4.

You smack your lips, dry with cotton mouth. You continue walking, looking up at the trees for another sign of the creature, and your foot slips in the dirt. You slide down into a cave or a tunnel, roots dangling free from the ceiling. Echoes of cars driving and little kids playing in the distance sound muffled, as though from underwater. You flip your cell phone open for light, but it’s dead. You take the lighter from your pocket, and click it. The author E.L. Doctorow likened writing stories to making a long drive through a foggy night—that you can see just a few feet ahead of you, but you can get where you’re going that way. You drag your fingertips across the rough surface of the curved walls, and the tingle in your fingers and your lower legs answers your question: yes, you’re still a little high.

You hear a tinkle of water before the flickering light of your lighter shows you an underground river, thin in diameter but maybe very deep. Fish you’ve never seen before swim under the surface. You think you see long trailing spines coming out from their scales, fine like hair and undulating in the water.

A shuffle of dirt, and a feeling of hot breath breaks the quiet. A four-legged animal with huge black eyes stumbles from the endless darkness. Your eyes adjust to the light to make out the thin legs and sharp face of a small deer, with sharp bottom incisors that curve around her lower jaw. A thought riles you: She looks a lot like the fawn you found in the woods as a middle schooler, with the ribcage exposed, her flesh in the process of being eaten away by small, white maggots. She rears her head up and opens her mouth. She cries, uncannily like a human child.

The piercing sound is identical to the baby’s cry-sound that startled you on an Albuquerque farm, as you jerked to hide behind Papi’s bulk, him huge against your tiny body. He patted your back and called you mijo, and you felt weird about being called his son and not his daughter but you didn’t have words for that. Papi said it’s just the goats whose milk he used to make cajeta. You feel his warm solidness in dreams sometimes, where he’s alive again until you wake up and tears well.

The young deer stumbles, kicking up little clouds of dust, and a small burst of flame escapes her lips. The heat makes you sweat in the cold cave. You wonder whether you should make yourself large, as if to scare a bear, or whether you should run.

The deer cries again, darting her head around. She’s a baby, you think, and she seems lost or confused. You walk slowly, close to her, and lay out your hand, palm up for her to sniff it. You’re ready to let her go, or to run at a hair’s breath, when the deer walks up and sniffs your hand. You kneel down to her level and pet her rough, patchy fur behind her ears, down her thick neck, and around her shoulder blades.

The deer’s cries soften and she shakes. You stroke her and tell it’s OK in soft tones. Her fur and flesh burn you like impossibly cold ice. She sinks to the ground and you sit with her. You draw your hand across her fiery hide and her breathing slows.

Your gaze goes soft as your eyelids sink, and you let your shoulders droop. The rhythm of your breath matches hers.

You open your eyes and the deer is gone. You sit on leaves, atop the spot where you fell in. Moonlight slips through branches.

Small swatches of gray aluminum and tile roofing lay far behind the trees. You need to make your way somewhere, the train station, catch something back to Chicago, because you can’t walk back into that structure, the house where you were raised with all your monstrousness burnt out, all your seething and ugly humanity siphoned.

You know you can’t be the daughter of the woman who birthed and raised you. You know you can’t be anything to her but a memory and a pile of regrets, because nothing’s going to change back there in that house, not soon at least, and so as far as you can tell she’s never going to bring you anything but hurt.

When you decide this, or realize that you’ve decided it a long time ago, you figure that if you can decide who your mother is or isn’t, then you know that you’re a daughter, and you can crack yourself open and let yourself be called mija by women you choose to trust.

You turn away from the house. No moon lights your way. It’s hidden by clouds, or it’s not out tonight. A small spurt of flame darts out from in-between your lips and lights a few feet ahead of you for a moment, and suggests a direction. Your boots make prints in the damp dirt, and you might be wrong about where you’re going. It doesn’t matter. You have all night. ♦