Free The Distant Marvels by Chantel Acevedo

The room is spinning now, and outside, the lightning slaps the sky.
    The stories are as true as this room, as the storm outside, as the sharp edge of Mayito’s framed picture in my pocket. I want to say this, but there are other words shaping themselves on my tongue, other pictures crowding my head—of a charred building and of footprints in blood.
    Noraida has settled herself on a shabby divan at the foot of the bed, turning her back on Mireya, who is now chewing the nail of her left thumb, her cheeks red from embarrassment or rage, I cannot tell.
    Now, she takes aim at me. “I bet I know how this one ends. The gentle innkeeper, Julio Reyes, kills the bastard Aldo Alarcón, doesn’t he? Then he sweeps Lulu off her feet and they run away together,” she says. “That’s the way of romances. They’re all like that,” she says.
    â€œFinish the story,” Noraida demands. Outside, the faint sound of a siren disturbs our room. Noraida turns towards the sound, biting her bottom lip and squinting. The siren stops mid-blare, and Noraida leans back in her chair. “Go on then,” she says to me, and the rest of the women lean forward, like palms in a strong wind. But only Susana speaks. With a hint of sadness in her voice she asks, “So, what’s your real name?”
    When I begin again, it is as if I am no longer doing the speaking. It’s like I’m there again, sitting in the tall chair in the cigar factory, holding a book in my hand from which I do not read. But this time, I tell a part of the story I’d never meant to tell.

12.
A Story Unspoken Before Now
    S omeone threw open the door to Lulu’s room. Both Lulu and Julio Reyes sat up in bed at once, terror in their eyes. But it was only Fernanda, and her forehead was shiny with sweat, her chest heaving.
    â€œThey’ve done it. There’s been a revolt in Baire!” Fernanda cried, not caring a bit about her uncle’s bare chest under those thin blankets.
    â€œBaire?” Lulu whispered. My mother had grown up there, a village just fifty miles from Santiago de Cuba.
    â€œCasualties?” she asked, thinking of old friends perhaps, but Julio Reyes had spoken, too, asking, “What else has been reported?” so that Fernanda did not hear Lulu’s question.
    â€œThey say Macéo and Martí are back!” Fernanda said, clapping her hands. Just as quickly, her face darkened. “But you must turn her out at once, Tío Julio. There’s been a prison break. Her husband is surely on his way here,” she said.
    â€œThank you, Fernanda. Give us a moment, please. Take María Sirena with you.” Fernanda pulled me up by my arms and dragged me away from the room. Though I was fourteen years old, I still shared a room with Lulu. A small trundle bed had been put in by the window for me. Fernanda had pulled me out of bed, and I was still drowsy.
    â€œAy,” I cried out, swatting at Fernanda.
    â€œBe quiet!” Fernanda had urged me. “You’re so much trouble sometimes.” Fernanda was a hard girl, toughened by work in the inn, life without a mother, and having no siblings at all. No young man had ever looked at her twice. She was twenty-six and practically ran the inn. What would she do were it to fall to ruin? Enter the convent? Fernanda was a young woman without choices, and it had made her rigid, her face frozen in a bitter expression nearly all of the time.
    But she was also a gossip, and when I pressed my ear against the door to my mother’s room, Fernanda had followed suit, and so we heard what we should not have.
    â€œMi vida,” Julio Reyes was saying to Lulu, and Lulu had murmured something, then began sobbing.
    â€œAgustín is not the man for me. He is my husband, but he was a brute. I married too young, too young,” she was saying between gulps of air.
    â€œThen we run away t-together. Tonight, we leave Havana, leave this w-war.