Chapter Text
“You see, mi pajarita, there is magic everywhere around us. Never forget that.”
Cristina looked up at her papa, then back down at the butterfly sitting on the yellow flowers of a marmalade bush. “Even in the toads under the logs?”
Her papa chuckled and brushed her hair with his hand. “Even the toads. Sit with me, let me tell you a story.”
Cristina curled up on the ground at her papa’s feet, grinning and fidgeting as she waited on him to begin his story. Then, he said, “Long ago, when I was about your age, I lived far away. One day, bad men came to my family’s house and chased us away from our home. We traveled through the forest, over rivers and hills, following Carlos and Magdalene de Cordova and the light of their candle. Then, as we came to this wide river, the bad men caught up to us.”
“What happened next, papa?”
“Señor de Cordova stayed behind and sacrificed himself. But in that sacrifice, the candle burned brighter, and the land raised to push back the bad men and create the mountains that surround us. It was a miracle! But it didn’t stop there, no, the miracle grew to create this very town around us, this encanto, and then it gave the de Cordova triplets their gifts. Magic created the ground you sit on, my little Cristina.”
She couldn’t help but quietly breathe out, “Wow.”
Her papa leaned over and ruffled her curly hair before picking up his violin. “It’s getting late, mi pajarita. Let’s head home and get you in bed.”
Life was perfect in the encanto, until it wasn’t. Up until the year Cristina turned ten, she ran around the village with hardly a care. Her favorite playmate was Raul de Cordova, and they ran the streets of the village, acting out stories while Raul grew roses from his hands. Sometimes, they stole small, innocent kisses behind bushes. If she scraped her knee or broke her arm, Teresa de Cordova always was at the center of the village, handing out her arepas that could cure any ailment.
But Teresa de Cordova wasn’t there when the accident happened. No one was. The village priest came first to tell her. Cristina’s screams and sobs still rang through their little house minutes later, when a few men brought her papa’s broken, shrouded body inside.
He laid in wake in the sitting room for seven days. Cristina watched over him as a steady stream of people passed in and out of their little home, leaving plates of arepas, bowls of ajiaco, baskets of pandebono. Two days into the wake, the priest had tried to convince her to cut the wake short, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t say goodbye to him and then celebrate his life, not yet.
But too soon, the week was up, and Cristina had to put herself together as the adults drank glasses of wine and swapped stories of her papa playing the violin at their weddings and their childrens’ birthday parties.
Cristina sat on the steps outside her house, listening as others celebrated her papa’s life. As she thought back on the times he would sit with her on those steps and help her count the butterflies, Raul slipped out the door and conjured a pair of roses out of thin air. “I wanted to make you feel better,” he said.
Cristina sniffled and accepted the flowers. “Thank you.”
He sat beside her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. He was two years older than her, and taller, too. He said, “Abuela wants you to move in with us. She says it’s fate, or—something.”
“This is my home! I can’t, Raul.”
“But we can play with each other every day! And you can’t live by yourself, you’re only ten.”
Cristina rested her head on his shoulder. She finally nodded, telling herself that she would be fine one day.