Flame Trees in May

By Karla Marrufo and Allison A. deFreese

In her most experimental work to date, Karla Marrufo Huchim explores universal themes with appreciable specificity: loneliness, family angst, memory loss—from a perspective belonging singularly to a native of the Yucatán Peninsula. Mayo’s unnamed narrator is an older woman, isolated in her domestic life, who is both suffering from memory loss and intent on recounting the lives of three generations of her family. The Yucatán culture and community that Marrufo Huchim describes through her narrator’s fine but faltering mind will be foreign but not fetishized for American readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781628974911

Karla Marrufo

Karla Marrufo Huchim holds a Doctorate in Hispanic-American Literature from the Universidad Veracruzana. Her work has been recognized with several prestigious literary awards, including: the 2005-2007 National Wilberto Cantón Award in Playwriting; the XVI José Díaz Bolio Poetry Prize for La Ciudad en Ti (Centro Cultural ProHispen, 2016); and the 2014 National Dolores Castro in Narration for her novel De ella Mayo. She received a fellowship from the Program for the Encouragement of Creation and Artistic Development in Yucatán, which resulted in the publication of her book Mérida lo Invisible (published under the title Arquitecturas de lo Invisible in its second printing).

Book preview

♦

did you know there’s a word in portuguese that resembles your name?

i’ve forgotten it now, but it means mementos or memories, like remembering to send greetings to someone, to send a memo. i would remember it if only i could pet the cat, just like i would remember to take out the trash on friday and to close the refrigerator door

the door to my tears,

and all the windows before leaving the house.

so much silence here. have you noticed? that when you keep quiet, the house gets dirtier so much faster? you are such stubborn dust. you pass through doorways and come to settle in corners kept under lock and key. maybe that’s why lola can’t stand this place

the room still sweats with the warm hypocrisy from when it was a law office

and i’ll tell you why, if we keep going like this, soon we’ll be able to rent it out as a funeral parlor.

that’s a profitable business. people will never stop dying

or keeping quiet

or thinking today must be friday.

come here. touch the wall. it’s covered in dark bubbles. so humid! the wood is swelling. i am swelling, and sometimes i feel myself rolling, floating, rolling—like those days when we’d go to the park and roll down the hill until we were exhausted, until we would land at the base of the hill where the grass was peaceful and green. remember? we spent so many weekends at that park! we arrived with our childish excitement, believing everything was going to be fine; we ate sandwiches and sipped fruit juice while the clowns blew up dog-shaped balloons

the dogs walking by were shaped like balloons that would later pop—

once blown up to full size and left to bloat at the side of the road, the cars never stopping.

but in those days, bubbles were clear, and everything was fine. we should return to that city again sometime, leave this flat landscape for a while.

have you noticed how tiresias looks at me? i’ve often wondered what he’s thinking when his little green eyes grow big and stare into mine. it reminds me of that movie

what was it called?

the one where they ask whether, instead of us being the ones who make animals more human, it’s not the opposite way around, that the creatures in our lives turn us into animals. later lola brought up that song again, the one about the professor who teaches puppies how to write

he was an animal lover for sure; a regular zoo-phile, lola said

what a silly song! it makes me laugh,

though my excitement lasts an instant

as i think about those animals

those bubbles

and how they drift through life with their broken fragments of memory.

so little time has passed, really, and yet i’ve started mixing things up; things disappear from my mind. sometimes the past is a faded beach house, condemned each day to endure the relentless caress of sand and the sting of salt swept in by the wind. lola insists i take vitamins, fish oil, seaweed capsules. she says i should sleep more

have peaceful dreams, sleep without needles pounding in my temples

for eight, ten hours

a thousand hours

to sleep forever

but a wicked sun keeps visiting me in my dreams, drawing black holes before my eyes

it wakes me—agitated—every forty minutes.

i saw it on tv. the blonde girl with the small mouth was talking about it: about the very dark spot at the center of a solar flare. you have to see it

we should talk more. a little more. you know? it’s easier to remember ordinary things that happen to us when we talk about them. that’s why names are so important

a handful of letters from the alphabet, bound to the heart our whole lifes.

mamá panchita used to repeat this ad nauseam.

she said names are very dangerous; they chart the lines that lead to our destinies.

i remember the last time, so sad, though it barely lasted a few seconds. we had bound mamá panchita’s hands with a rope, secured them to the ceiling beams, so she would stop

she was only hurting herself;

scratching open her skin as a way to remember.

her hands restless as kites,

but without the colors

and i was deeply moved by her dark skin. seeing it touched me in a way that no one else’s skin had ever moved me before. it smelled ancient, the scent of many years. doubt had left a deep crease between her eyebrows. in a corner of the room, right in front of her, the small altar to our lady of charity was laughing along with five freshly cut sunflowers and the sparkle of a few fake coins. eyes half-closed, mamá panchita squinted suspiciously as she observed the saint; her pupils glowering with the hatred of a thousand questions answered only by whispers.

and just as i walked into the room, an unspeakable anger seized me

she was scratching open her skin

who knows what she was looking for below the surface

that’s why she had all those sores on her arms,

that long scar on her face

and her terrifying screams and outrage made me shake with anger and then grow quiet because, there at her side for the last time, i felt incapable of speaking to her

come now, mamá, everything’s going to be fine. when i look into your eyes, there you are—so very much yourself, mamá, always you, taking the little thread of your name, that’s about to break

nothing. silence. in that quiet corner of the room, i didn’t so much as dare to light the white candles around our lady of charity; we kept still, our mouths sealed

by our dark hands.

when it comes to giving me looks, even tiresias is more expressive than that. this must be why he scratches me with such determination. you see? it’s the same thing backwards. relentless caresses and reverberating silences—and this house didn’t even suffer the misfortune