The Ways of Walls and Words 2016

I say the names aloud, so I won’t forget, and so the walls know who we are: Francisca, Luis, Isabel, Leonor, Catalina, Mariana, and Anica.

My name is Anica but I bear others too: one from the land my forebears claim as home; one for our hidden heart; one for the many times that heart has been betrayed.

I was born where the water shapes the coast of New Spain, the only one of us natural to this New World. Eight generations of our family lived along a different coastline—the Iberian one my mother still talks about—so the sea is part of us. I learned young to mix salted water into dough and knead it with a rhythm that pulls and crests…

Short story in Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction, Twelfth Planet Press, 2015. Click to order.