Chapters (41)
- PART ONE
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- PART TWO
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- PART THREE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
She loved her people. But she was a teenager, spoiled by fantasies of escaping to a big-city university, wracked with false pride. She wanted to escape her own neighborhood and everything it represented: the maíz man selling cobbed corn from his cart, his yellow butter, powdered chile, and crumbled white cheese, her mother in El Paso, chasing after her father, before Calliope ever realized he’d grown another family. After the funeral, she never asked her mother if she’d known. She’d known enough. Calliope had known her mother’s penury, her WIC counters and shame, suitcases sprawled on the front lawn like surgical bodies, peritoneal cavities, here a butterflied diaphragm, there a liver spitting bile, the heat-struck grass, mother stuffing grocery bags with clothes, shoes, and overdue library books into the clunker of a car her father had left. Bisabuela had taken her to see the Ancestors all over New Mexico, and Calliope had felt lost. Disappointed. It had taken years to turn that mal de ojo away from herself and her people—to see her false shame reframed as the destruction wrought against her people.
There was more than one way of seeing, yes, but back then, she had packed in her suitcase regret mistaken for ruin. Bisabuela had warned, Don’t pick up broken pottery—shards meant for the spirits.
Calliope had left for college and, within a few short years, by the time Calliope was in grad school, Bisabuela for the Spirit world, and Calliope had been trying to get back to her ever since. It wasn’t until Chance pulled into Zuni that Calliope even realized this. But it was truth, like the light on the Río Grande bridge, like the hallucination of Bisabuela in the hangar. It wasn’t a hallucination. Somehow, she had conjured or joined the Spirit world. Or the mal de ojo had been lifted. And Zuni was her proof.
It was just as she’d studied in the books, in the black-and-white photographs from before the US had claimed it, before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when her people’s lands had transferred hands and none of those hands were indigenous.