Content Note: Queerphobia, religious trauma, police brutality, violence towards animals, domestic violence, & the sexualization of feminine bodies  

I

Our Most Detestable Shape

Never forget you are their monster.

That’s the first rule we tell you, crammed between us in the back of Paola’s dad’s vintage ’22 Dodge Challenger, his project car he lets her borrow, with slick wheels and faux-leather seats that make our Sangrona noses scrunch away from the chemical scent. You’re against the back side door, buried under the Slurpees and Takis and sour gummy-worms we’ve all just stolen from the liquor store only two dozen heartbeats ago with a gun from Avalon’s purse and the pale milk-glow of our eyes. No need for fangs or blackened razor claws when fingertips with cheap black nail polish around a metal trigger will do just as good—if not better, honestly—and my body is pressed against yours. Your hot hair. Your sweaty skin. Knees tucked to your chest because you’ve curled yourself into some pathetic fetal shape against the window, rolled down to let in the night, to chill your wild adrenalized blood still thumbing through you. But I’ve caught you glancing at the window. The child-locked door handle. You’ve been counting the heartbeats it will cost to elbow us away—bullet yourself through that slip of night into the howling streets, advertisements beaming all around you, surveillance cameras everywhere, autopilot cars callously ripping past. I know you’re thinking this, I’ve sat where you sit. So I press myself harder against you. Hold you here with my body. My warmth. Make you listen to our rules, the way to be us, the way to keep yourself hidden, keep yourself alive.

 

Sangronas never go out alone at night.

We tell you this second rule, lighting-fast after the first, as if you’ve already let too much time drain by without it—this golden rule—and Avalon’s twisted around the passenger seat to plug the leak.

“If you’re by yourself when you get the Hunger, there’s no one to talk you down, huh?” Her lips are red, still shiny from when she’d spread the lipstick across them with her claw. “No bitch who smells what you smell, who feels the air shift the way your skin does. No one strong enough to muscle you down if you try some pendejadas.”

Together now, we tell you, Without your sisters, you will become their prey.

Let me tell you, babe, between predator and prey, it’s not even a choice, really.

But Avalon presses on, eyes dead serious as she glares you down, making sure this sinks in, that we care about you. That you have people who desire your safety at all. And you nod along, absorbing it all like a naïve little sponge. Obviously, you’ve forgotten the window, the night chill, the scabs from my claws when I’d grabbed you just a little too tight because I wanted to hear your yelp—Never mind it all. You want that warmth.

You want Our warmth.

“You won’t have us to watch your back. No one to be the eyes behind your ears. No one to tell us if ICE scoops you out of the dark and makes it so you never were. Make one less Sangrona littering the streets of Hayward, California in this great Eyu-Ese-of-fuckin’-Aye.”

 

Sangronas always carry Vaparu.

Our mothers’ catch-all cure in a bottle. That shit works for real, huh? Cigarettes do too, but Vaparu’s the classic, easy to come by. It hella stinks and we reek of it, strong and sticky and sharp. We rub that shit under our noses when we need to pummel away our senses, keep us muzzled and tame for the day. When we first sniffed the nape of your bare neck, standing behind you as we lined up towards the Padre at the front of chapel, to eat our Lord’s flesh and drink his blood—See? Even the priests feed like us—you smelled of Vaparu too.

We followed your scent: the lingers of candle smoke, citrus conditioner, and Vaparu. Figured there were things all Sangronas figured out on their own. We tried out the mouthfeel of your name on our teeth, Khiabet. Khiabet, Khiabet. We crossed the quad and caught the shape of you, your short hair, bleached bangs, sitting alone behind the science building in the crusty-eyed hours before class with… what? A squirrel? A pigeon? Pulp crushed in your hands. Blood under your nails. Even in private, you looked so, so guilty.

You didn’t even notice us drinking in the sight.

She is, We said.

You sure? We said.

Avalon and I. Paola was quiet, would have agreed with whatever Avalon said anyway. But Avalon gave me that no me chingues look. I shrugged; she wanted proof. Indisputable, in-front-of-the-eye proof. So we waited until after class, when we all had P.E. and when you’d wait to shower alone, because of course you fucking did. You with your clean Chucks, iron-pressed uniform, sympathetic eyes. I hated those eyes. I wanted to break them, pluck them right out.

You took your time rinsing your hair—did you only have cold water at home? A working shower at all?—and when you finished, you turned the corner, out the double doors where the mint tiles bit into courtyard asphalt and we flocked in. Us laughing, black shapes grabbing at your biceps under a cotton-candy dusk.

We threw you into the P.E. storage pod and shut the door. Locked it. Knowing full well we’d just ignore your pounding against the metal, wait until the sky’s pink blotched black and you had no choice but to face the test we left in there for you: the cat whose leg we snapped.

You wouldn’t have been able to see it, not with human eyes, but you would have smelled it. Because you’d just showered, and we’d plucked your mint-capped Vaparu bottle from your backpack. You would have felt the cat’s warmth in there with you, sour with fear and cornered between the basketballs and plastic hockey sticks. You would have tasted the raw bone on your teeth. Just you and it in that hot box.

The cruelty was the test.

We waited until the banging, shouting, whimpering stopped. Then we waited some more. Until eventually Avalon got impatient, like she always does, and we opened the door to let your wet chewing out.

We finally saw you: skinny fangs glinting, black claws sticky with fur, your face twisted and snarling at us with whatever shame or hatred burned within your whited-out eyes.

 

Sangronas keep checkpoints.

Empty parking lots, underbellies of overpass webs, abandoned strip malls—places without cops. No cameras. Those are the places we congregate for our own holy Sangrona communion, where we can let the monsters inside us stretch and tear into whatever animal we’d dragged in with our jaws. Hell, even the chapel is a spot, because despite them cramming one onto every campus, God forbid they ever put fucking eyes in them—priests can’t have that, can they?

Tonight, we take you to the car cemetery: the gorge behind sun-bleached strip malls where everyone dumps their cars once they do the math of gas versus taking your chances with the Zipper app, those white vans on their circuits around town for cheap. We stare at the corpses stacked up and up on each other’s axles and rusted hoods, listen to the hum of distant jack-jumps and pass around our stolen tequila to be like our fathers at the carne asada while we try to pry the story out of you.

Where you came from?

How’d you end up here?

You’re iron locked. The most we got was your shaky-breathed phone call to Avalon in the middle of last night. You’d told her you dreamed your own crucifixion, nails driven through your wrists with hammer blows. The priests strung you up while you screamed and your mother just watched.

A week had passed since we walked you home after our little test, never mind how many times we said how proud of you we were with back pats, my fingers between your shuddering shoulder blades, you couldn’t stop crying. We’d said we’d be there for you if you needed us, the offer would always be open. To join the exclusivity of us.

Your whispers leaked from Avalon’s phone, “When we moved, I thought I’d be the only one.” Now you’re just nursing a beer on the hood of some Ford’s corpse with us, not talking, which makes Avalon reach across the metal to flick your ear.

“You fuckin’ stupid or what, huh?”

“Leave her alone,” I yawn.

“We’re trying to help her ass.”

“Not an exchange. Sangronas stick together.” It’s why they’ve kept me. But Avalon flares at me, as if recognizing who I am. Rolls her eyes and gestures to our new beat puppy I want to keep: ¿Ahora qué?

Paola just watches to see who will win this moment to follow that decision.

Avalon groans, “Fine then.” She fishes in her pocket for her box cutter from her part-time at Cardenas and tells me to hold out my hands. I hesitate—she punches my ribs. I do nothing about it, not when I’m the largest, tallest, strongest of them and Avalon will catch even the hint of rage, say I’m acting brutish again. So I take it. Just sink my fangs into my lip to distract from the pain of metal splitting my palm. You watch as this happens to me and I catch, at the corners of your nose…the hint of a snarl?

“Sangronas stick together,” Avalon echoes. Then she cuts her palm too, then Paola’s. Together we squeeze our blood into a used Styrofoam cup and hand it to you.

And you blink at us under the buzzing streetlights.

And I’m holding my breath.

Craving your, “Yes.”

Because I want that.

Want you.

My mean-spirited desire to corrupt you.

 

Sangronas don’t forget where they came from.

That’s how you tether yourself, how to go back inside your skin and snap your jaw back together right after you’ve chewed up some dog’s guts and there’s stubborn tendons stuck between your teeth. We all have our different beginnings, before we knew you, before we made Us, when Sangrona was just an insult to tame us.

Sangrona. Always on the news. Creatures of the Night, totally fucking raw as hell—those things with teeth we’d dreamed of being when we were kids, those of us who dreamed of calaveras instead of the Disney Castles, putting on bed sheets as capes and hissing with our fingers splayed violently. To be powerful. The villain. The kind of beast that hunts prey, that sprouts feather wings through the pores in our goose-prickled skin, our dark Latina skin, hairy skin. We were daughters, choir singers, ballet dancers. We were tomboys in basketball shorts with grime caked under our fingernails, we were Streaming Service Scrollers, YouTube make-up-tutorial influencer wannabes, we were feminists. Would-be-presidents. Daughters of stay-at-home mothers and janitor fathers, heavy-handed construction worker fathers, telemarketer mothers, maid mothers, against-all-odds lawyer mothers, monolingual mothers, immigrant mothers, finance-savvy mothers—mothers who desired to dig fingers into us as if we were clay and re-sculpt us from our primordial, base selves while never forgetting, always aware of, our dark skin. Black hair. Sloped noses and strong arms. Us with our broken, no-sabo Spanglish we’d picked up and slapped together over basketball in the churchyard after class, sun beating down through the smog and smoke and all the glitching holo-billboards crammed into the sky.

“¡Güey, ya!” we’d bark, or, “Girl, ¡cállate!”

“This pinche school.”

“These pinche gringos.” 

“This pinche country—” Our favorite word we’d try on over ourselves to make us big. We’d chant it in our stiff vests and pleated tartan skirts after misa, crossing over hot slabs of California sidewalks that took us home. “Sangronas don’t give a fuck what normies think,” We’d say. “Sangronas protect Sangronas.” We made our rules like that—the essential way of being Us. Our chorus of three reveling in how our classmates called us loud and annoying, too intimidated to say it to our faces lest we leave fingernail rakes stinging in their peachy cheeks.

 

Sangronas stay stylish.

That’s how we chameleon, us with our cheap English slang, our borrowed cultures, American brands.

We learned on our own to hide in our skins long before we were Sangronas together, each of us in our private, separate homes, too afraid of being caught by those same mothers that pulled at our clay, now down the hall nodding along to the bleached hair and spray-tanned condemning the snarling beasts as Anti-American Agents Sent by Mexico to Destroy our Way of Life while we helplessly watched our fingernails split apart in the bathroom. Thinking Fuck! Not me! Not me! Not me! as black claws slid out our fingertip bones. We stuffed toilet paper in our throbbing mouths to muffle our screams: the taste of chalk and dryness. Iron too, as our first fangs wedged our canines out—popped them clicking against our sinks’ porcelains. Our new, too-too big teeth slashing up our tongues. God, it fucking hurt.

We became our own fear, then our repression. Adapted with our need to sniff each other out in the hallways at school, careful to study each other, make it inconspicuous. We became masters of looking each other up and down, only a head nod with our chins pointing “you” to confirm that those were splits in each other’s nails we saw, our way of saying “no te preocupes, I know what you are; I am too. I see you.”

“You are not alone.”

 

Sangronas keep their nails painted.

This one’s easy. They’re our most clockable feature. Our skins can sew themselves back up, our teeth can retract, and our gums can bully molars and incisors back into place. But the keratin in the nail is dead matter and we cannot seal the cracks from our claws. You can paint it over though. And once your parents start letting you spend nights with us, I drag long strokes of cherry red over your nails. We play horror movies that you’ll cry at when the teens start getting chopped up and I’ll laugh in your face.

“Girl, you ain’t them. You’re the antagonist.”

 

Sangronas keep each other warm.

Our blood is ectothermic, sucking in heat from outside because Sangronas are an in-between, not-yet the harpies they predict us to become, and more than the slit-eyed, reptilian brain they say we came from. So we share body heat, we hold you in our arms making a show of it in the dim school hallways, shoving anyone that gets too close. Our proclamation that you are our jurisdiction.

You are ours, and we yours.

I’d watched you drink our blood. My pulse quickened at how you’d desperately licked the bottom of the cup, like you’d never tasted water before in your life.

Now you glare at passersby too, a new meanness growing within you.

 

Sangronas don’t answer questions.

We know our fucking rights! We suck our teeth, become vicious and defensive to anyone who asks too much, who looks at us sideways. We tell them Fuck off! and I’m shocked how quick it is for you to wield our words with us when once they were so foreign on your tongue.

 

Sangronas help our people.

And only our people.

Avalon’s rule.

“Because look at the state of us,” she’d say, gesturing to our uniforms or hand-me-down smartphones. It would be one of those days where we’d just pawned in the shit we’d stolen a week ago just to blow the money on junk food and alcohol. We’d inch along at the base of a Walmart, just ants against a wall of beige, pushing our shopping cart under a blazing sun. This particular time, you ride in the basket and rattle with our glass bottles, a plastic Día de Los Muertos skull you just Had to Have balanced delicately between your fingertips. We pass another tarp, this one with bare feet sticking out, cooking on the sidewalk. We hold our breaths so the stale urine will not chalk our teeth.

Avalon gestures to the sun-dried city. “Everything’s fucked. Everyone’s fucking each other over. Give someone a hand and…” Claws snik! right out from her fingertips. Blood drops sizzle on the pavement. “Well, they just might rip off your arm.”

I pretend not to notice your eyes still on those crisp feet behind us, the way I just know you’ll come back tonight alone to set a box of sneakers beside that ratty tarp.

 

Sangronas don’t follow laws.

Laws are made by men, and all God’s men are wicked. Like you. Like us. So the laws too must be wicked. They have to be. So—

 

Sangronas aren’t snitches.

This one goes without saying.

Even if you don’t like it, you see what another Sangrona is doing, some older woman in her late twenties luring some guy into an alleyway and you can already see her fingertips pulling apart. You say nothing. Look down or ahead or whatever the fuck—You mind your business. Ignore the screams.

Because—

 

A Sangrona’s skin must grow thick to crime.

We start you off small, swiping items into your backpack as we amble between tight store aisles, work your way up to pickpocketing, to sitting behind the wheel of the purring car as we step out into night in search of victims. Because everything costs money, and there’s never enough, ya know?

We’re the ones that wait for some Silicon Valley techie in their expensive-as-hell collared-tees to walk so comfortably down our block. They’re always mid-thirties, sometimes forties, never had a family and that’s why we choose them, in case we have to do more than just rob them, in case we have to feed. No collateral damage. No fatherless kids left to struggle in this fucked up country. Just these men that the world can replace, is better off without anyway. The monster in me wants to snarl at the sight of them, make them notice us—take me seriously. Avalon always says that’s good. “Rage keeps us alive.”

So we wait until the güero checks his phone (and he always does) then once the holo-display throws the darkness behind his back and he is, for that heartbeat moment, blind, we flock out. Punch his gut. Kick him down. Use our rage to make us strong.

We strip the watch off his arm, fish the wallet out his pocket, and then we’re gone, leaving him coughing as we throw ourselves into the back seats of the Dodge and shout, “Fucking go!” and you shooting us through the night, howling.

We’ve made you complicit.

We give you a cut of what we pawn, and when Avalon sees your face looking at the wrinkled bills in your hand she says, “Oh come on. They steal all the fucking time, but it’s all with paperwork instead of violence. We’re just bringing back what they wrote up. Taking what we’re owed.”

She likes to talk about that: restorative justice. It’s those sanctions they put on Mexico over lithium in 2031 that drove our parents north. Their failed coup they’re still pushing a sequel for. The way that allowed them to grant ICE the power they itched to give them anyway: an uninhibited allowance to violence to strangle the edges of this country, seize whole neighborhoods in the name of national security. To devour them. Make more roads out of. Plant factory forests in.

To poison the sky and blotch out the stars.

It’s why puddles here are iridescent and sticky; why as kids we made games of turning industrial chimneys into tentacle kaiju, if they’d swat a drone or not.

 

A Sangrona is all or nothing.

We make you do more than drive, we make you pick targets. Eventually, we make you hold the gun. Avalon sets the heavy metal weapon in your hand. “You can do this,” she says. You’re shaking your head, no, no, no.

She’s saying “Yes, you can.” Paola’s nodding too. I’m watching curiously. Truth is, I want to see if you can do it too, if you have the mettle to seize power or if we’re wasting our time with you.

“Just suck it up,” I say. Wince once I realize that’s not me talking, it’s mom’s words crawling up my throat. Haunting. I shift my tone, softer than I’d ever gone so only you can register the notes, and I pull your face close to mine. “Come on,” I say with my mouth so full of needle teeth. “It’s fun.”

A man’s coming up around the stairwell of this parking garage. We’re waiting up here in the open ocean of asphalt in a red dusk. His footfalls grow louder, closer.

“It’s now or never,” Avalon says and pushes you out of the shadows just as the stairwell pukes the man out. You meet him under a streetlamp’s green. Your face done up smudged and weepy. Gun rattling in the sleeve of your sweater.

He gasps.

“Shit, are you okay?” He sinks to one knee to half his height, looks you in the eyes and takes your face in his big hands—I always hunch, my spine’s used to it, I don’t like making the others crook up their necks just to see me.

“What are you doing here?” he asks. “Where are your parents?”

“They don’t notice me.” I’ll learn later how true you are here, why the crack in your voice isn’t an act.

“Well, you must have someone. Got a phone? A number, maybe?”

I clench my jaw. They’re not supposed to be this kind.

You’re so quiet. So still.

“Don’t worry, I got mine.” He fishes in his jacket for his phone and when his hand comes out with it, he looks down the barrel of the gun. Only there’s no bite in you. I see it, Avalon sees it. Even he sees it, that’s why he just swats the gun out of your grip.

A palm cracks against your cheek.

You fall with your forearms covering your face. “Don’t move,” he shouts at you. “I’m calling the cops.”

I slide out of the shadows with my claws long but Avalon grabs the collar of my shirt. “Nope,” she says. “Let her work.”

All my fight leaves, while yours only grows more desperate under his shoe. He’s got you pinned, a cornered animal. I know you’ve never killed a human before, and I want to see you make that choice. Live or die. Eat or be eaten. You’re screaming our names to help—please help!

He’s dialing in the numbers, about to end you with a tap of a button. Your eyes meet ours through your stinging tears.

There is no helping you.

You know this. So you swallow, you shut your eyes, and I gasp at how fast you do it.

You slashed the night, now I’m watching the güero’s head jump, bounce, tumble over asphalt until it settles there, a black shape watching us from the edge of the dark.

Avalon claps. Paola blinks. I shove them both to reach you trembling on your knees.

“You okay?” I ask, feel your chest rising, falling, warm with the blood now soaking both our clothes.

You’re holding his phone. When you show me the screen, my stomach drops. The wallpaper: A wife. A daughter—we know her, we go to fucking school with her. Shit.

Shit.

Shit.

Shit—No time—Paola’s shouting, “Let’s go! Let’s Go! Let’s Go!” Waving her car keys pinched around her thumb.

 

Sangronas don’t let themselves get hungry.

We gorge ourselves any way we know how. Greasy fast food, expired meat, we swallow it all. Any way to blunt the edge of the Real Hunger. We go as long as we can, but we’re not saints. Like you, like them, we’re sinners too.

They say it’s a choice: Just starve. The only way to be a Noble Sangrona.

Thing is, if there were still cows, we’d have eaten them instead. Sometimes rats and cats are enough. Other times, it has to be someone. The desire for warm, pulsing blood is too strong, too electric. But you’ve never stooped so low before, huh? You’ve kept your hands as clean as you could. Sangronas shouldn’t worry about hands getting dirty—that’ll kill you. Before you, we picked bullies or drunks—not addicts though, can’t risk absorbing some shit to truly break all hell loose; we’ve seen the footage, the bodies, so many torn-off heads, and a starved-out Sangrona who must have been desperate for any meat, now laid out on the floor with too many bullets in her body to flex out.

We eat people nobody will miss, remember?

We’ve also eaten those we thought suspected us. Avalon or I did the killings of course, biting necks, then roping their guts all the way out. Paola always watched, terrified. Like you do now as we reduce the güero’s body into cutlets in the abandoned aquatic Rec Center, the walls trapping the bone snaps, our bellies swelling with warm meat. He’s evidence now, and if we must get rid of him, why not temper the beasts now thrashing wildly in our rib cages.

 

Sangronas don’t let good meat go to waste.

Everybody has to eat, so suck it up. Swallow it down. Remember we didn’t choose this life.

We didn’t choose this.

We didn’t choose this.

For the rest of the night, I can’t look at you, too ashamed to see the shine in you we broke. Instead, I look back; before we were Sangronas, we were girls, remember?

Just girls.

 

Sangronas are still people, we’re still attached to this world.

We wanted good grades, to find nice boys with clean mouths. We shaved our legs and lips and tweezed our brows and learned to love the pain. We associated woman-ness with pain. We applied for part-time jobs, we went to church, prayed to Dios, and tried hard, hard, hard, to be what our mothers wanted us to be—that next, lucky step up the ladder beyond their scope, to become more than them.

We remember the moments when we’d watch TV together, the quiet ones, us and our moms, then once the growing pains made us wince away from our mother’s embraces, us with each other, all of us stale from our individual days outside, now cooling off as one body, one shape, one Sangrona, not at all minding the dried blood on our clothes and sharing mango wedges seasoned with limón y Tajín, saying nothing, holding that silence, allowing ourselves to hope this will never break.

II

Our Ugly Preoccupations

Sangronas don’t watch the news.

But we all saw it in the end, online, and on TV displays at the laundromats while our clothes went ’round and ’round and ’round. The headlines proclaimed:

LAPD Catches Flyer.

The footage is a Sangrona who let the beast fully out. Never let the beast fully out—you might not ever cram it back between your bones. His claws are long and he’s shirtless, muscles glistening with sweat, his Sangrón wings full and bright. Even through the pixels we can see the macaw colors stretching wide. He’s so far above the skyscrapers with his hand reaching up and we’re all rooting for him to go just a bit higher, a little bit more, but the drones get him from miles away. Just a push of a button from some bunker and he’s plucked. Those red feathers all that’s left in the sky. Fluttering.

I’ll wonder about that for a long time; what was he grasping for? What did he hope to attain by going so high past the clouds?

We won’t ever mention the Flyer, how could we? Sangronas don’t watch the news.

 

Never forget that you are prey.

Despite your teeth, your claws, your strength, there are still more of them than us. More hunters of—what do they call us? Demi-ornitho-sapiens? Whatever government word they use to strip us out of what should be inalienable—and, well, their eyes are everywhere:

Your father and younger brother, whose eyes you’ve caught tracing your body, have been on you since you were thirteen and changing. Was it one of them who left your door open one morning, when you were sure you closed it the night before?

Some neighbor on a porch watching us walking down the block.

Pastor Ramón—You stopped in the pews one dismissal after chapel because the prey animal inside you felt eyes on your spine, turned to find they were his. No fatherly smile, no disdain. Just cold acknowledgement of you from way up at the podium, and you in a sea of passing heads. He wouldn’t let you go. Even as you fell into the flow and told yourself not to look back. Those forward-facing eyes; real predator eyes.

 

Sangronas always gossip.

We keep our history oral, no paper trails. Our creation myths are chisme—warnings of who are liars, who are shady—those whispers told to us by some older graduating, maybe-Sangrona leaving us behind with just a wink and a Hope you make it too. We take these tatters and threads as rompecabezas to construct our ramshackle history:

Avalon: Sabees qué, I heard it had to do with that dig in CDMX, you know? When they sniffed out lithium in the dirt and forced themselves too deep, found something in those bones of Tenochtitlán instead—like it’s a curse, you know? Some brujería shit.

Me: It’s a recessive trait that we all got, us mestizes. It was always gonna come back.

You: It’s the microplastics.

Avalon, again: It’s the synthetic food.

You: It’s God. Maybe we’re sinners. Did ya’ll ever think of that? I know you did.

Paola: I had a tío there at the time, 2030 or something, and maybe that’s why it went to me, we all had people in the city when it happened right? Your mom and yours. He says it was a fifty-kilometer radius, but there’s hella people in just one kilometer in the city. So many fucking people. But my tío…he was a welder. Said—he said he saw it…when the pyramid hatched down there in the dark. The city a muffle way above them. Said he’d never forget those feathers and fangs. Said he knew better than to look at It directly and that’s why when the light touched him, his eyes only sizzled. Unlike the others…que afortunado. GASLEAK! All the articles will tell you, but I know it, man, I know what the fuck they awoke and now…it’s inside us all. I keep thinking of that güero we ate. His daughter’s in half my classes and I see her every day. She’s so quiet, but in my dreams she’s loud and asks me “why?” And the güero is there, only—only without eyes and he’s speaking but his tongue is gone and his voice is gargled. Asking for his daughter, even if the girl’s right there next to him, he can’t see her. And I know it’s his tongue that’s missing too, because I feel that fucking thing inside me. It’s wriggling in my stomach. And I’m terrified…I’m terrified my eyes are going to bubble too. I’m terrified my monster is going to push itself out.

 

Sangronas always text each other that we made it home.

At the end of each night, when we split off into twos then fours to return to our cages we always have to. Avalon first, pretending like we don’t know her house is east towards the hills, unlike ours, westwards following the train tracks and landline towers right up to their kin hunched over the waves on the flooded side of town; like we don’t know she has a man at the front of the gates who knows her face, lets her swipe a plastic card, a red-light blinks green, the gate slides away.

Her home, where she carefully, carefully, sweeps the tiled floors, makes her bed, washes dishes without ever too much of a sound. And when she passes the living room, always, her mother sitting there. This time sucking cartilage from bloody fingers, the bones spat back on her porcelain plate.

“¿Sabes qué hora es? No, of course not. Siempre con esas niñas, ah?” She sucks her teeth. “I tell you, Sangronas don’t get attached. Not to people who’ll bring you down.” Another bone tings against the porcelain. “But you play leader to spite me, huh? You think I’m wrong—you wanna be an animal like them? End up where they will? Entonces, sigue así—see that I’m right. Your father was the same, and where is he? AH? They stabbed metal into his brain though his eye and now he’s a zombie in those prison-factories along the border. An obedient pet. Look at you. Standing like that—stop trembling like a fucking dog. You’re a Sangrona! We don’t do that, we steady ourselves, we learn English with a baby at our tits, same little sharp teeth. We become survivors. We don’t end up dead on the fucking TV—”

Avalon can’t follow the plate fast enough, just catch its shatter in time to see the pieces sprinkling off the wall with the bones. Thrown clean through the TV’s projection, the light buzzing then solidifying again to catch up with the telenovela audio that never stopped.

“You’re out at eighteen, remember,” her mother growls, eyes white as hell, crystallized and cold, nailing Avalon there between the family picture frames. “You will not become prey like them. Will you?”

Paola’s house next:

Where her mother watches misa on live-streams and makes Paola pray before each meal; where her father tries jokes as she hands him tools while he rolls under whatever cars he’s working on. Sometimes the jokes even work! The cars too. But nights are quiet, and last Sunday, Paola paced away the nightmares barefoot on the stained linoleum. We all had those nights. Paola’s treatment for them was the late-night anime she escapes into, but even those eventually end, and in the quiet, heavy dark she stared at her own fangs in the TV screen and watched the needle teeth talk.

You ate him. That girl’s papá.

She’s going to know; there must be a search for him, and they’ll find you, your Mamá, Papá too. Maybe they already have. And girl will damn you.

She swipes desperately at her mother’s words buzzing out from the black of her skull—There is always salvation in Him.

Then there’s you:

Your apartment with your family. You quietly slipping through your window because no one knows you leave at night, do they? Maybe your brother, but he’ll never tell.

You wash your hands in the bathroom, brush your teeth, scrub your clothes—anything to hide the proof of us so you can meld back with them. Hope they don’t suspect a thing from how you talk or stand or sit or laugh or hang your shoulders, feel so, so invisible at your table that you forget who you look like. Your eyebrow piercing, your choppy, did-it-your-self-in-the-bathroom-at-two-a.m. hair. All the times I caught you brushing your own fingers on your shoulders as if to remind yourself that yes, they’re yours. Did you practice how to tell your parents what you are?

Did you recite it in the mirror, only to blush at how stupid you sounded? Did you write in your notebook? Did you tell your mom, “hey,” once, twice, changed course at first syllable to swerve around that horrific collision? It doesn’t matter. Because she found your notebook with all our little rules within—the rules you break—and waited for you to get home, get comfortable, a delicate calculation of tact, to finally sit you down beside her, say, “Mi’ja,” your dread at first utterance. “¿Qué es una Sangrona?”

When you tell me this, I’ll picture your laughing response, full of spit and disdain, how you snarled at her. She said you were sick, that she wanted to help you. To please, God, let her help you. The cornered animal you are.

You, hearing your father coming from down the hall and not ready for this double team, latch onto the hope of your mother’s decency to swallow this bomb, keep it between women, but honestly, it’s the thought that she won’t that pushes you out of careful fear and into hot rage. You rush to the door, throw it open so the knob punches a hole in the sheetrock. You escape into the night, the rain, thrashing at the droplets and howling at the moon, not stopping, never stopping, hoping to outrun this fate.

And now me.

My routine: returning books and vintage slasher DVDs to the library on my way to the pharmacy for my prescriptions—Sangronas can’t risk medication—my blockers, my Estrogen, and the Pfizer-Merck, & Co. branded Diet Plus Powder™ that puts a fist in my stomach to keep the Sangrona in me starved. Anemic. Too weak to ever fight her way out.

When I go home, my tía helps me with the injections, with the powder she makes for me a shake and I gulp down its chalky gruel, she prays one day I won’t have to drink it anymore.

“Another letter from your mother,” she says. I look at Mom’s old font on the yellow paper. Her broken English tells me Papá is gone, to please give her a chance again. That she doesn’t care about the scars. That she forgives me. Not even me; a name that’s not even mine anymore. I crinkle it up. What else can I do? My medicine thrums through me, and I ask the thrashing, hating, smothered creature in me for forgiveness. By now that feathered serpent should know: any hint to tía that in my weaker moments, I release her just a bit and ICE comes to claim me. And I’ll become nothing, less than nothing.

A knock at the door.

The lightning rips across the city and over the bay. I smell it before I can reach the door handle, candle wax, citrus, Vaparu. I know it’s you as soon as the wood pulls away. Framed in the doorway of my home, soaking wet and mumbling, “I didn’t know where to go. You’re the only one I can trust. Marisol, please, help me.”

 

Sangronas help Sangronas, no matter what.

No matter what.

You’re standing there, trembling, the night a storm behind you. Little droplets falling from your bangs. I’m blinking, holding the door, our breaths making a cloud to hold only our faces within. As if I’d ever turn the pathetic thing of you away.

 

Sangronas don’t share who we were before we became us.

There’s no point in that, all that matters is that we are. But you never cared for the rules, did you? You were never a true Sangrona. Maybe I liked that about you, your determination to bite down on the meat of your desire, while I locked mine behind my teeth. I’d cram the deplorable things under my tongue so I could open wide, say AHHHH when the eyes of scrutiny were aimed at me.

You tell me your mom knows, and honestly, I don’t know what to do with that. I’m too afraid to touch you here on my bed. My desires itching under tongue. Back of throat. You’re crying and I also want to tell you to Suck it up. I don’t. Keeping quiet pulls more out of people, and without prompting, you lay bare the truth you’ve held for so long. You crack, “I chose this life.”

And at the sound of it I want to rip your head off.

“At my old school.” You sniffle between each word, breaking them down into just facts. “I knew what she was. There were rumors. But no one said shit, you know? She was so powerful. Like some goddamn goddess. A real Greek myth and tragedy. She was so-so cool. And no one fucked with her. And everyone fucked with me, and called me things, they never called her anything, even when she wasn’t there…I—I sought her out. Left her a dead owl in her locker. My boon to her. I told her, ‘Make me strong. Make me like you.’”

 

Sangronas don’t make more of us.

We stop the spread. Act responsibly. That’s why I don’t believe you—can’t believe you. Not when no one—NO ONE—would want this, and no one would pass it on. Sangronas don’t want to be us. We have to be. We make theoretical exercises of choosing “No” every time if we could, leaving our desire to hunt and bite and fly, fly, fly behind.

“It’s true,” your voice is coming undone. “She said no too, at first, so I gave her more than just dead meat. I…gave her everything I could. They took her soon after, but…” You slip off your jeans and I go numb at the connect-the-dot moon scars all along your hips, your ribs, your thighs. “In the end, I got what I wanted.”

“Stop it.” My claws are out. Teeth bared. The quills are pushing through the tight skin of my shoulder blades as I stand back up, ready to punish you. Kill you for your cardinal sin. I even smile when I see the fear in your eyes. It feels good, and I relish that sharp feeling. Is this what it felt like for you, when you gave in? Shall I do the same?

A buzzing from both our phones. That stops us from tipping over this knife’s edge moment, and soon we’re both reading the text Avalon sent, asking for us to meet at the chapel immediately.

These little pixels shattering us:

Paola’s gone. She told the Padre—They took her while she slept.

 

Sangronas don’t harm Sangronas.

But of course we do, you know this is a lie.

It was just a matter of time for us, Avalon just happens to be the one who beat us to it when we crossed the pews to where she stood, waiting underneath Christ. The stained glass behind him dyeing us gold and bloody. With all her strength, Avalon rips you away from me. A loud clap and your cheek is throbbing. You’re weeping again but Avalon doesn’t care. She’s calling you a traitor, an impostor—she knows you break all our rules and that you’re ruining her family of us. You’re the weak link. You did this to us—infected us with your guilt—You killed Paola. You should have just eaten that man with us the Right Way but you’re not a real Sangrona. You’re not. You’re Not. You’re not.

“Tell the padre it was you,” she commands, her box cutters constricted in her hands. “They think it was all of us! It’s just you. Tell them that—take the fucking fall and give me Paola back!”

You’re shouting No! Please! I’m sorry, but Avalon doesn’t care. She gives you one more chance and holds the silver blade to your cheek, then drags. She gets no further than an inch. So quickly she’s tumbling over the pews one—two—five—eight. Collapses into the wood seating.

When she pulls herself up, she gasps, “You,” but I don’t care. I’m helping you stand, checking your face, already I’ve forgotten the throbbing of my knuckles from my punch to her ribs, the bones I’d felt snap under her tank top.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“I’m fine. What about her?”

Avalon’s still shouting, accosting us with so many swears, but we’re already passing her place in the pews; I’m leading you to the doors. To Safety. “What about her? It’s just you and me,” I say, the words swelling in me. “Only us.”

 

Sangronas don’t leave the city.

Towns are too small, too much gossip, too many eyes on you. I tell you this as we pass a cigarette back and forth under another rusting phone tower. The crunchy grass swaying all around us in the dark.

“Where to, then?” you ask.

I exhale, flick the cigarette into a long arch over the field and shrug.

“Fuck it. Let’s get the hell outta here.”

 

Sangronas don’t risk public transit.

Yet without Paola and her car, we choose the bus with the wrinkled bills we have. It’s dawn at the station, and you’re asleep on my shoulder as we pass the walkers with The-End-is-Nigh signs on their pikes, the burning cars on the side of the road, the factories, empty lots, rotting mini-golf courses, abandoned slaughterhouses, soon that all slides away and we’re through the morning light across golden fields stretching as far as we can see to the rest of the continent, more space, more sky than we’ve ever known, and when you wake, somewhere on the 5 between SF and LA, the sun’s warmth on our skins, I share with you an ear bud and it’s just you and me mumbling soft tunes on the cracked faux-leather of this hardly crowded bus, not knowing where it is we’ll stop, if we ever will.

III

Itch to Kill

Sangronas stay the hell away from sleazy motels.

Welp, what are ya gonna do?

It’s somewhere near the bottom of the San Joaquin Valley, nestled between the tits of the mountains overlooking the sun-dried flatness we’d charted down. (You’d told me the land had once been miles of rivers, a long time ago.) More saloon than motel, it’s all real wood against the bone-dry gas stations, a relic from some before-time; its floorboards groan under us as we pass through its batwing doors. Behind us the doors clap, clap, clap.

We’d hardly spoken, stopping at a reservoir for breakfast where I watched your perfect dives into the mossy green. The water still, your form so good as to hardly break its glittering surface. I made sure you weren’t looking when I dipped my bloody, trembling knuckles into the cold. We stayed for burgers, rubbery and lab-grown. We ate them on fixed, plastic stools outside, and then I followed you to a bookstore where you tried to convey the span of you through all your opinions of those dusty pages, and delicately, I turned over each analysis of yours in my hand. Those detailed and complex musings on life and art and the human experiences you pulled into being with pure passion and drive alone. The truth, though, is that it made me jealous—in awe even—I don’t read, and I’d never love anything so purely, so free from any taint of irony or self-aware deprecation. My skin writhed in that bookstore like a body of unsettled maggots and I couldn’t enjoy our stillness; I focused my attention on the fact that this time was an illusion. One that would soon fade.

In the hotel room, you undress, and I try not to look. I glimpse your shoulders and my skin prickles warm. My shame is heavy and tarry, but I can sit with it; I know it so well. When I see the bite scars on your skin, I am reminded how much I should despise you. And really, what am I even doing here with you?

I change in the bathroom, not even looking at myself when I do. And after we each take an edge of that king-sized bed, a sea of sheets between us, and try to sleep. At midnight you ask me, because we’re obviously both still awake, why I take the medicine I do. I ask you which. You say the diet powder, not my hormones—you’ve apparently found those some time ago and never let that affect your opinions of me. “You’re already choosing to control your own biology, why use the powder to resist your Sangrona self?”

“Because I’m not.” My words gigantic; the room is so still, and so dark, and so quiet I might as well have shouted. “I’ve chosen nothing. Both are just treatments for what I already am. What I was born as. I’m not you—I didn’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

I twist—feel that you’re already facing me. Your short breaths.

“Shut up, you don’t know. You don’t. I can’t help it—I’m disgusted by me. It’s something I make do with, that I live with.”

“I don’t think you’re disgusting at all.”

Soft words, yet they’ve filled the space between us, and every corner, and all around my body.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Do you want me to show you?”

It’s all I want. And oh my God, I want it. Hate myself that I want it. Still myself because I shouldn’t take it.

Your fingers lock into mine. “Just say yes or no.”

I say nothing, and my feeble attempt at passivity doesn’t matter, my body has already answered: my fingers wrap back into yours when you start to pull away, the possibility of your warmth leaving me. I pull you back in. Closer, closer. I pull your hand down, and you pull my face in, and there are no more gaps between us.

 

Sangronas shouldn’t—

But we are. You ask to go further and I shudder, “Yes.”

We are—Hands hungry, hands searching, grabbing, holding.

We are—The taste of you flooding through me, your quiet breaths.

We are—Your skin giving under bites you do not pull away from because you know these teeth will not puncture you.

 

Sangronas should, like all active people, stay hydrated.

“There’s an ice machine in the foyer,” I say after having turned on the bathroom faucet and watched the copper-tinted water slither down the drain. I fit my jacket back on, the studs catching the neon from the motel sign outside, meanwhile you’re still on the bed, too comfortable to get up. The neon colors you blue, and at first I think it’s just the light that makes me think you’re sad.

“What did that mean for us?” You’re looking at your own body below you when you say it.

“I don’t know.”

“I took you as you are. I’m willing to, but…”

“But what, Khiabet?”

“I want all or none of you. The Sangrona too. But you won’t let it out, will you?”

You hold me there with your question. How cruel to do that now, after what we did, after the shame is already flooding back in. So much shame, I’m ruled by shame.

 

Sangronas don’t talk to strangers.

In the foyer there’s a bar and three drunk men, one bartender, one paisa-lookin’ fuck in the corner drinking tequila under a black sombrero while soft rockera plays. I’m trying to put time and space between me and your questions I could not answer. I squeeze ice cubes into a plastic bottle one at a time then ask the bartender to fill it with water. He glares at the sight of me and I glare right back, then he shrugs, does my small request.

I wait, tapping my thumb on the stained bar-top, ignoring the men’s looks, staring off into the trickle of cars outside, people with destinations to reach, when the sombrero whistles at me.

“Yes you.” A woman’s voice.

I take my water, full now, and take a seat across from this vaquera staring me down through her cigarette smoke with tired, apathetic eyes.

“Saw you when you girls came in,” she starts. “Don’t see many people like that around here, and most won’t bat an eye. Not me though. My job is looking. Reading people.” It’s only then that I notice the bloated holster on her hip. The steel’s gleam. “I like stories. I bet you got one, don’t ya, misssssssssss…?”

“Maria. And not an interesting one. We’re sisters going to a funeral. Just passing through.”

She tips her hat. “My condolences. But the thing is, people express grief in so many different ways. There’s no shortage of it in these times either, so we have a great diversity of expressions. Like those knuckles of yours. Looks like your rage stung. Doesn’t look nice next to your nails, then again…they’re chipped.” She’s got gloves on. Her eyes are so far behind her brim’s shadow, embedded in her dark, sunburnt skin. She sniffs the air. “You catch a cold traveling? That’s Vaparu, huh? I got a rash if you don’t mind sharing.”

“I’m fine, thank you.” I stand up, leaving the water on the coffee table she’s resting her boots on.

“You take care now—lots of strange deaths happening these days too.”

“What do you mean?”

She shrugs. “Oh, you know. Those harpies. They take little girls like you at night. You ought to watch out for them. Taken grown men too. I’ve seen it. You know, in Mexico some say they’re gifted by their Aztec gods. The Christians call them demons for sure, but you know, these beings are so new to us, we’ll have no idea what they are for decades to come. Not until they start organizing and marching and demanding—some think they’re doing that already, ya know? They all mature into flyers, and that’s when they get caught, soaring wayyyyy up there. The ones who’ve gone up and come back down say they can actually see past all the pollution, see Earth’s smoggy edge. They’re probably the only living creatures who’ve ever truly seen the stars. Maybe that’s why they do it. Maybe that’s worth it. Or maybe they’re leaving messages on the earth that only their own kind can see. That’s what worries me—they’re embracing it.”

“You’re a huntress.”

She doesn’t smile, just nods, slow and factual. “And you’re someone who probably thinks you know a thing or two about life. That you can keep on moving as you have been, but look at the world. The times, they are a-changin’. How long do you think you can last?”

“Long enough.”

“Not on your own. Don’t you know? There’s a gaggle of Ornithosapiens loose from the Bay Area, they could be anywhere, even all the way down here and they’ll pluck you right out of the night if you’re not careful.”

“I have to go, my prima’s alone.”

“Thought she was your hermana.”

“She’s—”

“Way I see it, there’s only two options for them. Either they have to organize, and they’ll take to the streets just to line themselves up all fish-in-a-barrel-like ready for their own annihilation. Because they can’t win, not really, there’s no way. OR they do the smart thing.”

“And what’s that?”

She hooks her index fingers in the corners of her mouth and tugs her lips back tight to show me all the black, sanded down nubs where fangs should be. “Join the winning team.”

 

Sangronas mustn’t overstay their welcome.

Minutes and we’re gone. There’s nothing to pack. We rush back into the dryness of the night, towards home, to fix this mess. A stupid fucking idea—Sangronas don’t retrace their steps—that makes us predicable, catchable. But again, we’re girls, and we miss our moms. I miss my tía.

“We’ll stay for a day,” I tell you on our dash through the creaking hall. “That’s enough time for a plan. For something.”

We climb back up the bus’s steps and when I turn back, the vaquera is there on the porch, emotionless, the saloon’s OPEN sign burning her face red.

 

Sangronas don’t trust no one.

It’s a liability, you can only be sure of yourself in the end. Only sometimes we’re desperate, and we’re burning to believe. Like when you show me the text from your mom, a whole wall of words distilled into: I won’t tell. You’re still my míja, please come home.

The sun arches across the sky and by dusk I’m watching you from the driveway as your mom takes you into the house. Your mom’s mouthing gracias to me, and you’re waving at me as if it’s okay. Shyly, I wave back, wait there for several heartbeats after the door shuts until I’m sure that nothing will crack on that still, little house.

Until I know I am alone again.

Medication’s still in my bedside drawer when I’m home. Cool. Tío’s working late and I don’t know where my tía is. A clock ticks. Dryer’s rattling. The lights are all off and I strip away my filthy jacket to let my shoulders breathe. I’m thinking, It’s just me here. The only soul in the world. Then I catch it, the slightest pinch on my nose.

Cigarettes.

The closet explodes too fast for me to turn, to scramble away from the leather hands bursting through grabbing my wrists—nailing me down with all their body’s weight. My own blood coating my teeth metallic and I’m spitting, scraping my face against the carpet to hitch my head up—see Avalon stepping into the doorway from the hall with hate in her eyes, my tía behind her at my mother’s side —Mom?! She’s saying she knew this would happen. Saying where they’ll take me they’ll make me better. They’ll fix me. Broken me. And I’m snarling at them,

I howl all my spiteful words I’ve locked in so long until those leather hands behind me fist a clump of my hair—slam my skull back down against the world, ringing now. Hazy. Spinning. A muffled argument of my tía and Mom I cannot make out because the world is going black, but the vaquera cuts through it all with her words dripping into my ear, “I tried warning you, you know. You had a way out.”

IV

The Indestructible Part of Yourself

We pray every night, doesn’t matter to whom, Sangronas make sure we always ask whatever God we have for forgiveness.

Maybe that’s why it’s the chapel Avalon brings me to. The vaquera drops me handcuffed before the cross like some fucked-up lamb for her altar, like Avalon will forgive me and rise me up once more if I take the blame, lie that I was the one who killed that man. Like that would sew our family right up. Like that too will save Avalon’s soul.

 

It’s all about survival, remember?

That’s what Avalon is saying in the candles’ glow, her eyes sleepless, what was her perfectly parted, perfectly straight hair now scribbles. “You’d do the same if you were me,” she’s saying. “Don’t lie. The Huntress promised I’ll be okay if I just helped—you know I can’t like the rest of them. You’re not going to ruin this for me. You’re not. You’re not!”

The vaquera’s watching us with bored eyes. “The badges will be here in ten,” she tells Avalon. She’s chewing on her cigarette stem, and maybe that’s why she only feels for the gun at her hip when the doors click in the foyer out front. She should have drawn it. But to her it’s just a noise. All that cigarette smoke tarring her inside out, she doesn’t smell it: candle smoke, citrus conditioner, and Vaparu—the unmistakable scent of you.

Did you find me sniffing for mine? I hadn’t texted you that I made it home.

The vaquera heads to the source of the sound, eyes on the foyer head. She steps in, then as the doors to this worship room shut behind her—CRACK!

 

Sangronas learn to love the pain.

The pain of being a woman, of being young, of breathing smog, crisping in the sun, cutting your tongue on fangs, splitting fingertip bones, because we know becoming is pain, and pain is temporary. Our bodies will fuse back together, our hunger always returns—never satiated—Our ability to keep ourselves one step ahead of death, a jackal nipping behind our heels. I can break my bones. I can slide through these handcuffs. My muscles will pull my bones back into their sockets by the time I’m springing for Avalon who has become right now all of her teeth, all of her claws slashing and biting and elbowing and howling at you.

And you’re biting back.

Only heartbeats ago, you’d thrown open the doors to the chapel with the vaquera’s gun raised after the shot shattered the quiet. I noticed her face leaking onto the floor behind the clapping doors; her blood slashed across your beautiful, determined, horrified face coming forward to gift me salvation. Shame washed over my monster self again—how could I have ever wanted to ruin your face? You were never a killer before.

But the vaquera, the güero, they were nobodies, and Avalon was somebody. This fact caught you when you reached the base of the steps, right under the stained glass and the cross, so much so that Avalon simply walked down, slapped your hand to let the human weapon jump away into the pews like it wanted it to, and then it was a battle of just teeth, and claws, and screams.

Now your skin’s ragged. Stomach leaking out your life. You’re gasping for breaths and stumbling away from Avalon’s slashes and she keeps rising after every attempt of yours to throw her down, never mind the knocked-over candles, their fire swallowing the curtains, lurching up the pews. Avalon’s still so much more experienced than you with your prepubescent powers—you lack the hate it costs to win.

And she’s going to rip your throat out for it.

I won’t let you pay the price.

I crack my hands—the pain is forgotten immediately, just a fact like the sound of the cuffs dropping and my bones snapping back together into hands reaching. Right for the boxcutter that Avalon always keeps clipped to the back of her belt. I push her down when I take it, raise the blade up high and when I split her open down the belly it’s not blood, but feathers that spill out. So many feathers. She’s crying, choking out, “Stop—please stop! It was my mom’s idea, not mine! I’m not her! I’m not her! Please!” And even though I know how like all of us, she only desires to live, to be more than a statistic, to escape the pain of a country we were all born into enduring, to be mundane, it’s too late. I’m already reaching inside of her to grab fistfuls of Avalon—this is how I undo her—I wretch out plumes of orange and blue and teal and green and violet and grey and yellow and white and black and red and red and red and red and red.

 

Remember, the Sangrona is in you, not the other way around.

I know that I’m a Sangrona, one pressing palms to your stomach to keep what’s left of you from spilling out, the church raging hellfire all around us. The windows rattling. The sirens outside. I’m telling you to hold on, let yourself heal, just a little longer, only you’re gurgling that you want to go home, but there is no home to go back to. There’s no time left.

There is only now.

The funny thing though? In all this bullshit, I breathe with relief. It’s still there. I see it—the kindness still deep in the liquid of your eyes, a declaration that being us doesn’t mean killing it. The way you still look at me with that kindness too—I realize how much I want to protect you. What I will do to ensure your safety.

Boots are coming up the stairs and they smell of leather and authority.

And there’s musk on their skin, sharp lead in their hands.

And I know that I am a Sangrona. I glare up to Christ looking down on us—No—I glare through him, the stained glass above. I stop fighting my own bones, my own skin, I let myself go and give my body to the Sangrona inside. Grit my teeth as electric euphoria knotted with pain pulses through me as my Sangrona, finally, pushes through my bones, my sinew, my muscle and skin, until my wings stretch out to blanket us both, and I take you in my arms, eyes towards the sky, the stars beyond, the Earth that will soon be below. With a flex of muscle, I push the ground away and I don’t stop.

We rise.

Because my wings are strong, and my fangs are sharp.

Because for you, I will devour them all.

(Editors’ Note: M. M. Olivas is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2024 M. M. Olivas