The Virgin’s Children (excerpt)

          Juan Carlos held a bottle of rum for guests who wanted to add it to their ponche.  I drank cup after cup of atole, a thick hot drink made from guavas, which needed no rum to burn the throat and warm the belly.  Juan Carlos teased me about the fact that I never drank.  But I needed nothing to be drawn to the moon, which rose full like a sea turtle finding its way up the beach to make its nest.  I rested my empty cup on the fence and the donkey slid his tongue inside it, slurping out remnants of atole.  The kids hovered around the piñata as I wandered down the street toward the beach.
          I fell on my back in the sand, which was bathed in light, and gazed up at the moon as if it could guide me to the nest where I would guard my babies until they hatched and made their way to the sea.  I wept for the little creatures who would never survive the waves as they returned to their mothers’ watery habitat.  Soon I was crying in great big gulps, as if I had drunk the rum Juan Carlos offered, my sighs directed toward the moon. 
          I quit my howling when I heard the donkey whistling through his nasal passages as he let out his own cry, over and over again, from his post outside the party some blocks away.  I got up on my hands and knees, sand falling from my ears as it had when I was nine and spent the night on the beach in La Costa.  I crawled up the beach and continued on my hands and knees over stones laid in the dirt, toward the little church where I listened to the mass in Spanish on Sunday mornings.  I tried to stand up but couldn’t, as if held by the gravity that pulled the moon in its revolution around the earth.
          As I got closer to the frustrated wheeze of the donkey I kept to the shadows, for fear someone at the party would see me and think I crawled because I was drunk with rum.  The children had broken the piñata, and a few of them ran around outside searching for overlooked dulces beneath the lemon trees.  One little girl, to my misfortune, Carmela’s niece Mariela, glanced across the street just as I slipped under the shadow of the awning above the produce market.  She ran toward me, but something, fear probably, made her stop.  She opened her mouth as if to ask, “Esta bien, Senor Paul?” then turned and darted back toward the house.
          Compared to the light of a full moon, the light inside the church was dim and, peering through it, I saw that my only company was Senora Maria Alvarada, a tiny woman of eighty seven years who was almost completely deaf and spent hours every day praying inside the church.  Even if she had not been deep in prayer and nearly deaf, she might not have taken notice of me as I walked on torn pants and bloodied knees to the front of the church, for what I was doing was a common form of pilgrimage to the devout.  But mine was not a pilgrimage, or not a declared one.  I was doing what I had wanted to that morning in La Costa when I was nine: crawl into the belly of the whale and sleep.  Sleep in the womb of the church at the feet of La Virgen. 
          I stopped at the foot of the statue and bent my forehead to the cool cement.  Querida Virgen, perdoneme.  I said a prayer for my Nanna.  I imagined if she and Mary met in heaven that she took Mary to task for her cooking.  I couldn’t help laughing at the thought.  I let out a yelp and turned briefly in the direction of Senora Alvarada, who, in her blessed ignorance of most sounds in the outside world, continued praying with her eyes shut.
          I stood and walked to the first pew and lay down.  Querida Virgen, perdoneme. Hidden from view, I closed my eyes and let my mind drift, past the posada and the wheezing donkey, back toward the beach bathed in moonlight.  I drifted off to the sound of waves falling gently on the sand.