When she first set the small thing in his hand, when she said, “Here, I found it in your clothes,” he did not recognize it as something that was his.
He turned it over. A tiny horse with wings on its back, chipped paint coating its body in green.
The wings were not the great feathered wings of a bird. They were simple and rounded. His fingers skimmed over the curved edge.
Green, the color of trailing vines in the garden valley. Green, the color of the dress the girl had worn. A cold shock of familiarity made him understand that this was why he had followed her.
He had barely taken into himself the knowledge that this little green horse was his, when the girl reached into her apron and pulled out another, yellow. Then another, purple. Then three more. White, orange, red.
She put them in his hands, their small bodies crowding the green one. “You can have these ones too, if you want.”
But he could not answer. He could not nod to thank her or shake his head to refuse them. With each small weight into his hands, these tiny horses broke him. Each new color cracked him open a little further. He knew them. The feeling of the worn paint, their colors, the shape of their wings all pulled him back toward something he could not reach.
These were things he had touched and held before. But between where he was and the place where that understanding lived stood a border as heavy as the stone of this house. It was the same feeling he’d had in the garden, wanting to speak and not remembering how to ask his tongue and lips to make the words.
He knew what this girl wanted. She was giving him these small, winged creatures, and in return she wanted things he could not tell.
He could not give her his name, because he did not know it. He could not say how he had come to the garden valley, because he had no memory of a time before. He could not even admit to her that he was lost, because lost meant there was somewhere he would not be lost if he could just trace a path back.
There was no path back. He reached past the moment of opening his eyes, blinking against the pale sun in the garden, but beyond it there was only the dark, heavy blanket that felt as open and empty as a dreamless sleep.
He could remember having this body. He could remember things like oceans and ice, leaves and the smell of lemons, but he could not remember what any of these things meant to him. He knew plates and spoons and how to use them, but not where he had first learned how. He felt the certainty that this little green horse had lived in his pocket, but he could not remember why, or where he had gotten it.
He felt like he had woken up from a dream he very much needed to remember, but the harder he thought about it, the more it faded. The few fraying threads he could grasp weren’t enough to suggest the whole cloth.
The girl watched him, her blinking slow. The brown of her eyes deepened and warmed. Her sympathy was so heavy and covered in thorns he didn’t know how to hold it. The compassion of these women and girls did not come without pity, and he bristled against it.
He could not remember if the three letters sewn to his shirt were the beginning of a verse, or the start of a name, or a warning declaring the thing he had done, the reason he had been sent here stripped of memory.
If it was a mark, he should wear it. Or as much of it as he knew, the three letters that had not been torn away.
“Fel,” he said.
“What?” the girl asked.
“You thought my name was Fel,” he said.
“Is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But that’s what I want you to call me. That can be the name you call me.” It would be the name he called himself. F-e-l, the three letters left on him.
“Estrella,” she said, fingers on the doorframe.
It was only after she left that he understood it was her own name.
This place, this house filled with women who treated him like he was a son, these gardens that spread out as wide as a sea, they were all too soft and too beautiful to be where he would pay for his sins.
Instead, he had done something he could not remember, and to punish him for it, to punish him for forgetting, God had taken the things he knew.
God had left him just enough to be sure he had existed before he had come to these gardens. Enough to leave him reaching for things he could not know.
His back felt hot and damp. He reached to take off his shirt.
On his back, his fingers found veins of harder, raised skin.
He turned to the mirror on the inside of the door.
Thick, pale scars crossed his back, like strikes of a knife over clay. With the sight of them, pain traced along each one, not alive in his body now, but remembered.
Even the memory of how much they’d hurt sank under the shame of realizing they marked him.
The grandmothers had seen them. When they’d taken off his clothes they had sucked air in through their teeth and echoed the word pobrecito. He thought it had been about his ribs showing, or the way his hair had gotten messy enough to make him look like a stray animal.
But it had been this.
He put his shirt back on.
He found the grandmothers with their Bibles, laughing together in a way he had never thought was allowed over those onionskin pages.
Their eyes all found him at once.
Their gazes made him silent.
He could not ask them to keep his secrets.
“Thank you,” he said, realizing that they could have already told their daughters and granddaughters if they wanted to. They all could have driven him out of their house as a criminal or a heretic or whatever they decided had gotten him these scars.
That night, behind the door of that room they had put him in, he broke open. All the color, all the things he did not know, the paths of scarring under his fingers, broke him open. He bit the backs of his hands so he would not cry onto the wooden horses.
He had done something wicked enough for God to carve out the center of him, and bad enough that men had marked him with it. If that was true, these women were showing him kindness God would not have wanted for him. But God had hollowed him out, and now he was not strong enough to refuse as firmly as these women insisted.
He could not even confess his sins to them because he could not remember the ways in which he had fallen.
As he slept, he held all those wooden horses in his loosely cupped hands, hoping he would dream of the things he had lost. But he woke up with nothing but the feeling of a dreamless night, empty and unyielding. He surfaced to the feeling of petals brushing his skin and realized they were falling from the ceiling like snow at midnight. Blue, dark, and shimmering.
The marks of his own teeth had cut into the knuckles of his forefingers. The salt of his tears had dried pale on the winged horses, like frost coating their bright backs.