Dark and Deepest Red(52)

Her skin feels covered in the hailstones’ chill.

“How could you do this?” she asks, the words bursting from her lips so hard they sound angry.

“Lavinia,” the canon says. “Contain yourself.” He grips her upper arm, pulling her back from Alifair, this boy whose face holds so much pain and so much relief.

“Your anger is a human impulse,” the friar says, both of them misplacing the center of her rage.

“Resist your baser instincts,” the canon adds.

“Justice will be served,” the friar says, as though an hour ear lier he was not smirking over having gotten a confession from Lala. “You will leave it to us and to God.”

To us and to God.

Of course these men place their own power first.

The sergeants take Alifair, binding his wrists with heavy rope as Lala screams. She screams after him, and the friar and canon continue their urging, still convinced it is her rage at Alifair that gives her such a voice.

She keeps screaming, and they think nothing of it but that she is a woman wailing over the deeds of a demon-filled boy.

She screams, loud enough that she hopes it rattles la cathédrale’s single spire.

She wishes it to echo over Alsace, to the Vogesen, and to the Black Forest.

She bids it to Paris and Rome, into the souls of kings and emperors, to every man who makes the law of a land he has never bent to touch.

She commands it to carry across a thousand years.

She wills it to reach the very ears of God, so He will know what men on this earth do in His name.





Rosella


Whatever hope I had that my parents would still be asleep withered when I saw the living room light on.

I crossed my arms against the feeling that all the water on me was turning to ice. I had to brace myself to walk through the front door.

My mother stood just inside.

She took in my soaked clothes. “Where have you been?”

“I’m fine, Mamá,” I said, dragging myself and my damp pajama pants toward the stairs.

She eyed the red shoes, the fabric a little darker from being wet. The candy-apple sheen they had in daylight looked deep and slicked as blood.

“Take those off,” she said.

Her voice came as forbidding as I’d ever heard it.

“What?” I asked.

“I know all your friends are wearing them,” she said. “I know they make you feel like you can do anything you want. But the things you’ve been doing, they’re not you. Sneaking out. And this.” She gestured at the water dripping off me.

“Mom,” I said. “It’s not like that.”

“Then what were you doing?” Her voice rose, more panicked than angry, and that just made me feel worse. “Was it some kind of dare? Something those girls told you to do?”

I couldn’t meet her eyes.

“Take them off,” she said, sounding as scared as she was stern.

“Mom,” I said.

“Take them off.” She hit each word.

I withered under her stare, until two breathed words slipped out of me: “I can’t.”

An odd expression flashed over my mother’s face, an uncomprehending panic.

“What do you mean you can’t?” she asked.

I went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife from the block.

My mother followed.

I moved it toward my own feet.

My mother gasped. “Rosella, no.”

But I was already dragging it across the fabric.

A seam opened, and my mother breathed in as though she might scream.

Then the seam closed, like a wound healing in seconds.

She stared at me, her fear of my own recklessness shifting toward the red cloth on my feet.

A stricken look tinted her features. All this fear, without her even knowing that they had been making me dance.

I slid the knife back into the block.

Her face hardened.

Not anger.

Resolve.

“We’ll call your cousins,” she said.

“Mom.”

She cast her eyes to the floor. “Every curandera we know.”

“Mamá,” I said.

“Every one that everyone else knows, we’ll ask them all. And all the priests.”

“Mamá,” I said.

This time, I landed on the word hard enough to stop her.

She and my father would rip apart this town trying to help me. They wouldn’t care who found out. By the time they were done, everyone would think of our shoes as more murderous than beautiful.

One cursed pair could gut our family’s business. All of it would fall away. The peacock and plums and bronzes that painted our workroom. The indigos and flame yellows and oranges that dyed our lives. I had learned the seasons by what colors we sewed. Pastels for the spring, grays and ice blues for winter. Clusters of beads like lilac blossoms. The moss green that made me think of wood fairies.

We would lose all the months by colors.

It would ruin us.

Everything my great-grandparents had worked for, the years they’d endured in the maquiladoras, the factories where they were paid pennies for each seam, where their blood darkened the metal corners of the equipment, all of it would turn to ashes.

All the whispered magic of Oliva shoes would turn to poison.