Thanks to the amazing reader who left me a comment asking about it a couple weeks ago, I wrote a new chapter for my fic La Traes.
I went back and finished up a half-written chapter I've had floating around for the last year. I'm planning to post it at some point today or tomorrow, if anyone else is still reading it! It features this poem by Rafael Pombo, which I love.
El Buho y El Palomo por Rafael Pombo
Érase un búho, dechado
de egoísmo el más perfecto,
de todo siempre esquivado,
cual si diera resfriado
su agrio, antipático aspecto.
“¿Por qué me aborrecerán?”
Dijo irritado y confuso
a un palomito galán.
—"Por culpa tuya", él repuso:
“Ama, oh, búho y te amarán”.
The Owl and the Dove by Rafael Pombo
Once upon a time there was an owl,
a paragon of the most perfect selfishness,
always avoided everything,
as if it had a cold
his appearance sour, unpleasant.
“Why will they hate me?”
He said, irritated and confused.
to a gallant little dove.
"The fault is yours," he replied:
“Love, oh owl, and you will be loved.”
Mirabel felt sudden trepidation flutter in her chest. It was this again…that same unspoken something that she kept catching when he thought she wasn't looking, that mysterious weight that he kept trying to keep hidden. She looked up at her Tío, who was now pulling anxiously at his collar, and still avoiding her eyes.
She took a fortifying breath.
“Hey.”
Mirabel tipped her head down, waving out her hand toward him to catch his gaze with her own. When he finally looked up at her, she let her arm drop.
“Whatever it is, it’s okay, really. You can tell me…or you can not,” she shrugged, willing more certainty into those words than she felt. “I trust you, Tío.”
His mouth tightened and his face grew grave. He nodded.
“I know you do.”
He turned then and shuffled toward his desk, kneeling to pull something from a drawer. Mirabel craned her neck to try to peek around him, though in her heart she already knew what it was.
He took a shaky breath, then stood and slowly turned back around. Over his cupped hands was draped a cloth, within which was cradled a hundred tiny shards of emerald green glass. Mirabel breathed out a shaky oh, feeling a prickle of apprehension and anticipation make its way through her arms.
“I had a vision of you, months ago. You, heh, you probably remember.” He gradually walked toward her again. “I’m sorry I took so long to…to…um. Anyway, it seems like I can’t, um, I can’t stop having this vision, and I don’t know why. The first one, that day in the forest, the glass broke, so I thought, okay, maybe I need to find the pieces and that will help, but….but i-it didn’t.”
He sat down on the edge of the low table, holding the glass close in his lap and staring at it despondently.
“All the sand everywhere….” she whispered, guilt pooling as she connected the dots. “All your vision dreams. Tío, was it because of this?”
He glanced up at her sadly, then looked away. He adjusted his hold on the bundle, freeing one of his hands to pick up a larger splinter front the pile. He turned it carefully in the light, then held it out to her.
“There’s no fixing this one,” he sighed, “so I-I think you’re just going to have to take my word for it. This vision, it’s…. uh, it’s complicated.”
“Like, bad complicated? Or…”
Mirabel stared at the small shard now resting in her palm, no longer than five centimeters and no thicker than her little finger. Incomprehensible shapes shifted in the glass, as unknown as her future now.
Can you believe I could not find a gif of the kids playing with sparklers in Encanto? Ah well. I can't believe I finished a chapter. To whomever may read it, enjoy!
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“Were you going to eat Chico?” Andrés asked.
“W-what?”
Bruno choked on air, his spiral of guilt coming to a screeching halt. Andrés stared up at him curiously.
“It's just…I’ve heard that you feast on the dreams of children who don’t listen to their parents, and you feed the leftovers to your rats. But Chico’s pretty good, for a baby, except when he wanders off. But I thought, maybe if you got really hungry…”
He shrugged, and his words trailed off as he gave Bruno another appraising look. Bruno gaped at him.
“You didn’t look like you were going to eat him.”
“I-I wasn’t!”
“Oh. Okay, that’s good.”
Bruno nodded, trying to school the incredulity from his face. Ay, how bad had the rumors gotten? The bringer of bad luck? Yeah, he’d been that. A harbinger of evil? Sure, occasionally. Disappointing failure? His greatest role. But an eater of children?
Well. That was a new one.
“You seem nice, actually,” Andrés continued, apparently sufficiently assured by Bruno’s answer that he was not about to be consumed. “And Pa says el idiota se lo cree, or something like that. Plus, Chico likes you.” [the fool believes it]
Bruno looked down at the baby, who’d sat down at his feet to again play with the tassels of his ruana. Despite it all, he huffed a small laugh.
“I like him, too,” Bruno muttered.
“Do you have magic, too? Like the other Madrigals?” Andrés asked.
“Oh. Um, yes.”
“Can you show me?”
“I..uh, I don’t think that’s a good idea, kid.”
“Why?”
“I..uh…I don't…”
“Does your magic eat people?”
“No.”
“Oh. Okay.”
An uneasy silence fell between them. Bruno glanced at the boy, who watched his brother with a disappointed expression on his face.
“I do have rats, though,” Bruno offered quietly.
Andrés looked up, his face now bright and eager. “You do?”
“Yeah. Here, uh,” he reached through the collar of his ruana and found the soft, round body in his shirt pocket. “This is Manolo. S-say hi, Manolo.”
Andrés squealed with delight and drew closer to Bruno’s lowered hand, while Chico pulled insistently at the edge of his ruana, demanding wordlessly to be included. Bruno looked around, considering for a moment what the adults in the square to their left might think. Then he looked again at Andrés, who was grinning ear to ear at the small rat squeaking in his hand.
Bruno smiled. He let himself fall into a seat on the ground beside them.
Bruno stepped his bare feet down onto the wood of his bedroom floor. He stood from his bed and padded to the center of the room. The air was thick with salt and brine, filling his nose with the sharp, wet scent. He could taste the saltiness on his tongue. The tide pushed in across the floorboards, the chilling foam washing over his bare feet, thinning as it went until it was just a film across the wood behind him. As the water pulled back, it carried grains of wood with it like sand, and Bruno's heels sank slowly into the floor, leaving him standing just a little deeper than he'd begun.
He'd never been to the beach. He'd read about it, but being here was different. The saltiness tasted different than salt tossed into the air, than the rush of dry sand. It all felt thicker, heavier. He used to daydream as a child of visiting the beach, and here he was. How funny that all he had to do this whole time was step out of bed.
Ahead of him Mirabel and Antonio splashed and played in the wake, seagulls dipping down to greet them with harsh calls. Deeper in, Luisa and Camilo swam amidst the waves. Antonio was almost as tall as Mirabel. When had he gotten so tall?
...
It was a sunset. Or was it a sunrise? Wait--hadn't it just been night, hadn't he just been in bed?
As the last of the orange sun slipped below the line of water, a flash of green raced out like a gunshot, pulsing toward him faster than the tide. WOOSH. He squeezed his eyes shut as it pushed past. Everything tasted green, salt and brine.
For @encantober-official Day 1, I took inspiration from a vision-dream that Bruno has in chapter 13 of my fic La Traes. His reimagined bedroom is from my other fic Bruno from Before; you can find its description below the cut!
There were no more treacherous stairs to trek up, nor ghastly images of a haunted prophet to pass to get to Tío Bruno's cave. Now it was just the ornate round door settled deep into the back wall of his room, shadowed slightly by an hourglass shaped entryway that no longer poured out sand. His main room was cozy and warm now, despite the impossibly high ceiling of the tower that rose above it. Natural light filtered in from the round window at the top of the tower like a cathedral, illuminating minute particles of dust and sand that floated lazily through the air. The left side of his room held a small bed tucked against the wall, a desk littered with papers and pencils, and a dresser situated next to the main door. The entire right side of the room was a sitting area, red and green cushioned chairs angled at each other just enough to encourage conversation but not enough to force it, a low table sitting between them. The backs of the chairs were to the center of the room, the chairs positioned to face a wall of bookshelves loaded with not only books but also doo-dads and collected odds and ends that Tío treasured for some reason or another. Two or three of the plants gifted by Isabela climbed precariously from their potted places on the shelves. One entire shelf seemed to be some sort of rat maze. Framed pictures of each and every Madrigal, some current and some yellowed with age, spread across all the walls like butterflies drifting in clustered groupings.
And there, straight across from the main doorway, stood the hourglass cutout and the large round door through that, looking for all the world like nothing more than a particularly interesting closet and not a room where the future sifted into the present.
...He raised his eyebrows in surprise at that. Favorite people? Was he included on that list? Julieta just smiled and turned back to the dishes. It took Bruno a moment, but he also slowly resumed his duties, finding he couldn't put away the little smile on his own face that had arrived at the thought that he might be someone's favorite.
I drew from my fic La Traes again for @encantober-official Day 2 - siblings. This scene is a little exchange that happens between the triplets--the OG siblings. You can find the whole thing below the cut.
“You need to get out of the house, hermanito,” Julieta had said to him gently one evening after dinner as they washed dishes together. “It’s…been a while, sí?”
“Eso se queda corto,” Pepa had mumbled as she dumped some more dishes into the soapy water, earning a glare from both of her siblings. [ That's an understatement.] She widened her eyes at them as if to say What? Am I wrong?
“I’m just saying ,” Julieta continued, pointedly moving past Pepa’s comment, “that it might do you some good, to have a little more change of scenery.”
“I-I think I’m doing just fine,” he replied a bit defensively. And he did. He went for walks with Dolores around the perimeter of Casita, down to the river where it ran past the southwest edge of the grassy lawn. Sometimes he’d wander out back behind the house, napping in the afternoon sun before it disappeared behind the mountainous wall that guarded the back of their home. Compared to the previous ten years, he was a veritable expeditionist now.
“Of course you are,” Pepa said, putting an arm around his shoulders. He hunched them in response, glancing at her suspiciously.
“Y-yeah?”
“Yeah! You’ve made it to the edge of the grass! That’s like, what, un kilómetro cuadrado, yeah? A completely normal amount of space for a person to exist in.”
“A-alright, alright,” he said, waving his hands in the air beside his head in surrender. “I’ll, uh, I'll go to the banana fields tomorrow. As long as it’s not a harvest day,” he added, pointing a finger at Julieta, who rolled her eyes good-naturedly at him. “Or an irrigation day. Or you know…a-a day with other, um, other people there.”
The busyness of rebuilding Casita last year had given him enough social interaction outside his immediate family to last him quite a while…a very long while. Thankfully, he’d been able to largely lose himself in the organized chaos of it all, and Mirabel had been particularly helpful, working as a liaison between him and anyone he’d had to interact with, smoothing the awkwardness away with her easy conversation and joyful presence. And he had managed to largely ignore the curious stares that came from, well, from pretty much everyone until the novelty of his return had worn off. Well…at least he had pretended to ignore them.
“I don’t want to pressure you, arenoso,” Julieta said gently, putting a slightly soapy hand on his shoulder. “I just don’t want…”
…don’t want you to get lost again. She’d let her sentence trail off, but the unspoken ending hung awkwardly in the air anyway. They’d both turned back to their dishes, with Pepa standing stiffly beside them, hugging a freshly dried plate to her stomach. The cloud above her head darkened just a little. Bruno winced down at the soapy water as the silence surrounding them grew painful.
“H-hey, maybe you can spend the day with Antonio tomorrow?" Pepa offered nervously, popping the tension like a soap bubble. "He needs a…a break …from routine, too."
Bruno and Julieta looked at their sister with matching frowns, both narrowing their eyebrows in concern. It would have been comical or even sweet to see the same expression mirrored between her two siblings again…if she didn’t feel the weight of the very same concern pulling down the corners of her own mouth.
Antonio had been struggling to find a place for himself in the Madrigal visits to town. Before his gift, he might have shyly clung to Mirabel’s skirts or played in the dirt while Pepa rained on the fields, never quite brave enough to venture out to play with the other children on his own, refusing to speak to the adults that smiled down at him. Pepa worried about his shyness.
But now a different problem had presented itself. Antonio was now more than happy to engage with anyone and everyone, possessing a newfound courage with his animal friends by his side, but his animal friends were also decidedly wild, and even Antonio could not control every move they made. Just last week, some monkeys that had trailed him into the town had wandered away and found some storage crates of fruit, working together to drop them from the roof of a nearby house until the crates smashed open and spilled out a feast that was then fit only for them. The owner of the crates had not been happy.
Most of the jungle animals had largely maintained a healthy, fearful distance from the bustling, busy streets of the Encanto for the fifty years it had occupied the valley, but Antonio’s warmth and friendship seemed to have blurred that boundary, and Abuela was struggling to find a balance between loving encouragement and civic order. And when Abuela struggled with something, all the Madrigals struggled with her, in one way or another.
“...Mamá suggested that maybe Antonio might spend some time in the forest paths, playing with his gift,” Pepa explained, putting away the plate so she could pull at her braid. A knowing glance between all three siblings conveyed the underlying meaning of the word play—learn to get it under control. “Félix was going to take him, but you two get along so well, Bruno. Maybe you could spend some time with him, and you both could enjoy the fresh air. You know. Bonding?”
Bruno blew out an exaggerated breath, his cheeks puffing and his shoulders dropping dramatically. He pulled his mouth to the side and looked at Pepa with an expression of reluctant concession. How could he say no to a whole day with his sobrino? He loved the kid. And the very fact that Abuela had been the one to suggest the break from town…well. He knew what that felt like. No matter how nicely she put it, how lovingly she intended it, he knew it would feel like a punishment to Antonio. That thought…well that thought broke his heart a little.
“...F-fine,” he mustered in response. “We’ll go for a walk in the–- ” he swallowed dryly“ –- i-in the forest.”
A bit of sunlight broke through from behind the cloud above Pepa’s head, and Bruno couldn’t help but flash a small, crooked smile up at it. She pulled him sideways by his collar and planted a kiss on his cheek, which he winced at but accepted gratefully. Julieta nudged him with her hip.
“There you go! That will be fun,” she said happily, clearly convinced this was a fantastic solution for all parties. Bruno was not so sure. “Take Mirabel with you, too, if you want. You know she’d love to join her two favorite people for the day.”
Bruno had raised his eyebrows in surprise at that. Favorite people? Was he included in that list? Julieta had just smiled and turned back to the dishes. It had taken Bruno a moment, but he also slowly resumed his duties, finding he couldn’t put away the little smile on his own face that had arrived at the thought that he might be someone’s favorite.
So here he was now, sharing a picnic blanket with a sloth and a capybara—among other crawling, flittering things—nursing a bruised ego after having been tackled by a six year old on a jaguar, all because he was a pushover who couldn’t say no to time with his sobrinos.
Here is the next chapter of La Traes, and an old sketch I did when writer's block had taken hold, as compensation for the months between updates...😬
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An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
“The air felt different that day, though none of us realized why until much later. It had been temperate the few days before, the rain clearing and the temperature rising. I thought it was a sign that we were being given more time, I thought—” Alma's hand raised again to the place of her missing shawl, and this time it pressed firmly against her heart. “We had no way to know—”
Bruno’s breath suddenly hitched as a terribly familiar buzzing sensation rushed through his skull. If his eyes began to glow, he had no idea, though even that concern dissipated as his fuzzy memories quickly sharpened, thrown into razor-fine relief, gossamer-green and certain as glass.
—His hands pushing through wet foliage, each leaf leaving a shivering chill on his fingertips.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Bruno’s hands wouldn't stop shaking.
As he sank down into the sand, he kept his eyes locked on the small flame at the end of his match. It flickered and staggered with alarm, stuttering at the mercy of his quivering fingertips. He reached past his stiffly crossed legs toward the pile of leaves and herbs, watching as the flame fell to the kindling and the fire crackled to life. The heavy smell of sage filled the air.
At the moment, the smell was making him feel a little sick.
Okay, okay, cálmate. Oíme, sí? You've gotta calm down, Bruno. P-p-pull it together. Going into it like this…nah you-you can't go into it like this. Now. Relax. Caaaalmate. [Calm yourself. Listen to me, okay? Caaaaalm down.]
He took a deep, steadying breath, but he couldn't make it reach the bottom of his lungs. He closed his eyes and rested his palms as loosely as he could against his knees, but they continued to quiver in the still night air. The inaudible whispers that had lingered after his vision-dream now seemed to move tangibly through the air around him, swirling in whisps like smoke from his fire.
Let's get you to your door. Let the way be open. A new perspective. Let the way be open. Let the way be open. Let the way be open…
He could feel his magic rising in his chest, could feel it pushing at his mind, antsy and impatient, refusing to be held back any longer.
He still wasn't ready. But that didn't matter anymore.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
“Truly, Brunito.”
He suddenly found that she was looking at him intently, her brow furrowed and her eyes soft and concerned. Beneath that gaze, he suddenly felt so very small.
“I want to know. ¿Cómo estás, mi vida?”
He opened his mouth and closed it again without success, blinking, unable to look away from her kind, searching eyes. It was almost as if he was melting, sifting away like sand through time right there on their little wooden bench. He wasn’t 52 any more, but five, smiling at her with a heavy green glass in his hands, somehow lighter then than it ever would be again. He was four, seeking her out for comfort after scraping his knee. He was three, wandering downstairs, the first of his siblings awake to find her sipping her café in the pale morning light.
“Brunito,” and the name on her lips was joy, not exasperation. “¿Cómo estás, mi vida?”
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Since I don't know how to make good quality gifs, stills below the cut 👍🏼
