Page 75 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

MILAGROS

Cynthia Pelayo

Blood smeared on banana leaves, and a dusty sun. That’s what I have. That’s what I see.

That’s all I have, I guess. Maybe that’s all that’s left?

Well, that and Choco.

I hear them just now, cawing, trying to scare me, but I don’t see them. They’re close though.

I know it.

I’m looking out the window of the concrete block school building.

I don’t see anything except a few bodies, little kids whose parents didn’t come to get them in time so they could die at home.

Instead, they just died here at school. This school is just a short walk from the beach.

I wondered as they were coughing, their fevers raging, if they wished they could just get out there to the water, the ocean calming their bodies before their lives ended.

I didn’t attend school here.

I attended school far from here, way up in the mountains and somehow Choco and I got down and found this place. We walked. We cried. My feet stung with blisters, and when that happened, I’d just hug Choco and hold a milagro in my hand.

For parts of our trek, we didn’t take the road. Instead, we walked through the jungle. I held Papi’s machete tight in my hand, whipping and chopping away at leaves as big as my head, bigger.

We crossed streams, and I stopped at the waterfall Salto Collores and I washed up there with Choco.

It felt sad to be there alone. The last time I was there was with all of my classmates.

Things in your life can change so fast, the night taking away all you love, replacing their voices with hacking coughs, their kisses with thick green mucus, and their hugs with bloated bodies.

The sickness took so much.

My bed is the teacher’s desk. I have a few blankets here on top of it for a cushion, and coloring books and crayons.

With me I also have a prayer card of La Virgen de Guadalupe, the patron saint of Adjuntas, my town, the white rosary Tía Nelida gifted me on my communion, and some silver milagro charms from our home altar I keep in a little velvet pouch, my pink backpack where I store everything, and Choco, my pet chicken.

She’s asleep beside me.

I can almost hear the whooshing of the ocean waves and it fills me with so much peace, but terror, too.

And then I hear it, the harsh caw.

Choco lets out a loud cluck .

“I know, Choco, I don’t like those birds, either,” and when I say this, one appears, flapping its wings on a branch.

“They’re back,” I whisper. Another crow flies down from the sky and stands on the body of a little girl. Her face is turned away from me, but I can see her neck is bulged and blue and green. A thick yellow paste of vomit is dried and clumped in her hair.

In time, she’ll rot and liquify. They all do. The heat isn’t kind to the decomposing bodies of Puerto Ricans.

I attended high school with Karla and Jonathan, Francisco and Mrs. Reyes.

Mrs. Reyes was just a few years older than us.

Her name was Socorro. Her parents died when their car veered off a sharp turn heading into the mountains.

Jonathan said their bodies were there so many days, and with the heat and humidity, by the time a group of men from the pueblo went down to check, all they found were slime and bones.

The mountain isn’t so kind to bodies, and there’s a lot of bodies rotting on the island now.

Mrs. Reyes was the first one who started coughing.

“ Es una gripa .” She laughed it off, rubbing her hands through her short, bouncy brown hair.

I always loved her hands. She said she’d go into San Juan every few weeks to visit her sister and there she’d get a manicure with bright red nail polish.

Bright red nail polish always seemed like it was for someone special.

I guess Mrs. Reyes was very special. I looked at my own hands, dirt lined right beneath the nails.

In the morning and after school I’d spend it outside with the chickens or the cows, feeding them, cleaning them, and walking along with Choco, her little chicken body wobbling beside me.

I guess if I were to be a farmer, I wouldn’t really be in need of a manicure.

That day in Mrs. Reyes’s class, I watched her stir honey into her manzanilla tea. She let go of the spoon and covered her mouth, those pretty red nails facing us. Her cough rattled her so much that her entire body shook. The kids laughed, but I didn’t.

Carlo behind me said something mean. “You sound like death.”

Mrs. Reyes stood, her legs shaky, her face pale, shiny with sweat.

“Carlo, are you reading?”

I turned around and saw that he nodded, but I knew he wasn’t reading the assignment. Mrs. Reyes approached and as she walked past me, the sound of her heels echoed like hammers on the tiled floor. I smelled sharp menthol from the Vicks VapoRub she must have smeared on her chest and shoulders.

Carlo’s eyes were wide as he held up his United States history book.

I always thought it was funny we had to read so much about U.S.

history and so little about Puerto Rican history.

It’s like we were supposed to learn about and love someplace most of us would never visit, but completely ignore where we lived.

Mrs. Reyes plucked a magazine that was tucked between the pages of Carlo’s book. “This is not what you’re supposed to be reading, Carlo!” she said, waving around the issue of Mad magazine, taking it away from him.

Carlo started coughing by lunchtime.

I always thought Mrs. Reyes’s name was like a prediction, not just of her life, but for all of us, Socorro.

Help.

I’ve been here three nights in the elementary school. I’ve been too scared to make my move, but I have to.

I’m in the kindergarten classroom. I like it here because there are pictures of animals on the bulletin boards—birds, dogs, cats, goats, sheep, pigs, cows, more, so many more.

It makes me sad, too, because I wonder if I’ll ever have a farm now that I’m leaving.

I knew I’d miss people, but really, I miss the animals the most.

There’s a large map of Puerto Rico, all of the pueblos, Ponce, Jayuya, Yabucoa, Salinas, more.

Next to it is a map of the mainland and it looks so massive, like another world.

Square shapes and rectangle shapes and funny shapes with funny names like Louisiana and Texas, Missouri and New Mexico, New York and Nebraska.

I hop off my bed and move over to the map.

“Choco, we have to take the boat here.” I point to San Juan and then slide my finger to the tip of Florida. “And then we have to somehow make it all the way over here.” I slide my finger across the map and up to Nebraska.

Mami always wanted me to leave here. She said I’d have a better life if I went to San Juan, studied there, and then moved to the mainland.

I wanted to visit San Juan, but to get my nails painted red like Mrs. Reyes, because I knew I was special like her, too, and to see the Castillo San Felipe del Morro and maybe spot the ghost of the soldier who patrolled at sunset.

But, never in my life had I planned on going any farther than that.

“I’m too scared of planes to leave the island,” I’d said.

“Then you can take a boat to the mainland,” Mami replied.

“I’m even more afraid of boats than planes.”

Papi told me about ships commandeered by dead pirates, drifting to nowhere. I feared finding myself aboard one of those crafts, doomed to die out there on the water with my island home just out of reach.

This morning, though, I had to take that risk.

“We die here, Choco, or we die out there,” I said, trying to sound brave, even to myself.

I shoved my hand in the small pocket of my backpack.

There’s a little Ziploc bag with dried corn.

I pull out a handful of kernels and set them down on the ground for Choco and she begins to peck at them, cooing as she does.

“We don’t have a lot of food,” I say. “And I don’t know how long the trip will be to Nebraska.”

Jonathan said by plane to the mainland is just three hours, but by boat he said it could take three days to get to Miami alone. I wondered if it’d take months then to get across the mainland.

“I’m worried,” I say, stroking Choco’s brown feathers.

“I don’t know how to swim. I never learned.

And I’m scared of the water. I’m scared of tiburones .

Oscar said that a tiburón can chomp down and remove your entire leg with a single bite.

Laila said no, that the shark will just clamp down on your torso and chew and chew and chew.

I know both Oscar and Laila are dead now.

I sigh and look back to the window and think of the crows outside waiting for us.

It’s la madrugada , that time of day that light begins to break through the clouds. The western part of the sky has gone from black to dark blue, but the east is this baby blue on top with a streak of peach and pink where the sun will rise.

“Once I open that door, Choco, we need to move fast,” I say, shoving the prayer card and milagros , coloring books and crayons into my backpack. I look to the sheets I brought from home, but I can’t carry any more for this part of our trip.

When we lived at home, Choco used to have her own bed.

My friend Karla would laugh because she’d say we treated Choco like a dog, and not like the other chickens outside.

Choco never liked being outside. She was always an inside chicken.

Mami said she couldn’t sleep in my room, and so we made her a little bed in the sala and she slept there.

Choco never really liked the total darkness.

She’d grow agitated. Pacing, her claws tapping against the floor.

But she liked sleeping in the sala . I think the flickering lights of the altar gave her some comfort.