When he realized he had hands, and a body, he crossed himself. Even before he could open his eyes, he lifted his fingers to his forehead and prayed the words. En el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo.
He could not remember when he had last had hands and a body, so thanking God for them seemed the thing to do if he didn’t want to lose them again. I exist. I thank God for my existence.
It was too cold to be el Cielo. If he was with God in Heaven, why would he feel so cold? He wondered if he was in el Purgatorio, the place he would pay for his sins.
But the air. The air smelled too sweet for this to be Purgatory, like the sugar of fruit and the green of trees. These scents came to him as familiar, but he didn’t know why.
He could not remember dying. He could not remember where he had been before this either.
A damp chill soaked his back, and under his fingers he felt the wet brush of grass. He opened his eyes to columns of white sunlight. Those fingers of sun spread out over a world that looked like a single garden but stretched as wide as a valley. They cut through a gray mist turning a little blue at the edges.
Everything else was color. Trees rose toward the sky, letting the pale sun through their branches. Vines crawled up the walls of the valley. The grass was so bright it looked polished. The flowers stood sharp against the green valley and the blue-gray morning. They grew in pink and orange and violet. It was vivid and beautiful enough that it hurt him to look at it, and again, he wondered if maybe this was el Cielo.
A figure floated through the light so slowly he did not flinch or startle. The blurring of mist and sun fell away, and he saw her, a dark-haired girl in a green dress, the mist collecting into drops on her hair. The brown of her shoulders looked familiar, not because he knew her but because the color felt like something that was his, too.
He looked down at his own hands and forearms, remembering this body he once had and now had again. He and this girl were not the same brown but close, like the bark of two different trees in this garden.
She spoke to him, but he did not hear her. She sounded as distant as the far-off call of a bird echoing through the valley. His own heartbeat, a thing he had not understood to be there until that moment, grew louder in his ears. The pressure in his rib cage made his chest feel like it was hardening into wood. He hadn’t realized he was trying to get to his feet until the act of sitting up and trying to stand left his lungs raw and worn.
The girl knelt near him. Her skirt spread around her, the hem lapping at his thigh. He tried to breathe, but the shame of realizing how dirty his clothes were made the feeling of weight on his chest worse. The stains on his shirt matched the soil caught under his fingernails, like he’d been raking his hands through the ground. Flecks of earth fell from his forearms but dampened and stained his collar and the hems of his pants.
They could have come from sleeping and waking on this ground. But each dulling stain felt like the sign of some transgression he had yet to confess. Maybe this girl had come to give him a chance to unburden his soul, but how could he confess the things he had done if he couldn’t remember them?
Again, the girl spoke to him, this time with light hands on his shoulders, like she was telling him not to move so fast.
The wonder of her struck him still. He wanted so much to both run from her and be in her presence that she must have been some saint he did not recognize. She had been sent there to find him, and now she would judge his spirit.
But she was not dressed as some angel of Heaven, in the golds of saints’ light and the blues of la Virgen. Nor was she the flame colors of the damnation he knew to fear; she was not some beautiful demon who would turn to fire and ash when he touched his fingers to her dress. Instead, there was the dark brown of her hair and her eyes. The lighter brown of her face and her hands. The faint red of her lips, and the soft green of her dress.
She was warmth but not fire, light but not sky.
“Fel,” she said, and because he did not understand, he shook his head before he realized he was doing it.
She touched his shoulder.
“Fel,” she said.
He followed the line of her arm down to her hand. Between her thumb and forefinger she grasped a scrap of cloth sewn to his shirt. She pulled it until the end came free from under his suspender strap.
Three letters, F-e-l, had been scrawled onto the cloth.
It looked like there might have been more letters, but the scrap had been torn, and those three were all that was left. The loss of the other letters felt as heavy as a prayer unsaid, like they were a map to this garden valley.
“Is that your name?” she asked.
He opened his mouth to say no but then realized he did not know what name to tell her instead. He didn’t remember what he was called any more than he remembered where he had been before this garden.
If this was el Purgatorio, maybe it was his first test to resist her. The quiet force of her made him want to tell her things he did not know. It made him want to make things up, lie just so he could give her something that sounded true. And maybe she knew this and was waiting to see if he would lie in this way, or if he would admit that he knew nothing.
But her dress, green as the trees that softened the edges of this garden valley, her dress made him think of something.
Some understanding about the color drifted toward him but then skittered away before he could grasp it. And because he wanted to follow that understanding, to see if it would come back to him, he let this girl take his hand.