Salt Bones

by Jennifer Givhan

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Suspense; Occult & Supernatural; Magical Realism; Horror

Synopsis

For fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Ramona Emerson’s Shutter: a gripping retelling of Persephone and Demeter in the Mexicali borderlands

At the edge of the Salton Sea, in the blistering borderlands, something is out hunting. . .

Malamar Veracruz has never left the dust-choked town of El Valle. Here, Mal has done her best to build a good life: She’s raised two children, worked hard, and tried to forget the painful, unexplained disappearance of her sister, Elena. When another local girl goes missing, Mal plunges into a fresh yet familiar nightmare. As a desperate Mal hunts for answers, her search becomes increasingly tangled with inscrutable visions of a horse-headed woman, a local legend who Mal feels compelled to follow. Mal’s perspective is joined by the voices of her two daughters, all three of whom must work to uncover the truth about the missing girls in their community before it's too late.

Combining elements of Latina and Indigenous culture, family drama, mystery, horror, and magical realism in a spellbinding mix, Salt Bones lays bare the realities of environmental catastrophe, family secrets, and the unrelenting bond between mothers and daughters.

Release date: July 22, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 384

Sample

THE SALTON SEA, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Thick, noxious air burns her throat as she flees through the fields, mud clotting to her soles like leeches, one untied shoe after the other over the rutted vegetables.

She shouldn’t run toward the water—it isn’t safe. But the murk would offer cover.

She doesn’t risk a glance behind her or fumble at the yellow onions bulging from the ground. At first, it’s the familiar stench of sulfur bubbling from deep in the earth, mangled with the smell of rotting fish, thousands of carcasses gurgled onto the brackish marsh just ahead.

Then something intoxicatingly sweet fills her nostrils. She’s not near the sugar plant on the other side of town, but those sugar beets smell like overripe dirt anyway. This is more walking into the donut shop at sunrise and ordering a maple bar and sweet tea. She shakes her head, sure her blood sugar’s collapsing from starvation and dehydration and she’s about to nose-dive into the fields when the sweetness sours just as suddenly as it came—and she’s overtaken by the dank stench of sweat and shit.

Her heartbeat throbs in her ears, eclipsing the sound of a truck engine’s roar—another predator in the night, tearing through the furrows and ruining the crops, chasing her.

Would anyone hear her if she screamed?

She can’t waste the breath she needs for running.

In the distance, golden lights twinkle a mythical city arisen in the nowhere between the closest towns, neglected or desolate, and the still-living, breathing town where her people are.

But the lights aren’t magical, and they’re far, much too far. She’d never outrun the truck to get to the geothermal plant where someone at the gate might hear her. Let her in. But would they believe her if she told them who was after her?

A few hundred feet ahead stands a dock. Rickety and slanted, but still possible cover. She could jump into the frothy, stinking water, hold her breath, and hide beneath the battered, salt-crusted planks. Her pursuers might assume she’s darted toward the wildlife preserve, climbed the chain link. Or drowned.

The fug of gasoline and exhaust commingles with the acrid sea, fertilizer, her own sweat and spit, and her blood pumping, pumping furiously. Her lungs scream. Don’t let me die out here—

The sky lights a purple path upward—the Milky Way beckoning as if someone’s holding a flashlight behind a pinpricked cosmic bedsheet. It cascades across the expansive blackness that blurs into the jagged peaks of the Chocolate Mountains beyond this stretch of desert that’s claimed countless lives.

The clomping of hooves and a blaze of headlights pierce her back. Her dark hair flaps crow’s wings against her sweat-drenched hoodie as her high-tops slip against the mud.

There’s nowhere to hide, no tree cover, nothing but shrubs and dirt, and the green fingers of onion bulbs wavering the hands of the dead, reaching for her, grabbing, pulling her downward.

She falls to her knees, blackening her hands with soil.

But the creature canters steadily toward her.

She scrambles up, the Salton Sea in sight, a soupy bog in the darkness.

Her feet crunch fish bones and the minuscule shells of dead crustaceans; millions of them crackle beneath her while she flies toward the pier stretching into the abandoned lake, all that “accidental” water sloshing for miles across the dusty bowl of valle, before the headlights overtake her, and the horse-headed woman cackles, her midnight-black mane scraggling down her bare back.

For a moment, she’s glowing yellow, gleaming with beads of sweat. Saintly.

Then the gunshots resound.

One. Two. The deafening booms reverberate through the mountains. Aerial drills. Only this is no drill. Following the shots—metal clanks its sick click, click. Boom, click, click. Boom.

If anyone were out here but the night animals, the stars, they’ve shut their eyes. They haven’t seen a thing. They haven’t said a damn word to anyone.

ONE WEEK EARLIER

Mal’s chopping block already seeps with blood when the hinge on the door to the carnicería squeaks like a distressed house cat. Mal pays no attention from the back room where she’s butchering today’s cuts. Not that she’d greet whoever’s entered the shop anyway. It doesn’t belong to her. She just works here. Putting on a cheerful face for the customers is Renata’s job.

You have to be a bitch in this business to get anywhere. By bitch, Mal means tough. Her terrible mother named her Bad, so that’s close enough. Like bad seed. Malamar, bad sea. Mami concocted the name as a punishment for the daughter she believed kept her chained to the Salton Sea, wrecked by a series of hurricanes the year Mal was born. Still, they stayed beside the water, which sometimes blossomed blood-red from the toxic algal blooms, killing all the fish and stinking to high heaven for weeks. If you ask her mother, Mal was born for this place.

She rolls back the sleeves of her hoodie, cranks up Radiohead’s “Creep” on her headphones, and swings another carcass onto its hooks, dragging it toward her workstation, metal scratching as the cold, solid slab sways between her bare hands. She wears a white apron and hairnet but forgoes the restrictive plastic gloves, needing that tactile connection. Some artists work with wood or metal or glass; Mal creates masterpieces from meat.

She pops a mint-flavored Tums into her mouth, the chalky tablet mixing with the tang of blood on her palms, salving her acid reflux burns. She keeps a roll in the ass pocket of her jeans and chews half a pack a day the way Mami used to blow through cartons of cigarettes before Mal’s big brother would throw them out and Mami would just run around the house screaming, “Mal! What the hell did you do with mis putos cigarrillos?” in her half-mock Hollyhood accent she’d perfected before her life went to shit.

As if Mal has the cojones to stand up to Mami. That’s her older brother Esteban’s wheelhouse, not Mal’s. That’s why he’s the one campaigning for the Senate this fall, not her.

I’m a weirdo—the lyrics Mal’s loved since she was a teen lull her into a flow state. She hauls the carcass to the electric saw, carving it in two, leaving half on the hook and carrying the other chunk to her block where she aims her ivory-handled breaking knife, tip curved like a lover’s tongue, through the gristle, then pulls, slices, and tears the splintered muscle, ripping it from tendons and fat, until she has a manageable primal piece, born of the skill and precision of her twenty years performing this same cut.

Whole animal craft butchery is a rare art form—and Mal knows she’s talented. Suppose she was working farm-to-table in an upscale Orange County or New York butcher shop? Given her experience fabricating animals of all different breeds, feeds, and finishes, she’d be able to market herself as an artisan butcher. But here? She earns just above minimum wage, like all the other cooks. Of course, they’re all women. Mexican women, to boot. Lowest on the pay scale, her college-educated daughter told her when she was taking some feminist class.

Mal grabs her desert-island butcher knife and removes the tenderloins. The money cuts. She finds the natural seams between muscles and draws back with her sharp tool, gently tapping the meat. From the loin, she breaks it down into subprimals: rib loin, center cut or short loin, and sirloin—her guiding and tearing hand in disciplined choreography with her slicing hand. All that gorgeous marbling. As she cuts the thick covering of fat she belts out, “I don’t belong here.”

Griselda’s still taking UC San Diego by storm, an environmental researcher who may one day return to salvage the ruin los ricos have made of this land. Papi’s land. But Mal doesn’t want her eldest daughter to come home, not really. She escaped El Valle—a feat Mal never achieved, nor her mother before her, nor hers. The only one who got away before her was Mal’s sister, Elena—swallowed by the same toxic bloom that tainted their childhood. The town was quick to brand Elena a runaway, a puta who got what she deserved. But Mal has never been convinced.

She’s finishing the tenderloins and moving on to the next cut, when the back door swings open with a familiar creak, and in saunters her work bestie, Yessi, carrying a tray of asada. Afro-Latina with tawny skin and wide eyes that remind Mal of walnuts, her natural coils gathered into a tight bun, Yessi’s got a pinched-lip look like she’s here to stir the pot.

With her usual pomp and circumstance, she leans against the doorframe, balancing the metal tray on her arms, a smirk cutting across her lips. “Oye, yunta.” Their term of endearment she says as casually as dude but given their history is a loaded inside joke. “Heard the latest chisme about your favorite front girl?”

Mal doesn’t pause her butchering but shoots Yessi a look, one eyebrow raised. “¿Qué pasó?” She removes the earphones.

“Renata got arrested the other day for giving head down at the FFA swine barns…” Her smirk widens. “To some high school chavalón, aunque she already graduated.”

Mal shakes her head and slices through the meat in front of her, acid curling her throat. She pops another Tums. Why Yessi loves talking shit about her own cousin, she’ll never know. When Mal’s sister vanished, people said she deserved her fate. They didn’t say it to Mal’s face. But she heard. Everyone around her loves shaming so-called sluts. “People’s business is their own,” Mal says as much for Elena’s memory as for Renata’s defense.

“Ándale, yunta. I’m just passing along what I heard.” Yessi chuckles, as though she’s not offended in the slightest by Mal’s rebuke. This is just how they are with each other.

Yessi sidles up to Mal, whose pulse flutters, damn butterflies throbbing her wrists at her nearness. Yunta, yes. But only because Mal’s been unavailable her entire adult life.

She’s the closest Mal has to a real friend, even if she only knows half-truths. The truth is, she and Yessi might’ve been girlfriends—they’d kissed once years ago, on their break, between the carnicería sidewall and an abandoned field, overgrown with burnt-orange creosote that sprouted like wildfire.

Yessi’s long onyx hair had been coiled in a tight bun, her aura a blend of crushed chile and sweet lilacs. Yet something in Mal resisted, despite the soft crawl of her body toward Yessi’s spunk and sass, the smeared red lipstick across both their faces. The full truth was that Mal had committed herself to a half-life with someone else twenty years earlier.

Now, in the back of the carnicería, Yessi—hands in gloves, black apron around her tank top and jeans, hairnet around her bun—reminds Mal why she hasn’t let anyone know about her and Gus. This, right here. Everyone would say about her what they say about Renata. More to the point, they’d say it about her daughters.

Even so, Mal leans in. “How long did they hold her?” She wonders if she can still smell burnt wildflowers on Yessi. “Renata, I mean.”

“Just a few hours, pero ay, qué vergüenza. Mi tía Carmen was boiling!” She’s holding in a delighted chortle like she’s waiting for Mal to give her permission to burst into hysterics. But as Yessi takes a hard look at Mal, she draws out a long “Girrrrrrl, what’s wrong?”

Mal shrugs, and Yessi sets her metal tray on the counter, layered with pink strips of thin-flanked steak.

“Did the guy get arrested too? The high school kid?”

Mal wonders if her little brother, Benny, had anything to do with the arrest. Maybe not. He’s a big-time detective at the station now, not just a beat cop. Their youngest detective.

Yessi shakes her head no and gives Mal a little bump with her hip. “I just served you the freshest tea, pero you look like you’re about to cry.” She leans her head on Mal’s shoulder. “Isn’t Griselda coming home for your brother’s thing? You should be excited.”

“You and Lisa will be at the fundraiser, right?”

“Of course, yunta. It’ll be fancy, ¿qué no?”

Mal rolls her eyes. “So posh. You know Esteban. Always kissing up to the Callahans. If it were my party, I’d have barbacoa in the backyard.”

“Right?” They both laugh now. “Dime, ¿qué te pasa?”

Mal stretches her neck, unknotting the constricted muscles, grasping for how to explain the malaise fomenting in her for almost twenty-five years—and whatever darker emotion’s bubbling beneath that—but before she can reply, the back door swings open and in steps Renata. The tension snaps like a cheap condom. “Everything okay here?” she asks, glancing between Mal and Yessi as if she knows she’s interrupting.

Yessi rolls her eyes at her younger cousin. “God, Ren, you’re such a pest. Don’t make me regret getting you this job.”

Renata curls her lip. She has a cheerful, round face like a toasted tortilla and cropped, silky hair several shades lighter than Amaranta’s, which is frizzy and dark as coal. “Whatever. Stop taking breaks and come help me. We’ve got a rush.”

“Saturday morning. Hangover cure time,” Yessi drawls, a hum to her voice.

Menudo’s the hair of the dog. The cook makes it a’yight here. Papi’s is ten times better.

As Renata huffs off, Yessi winks at Mal and whispers, “We’ll talk later, yunta,” then sashays through the swinging doors after her cousin.

A few minutes later, when the front door’s whining again and Yessi’s bustling to the back room, Mal suppresses a grin. She here to keep flirting or spreading worse rumors about her prima? Mal sets down the boning knife and leans against the chopping block, waiting for Yessi’s next theatrical burst of bochinche. Instead, she says flatly, “Your dad and daughter are here.”

They come every weekend for groceries. At home, Papi cooks—more chicken than beef lately since he’s put Mami on the diabetic diet. They’d better pick up some pollo asado this time. Plain white chicken breast is the worst.

Mal wipes her bloody hands on her apron—the red stains smearing watercolor poppies on a painter’s canvas—and follows Yessi to the counter, where Amaranta’s staring at Renata with the focused intensity of a guard dog, which is unlike her younger daughter. Except, she is a newly minted teen, self-conscious about her looks in a way she never used to be, and Renata’s drop-dead gorgeous. Could it be envy? Mal stays back a beat to see how this unfolds.

“What can I get you?” Renata asks Amaranta, who gives her head a dazed shake, barely noticeable, but Mal catches it. “A sample of menudo?”

Amaranta nods emphatically, the edges of her lips twitching, and Renata serves her a deep ladleful into a paper cup. But when she takes a slurp, she scrunches her face. See? Papi’s is better.

“Mija,” Papi calls when he notices Mal at the swinging doors, and she relaxes. Papi has that effect. His presence calms her. There was a time, after Elena disappeared, Papi’s drunken stupor was almost as terrible as Mami’s vitriol. But once they moved away from the sea and he took up gardening, he mostly came back to himself.

She gestures for them to join her at the end of the counter, where she hunches and plants a kiss atop Amaranta’s frizzy head, careful not to lean too far, keeping her blood-spackled apron away from her daughter. She’s the same size as Mal though she’s only fourteen and for the moment, they wear the same clothes, some of which had belonged to Elena. The Converse Amaranta loves, for instance. Egg-yolk yellow.

Griselda’s the one who inherited Elena’s face; it’s uncanny to walk into a room and find Mal’s long-gone-likely-dead sister. Until the sunlit filter that blurred Gris into the tía she never met fades and there’s the staunch and steadfast daughter Malamar raised instead.

It’s different with Amaranta. Rounder, darker, with the budding of plumpness, all her childish edges going soft. She’ll end up like Gus, tall and thick.

“Buenos días, Papi.” Mal kisses her father’s cheek. Cafecito and pan dulce with a trace of fertilizer. Back when they still lived beside the sea, in the government-provided house where Papi worked tirelessly to repopulate the waters and oversee the fish he’d introduced from the Gulf of California on the land his ancestors had toiled for millennia—back when he was jefe and felt such pride in the thriving fish and game industry—he smelled of salt and, eventually, sulfur. But he ceased working after Elena disappeared, and for too many years, he exuded a fermented odor, a loaf of sourdough left in the rain. As he’s aged and made a brittle peace with his grief, he’s become an avid gardener. Now he emanates the scent of soil and the tres flores oil he still slicks into his sable hair.

“What are you two doing here so early?”

“We’re tired of chicken!” Amaranta moans, and they all break out laughing.

“Hallelujah,” Mal says. “We’re Mexican, Papi! Get some carne asada, for Christ’s sake!”

“Ay, mija.” Papi tsks, but he’s laughing too.

“So what’ll it be then, eh, Pop? Between you and me, the menudo here can’t hold a candle to yours. We’ve got some good tripas if you want to show your nieta what’s up. It’s time she learns.” Mal raises her eyebrow at Amaranta, who slinks a bit. She gets away with everything around the house, including leaving all the chores to her elders. Papi finds solace in his work or else Mal would put her foot down. Let him take care of them now; Mal was little more than Mami’s maid during her childhood. Mal won’t put her daughters through that.

“We’re making birria de res,” Amaranta bursts.

“I’ve got the perfect tender chuck roast for you.” Mal retreats behind the counter to select the meat and wrap it in puckered white paper.

While she’s prepping the roast, Papi chats with Renata. “I get my beef here,” he says conspiratorially, “instead of the meat market closer to our house. It tastes better.”

Renata nods, solemn. “It’s kinda why I work here. Poorly treated beef tastes bad.”

Mal hands Papi the crinkling package. She ties it with string, old-school.

“I knew I liked you,” Papi tells Renata. “Not everyone can taste that difference.”

He means the Callahan butcher shop, Beef Tooth, replete with factory farm cattle yard. Their families have fought Mal’s whole life. It’s another art, fending off the exploitation of the privileged assholes who think they own this town. Mal refuses to source her meat from Sean Callahan’s and orders from a smaller, organic farm near San Diego, where the cows graze and are grass-finished.

Papi took her hunting when she was a girl and taught her to respect her kills—the lives they lead before they die. He told her the Kumeyaay word for the land is the same for the human body: Mat/’Emat. That stuck with her. Connects her to everything. Even the cows. Even the sea.

Last summer, Griselda came home for an internship and preached for weeks at the dinner table about the Callahans’ unfair practices. Grisly tales of their slaughterhouse just down the road. Unexplained illnesses, water pollution, land destruction, mud-smeared cattle wedged in the packing yard, their hides glistening and sticky with confinement. The workers aren’t spared from injuries, diseases, or accidents either. Not to mention the waste, that abattoir mess—shit, blood, bone, chemicals like nitrogen and phosphorus—all floating out into the Salton Sea.

Griselda’s impassioned tirade sounded like a college presentation—all those gruesome details about slicing the necks of conscious cows. It made Amaranta sick. Pobrecita left the table, gagging up the sopa her abuelo spent literal hours stewing.

Gris’s soapbox talk probably stems from Sean Callahan’s only son, Harlan, her on-again, off-again boyfriend, who was back on last summer. Even though he’s a yuppie who protests his own father’s business while still living in his gated estate, Mal respects his efforts. The Callahans make terrible enemies, as Mal knows all too well. Harlan secretly undermining them from within their own posh home takes serious cojones. She only knows about his guerrilla tactics through Gris, and as far as Mal can tell, his dad has no idea. She’d respect Harlan even more if he moved out altogether, but dismantling an empire takes time. And resources. Mal’s not one to judge someone for who their family is, and he wouldn’t make the worst son-in-law, if it came down to it. Still, she doesn’t want her daughter stuck with him in El Valle.

“I’m not gonna work here forever,” Renata adds, as if she’s been privy to Mal’s thoughts. “I want to be an eco-justice lawyer.”

Yessi’s never mentioned her cousin’s aspirations. Damn. Good for her.

“Una abogada,” Papi rejoins. “Working for change como mis nietas.” His voice swells as he tells her about his scientist granddaughters. “Amar es una futura científica, y mi otra nieta, Griselda, está en la universidad. ¿La conoces? She’s about your age.”

Mal, ever the mama bear, spies the briefest scowl shadowing Renata’s face before she catches herself. At first Mal wonders if Renata doesn’t speak Spanish but then realizes it was the mention of Griselda’s name that struck a strange chord. Does her coworker dislike Mal’s eldest? Wouldn’t be the first. Everyone knows everyone in their small town. Everyone’s got beef with someone. Even her own brothers, Lord help them. Splitting up the family over this damn fundraiser in two nights. Benny refuses to support Esteban since he’s holding it at the Callahan mansion, of all places. Enemy territory. But Mal and Esteban have always been close: Chuy and Mallow Mar—like the candy bars. In high school, they were a bookish pair of Mexican nerds and scholars ¿y qué? Mal won’t abandon Esteban now, not when he’s so close to winning his Senate seat.

The house cat in the hinges screeches as the door swings open wide and two men in khaki and olive-green camouflage tromp into the carnicería. At first, they strike Mal as military, men who sometimes come into town from the bases dotting the outlying mountains and desert beyond El Valle. But they’re missing key elements of a soldier’s attire—no glinting dog tags, no combat boots or crew cuts. One guy has a Viking beard and mustache so manicured and sculpted it’s comical.

Renata’s demeanor changes when the hunters come in, and, in fact, she begins to resemble a house cat herself now, all coy and mischievous.

The hunters zero in on Renata, cutting off Papi midsentence. “Is Mal around? We need to discuss a job with him.”

Amaranta stifles a giggle. Renata smirks too.

Mal clears her throat and steps forward, crossing her arms in front of her bloody chest.

“That’s me,” Mal flexes.

The hunters are taken aback—bocas tan abiertas que los peces podrían nadar en ellas, as Papi would say. He makes up his own dichos. Their mouths gape so wide, fish could swim in them. Mal’s used to this reaction. It amuses her every time.

Hipster Beard grabs the elk teeth dangling from his keychain. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize, but, hey, great we caught you. No disrespect. We’ve heard you’re the best butcher in the valley. We need someone to process game for us.”

The other guy chuckles. “We’d have done it ourselves, but it was a train wreck.”

“Right?” Hipster Beard agrees. “We need more bang for our buck this time around.” He shakes the keychain and both men laugh. Buck. A male deer.

“Yeah, I have the chops to prepare your venison,” Mal puns back.

Amaranta cracks a smile and Mal winks. She’s taught her daughter how venison comes from the Latin venatus, which means to hunt. Originally, the term referred to any kind of edible game, but it’s used now to mean the meat from deer. It also means hunted or pursued.

Once they work out the details and price and Mal gives her cell so they can text when their kill’s ready, Renata asks if they need anything else. When they decline, she leans against the counter, pulls out a compact tube of lipstick from her snug jeans pocket, and applies another greasy coat of mauve around her crescent-moon pout. The hunters remind Mal of wolves in a cartoon, grinning and nudging each other as they depart, the hissing feline of door hinges bidding them farewell.

When Papi pulls Mal aside to ask her advice about what to cook for Griselda’s return and whether she thinks Benny will join them at the fundraiser even though he’s not speaking to Esteban, Mal notices Amaranta suddenly light up in a spirited conversation with Renata. Mal wants to eavesdrop but also respect her daughter’s privacy. Her girl’s growing up. Looking for women to emulate. Far be it from Mal to deem Renata an unsuitable influence. Even if she does hook up with guys in the parking lots of swine barns.

Elena hooked up all across town and the surrounding countryside, everyone said.

A year older than Elena, Mal still had no idea who her sister was. Elena kept her secrets but Mal could’ve tried harder. Could’ve been a better role model. A better sister. She might’ve been a failure at the root, a bad sea as a sister and a daughter, but as a mother? At least she got that one thing right. Right?

The meat falls off the flank of the birria de res, plopping into the chile-red broth with a plunk. Papi said when he was a boy, they made this adobo stew from goat meat.

But Mal was right about this beef chuck. It’s the perfect cut. So tender.

She tops hers with finely diced onions, cilantro, and a wedge of lime, glad to see Amaranta helped her abuelo and her chopping skills are improving. She grabs a tortilla from under the Styrofoam lid of the warmer, breaks off a piece, and scoops out a chunk of meat from the broth, staining the blanket of tortilla bright red.

Everyone but Mami’s doing the same. Mami uses a spoon. Slurps loudly. The juice runs down her mouth like she’s bleeding from her gums.

After dinner, Papi’s washing dishes while Amaranta does her homework at the table. A kid who does homework on a Saturday night. That’s the kind of girl Mal’s raised.

She has tutoring tomorrow. A boy in her class. Maybe she’s crushing. But Amaranta prides herself on remaining an enigma, steeped in gender-nonconforming mystery. Mal’s fine with that. Boys screw everything up anyway.

Papi’s humming above the sound of the rushing faucet and the gentle clink-clink of dishes. His voice to the thrum of the water takes Mal back to the sea. The dock at the edge of their old yard led to Papi’s little government-issued boat. When Papi was a boy growing up deeper in El Valle, his people were more than laborers in the irrigated fields—they were farmers in their own right, cultivating the land to grow and thrive.

Back then, his family, being Kumeyaay and Cahuilla, the original inhabitants of this land, were welcomed as immigrants. It’s ironic, considering they’d come from this place but migrated to Mexico, moving back and forth over thousands of years until the imaginary borders drawn by los políticos restricted international travel. When the floods came again and nourished this land, they also rebirthed the sea, which for a time sustained his family—until everything decayed, and over the past two decades, Papi’s borne the brunt.

Mami’s nurse, Lupita, hasn’t come for her shift again. Her daughter’s sick with asthma. Mal remembers those days with Griselda in and out of emergency rooms—how harrowing when a daughter can’t breathe. So Mal cleans Mami’s pressure wounds in Lupita’s place. They flush bright and toxic as algal blooms.

She lifts Mami from her wheelchair to the flowered couch, props her one remaining leg on a towel, and sets her first-aid supplies on the coffee table like her butcher’s knife set. Maybe if she thinks of Mami as a carcass, the whole process will be a pinch more tolerable.

But as Mal scrapes the flesh, Mami slaps back her hand, hard. Mal’s skin turns red along her knuckles. If it’d been palm to palm, it would’ve been a high five. But with Mami, it’s always a rebuke. “That hurts,” Mami squelches. “Watch what you’re doing, tonta.”

Tonta—stupid girl—Mami’s term of endearment for Mal, who releases a moody puff that blows the wisps of bangs from her forehead as if she were a teenager sulking. She’ll be forty-two soon. Why does she still let Mami do this to her? She turns her huffs into the box-breaths her therapist taught her. You’ll choose a familiar hell over a strange heaven every time unless you . . .