Chapter 1
The mornings are foggy and cold this time of year, the type of weather that leaves the clothes she left hung on the line yesterday but forgot to bring in, damp once again. Lots to do, this girl has, and not much time for it.
Maricella hops on one foot as she tugs on her right shoe, simple shiny black flats, because her sneakers are drying after her aunt advised a through scrubbing with soap and a toothbrush. Toast in her mouth as she double checks that the door is locked behind her, keys jingling as she darts around the side of her little back-house-shed-home. She used to live in the front house with Tia and Tio, but now that she's older, she wants more space.
Tio and Tia have always been kind to Maricella, for that she's grateful, because she knows in passing many other young women her age who aren't so lucky. Maricella is mostly free to do what she wants, so long as she helps out with her assigned chores and, once she proved herself responsible enough, Tito's Kitchen.
It's what Tio's restaurant is called on the maps, though Maricella doesn't know why Tio is called Tito, she really thought that was his name for most of her life, and he still refuses to tell her his government name, stating that already Tio Tito is a tongue-twister of a mouthful. Still, he giggles rosy cheeked with a beer in his hand, yelling in a jovial tone to all and sundry at extended family parties that, when Maricella was younger and oh-so-small, his little flaquita could not, for the life of her, say his name, only managing to do a rather fine impression of Daffy duck. Maricella plays at annoyance, but the fact that he remembers and takes joy in telling this story over and over to anybody who will listen warms her awkward little heart.
She deftly hops the short painted cinderblock fence separating the houses from a vast garden. Barreling through a slim dirt path will take her out onto the road behind them, a shortcut she figured out not too long ago after years of scurrying around the block and wasting five minutes of her precious sleep time. The restaurant isn't too far, only about three blocks, but the first light she needs to cross at is, for some unfathomable reason, in the middle of her block, just about one house and a randomly placed laundromat away from home. Tito's Kitchen is a little hole in the wall joint that always smells good, with a consistently delicious menu if she does say so herself. How Tio managed to score so much land is beyond her, something to do with a fire and helping beloved neighbors out when they decided they'd rather move back to Mexico than rebuild. Maricella thinks they might have been cousins, or at the very least good enough friends to her relatives to be considered as good as.
Bare branches scratch her cheeks and thwack her shins as she rushes past, Tio Marzo not having had the time to come over and prune them. Tio and Tia do a rather good job of keeping their garden going in the flourishing months, but leave baby tree trimming to Tia's big brother. The man has a wicked green thumb, which he says is magically gifted. Maricella is skeptical, sometimes, but most of her family is dreadfully Catholic, with roots steeped deep in mystical tea tracing who knows how many generations back, just like so many other families in her neighborhood, really.
She's so late.
This, of course, makes her distracted, which isn't all that hard to do, her thoughts are always in a hamster ball that coincidentally happens to make the hamster invisible and thus nigh impossible to get back on track.
She grabs the thin trunk of a teen guayaba, ducking under its unruly grasping tendrils and takes a sharp left through a crumbling brick arch being choked by the largest pair of rosemary bushes she's ever seen. Here, past what really should have been called a hedge since she was about ten, normally she'd turn right and scramble out the new chainlink fence her Tia nagged for years about, hitting herself in the chest with the thick but light pipe framed door as she opens it, but there's a flash of light she thinks is the winter sun blinding her for a short moment through the thinning canopy.
She trips.
Falls, for what feels like impossibly long.
When she lands, it's on wet mossy soil, so different from the hard-packed dry path she was running on before. It knocks the wind out of her sails, with a quiet 'oomph' she lays face down, palms splayed, and dispares the thought of having found the rare patch of cat shit that sometimes sneaks it's way into their little mini-forest despite Tio taking potshots at the ferals regularly.
When she finally heaves herself into sitting, she looks around in confusion. Her surroundings are still just as foggy, but the plants are nothing like home. Too green, too alive, too not-tropical.
Something resembling familiarity niggles at the back of her mind but she can't quite put her finger on it. Is she still dreaming, having missed her alarm? Did she forget to reset it after she got better from that nasty chest-rattling flu that seems to catch her unaware every year right after Christmas?
The world seems so limited, like an odd little animation her classmate once made of a man walking on the world as it rolled, almost like walking on a log in a river but with far too smooth a gait. In the eye of the storm, there's not much she can do but sit where she is and hope she hasn't been kidnapped by the Fae.
There's faint sobbing, somewhere far off in front of her, which she hadn't really noticed until she'd been sat up for a good while idly fiddling with little moss buds. Steadily the sound gets louder. Soul-wrenching wails. Then comes the dragging thump of uneven footsteps and the rustling of leaves. From out of the mists stumbles a woman of an equal height and even shape to Maricella, only her clothes are clearly worn and stained a rusty brown from waist-down. Torn in some places and only fit for rags is the woman's shirt, likely once a soft beige like old clothes that were meant to be white, before the technique for bleached white threads came along. The woman's hair is bundled up in a dishevled bun at the top of her head, which is just about the only thing that stops Maricella's desperate prayers for having become the only unlucky bitch in history to have come across and or angered La Llorona in her own damned back yard, because of course she's really rather sorry about not saying her prayers every night before bed, though only for a good minute as the woman heaves for breath against the trunk of a gnarled willow-looking tree that wasn't visible before the bedraggled person before her used it for support.
Hesitantly, and against her better judgement...
"Hello?"