Transitions
Maggie was obsessed with feathers. The fascination had
started two weeks ago when Rita picked an electric blue one from the stone path
that took them out of the Castelo so they could avoid the eager tourists waiting
in line. Rosalia had shown her the side stone road, contorted, hidden, and
inviting like Rita’s thoughts after every visit to her only friend, the
Castelo’s administrator. The faraway shy stops at the castle, whenever rain was
imminent and tourists absent, had turned into a soothing routine for Rita
during Rosalia’s lunch break. None of the two women ate much during the narrow
hour, only Maggie filled her fists more than her mouth with the black hard
candy that Rosalia smuggled just for her.
“She will turn three next week.” Rita sighed looking
intermittently at the cod croquettes in her paper plate and at her daughter,
who was following a peacock with a hand full of candy and a heart overflowing
with greed for a blue feather.
Rosalia raised her head and followed the decisive
steps of the girl on the grass of the historic garden with the same attention
with which she chose the right words in English to express her Portuguese
thoughts.
“She is a happy girl. At that age, my granddaughter
was all about butterflies. She wandered around that same patch while I was at
the office. She didn´t care for the peacock feathers. She was already afraid of
birds.”
“Maggie is afraid of the fire now. I think her father
was talking about the Lisbon fire the other day to a couple who came to the
house. Henry loves educating the new ex-pats about all he has learned about the
city. And Maggie happens to conclude that all that daddy says is a golden truth
sung by the angels. So now she thinks the city can burn down any time like
after the earthquake of…”
“1755?” Rosalia smiled. “All little girls are in love
with their daddies. You know that… By the way… how’s the other fire in your
house? The one you don’t talk about that much anymore.”
Rita left the strict watch on Maggie’s peacock chasing
and looked into the distance, beyond the stone wall, and into the far sea with
the same attentive gesture of the gazelle smelling danger. “I am not sure I
understand,” she whispered.
“Forgive me. I didn’t want to pry. I was trying to
make a lousy metaphor about the lack of fire, of passion, between you and
Henry. Are things a little better? This is the first time you mentioned him in
a long time.”
“You know… I am confused. He’s there but he’s is far
away from us. I’m not sure how much I care anymore. We love Maggie together.
That I know. Sometimes I wish for a sign, a message, some little clue easy to
decode. But nothing… I wonder day and night when it was that everything
changed. But it’s like we’re only allowed to know the before and the after, the
first kiss and the last, the time I struggled with Maggie’s thin baby hair and
that tangled mane of curls I cannot manage now. But if you asked me how all
that changed, or when, or even why… I just don’t know”
Rosalia slid close to Rita and away from the sun. The
surface of the stone bench was rough and welcoming at the same time. She hid in
Rita’s hand one of the little candies destined for Maggie. “But knowing when
things change doesn’t bring you any consolation either, my dear. There are only
two moments in my life when I witnessed the exact wink of upheaval and both
hurt too much, physically first and now still in an invisible vine of the
universe that God doesn’t allow me to cut.”
“You mean when dear people died, Rosalia?”
“No, dear. Perhaps the exact opposite. I mean the
moment I gave birth to my daughter.” Rosalia looked down, her eyes fixed on the
grey threads of her uniform skirt. Rita kept her lips tight as her fingers
played with the candy, inviting her older friend to spin the painful memory.
“I was alone and exposed, surrounded by two nurses and
a midwife I had never seen before. All of them closing curtains and moving
trays. One of the nurses had a cloudy eye, she was the one encouraging me in a
language that I still hadn’t mastered. The language gap is wider, abysmal if
you are by yourself and terrified. There were also three young women sitting in
a corner with a big matron, another midwife or authority it seemed. She was
lecturing them on the graphic aspects of childbirth. I had been chosen as a
teaching specimen. Nobody asked me for permission. I wouldn’t have understood
what they wanted permission for, anyway. I was just broken with pain and
desolation. My baby was coming and nobody had been able to find my husband. My
two idiotic sisters-in-law, Argentinean female versions of Groucho and Harpo,
changed the subject every time I asked about him. And then, when my
contractions hastened and my breath expanded and crushed my bones from
within... that second midwife said to the future nurses, to those wide-eye
pigeons clucking around her: ‘And this is the last stage of labor before
childbirth. The baby is coming now. Transition is called. Write it down.
Tran-si-tion.’”
“And you remember that?” muttered Rita touching her
lower lip.
“It seems that panic and pain could be echo chambers
of inappropriate words at the wrong moment, darling. Who knows? My next memory
is having my baby on top of me and being thirsty and being happy and feeling
abandoned and fulfilled at the same time.”
“Mammy, look!” In her tight fist, Maggie smashed half
a whitish plume that one of the female peacocks must have lost in her
disdainful dance from an electric-blue male.
Rita took the present from her daughter as if it were
a relic and smiled toward Rosalia.
“And the second time?”
Rosalia was already piling the plates and cups on the
bench and throwing the crumbs to the hungry birds.
“What second time?”
“When you noticed that something had changed without
redemption.”
“Oh, that was when my husband slammed the room of our bedroom after I told him I was convinced our baby was deaf… That is the problem with transitions, my dear, someone always leaves, someone always stays. It could be you, me, the mermaids singing to the sailors in that sea, the snake, or Adam and Eve. Because every change is an instance of labor witnessed by the one who shouldn’t be there and suffered by the one following a feathery dream. Let’s go now. Let me take you to the back path before the mob gets here.
Fabiana Elisa Martínez
I was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I
graduated from UCA University in Buenos Aires with a degree in Linguistics and
World Literature. I am a linguist, a language teacher, and a writer. I speak
five languages: Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, and Italian. I have lived
and worked in Dallas, Texas, for twenty years. I am the author of the short
story collection 12 Random Words, my first work of fiction, the
short story Stupidity, published as an independent book by Pierre
Turcotte Editor, and the grammar book series Spanish 360 with Fabiana.
12 Random Words, in its three bilingual versions, has won nine awards, and two of its
stories were selected to be read in February 2017 as part of the Dallas Museum
of Art’s distinguished literary series Arts & Letters Live. The book was
also among the six finalists of the Eyelands Book Awards 2022 and won the First
Prize on December 2022. At the moment, it
is a finalist for Best Book Category for the Page Turner Awards.
Conquered by Fog is a finalist in the
2023 Global Book Awards.
Other short stories of mine were published or
are forthcoming in Rigorous Magazine, The Closed Eye Open, Ponder
Review, Hindsight Magazine, The Good Life Review (UK), The
Halcyone, Rhodora Magazine (India), Mediterranean
Poetry, Writers and Readers Magazine (UK), Libretto
Magazine (Nigeria), Automatic Pilot (Ireland),
Lusitania (Buenos Aires), The Pilgrims of the Plate (Buenos
Aires), Heartland Society of Women Writers, Egophobia Journal (Romania), Defunkt Magazine, Brilliant
Flash Fiction, Freshwater Literary Journal, Syncopation Literary
Journal, The Raven’s Perch, Write Now Literary Journal,
Defuncted Journal, and the anthologies Writers of Tomorrow, Pure
Slush-Love, Lifespan 4 Anthology (Australia), the 2022
Wordrunner Anthology, the Crossing the Tees Firth Short Story
Anthology (England), and Pure Slush-Marriage, Lifespan 6
Anthology (Australia). Two short stories were read as part of
the Manawaker Flash Fiction Podcast.
My manuscript of short stories, Word Flakes,
has been a finalist of the Harbor Edition’s Chapbook Open Reading Period in
2021.
My short story “Conquered by Fog” was nominated for
the 2023 Pushcart Prize by the editorial team of Freshwater Literary
Journal.
I am currently working on my first novel.