friend’s husband needed help starting a business and her husband the politician refused, they got into it, hissing at each other, accusing each other of hateful things like spitting in the chicha or cursing the alpacas. At the end of it, when their chests were heaving with exhaustion, my bisabuela asked, “Are we still friends?” and neither of them knew.
Sometimes, you just grow apart.
• • • •
One of the first memories Abuelita fed me was of my mother. She was moving out, taking her Selena posters off the walls, stuffing her clothes into garbage bags, piling it all up by the door to bring down to her car, a beat-up Honda she bought on Craigslist for $600. This was supposed to be her moment of triumph (the fulfillment of a lifelong dream to get her own place and strike out on her own), but as she packed up the room she once shared with her brother, she grew sullen and reserved, hiding her face behind a curtain of hair. When Abuelita tried to ask her what was wrong, my mother insisted, “Nothing’s wrong,” even as she tossed a stack of CDs in a box, cracking one of the plastic covers. It’s fine, the damage is cosmetic, she muttered, restacking the CDs neatly so she could wedge in her boom box. She threw in some bracelets, a couple books, a stuffed lion her father had given her for her sixth birthday. And that was it. Her childhood home, home no longer. “I’ll take this down to the car,” she said, by way of goodbye, but Abuelita wasn’t ready yet.
“Why don’t you show me your new place, mija?”
My mother winced. “You won’t like it. It’s not very nice.”
“I’m sure it’s lovely,” Abuelita said. She regrets that now. If she had to do it all again, she would put her foot down the second Mom showed her the new apartment, which was really just a one-hundred-square-foot room tucked into the corner of a shared house with six other people, two of whom lived in the basement. Its floor was slanted, its ceiling angled to the roof on one side, so you couldn’t stand next to the window without ducking to protect your head. To call it a bedroom would be too generous, because the room was so narrow it only fit a tiny dresser and a twin-sized bed pressed right against the wall. She remembers thinking, You’re leaving me for this? but when she saw my mother’s glum face, the way she sat on the end of the bed like a reprimanded child, it seemed kinder not to question it, not to wonder what happened to the two-bedroom Mom had her eye on or the friend who promised to rent it with her, and to say something inane like, “Everyone starts small.”
Now she understands how much was lost in the silence: how that “friend” ran off with the security deposit and left my mother in the lurch, how breaking the lease dinged her credit, how in the aftermath all she could afford was a cash deal on a sublease a friend passed along to her when he moved to Berlin. It was supposed to be temporary, just a cheap place to bide her time until she saved up enough to start fresh, but then the Honda broke down, and then she lost her job after the bus got stuck in traffic, and then her brother died, and she never found a way to dig her way back out. She used to say, Your mother’s been digging her own grave since before you were even born, but that isn’t exactly true, is it? Anyone could’ve made those mistakes at twenty. Entire countries have been scammed over less. Credit scores are just numbers cooked up to justify discrimination. They don’t say anything about who you are as a person. Think of them as stories other people tell about you. My mother chose to believe them, but I won’t make the same mistake.
• • • •
When Abuelita handed me the bowl of ají de lengua, I could see the memories swirling in my dinner. They were purple, like La Flor de Papa tea, and glimmered on the surface of the stew, like a ribbon of oil. If I dipped my spoon into that ribbon, I could skim off parts of a memory and drink them separately, but this was not recommended, if only because memories themselves were flavorless at this stage. Until the brain processed and sorted them all, they would offer no sensory information, no smell, no texture, because to do so risked unleashing the emotional content of the memories (the bitterness of a break-up, the cloying sweetness of a birthday cake) and thus render the meal before you unpalatable. It was better to mix ancestral memories in, to get a little bit with each bite so that you didn’t get overwhelmed. After the first spoonful, I saw the farm in Sapecho. After the second, Delia, her floppy ears and pink snout, and after the third, it all started to unfold, the rise and fall of Tío Roberto’s fortunes recounted in a matter of moments.
It took hours to digest. Once dinner was over and the dishes clean, I flopped on the couch with Abuelita, half-watching TV and half-lost in the past. She had given me more than I expected (much more), and I kept drifting in and out of the present as I processed, saying things like “Your great-grandmother gave you that recipe” and “Mama Zara was a weaver,” even though neither of us had met Zara, who lived some four hundred years ago, in a little Andean village that no longer exists. No doubt she would’ve loved the knitting needles Abuelita was using, the ease with which she produced a whole garment (a sweater for the baby the two ladies down the hall just adopted), whereas Zara would have spent the better part of a summer on the same project, first spinning the fleece from her husband’s alpacas, then bending over her backstrap loom, using her body to keep tension in the threads. She enjoyed the work, though. She was like Abuelita that way. She always had to be doing something, whether knitting or cleaning or folding laundry.
In one of my lucid periods, I asked Abuelita, “Do you ever just sit? Do nothing?”
She didn’t even look up from her knitting. “Why would I do that?”
“Because you want to relax. Because your doctor told you to reduce stress.” He had given her pills to reduce her blood pressure, thinking maybe that was what caused the TIA, since all the other tests showed up negative or inconclusive. She even took them regularly for a while, but one of them caused little red dots to appear on her forearms—petechiae, they’re called, pinprick spots where the capillaries had burst, pushing blood to the skin—so she stopped.
She chuckled to herself. “What do I have to be stressed about?”
“Lots of things,” I said, but I was drifting away again. Flying over the Andes, watching as the mountains receded into the distance. It was Abuelita’s first time on a plane, and her heart was pounding, her upper lip sweating like it always did when she got nervous. My uncle was drooling on her shoulder, not a care in the world, but my mother was fussy, constantly sticking her pinkies in her ears, because she needed to pop them. I felt it, too. That build-up of pressure, like balloons pushing against my eardrums. When they finally burst, I jolted upright, and for a moment I didn’t know where I was, who I was, why this old woman was inspecting my mouth, telling me I would be fine. Only after, when my heart rate slowed, did I taste the blood.
“It’s always like this,” Abuelita said. “I bit my tongue so many times during the ritual.”
I wiped my mouth, swished around a little water. “What if it never gets better?”
“It will,” she promised, but offered no proof other than her existence.
“And what if this is the end?”
“¿Qué?”
“What if our entire line stops with me?”
Here at last she put down her knitting needles. “Why would it stop with you?”
“You know why. I mean, look at me. Do you think I’m ever going to have kids?”
We had never talked about my choices, my queerness, how even if a partner and I wanted to have a baby somewhere down the line the expense would be astronomical. In vitro fertilization isn’t cheap, and there was no guarantee that an adopted child would be capable of completing the ritual, even if they were willing to try. All this pain, all this suffering—and for what? A biological dead end. I expected Abuelita to shy away from the conversation, to ignore it just like she did the lies I told about my nightlife, but she seemed unbothered by the implications.
“You’ll find a way,” she said, picking up her knitting. “Your ancestors always did.”
“Yeah, well, they weren’t queer,” I said, adjusting the hem of my shirt so it lay flat.
“Who is telling you these lies? You have many queer ancestors—and not just in the books you hide under your bed, where you think I can’t find them.” She glanced over at me, her reading glasses sliding down her nose to emphasize how foolish I had been, given that she still does most of the vacuuming. It was enough to make me curl into myself, sheepish at having been found out, but also pleased to have had her tacit approval all along. What a burden my assumptions were. In their absence, I felt liberated.
I said, “You never told me that,” as if unveiling some marvelous secret.
And again Abuelita surprised me, revealing that she had already transferred some of those queer ancestors’ memories to me. “That first night. I put them in the sopa de man’.”
I searched my ancestral memories, trying to unearth something—a crush, a kiss—but all I could see was a farm, its terraced plots built right into the side of a mountain, so that if you stood at the top and gazed out over the fields, they would look like an overgrown staircase. Dig deeper, Abuelita told me, so I did. I worked the land, seeded the crops, carted stones up the mountain and stacked them tight enough to hold back the soil from the terrace above, but not so tight that water couldn’t drain through them to irrigate the levels below. I stood where my ancestor had stood and gazed out over the land with pride and bone-deep exhaustion born of labor. He had spent the past week building new terrace plots and repairing retaining walls with a crew of ten other men. Once they were done here, they would clear the aqueducts that carried water to the plots from a nearby glacier, but that would not be for a few days yet, and he was in no particular hurry to lose out on this view. Sometimes, the crew teased him about how in love with the world he was. They would call him Yachay, the Wise. Yachay, the Wistful, who holds the entire mountain with his eyes.
His life unfolds inside me like a flower to the sun: the blanket he slept with every night as a child until inevitably it grew patchy and threadbare; the birds that nested in the foothills behind his family’s home and the hours he spent guarding their eggs from his brother, who liked to crush them; the game he played with his friends where they pressed their feet together to form a living, undulating river, then each attempted to cross while carrying a friend on their back; that first time he felt desire, the sudden heat of it burning a hole in his chest that oozed with unrequited love for years; the loneliness, the sharp and unrelenting solitude, that drove him to cross the Andes, to test the limits of his longing; the man he found there, in what would be Lima, Peru; the life they built together, the alpacas they sheared, all the places they traveled with the herd; and the little girl, his niece, his eldest sister’s youngest daughter, who begged him to stay in Cochabamba, who wanted to hear all his stories of life on the other side of the mountains. She would take his memories in the end. His sister would pass hers down to her eldest child, a son, as usual. Yachay and his niece were not the first exception, and they won’t be the last. I’ll make sure of that.
About the Author
Ruth Joffre is a Bolivian American writer and the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in more than 100 publications, including Lightspeed, Nightmare, Adi, Bourbon Penn, Adventitious, Diabolical Plots, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Columbia, MO, where she co-founded the Nightjar Arts Collective.
Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the July 2026 issue, which also features short fiction by Oyedotun Damilola Muees, E. Catherine Tobler, Max Gladstone, B. Pladek, Rhiannon Rasmussen, Sean Williams, V.M. Ayala, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99 or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
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