2nd Place Winner – Flash 405, August 2024: “Otherworldly”
Nonfiction
Grown now, I’ve moved away to a sprawling Western city where everyone asks,
—What are you? Where are you from?
—New Mexico.
—And your parents?
—New Mexico.
—And your grandparents?
—New Mexico.
—And their parents?
—Them, too…
The truth is complicated. To strangers on the bus, I don’t try to explain the convoluted lacings in my veins, the shadowy legacy of Spanish settlers and hidden-away Native survivors. My ancestors worked the land, and raised livestock, and prayed and prayed for rain. Though I roam, New Mexico roots run deep. I visit in September, when the sweet smoky scent of green chile weaves through the air. Bright green peppers toasting in black iron cages at the market, spinning over fire.
On the patio of the house my parents built, we sip coffee with sticky chile juice-covered hands. Peel papery chile skin from silky chile flesh, juicy as mandarins. We will chop the chile, pile it high on enchiladas or burgers. Or simmer patiently in posole. Chile warms us through, burning away weariness of body, mind, spirit.
My father works the land when he comes home from earning a living. Just three acres, but difficult to weave nutrients into that sandy valley soil—bed of an unbridled Rio Grande generations ago. Irrigating through the night, he rises in the darkest hour. Dreaming of alfalfa so tall and green it begs to be cut and baled.
This is the desert, though. Rain scarcer each year, and-strewn seed lays to waste, or hay comes up weedy and apologetic. Fine for feeding cows, but horse hay runs for seven now. My father will want to sell the three mares. He will relent when, together with my mother, we race across the fields, hooves beneath us, wind pressing onward.
My father’s eyes always dance when we peel chile in the autumn. His black mustache tipped with more silver than I remember, he tells me that, as the air cools, chile left in the fields transforms from green to red. Red chile is strung into ristras the shape of trees with many branches, hung upside down to dry. These aged peppers will be ground into finest powder. Blended with aromatics—garlic, onion, cumin, oregano—until we’ve formed a blood-red sauce. Dark as rich clay soil.
Judge’s Comments:
I was captured by this gorgeous prose that beautifully weaves together the desert of New Mexico, memory, and ancestral resistance through a snapshot of chile season. The line “Though I roam, New Mexico roots run deep” is promise to the past, present, and future of land, self, and family.
Lorinda Toledo (she/her) was born and raised in New Mexico, while Los Angeles has been her home for more than a decade. Her novel-in-progress, The Nature of Fire, was named first-runner up for the 2019 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and she is currently revising the completed manuscript with her agent. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Mississippi Review, The Normal School, and Lit Angels, among others. She holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles, and she earned a PhD in literature with creative dissertation from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where her writing was supported by multiple awards including the Barrick Graduate Fellowship and a Black Mountain Institute PhD Fellowship. Learn more at lorindatoledo.com.
Photo by Heijo Reinl