Something from Nothing

From the hammock Rosa wakes to the brilliant colors surrounding her small house. Blue sky with white brushstroke clouds. Dark rich soil of the coffee fields. Flowers of every shade that her mother plants in old Nido tins. Rosa notices other colors too. Only these colors cannot be seen in the same way as she sees Papa's brown eyes or her doll's mismatched clothes. Colors that exist somewhere beyond the world of vision.

The blues and greens come swirling from laughter and playing with friends. Rusty red instantly surrounds her when she gets stung by a bee or listens to the neighbor's hungry children crying for food. Rosa also sees darker colors, grays and blacks, the confusion of nightmares and burning villages.

"Rosa, Buenos d�as! How did you sleep?" Rosa's mom asks. "Fetch the water and help me make the tortillas."

Carrying water up from the river is difficult work. Rosa slips on the mud under her bare feet, rocks cut into her skin. Her neck and back ache from the weight of the water.

Making tortillas is something that Rosa enjoys though. "Slap, slap, slap!" Shaping the cold mass between her hands is fun. She likes forming the tortillas from a wet lump of ground corn. She feels she can create something from nothing.

Rosa's abuela is an expert at creating something from nothing. Abuela's ancient hands share the color and texture of clay. Her eyes match the deep dark brown of Rosa father's. They are colored slightly darker by cataracts and memory and wisdom.

Abuela and Rosa share bits of sacred time. Not often, because Rosa has much to do each day: fetching water, gathering firewood, making tortillas, washing clothes. When this is done Rosa, exhausted, visits Abuela.

Rosa's brothers finish the work of grazing the goats and cows and run off to play. Sometimes it's a dusty game of soccer or a contest to see which boys' homemade top will spin the longest. Rosa loves watching these games. The blush red of her brothers' smiles mix with the spinning and twirling of orange and blue.

Sometimes her brothers play another game. Running through trees, the "pow, pow" of bullets flying, falling, dying. It's all make-believe but to Rosa it is dizzying. The confusing olive green and brown of soldiers' camouflage blending with mustard yellow shouts and tears.

Abuela teaches Rosa many things. How the right leaves can cure an upset stomach. How to pick the best mangos and leave her brothers with the sour ones. Abuela promises Rosa, "Mi hijita, when you are just a little older I will teach you to weave the stories and songs of our ancestors onto the huiples and clothing that we wear." Rosa looks forward to this day and can't imagine life without Abuela.

Rosa settles on learning how Abuela makes dolls. Dolls from sticks and scraps. Dolls with ragtag clothing and button eyes. These dolls are more than Rosa's toys. Like Abuela, they are her best friends. The ones she tells her secrets. The dolls understand Rosa and all the colors she sees. From the brilliant ripeness of luscious fruit to the frightening pattern of camouflage.

War had waged for all of Rosa's 10 years. The war started even before her parents were born. Rosa doesn't understand the fighting and dying or why neighbors and even her uncles suddenly disappeared. She only understands her grief and terror. No one dared talk about any of this. Not even Abuela, who sometimes wept silently to sleep. Rosa's father often said, "Even the trees have ears."

Every night Rosa clutches her rag dolls and whispers secrets and dreams to them. Dreams of a peaceful place where laughter is not chased away by soldiers and bombs. Normally, sleep comes easily to Rosa. Tonight is different though. The nightmares breath down her neck, near and real. Footsteps, running, shouts, shots, and flames. Rosa wakes from her nightmare, Mother weeping and wailing. Dark clouds of terror surround her village, men pulled into the jungle, houses set aflame. Mother gathers Rosa and her brothers in her arms and leads them off into the night.

Rosa remembers the journey to el Norte, fragmented, like an ancient, faded mosaic. Long nights of travel through misty moonlit jungles. Days hiding in dripping bat-filled caves. Hours of travel in grumbling trucks shared with roosters, goats, and other displaced children. Crossing the desert, a journey through hissing golden sunshine and thorny air. Exhausted and defeated, Rosa, her brothers, and Mama arrive in el Norte greeted by smiling t�os and t�as. Relatives that are strangers to Rosa in a land overwhelmed by metallic, neon, and a pale green loneliness.

Loneliness replaces Papa's loving embrace and dancing brown eyes. The soldiers forced Papa into the jungle the night the village was raided. Mother says, "He is in the place that you dream about Rosa, the place of peace and angels." Tears and shards of her broken heart remind Rosa that she is in a very different place.

"Elderly," "nursing home," "fieldtrip." New words tie Rosa's Mayan tongue into knots. School is full of new words and old memories. Abuela was Rosa's teacher. The school's walls were the greens of the jungle decorated with magenta flowers. The sky ceiling was painted a blue of warmth and breeze. Here the school is stark white, reflecting the coldness that Rosa feels. She likes her teacher, a silly, bearded man she barely understands. So different from Abuela.

The musty yellow scent of ancient bodies and uneaten food creates waves of nausea. The class trip to the nursing home shocks Rosa. Abuelos and abuelas sit in solitary rows of shiny metal wheelchairs. Waiting, staring, not through Abuela's sharp brown eyes, but with the lonely cloudines of giving up.

For the first time Rosa thinks, "Maybe it is better that Abuela didn't come with us. It is better for her to breathe air alive with flowers and birds and eat food prepared with sweat and love." Rosa's job on the field trip is to hug, sing, and smile. But Rosa feels like they do, disconnected, torn from family, taken away from the rich, dark soil that raised her and held her proudly.

Rosa misses Papa and Abuela more than anything in the world. Their loss is as if all the rainbow colored flowers and twittering birdsongs disappeared from Earth. Rosa has no one to share secrets with, no one to laugh with, no one to help breath life back into her hopes and dreams. She turns to making a doll, as Abuela taught her. Creating something from nothing. Her teacher is more than happy to give her the scraps of cloth that litter the messy art shelf. The doll's shirt is from somebody's old Halloween costume: dark purple with sickly green skeletons. The skirt is an outrageous metallic pink that Rosa has never seen before. Blue yarn hair attempts to hold on with Elmer's glue. Rosa finds a gold button eye waiting on the playground. Another brown button appears in a crack in the sidewalk. Her doll is ugly, not like a Barbie, but precious and loved.

Rosa shares everything with her doll. How girls here wear jeans and have brown, blond, black, even blue hair. How bad the food tastes, especially the school's. She tells her doll about water flowing warm and cold from the faucet and how she used to carry water on her head. Rosa tells her new doll about Papa, Abuela, and her favorite hiding place in the jungle near the glimmering waterfall. Rosa talks and talks, her doll fills and swells with memories happy and sad. The doll sits taller in Rosa's hand and goes everywhere with her. Rosa's pale green loneliness slowly fades, replaced by Abuela's love.

This time Rosa understands the words better. "Nursing home", "elderly," "fieldtrip." She is not excited to return to the sick yellow place but she knows what to expect. She tries to wear a smile this time in honor of Abuela. Rosa pushes away the waves of nausea. She finds Lizzy, the elder she was paired with last time, and takes her hands. Lizzy's ears and nose grew large but stopped working long ago. Her eyes are cloudy with cataracts and desertion. No one would guess that men used to push through crowds to dance with her. Even Lizzy has forgotten most things about her life. The names of her husband and the hard work of raising children are distant memories. For some reason she remembers the velvety pink dress of her favorite doll and "Muffin" the name of her dog from long ago.

Lizzy responds to Rosa's warm hands, pulling her closer. Rosa keeps trying to smile and speaks what little English she knows. It doesn't seem to matter that Rosa doesn't speak English or that Lizzy keeps talking about missing Muffin and something about a doll. Stories cut through languages, cultures, and years. Holding hands and sharing stories warms and unites them in a loving golden warmth.

As Rosa's class prepares to leave she wipes tears from Lizzy's foggy eyes. Lizzy holds tightly to Rosa hands afraid to go back to cloudy loneliness. Rosa steals her hands away, reaching into her backpack. Safe at the bottom, next to a few pencils and some crumbs, Rosa pulls out her precious, mismatched, ugly doll. Giving it one last kiss and one last hug, Rosa places her doll into Lizzy's hands and closes them around it. Smiling and crying Rosa knows that her secrets and dreams can create something from nothing. Rosa says goodbye knowing that Abuela would approve.