I run my fingers down a carcass, the walls of my home. My thumb in between a dent in the skull we inhabit and my pinky reaching for this orbit of ours. Last night, the bone eating began. Worms biting mandíbula. Gnawing right next to my pillow. The beings sprouted from the ground like I knew they one day would and didn’t care that I was around to witness: the crawlers birthed from dirt and páramo mud grew, matured, and multiplied, all destined to this rot we live in, with their mouths open, fangs out, ready to cut and champ and swallow our whale whole.

I tell all of this to my mom who sweeps the ribcage clean of dirt she always complains I bring in. I tell her we will lose our home soon. I tell her we should be scared.

When’s your fieldtrip again? she asks to change the subject. I can see how the strands of her hair that fall on her face stick to her pink lip gloss. It’s the same shade she wears in the portraits that hang on our walls, below vases filled to the brim with tiny yellow flowers she herself picked and plucked. She used to smile so much she gave herself dimples, she liked to say to me, poking her index fingers into her cheeks. And in those photographs, I see her happy, lip gloss intact, and wonder where has that smile gone.

What are we going to do after our esqueleto is eaten? Where will we go? I ask.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Marti. Now, please, tell me—do I have to sign your permission slip or did I do that already? Mami asks me. In her dustpan, particles of us sit with soot and volcanic spew, red mud from the insides of the fire being volcán Cotopaxi whose hills we reside on.

The worms, Mami, I respond, ignoring her. I can fight back, too. Los gusanos, I continue, are the last of it all. There will be no more skeleton left after it. We should’ve never come here.

You did your fair share of damage, too, Mami replies, tossing the dustbin bits out the window, only for an Andean breeze to push them back in through the empty spaces between cartilage. You helped ruin this house, she says. You don’t get to dictate when we leave. Now, please, Martina, isn’t your fieldtrip tomorrow?

I nod.

Then go to bed, she urges me.

Where has that smile gone.

Sharp edges that have cut me before. They spring up from the ground when they sense our footprints. A step on a patch of grass and then a bloom of a seashell, its insides oranged and glossy, fractured apex and undone whirls. They burgeon like the bone-eating worms. Destined. I pick up the shells from an ocean so, so far away, and with my fingers try to wipe away the filth.

Mr. Fortuna bores us with pictures of things we rarely see—pumice, lava rocks, obsidian—because it’s all shell. It’s all sea and ash and iron. It’s never what it should be.

I stuff my pockets with spondylus shells and clods of iron, and when our class is over, I walk back home to my whale and a mother who is done with me, too.

I remember a hiss in the night. The popping of a vein, a cascade of blood rushing into my room. The condor’s beak piercing my whale’s eyeball. Te juro que I heard our home whistle and cry. Mami keeps telling me it was a dream. It was a dream, and this is our house, she found it, we’re in it, and she’s making it a home for us. Why should I resent her so. And la ballena whistled and whistled and cried and cried.

Tonight, I lay my chin on a cracked ribcage of a whale who doesn’t know where she’s buried. How her body didn’t end up at the bottom of a hungry and gloomy ocean floor ready to be devoured, ready to bring life to where life doesn’t belong. I smell the bone and it reeks of sulfur. My heart is heavy with guilt.

In our fieldtrip today, Mr. Fortuna told us my home was once the deepest part of our continent. That this whale traveled from below to here, to above, pushed by tectonic plates and fire and such violence.

But what if my ballena once glided with the wind, dorsal fin and flippers cutting through clouds, blowholes bursting with the breath of stars. And when it died, when it was time, the animal fell. Descending and plummeting until she reached the volcanoes she avoided. A whalefall up for ravaging, and so we did.

Hoy noche I apologize to her for feeding off of her, too. For consuming her, living on her, when all she wanted to do was rest. Her bones feel cold like this moorland night.

Volcán Cotopaxi’s fumes reach my skeleton. I sigh and watch the grey clouds travel and conceal stars. The seashells I hid in my jeans pocket puncture my skin and I bleed.

Above me, a movement.

Flukes pierce clouds, moonlight shines on ventral pleats, eyelids with no eyelashes. A ballena of the skies swims above me, next to an active volcano, and I smile and nod along to its pulsed call. It calls for me.

© 2023 Ana Hurtado