Promises

Promises

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Published by Flash Fiction Magazine, November 4, 2020. Nominated by Flash Fiction Magazine for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. Chosen as Honorable Mention for the 2020 Flash Fiction Magazine Editor’s Choice Award.

Promises

Hace mucho tiempo, there was a young father who left his country for El Norte after his beloved wife died. Gio’s last promise to her was to find a better life in a green place for their only child, Nina. Their village had suffered from drought for ten years during which Gio slaughtered every goat and pig they owned before they both died of starvation. When he’d wrung the last chicken’s neck, it was time to leave.

He walked for months, more than a thousand miles with his eight-year-old daughter, and nothing went right. They lost all their money to bandits who tied them up and left them to die, they got sick from the dirty water they drank, and when they crossed the border, they couldn’t find any work except at a poultry farm on the edge of the desert collecting eggs and shoveling chicken shit, un trabajo duro.

One morning, after nine years of working on the farm seven days a week, Gio gasped at the face staring back at him in the outhouse’s cracked mirror. It was a stranger with lines on his face as deep as crevices and a beard of snow.

“Nina, this no way to live.” He cradled her face gently between his rough hands. “We only exist and grow old. Once I find us a better life in a green place like I promised your mother, I’ll send for you.”

“Papi, you must make a promesa sagrada you’ll come back for me,” said Nina, clutching him like a drowning child. Her tears made her last glimpse of her father blurry.

Gio, sobbing the whole way, trudged ten miles to the nearest town where he applied for work at every restaurant, gas station, grocery store, and hospital, but no one needed a former chicken farmworker. He slept behind the sagebrush at the side of the road and slogged to the next town, and the next, and the one after that. A few months later, a scorpion who’d spent the night in his boot, bit his toe, and he died alone. A red-tailed hawk circling above saw it all.

Nina worked twice as hard to make the time pass until her father returned. The chickens and turkeys sensed her lonesomeness. They’d sit near her feet and didn’t run when she gathered them into the coops at night or nip at her when she took their eggs. Now her heart always ached since she’d lost both her parents—one to death, one to distance. She fell asleep holding the comb her father left behind and clasping her mother’s Virgen de Guadalupe medal. She feared she’d forget their faces.

Gio’s soul fought to dwell inside the hawk, who thereafter soared across the desert sky for a hundred nights looking for Nina. Gio, the man, had wandered the land like a hungry bee searching for nectar, so Gio the hawk didn’t know which way to fly to find Nina. The land looked so different from above—sometimes sprawling and barren or green and lush with little ribbons of water.

He found her one evening crying outside. Being mindful of alarming the chickens, he waited until she was alone. He perched on the porch rail and gazed at her first with one eye, and then the other. She was thinner and had purple moons under her eyes, but was still beautiful.

“Nina, it’s your Papi,” the bird whispered so as not to frighten her.