Woman of Light

Luz Lopez sat with her auntie Maria Josie near the banks where creek and the river met, the city’s liquid center illuminated in green and blue lights, a Ferris wheel churning above them. The crowds of Denver’s chile harvest festival walked the bottomlands with their faces hidden behind masks of turkey legs and bundles of buttered corn. The dusk air smelled of horse manure and gear grease and the sweet sting of green chilies roasting in metal drums. Through the smog of sawdust and food smoke, Luz was brightened by the flame of her kerosene burner, black hair curled around her noteworthy face, dark eyes staring into a porcelain cup. She wore a brown satin dress dulled from many washes but still she shined.

“Tell me,” said an old man in Spanish, fiddling with the white-brimmed Stetson across his lap. His eyes murky, faraway. “I can take it.”

Luz searched inside the cup, tea leaves at the bottom. Along the edges, she saw a pig’s snout, and deeper into the mug, far into the future, she glimpsed a running wolf. Luz placed the cup on the velvet cloth over her booth’s wide table, which was really an old Spanish door, the rusted knob exposed like a pointed thorn.

“Gout,” she said. “A bad case.”

The old man lifted his hat to his sweat-salted head. “The god damn beans, the lard Ma uses.”

“Can’t always blame a woman,” Maria Josie interrupted with reserved confidence. She was thickset with deep brown hair cut close to her face, and she wore workmen’s trousers and a heathery flannel with wide chest pockets, her dark eyes peering through round glasses. She told the old man that almost no one she knew could afford lard anymore. “Especially not in an abundance, señor.”

“You’ll have to give it up,” Luz said sweetly. “For your health, more time at life.” The old man swore and tossed a nickel into Luz’s tackle box, leaving the booth with the hunkered posture of a man bickering with himself.

It was an annual festival, a grouping of white tents and a lighted main stage. Denver’s skyline around them, pointed and gray, a city canyon beneath the moon. Rail yards and coal smelters coughed exhaust, their soot raining into the South Platte River. Young people had unlaced their boots and removed their stockings, wading into the moon’s reflection. Bats swooped low and quick.

“Can I interest you ladies in a reading?” Luz asked. Two younger girls had slowed their pace, dissolving cotton candy onto their tongues. They gawked at Luz’s teakettle and leaves, her tackle box of coins.

The taller of the two girls said, “Bruja stuff?”

The shorter one giggled through blue teeth and licked the last of her candy. “We don’t mess around with that,” she said and reached across the booth. She pushed aside a mossy stone, snatch- ing one of Diego’s handbills. The girls locked arms and skipped down the aisle between tents, bouncing to the main stage where the Greeks were hosting their annual contest, “Win Your Woman’s Weight in Flour.”

Maria Josie whispered, “The young ones are no good.”

Luz asked why, and said at least she was trying.

“Focus on the viejos-they’re steady.”

“Sure they are,” Luz said. “Until Doña Sebastiana comes.”

Maria Josie laughed. “You’re right, jita. Never met a dead man with a future.”