Karen Jordan Allen - Godburned

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GODBURNED by Karen Jordan Allen

Karen Jordan Allen lives in Maine with her husband and daughter. Her fiction has

appeared in such venues as Black Gate and The First Heroes: New Tales of the

Bronze Age. She has worked as a Quaker pastor, an art school admissions office

manager, a high school Spanish teacher, and a pianist. She has a master’s degree in

religion from Yale. At Yale, she tells us, she took an anthropology course on

“Ancient Mexican Thought” with archaeologist Michael Coe. “This sparked my

interest in the Aztecs. Some years later I spent a week in Mexico City, where I

visited the sites mentioned in ‘Godburned,’ got a sunburn in the rain, and watched a

young man put his hand on the Sun Stone.” These experiences all provided

inspiration for her first story for Asimov’s.

* * * *

Shouts and triumphant howls. Woody thumps, as if clubs struck trees. More

shouts, the low and heavy rumble of many feet pounding the earth.

Pearl tried to push herself up, but a large wooden disk strapped to one arm

impeded her. She fell back to the ground and tried to think.

Was this it? This noisy place?

She hadn’t expected to be conscious of anything. At most, a bright light, a

soundless void. Never had she dreamed it would be like this—raucous, dusty,

dimly lit. Perhaps she had been wrong not to believe in hell.

She pushed herself up again with her free arm. A coarse grit shifted under

her fingers and dug into her knees.

Must be the medication, she thought. Goddamned stuff. I told them not to

give me any more. I told them to let me die.

A thin light shone, too pale to permit her to distinguish colors. Gray earth,

gray skin, gray round object bound to her left arm. No, this couldn’t possibly be it.

Could it?

* * * *

Pearl squinted into the crooked hotel-room mirror and winced. Pink—God,

had her face ever been such a flaming pink? Or she so stupid? Yes, clouds had

blanketed the sky. Yes, rain had spit on her while she stood atop the Pyramid of the

Sun. But she was in Mexico, in the tropics, for pity’s sake. She should have known

better than to leave her sunscreen in her room.

She parted her gray hair carefully to cover the painful scarlet strip on her

scalp, and rubbed a little SPF-30 cream into the new white part and the roasted

wrinkles around her eyes. I looked like a goddamned steamed crab, she thought.

She turned from the mirror in disgust. Not that she really minded about her looks.

She glanced down at her travel-worn sandals and the ugly crossed toes that

protruded from them. It had been a long time since she’d cared much about her

appearance. But being thought stupid, even by Mexicans she would never see

again—that would rankle. Gringa estúpida, they would think. Gringa idiota. Viejita

gringa idiota.

But she had no time to waste anticipating insults on this, her last full day in

Mexico City, with the Great Temple of the Aztecs and the anthropology museum yet

to visit. They were the heart of her trip, her reasons for coming, and she was

annoyed with herself for leaving them for last. Of course there had been distractions:

the shrine of Guadalupe, the Frida Kahlo museum, the markets, the pyramids. She

had even visited the great central plaza, the Zócalo, to see the cathedral and the

National Palace, right around the corner from the Temple. Why had she neglected

the Temple itself ? Was she afraid of being disappointed? Or just saving the best for

last?

Oh, don’t kid yourself, Pearl, she scolded. You just don’t like being

reminded of all that death. She had read most of the Florentine Codex and knew all

about Aztec sacrificial death: the cutting of hearts, the flaying of skins, even the

killing of children—

She shook herself, plopped her faded canvas tote-bag onto the bed, and

checked her day’s supplies. A bottle of water. Two juice boxes. Granola bars,

raisins, a stale peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, a roll she had risked buying at a

bakery. Surely Moctezuma could not exact revenge with a roll. She had wondered,

when she opened her suitcase full of food and drink in customs, what the young man

there would think. But he had gazed on the contents only briefly, his face

expressionless.

“I suppose I’m being silly,” she said out loud. And in her mind she could hear

Burney say, Silly woman, his imagined voice so clear it sent a pang through her

heart. Poor Burney, Mexico had not been kind to him on their honeymoon here,

years ago. They had both been sick, but he had suffered more than she. A week

together in a Mexican hotel little better than this, taking turns in the bathroom—it

hadn’t been much of a start for a marriage.

Got sick a few days ago, he had written from Korea, not long before he was

killed. Stomach bug. Pretty bad, but Mexico was worse.

She inspected the roll for dirt and insect parts, and returned it to her bag. She

wished she hadn’t taken half a century to come back to Mexico. After the disastrous

honeymoon, she had vowed to return to see everything she had missed, everything

she had longed to see since studying Spanish in college with the young and dashing

Señor Rueda—Raúl Moctezuma Rueda Tinoco. She whispered his name and

smiled, remembering his sculpted chin, his outstretched hand, his eagle’s gaze that

searched the air as he shared the words of Nezahualcoyotl, the poet-king of

Texcoco:

* * * *

Cuix oc nelli nemohua in tlalticpac?

An nochipa tlalticpac

Zan achica ye nican.

* * * *

Perhaps we truly live on the earth?

Not on earth forever,

Just for a moment here.

* * * *

Then Señor Rueda had lowered his arm, leaned on Pearl’s desk, and looked

into her eyes. “I once recited this poem with my hand on the Sun Stone,” he said

quietly. “It is a very special thing, to touch the Sun Stone.”

From that moment Pearl had longed to visit Mexico. Señor Rueda lent her a

book of Aztec poetry, and she read it aloud, over and over, even stumbled through

the original Nahuatl. Then he gave her a history of the Aztecs and a travel book, and

she imagined herself strolling the streets of Texcoco or Tenochtitlan, bargaining in

the plazas, approaching the Sun Stone with her hand outstretched.

But she could not possibly have imagined being here today, seventy-three and

retired, her life largely behind her.

Retired. Re-tired—tired again. What an awful, dull word. She didn’t want to

be retired. She preferred the Spanish word, jubilado, which looked quite jolly.

“Jubilant,” she always thought. That was what she wanted to be. The jubilant retiree.

Maybe she should join the Peace Corps. Could the Peace Corps use an old

but jubilant school librarian?

She grunted. She could just see herself trotting through the jungle with her

suitcases of granola bars and juice boxes.

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