Countryhumans Hispanic Heritage Month 2024

Sin Consuelo

Prompt: Mexico

Mexico was coated in ash.

It covered her arms and her legs, got in her feathers, and left her mouth dry.

It tasted like death.

Mexico felt tears trace their way down her face, cutting lines through the ash on her face as she mourned.

She was empty.

Mexico wanted to be mad at her government for what they had done, for the governmental change that had killed her children. She wanted to cry and scream and rage and take her revenge against all who were involved.

But she felt numb and could not bring herself to do it. She couldn't move. She couldn't feel. She was just empty.

What even was the point of living anymore with all of them gone? Without Tamaulipas' piercing laughter and ever-present joy, without Chihuahua's love of animals and the outdoors, without Sinaloa, her baby, so new to the world before she was ripped away.

What was the point of living without them, without Chihuahua, without Tamaulipas, without Sinaloa, without Guanajuato, without México State, without Oaxaca, without Puebla, without Michoacán, without San Luis Potosí, without Veracruz, without Jalisco, without Querétaro, without Yucatán, without Zacatecas, without Sonora, without Tabasco, without Coahuila, without Nuevo León, without Durango, without Chiapas, and without Federal District.

All twenty-one of her children were gone.

Mexico doesn't know how long she sat there, staring blankly at the piles of ash that were once her children until muffled voices began speaking around her. She just stared at the ash, trying to find the lights in her chest that were her children, trying to find them, and only finding an empty void of nothingness.

The people the voices belonged to eventually lifted Mexico to her feet, helping her walk to the door. Mexico felt distant as if she was watching everything from far away, head fuzzy and distant.

It was hard to do anything without help, but anything she did, she did numbly and stiffly.

Mexico blinked, and she was sitting in a bed, ash cleaned from her arms and legs but still caught up in her wings, itching fiercely. Mexico couldn't bring herself to care about it.

Mexico was still crying.

She couldn't bring herself to move, hunger and thirst clawing at her mind and body like an angry beast, drowning her in pain and paralyzing her even more.

She didn't care.

She deserved it for letting her children die, for not stopping it. She deserved to have a slow and painful death, to waste away into nothingness.

She deserved no mercy.

The human aids tried their best to make her eat and drink as Mexico slid in and out of awareness, broken up only by the blissful nothingness of sleep.

Sleep was so much like death.

Was that what her children felt as their bodies crumbled and lives ended, turning into nothingness before her very eyes? Was it like falling asleep to them?

Or was it painful and slow, agonizing and cruel?

She didn't know. She wasn't sure if she wanted to know.

Very few people come to see Mexico anymore. Miguel Barragán Andrade had come once to tell Mexico about the age of prosperity that would come now that they had a new constitution. Mexico spit at his feet and told him his constitution brought death and pain.

It was the first thing to rouse her to her feet before she collapsed out of weakness and exhaustion.

It was the first time she had felt anything but numb emptiness. She had felt rage, pain, and overwhelming choking sorrow. She had sobbed harder than she ever had before until she was too exhausted to remain awake.

The numbness had ended somewhat after that. Mexico began to move again, taking short walks around the house she had been brought to. She wasn't sure who it belonged to, but she was glad she wasn't at her home. She knew she would be unable to handle that.

Mexico ignored her government's demands to reengage in politics, to do what they demanded of her. They decided they could work without the countryhumans of her children, so they could work without her.

Instead, Mexico devoted her time to making her house a memorial to her children. She wouldn't step foot there, but no one else would either. The grounds became a graveyard, and Mexico moved into a new home.

Her old one belonged to the dead now.

And Mexico became as lifeless as the ghosts that roamed there.