Deny Deny Deny
Constanza was 16 when she drowned. She tried fighting against the crushing waves. Every muscle, nerve, ached with the strain of trying to keep herself afloat. In those first moments, the shock and adrenaline kept her body active. Her throat felt slashed by the violent way water forced its way inside. Her eyes stung from the salt. Then she remembered. She always did as she was told. Always came home an hour before curfew. Spent her Sunday mornings at mass with her mom. Ate every last crumble on her plate even when it made her stomach hurt, and later made her want to throw up. Every report card since her parents enrolled in a private pre-K program has been nothing but As. When her mom told her she couldn’t hang out with Veronica anymore, Constanza immediately forced herself to forget the friendship. Even after completing her Confirmation, her mom doubted her. Constanza remembered, and her body stopped.
A few days later, she woke up to the fragments of a story scattered. Flowers and trees of all shapes and sizes, iridescent and multicolored. Scattered in between floral bushes, housed inside tree trunks, different stalls of food, clothes, trinkets, and knick-knacks stood, made of wood, adobe, cement, and other materials she couldn’t place. Orbs of warm yellow light floated by, illuminating the area without a clear path. Others roamed around her with totes and baskets, taking their time in between stalls. A woman with bioluminescent skin in a flowy purple dress with a little boy in a Spider-Man costume walked by her. The little boy aimed his hand as if he were firing spiderwebs at her as they passed her.
The smell of seaweed and a campfire. A girl. They spent time roaming the halls of her old Sunday school. There were large libraries and the grounds of a university and hallways she didn’t recognize. A house with red clay-like walls. None of it had made any sense to her, but the girl knew where to go. Constanza trusted her and followed her blindly. In the world with her physical body, it’d been three days, but she felt it’d been longer in the girl’s world.
“That’s a nice story,” her mother said.
Constanza said, “A girl found me when I started crying. She saved me.”
Her mother said it was heaven and that the girl was an angel. Constanza knew it hadn’t been heaven, and the girl hadn’t been an angel. Not that she didn’t have the beauty and horror of an angel. The feeling of terror and awe lingered inside her days after waking, but she knew her mother was wrong.
