Tonight, I consummate.
The ceremony itself is discreet, and the only people in the church’s kitchen are my mother and I. The anticipating groom the size of my child eye, only maize dough between my mother’s index finger and thumb. Instructed by a nod, I let cold water anoint my fingers and press into the mound. The priest, a bouquet of blue tongues licking saliva from a scarred skillet. My mother clucks her tongue to drive my eyes away.
“Since you never pay attention, allow me to mold for you.”
She leans forward and folds him in her wet palms. Into himself, into himself, into himself.
“To make a tortilla, you must imagine this is the clay from which God molded Adam, and create.”
Beads of water from her hands permeate his pores—his mouth, eyes, the barrels of his ears. There is not a breath, nor a wrinkle, nor a crack, that breaks his skin, nor hot steam that bursts through his lips; he is perfectly silent, as good masa must be. Even when her ring finger presses down, leaving an indent on his perfect face, he dares not yelp in pain.
Fingers kissed in red polish veil me over my immature lashes and tighten the white mandil around my waist. I can feel squealing ribs under the apron and my throat pulsating with bile, knowing this suitor will have the same face hardened by despot and sunspot as every other boy born, and every man crafted by mothers.
“Lay the wax paper on the press.”
Swiveling her palms over, she molds him to the maternal aspect of perfection. The expressionless slate mostly divorced from the store-bought, milled powder he came to her as, which, itself, is completely divorced from the mosaic of white, gold, and brown kernels behind his hay-silk.
It is here I notice his striking resemblance to my father, a punctured tortilla so brittle his skin has snapped off in scraps. I am so fortunate. My mother was married on an expired comal. Her own mother could not afford the fine selections of store-bought maseca and filtered water available to us now. She harvested my father in sand and yellowed him with hellfire, only introducing him once he was digestible, blessed with brown river water and hydrated lime.
“The wax paper, niña!”
My mother pulls me down the aisle of the basilica with her gaze. I shakily lift the wooden tortillero’s hand, then dress him in a transparent cloak. She takes her finger from his nape to his lower back and lays him flat in all his naked glory. I imagine he sneaks a look from below and that he imagines the plush perfection of my slate. For a moment, there is a brief chance to save him and melt the wafer on my tongue, but he has already been rubbed, treated, and cured––the wax paper is already stained with his shape. I rip another wax sheet and blanket him in the groom’s wool. I slip my hand into the sepulcher, shut my eyes, and lower the handle, before my mother cloaks my fingertips in her palms.
“¡Con huevos!”
With the bells comes the howling of want on priestly flame, hungry to melt our blank slates into one. The comal laps up shreds, crumbs, and dust. I admire the groom’s pristine whey as I lift him from the wax paper, though every man before him seemed paved of the same sand. My lips betray me, salivating at the thought of the consummation between the flame and his bubbled skin. My mother chokes her sobs between yellow-toothed smiles. I place my hand in his for mere seconds on the comal; bubbled blisters wrinkle my hand through every one of our vows. The veil singeing brown between the lace braids. A tortilla can only lay so much on the comal before he consummates black with the pan. My mother fingers the bow of the apron and my groom begins to shudder. The burden has come in a breathing sack of cornstarch, water, and oil.
Before me, the tortilla balloons into a rotund beauty, unwrinkled by the heat. I know then that this manufactured groom has accepted the ashes of this romance. A Mexican reproduction, reanimated with a tortilla I could not mold for myself. My mother’s expectant eyes burn into my nape. This woman can harvest you, bathe you in lime, water, and salt, roll the length between her palms, and warm you long enough for her to swallow—a promise made between the whispers of my fingertips and his spine. I tip him on his back without the safety net of maternal skin.
We are the new creators; I was crafted from my father’s rib and molded into the blackened bride. I lay an unscathed index finger to the dirt-plain comal, and consummate, folding my white fingers into the stiff, indigestible tortilla.
Esénia Banuelos
Esénia Banuelos is a living Mexican-American word-wreath from Chicago, Illinois. She is an undergraduate double-major in Educational Studies and Linguistic & Language in the Quaker Consortium and a preschool aide for the Phebe Anna Thorne School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Her work is rooted in the semantic and syntactic revolution of Chicano identity and confronting the generational traumas of NAFTA, Bracero, and mixed status living.
