Free The Aguero Sisters by Cristina Garcia

barred them all from her room.
    Reina doesn’t particularly mind her skin, mismatched and itchy as it is, but she cannot tolerate its stench. No one else seems to notice, but to her it reeks of dry blood and sour milk. She recalls hearing of animals in the wild spurning their own kind when touched by an unknown odor. Now Reina understands why.
    She tries to mask the odor by rinsing smoked grapefruit through her hair. But the relief is only temporary. The stink ruins all her familiar pleasures. Gone is her rapture. Gone her hot, black scent. When Reina makes love, nothing, not even Pepín, whose hands erase all borders, whose mouth clashes against hers in love, can make the bliss return. Perhaps it was her own scent, Reina thinks, that had stirred her all along.
    It is the first day of her period. Reina is proud thatdespite her age and incongruous skin, her monthly blood, at least, is still intact.
    Remnants of a bird’s nest
dangle from the chandelier in her father’s study. Reina remembers how Papá used to leave the French doors to his room wide open so that families of birds could flit back and forth with their twigs and bits of thread or twine. They fed on the crumbs of his sandwiches and the mashed-potato croquettes he messily ate at his desk.
    â€œTell me what you want, and I will tell you who you are.” Her father had read those words to her once from a book in his lap. She was too young to understand the question, but she remembered it nonetheless. Well, what is it she wants now? Reina wonders whether it’s nostalgia to yearn for her mother, nostalgia to gather her shadows all these years. Why else would she choose to live like this, amidst the debris of her childhood and Papá’s dead specimens? What truths can they possibly reveal to her after so long? Can they tell her why her mother died, why her sister was sent away?
    Reina remembers how, after her mother’s death, everyone’s vision splintered. There was a bird that hovered over Mami’s burial plot at the Colón Cemetery. Her father pronounced it a common crow. Constancia, fresh from the farm in Camagüey, insisted it was electric blue. Reina wanted to believe her sister, but
she
saw a bird on fire, tiny and bathed in a violent light. It broke the air around them, invited an early dusk. Reina recalls how the emptiness seemed to surround them then, a sad bewilderment that has never lifted.
    The day before, Reina had accompanied her father to the Flores y Jorganes Funeral Home on Obispo Street. She carried a prized snakeskin in a little felt sack to place in her mother’s coffin. But Papá wouldn’t let her anywhere near Mami.
    The odor inside the funeral home made Reina catch her breath. In one room, she saw a man with a preposterous mustache, naked and covered with leaves. In another, a plump woman with no fingertips, resting on a sea of satin. Next to her, a pale sliver of a girl lay in a frosted-pink coffin. It was early morning, but Reina remembers thinking she could already hear the moon, its long, threading wail of solitude.
    Quietly, Reina slipped away from her father while he was talking to the funeral director. In the last embalming chamber, her mother lay on a rusting pedestal, her throat an estuary of color and disorder, as if a bloody war had taken place beneath her chin. Reina stared at her mother, forced herself to see her whole again, to breathe the lost incense of autumn in her hair.
    There were footsteps in the hallway. Reina quickly kissed her mother’s cheek, then snuck out to the patio, into shrill daylight, and released the papery fragments of her dried snakeskin to the wind.
    When Reina returned
from the hospital in Santiago de Cuba, the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution insisted she volunteer for night duty since she was awake anyway, but Reina refused. Like her cursing, blinded, half-mad
compañeros
at Céspedes Hospital, Reina decided to do nothing more for