FULL NAME › Leticia Magdalena Villalobos Ortiz
AGE › thirty
GENDER › Cis female (She/Her/Hers)
FROM › Puyallup, Washington
RESIDENCE › Miracle Mine Mobile Home Park (Outskirts)
OCCUPATION › Trainer/instructor at Iron Fitness, Clerk at Chuy’s Auto Service
NOW PLAYING › Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me by The Smiths
trigger/content warnings: parental death, murder, traumatic birth, drug use, abuse
everyone calls her a miracle as if somehow being born from the body of a dead mother is a celebration more than it is a tragedy. she is called miracle so often that she thinks it’s her name until the age of five when she goes to school and no one calls her name at attendance. thank god her mother had written out her name in the baby book she was saving, or maybe her grandmother really would’ve named her that–miracle.
leticia sounds like another girl’s name. a girl whose mother is alive and well. a girl whose mother tucks her in at night with stories and songs and goes to sleep in a bed with a father instead of lying six feet underground in a cold box of wood trying to outlast the worms and moles. leticia has a grandmother who puts silk ribbons in her hair and makes her pozole on cold, winter nights. she buys her love with pretty dresses and a doll each time she makes an appearance with her grandmother. it takes years before she learns this is not a normal way to grieve. there are so many vhs tapes of interviews on oprah and specials on court tv in abuela’s closet that they trump the years she’s been alive on earth. yolanda ortiz makes a monopoly, a dynasty, atop her daughter’s suffering.
it’s not until leticia is twelve that she learns the full story. she’s made so many appearances on television that she’s practically a celebrity–a child star–but she has grown up knowing only that she sprung from her mother’s dead belly like pegasus from the slain body of medusa. so strange, it was almost immaculate. her grandmother had always compared her sweet mother to santa maria. it only lived to serve that in childbirth, she shared that magic. instead, leticia learns that her mother had answered an ad in the paper for free baby clothes and supplies. so clever in its inncouous offer, even the most cynical of her mother’s loved ones would have fallen into that sweet trap–flies to honey.
this is what she learned.
the canonized gabriela ortiz went to 241 nw westbrook dr at 1100 on a tuesday in september. she parked her car in the visitor space of the apartment block and went upstairs to meet ana hernandez and was greeted with a hug and the scent of fresh coffee when she entered the apartment. the two sipped their coffees and talked about the challenges of pregnancy and, for gabriela, impending single motherhood ( oh, but she had her mother to help ). for ana, her husband was anxiously awaiting the birth of a son–if that’s what they ended up having. neither woman knew what she was expecting.
when gabriela told ana that she had an appointment to keep, the generous woman left the kitchen to grab the things she’d promised her–things, she explained, that were doubles of hand me downs from her sisters. ana hernandez returned, not with a box of baby things, but with a knife. leticia shuts the tape off then and does not revisit it until the age of fourteen, where she learns two things. one, that her mother was a fighter. and two, that she was cut from her mother’s stomach with the clumsy skill of a woman who’d never deigned to carve her own turkey. it explains the scar that runs through her hairline, just above her ear. it explains her grandmother’s obsession with tragedy. it tells her nothing about herself and she refuses any more interviews or appearances. she refuses any of her grandmother’s plans for her future. she learns, like her mother, to put her trust in people who are as clever as they are unworthy.
the only thing that makes leticia villalobos feel like she can breathe is running and getting high. she doesn’t give a shit about organized sports, but she loves the feeling of the wind blowing the salt of sweat and rain off of her face. she falls in love several times. she gets her heart broken several more. every person is an opportunity to find some piece of herself. every person is an opportunity to be loved for some other reason than being a miracle. girls like leticia are symbols. like the virgin she represents hope; like the virgin, she is given no identity of her own.
tired of her antics and disobedience, her grandmother sends her to live with some cousins in boot hill. leticia thinks that her grandmother will have a much easier time controlling her narrative without the burden of a teenage girl. the nunez’s don’t have a lot, but they at least have their own business–one that’s not built on immortalizing her mother’s death. they don’t even seem prepared for her arrival, but they accommodate her quickly and soon it’s as if she’s always been there. boot hill feels more like home than life with her grandmother. boot hill just feels more like home.
boot hill may be a reprieve from the press and the papers and the goddamn interviews or dateline specials, but it’s not without its own semblance of purgatory. it’s hard to be the new kid, but she does a decent job of keeping her business to herself. no one learns that little leticia villalobos is the miracle baby phoenix, born from the ashes of garbiela ortiz. her cousins seem to know very little about her mother’s tragedy or else, that they’ve forgotten. some days it makes her tremble with anger, but she tries to remind herself that they never knew her. they barely knew yolanda and her family at all until leticia came to live with them.
the small town is an easy place to make the same mistakes, but leticia finds some good things too. she does odd jobs around the auto shop to help out the family that took her in and treated her like a real daughter. she starts teaching yoga and spinning classes at iron fitness after it opens. she still looks for a dream or for her heart in other people. it’s gotten her into trouble with a long list of exes who should’ve been buried in the desert or left for dead in the mines. stolen from her mother too soon, there is a hole in leticia’s heart that hungers. even in boot hill, where she doesn’t have to be a miracle to everyone she meets, she wonders if her heart will ever be full.
❝ i killed a plant once because i gave it too much water. lord, i worry that love is violence. ❞
FACECLAIM › Melissa Barrera
AUTHOR › Lucia
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