Barefoot Dreams of Petra Luna

The smoking star lit the night sky as women wept, holding their babies close. Men kept quiet while the old and the weak prayed for mercy. It was on that night that all of us huddled under the giant crucifix, the night when everyone-everyone but me-awaited the end of the world.

Everything was a sign to us mestizos, from eclipses to new moons to burned tamales in a pot. I learned early on that all signs were bad. When sparks flew out of a fire, it meant an unwelcome visitor would show up. A sneeze meant someone was talking bad about you. If a metate-a grinding stone-broke, it meant death to its owner or a family member.

But the biggest sign of all was citlalin popoca, the smoking star. Papa’s big boss at the mine called it a comet. It was some sort of a traveling star, he said, one that crossed our sky every so many years. To people like Papa’s boss, that’s all it was, but to us mestizos, it was the worst omen possible.

The Aztecs, our ancestors, saw smoking stars as an omen announcing the death of a king. We had no kings, only a man who had been president since before Papá was born, and had he died, I doubted anybody would have missed him. These days, a smoking star meant something different. It meant war and famine. Yet, others believed the star would come crashing down upon us, burning our homes and everything in sight. I didn’t believe any of it.

There had been plenty of unwelcome visitors to our hut despite calm fires. Tiny babies sneezed all the time. Who could possibly talk bad about them? And I couldn’t remember how many metates I’d broken in my life, but still, we were all kicking. My dream to go to school and learn to read had yet to come true. I did not plan on dying that night or anytime soon.

Little did I know that, soon enough, my world would turn into a nightmare. Still, in my heart, I believed that the smoking star wasn’t to blame for halting my dreams or for taking loved ones away, or for bringing a war to my doorstep-a war so horrific and frightening, it reminded me of stories about the conquest of our people. Except this time our enemy didn’t come from a faraway land. Our enemy lived among us.