Mortal Overture

Before I was what I am, I was the child who would not stop talking to things that did not answer.

The temples at dawn with the priests moving through the smoke, and the small girl who had slipped away from her mother’s side to crouch beside the skull rack and listen. Not for ghosts. For whatever the skulls were still holding, the remnant heat of what had been a person, which is not a ghost exactly but is also not nothing. Tonalli. The warmth that concentrates in the head. I could feel it. I did not know yet what to call it. I only knew that the dead were not done, and that I was one of the few who could feel that they were not done, and that this made me useful, which made me frightening, which made me alone.

My grandmother called me tlacatecolotl. Human owl. The one who sees past the veil. She said it without fear because she was the only adult in my world who had decided what I was before deciding whether to be afraid. She was a midwife. She had put her hands in the dark and waited for the living to come through. She understood that the boundary between not-yet-here and here was thinner than people wanted to believe, and that someone had to stand at it. She thought I was that kind of person. She was not wrong about what I was. She was only wrong about the direction I would face.

The bones moved because I sang to them. I was twelve. It was a test: Telpochtli had placed a pile of cursed remains before a gathering of the young and gifted and waited to see who would flinch. Most of them wept. Two vomited. One ran. I knelt, and I sang in the first tongue the thing my grandmother had taught me for the newly dead, the song that tells them they have arrived, they can rest now, the world is letting them go.

The bones stirred. Not in violence. In recognition.

Telpochtli said, after: if you dedicate yourself to this work, on the eve of your twenty-fifth year I will give you what I have. He meant the change. He meant the trade of the breath and the heartbeat for something that does not end. I was twelve and I understood exactly what he was offering and I said yes without considering what I would lose.

Here is what I did not lose: the songs. The knowledge my grandmother pressed into my hands along with the herbs and the sharp tools of the midwife’s trade. The capacity to hear what is not yet gone. Here is what I did not know I was losing: the body that grew warm in the afternoon. The way food tasted on a day when you had not eaten since morning. Sleep. The small unremarkable warmth of sleeping, which I did not know was remarkable until I could not have it.

I trained for a decade. The obsidian cave beneath the Templo Mayor, the dead in layers below us, the older and stranger dead the deeper we went. Telpochtli taught me to speak at each layer in the register appropriate to how long they had been waiting. The newly dead: patient and close. The decade-dead: beginning to thin, distracted, like a person who has just woken and is already reaching for their morning task. The century-dead: barely recognizable as individual. The ancient dead, the dead who had been in the dark long enough to forget every name they had ever been given: vast and slow and not unkind, but no longer quite shaped the same as us.

On the eve of my twenty-fifth year, in that cave, he opened his wrist. I rose cold. I rose breathing for the last time. I rose hearing the dead more clearly than I ever had in thirty seconds of my life.

The trade was not what I had imagined. It was better and worse simultaneously, which is the only honest thing you can say about it.

I did not go home after. I did not know yet that I would not go home for five centuries. I thought: in the morning I will go to the market and see what I have become in the light.

There was no morning for me anymore.