Rios de la Luz’s An Altar to Liminal Saints
Broken River Books, $12.99, 102 pgs
In Mexica theology, hearts were extracted from people’s chests–it was imperative to the ritual that the heart still beat when it was presented to the moon, the sun, and other deities as an offering in exchange for mercy. This is what Rios de la Luz does in her short story collection, An Altar of Stories to Liminal Saints, she brings the beating heart of her characters to the reader through gruesome happenings and lyrical prose. Though many sections in the book teeter on the macabre–e.g. in the opening story, Ignacio vomits “giant red slugs of mucus and meat,” Rios de la Luz conjures stories of a painful but sublime human existence. Deeply flawed and hurt people survive their ill-starred fates and are purged, cleansed by a force of nature, freakish as it may be.
In “Dirt” Ignacio is a troubled man addicted to dirt, grappling with having a child outside his marriage. The guilt of missing out on Luna’s life, his daughter, haunts him. Wanting “something miraculous to happen,” Ignacio eats holy dirt inside a catholic sanctuary, El Chimayo, and his exoneration begins. He spits out his heart inside the chapel. Outside his body, the heart grows to the “size of four giant bags of topsoil.” He promptly transports the organ, in the back of a truck tied by bungee cords and hidden beneath a tarp, across the country to Luna’s home in Oregon and places the heart in the backyard. The heart speaks, asks Luna to sleep inside of it, has dreams of its own, and constantly whines to Luna about his wishes. Luna grows attached. She “gives him grace.” After some years, Ignacio, now a ghost who died in an accident, moves into the heart. They watch Luna grow up. When she leaves home as an adult, she leaves Ignacio a glass of sand and a letter, actually seeing him for the first time in her life. “Luna was a gift to the planet,” he says, filled with gratitude.
Not everyone has to die or undergo a monstrous transformation in the book. De la Luz’s visions are dark and deeply spiritual but filled with absurdity and humor. The title story is structured as ten vignettes. Each short narrative is framed around boxes delivered on doorsteps, each holding a spiritual revelation. One of the boxes, however, is intercepted by a raccoon. The note inside is blank “because the raccoon can’t read.” The rodent finds bliss by dreaming “about swimming in a pond filled with trash.” In “Tame the Coyotes,” the women of a town go on strike by becoming invisible and masturbating in unison in the middle of town. They howl out of pleasure each night and are mistaken for coyotes by the men. In another story, a woman trying desperately to become pregnant visits a curandero who tells her there’s something dark inside her. She responds, “I could guess why the shadows lurk around my, como se dice, vagina.”
Still, the serious subject matters persist. Many female characters are seriously beaten, raped, or neglected–though there’s a tender salvation that grows between the women–many are linked by blood and others romantically involved. Mothers and daughters connect in miraculous ways, given they’re single parents carrying, and a lot of times unloading intergenerational trauma. In “Mother Nature” a teenage narrator scratches her mami’s bald spot every night at her request. A deeper desire follows the grotesque descriptions of the scalp action: “Could I poke a hole in her head and create a psychic link to her history? Her past. Her childhood. Her reasons for leaving a country.” The scratching is the young girl and her mother’s only form of intimacy.
A thread of the supernatural binds the collection together. Nearly every story ends with a grand, ethereal moment rooted in the natural world and sprinkled with fantasy. De la Luz lifts her characters into the idyllic and sublime after they’ve paid their high dues to life.
In the same story, honeysuckle vines, dark forests, rain, and oceans appear to the unnamed narrator. The vines follow her into her mother’s room. When the time for the head-scratching comes, “vines burst beneath her bed and curl around our bodies like skinny anacondas mimicking some kind of maternal embrace.”
A daughter inquiring about her emotional lineage, her mother’s past, frequently reappears. “Genetic Shadows of a Chola” begins with a discovery–an eyebrow pencil. “I felt I’d found a piece of jewelry, a piece of art,” the young narrator confesses. “In her chola days, Mami wore her bangs close to the sky,” she admiringly recognizes in an old photograph. She begins lining her lips frequently with the pencil, then hides it inside a glitter-filled sock, “It was a love spell to myself.”
Mami’s daughter closes the story, “I looked up at her and saw pieces of me. Here was my lineage, my stubbornness…there we were. Both of us, brilliant and hopeful, lucky enough to be on this planet at the same time.”
Perhaps the most enchanting aspect of de la Luz’s book is what morphs from sacrifice. By definition, sacrifice means offering something in exchange for another thing–it’s a gifted loss. It’s what allows a continued lineage. Despite these characters finding themselves in a maze of violence, poverty, and oppression, what they give to make a path for their family and community transcends it all. They keep walking, even if it means making it out without a heart, it will be a miracle.
Infrarrealista Review is a literary nonprofit dedicated to publishing Tejanx voices.