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LatinosUSA Editors: J. Ré Crivello, Nolcha Fox, Michelle Ayón Navajas, Francisco Bravo, Robbie Cheadle
Masticadores -en español / LatinosUsa —Click to read in Spanish
A Short Story

Fruto: Bearing the Burden of Care, translated by John Gibler

by Daniela Rea

After the birth of her first child, the relentless work of motherhood left award-winning Mexican journalist Daniela Rea feeling overwhelmed, despairing, and afraid of losing her identity. She took up the tools of her trade and began a series of interviews with other women, some mothers, some caregivers. As she listened to their experiences of providing care for others, sometimes under extreme circumstances, she began to find a place and a meaning for her own story.

Fruto examines the personal and social contradictions of care. Fourteen voices weave in and around Rea’s own, punctuated by diary entries from her first days of motherhood and reflections on her upbringing that are sparked by a lengthy interview with her own mother. Throughout, she engages with an international women’s chorus of philosophers and feminists, poets and essayists, and the result is a compelling page turner that chronicles a journey of listening in search for meaning.

***

March 27, 2014

And now we’re here and happiness weighs seven and a half pounds and is eighteen inches long. This day will last my whole life.

I started this diary the day my first daughter was born. It was a kind of conversation with myself, sometimes with her, and then later with them, when Emilia, my second daughter, joined the family. My partner, my mother, my sisters, my girlfriends, were with us, but there were things I could only speak of between the two of us, my daughter and me.

Something of my fragility, of the contradiction that motherhood revealed to me, and which devastated me. Only here, in this diary, did I feel I was myself.

Later, in 2018, after I had been writing for a little more than four years, fragments of this diary were published in the anthology Tsunami, edited by the writer Gabriela Jáuregui. Gabriela, also a friend, invited me to participate in the anthology with an essay on motherhood. All I could offer her were these words that became, with her help, the piece “While the girls sleep.” My fragility and my contradictions drew me closer to other women, mothers, daughters, sisters. And I understood that these were not only the words and misgivings of a mom. They were, above all, a daughter’s questions.

“We Enter a New Space. Space filled with the presence of mothers, and the place where everyone is a daughter…” wrote Susan Griffin in Woman and Nature, a book that Terry Tempest Williams’s mother read and underlined in college. Tempest Williams then quoted the underlined passage in her book When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. I am the history of my mother and her mother and her mother before her. I am also the history of my daughters. I am their fruit.

April 15, 2014

I woke before dawn. Ricardo slept on one side of me and you, my daughter, on the other. I had been unable to sleep for days and I woke up troubled. What’s the point of making a family? I asked Ricardo this, or maybe I only thought it. Ricardo was sleeping and I didn’t insist, not sure if I wanted an answer. I lay there in the darkness and silence, lying between the two of them, filled with a sense of doubt made of weariness, confusion, regret, and distress. I don’t know why.

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Bookshelf (Poetry, Book News, Articles)

Editor: Nolcha Fox

Little Chews
Editor: Nolcha Fox

MasticadoresAfrica —Today’s publications

Feedback / Essay
Hotel: «Hotel of the Broken Hearts» Editor: Michelle Ayón Navajas

“There Were Daisies” © 2026 by Michael L. Utley and Joni Caggiano

I. Wife

“There were daisies,” she said.“Don’t forget about the daisies…”

With my eyes closed, there was a clearness about that perfect day, the day I asked her to be my wife…

“Do you remember how we lay in the grass and you’d count the freckles around my nose and the scattered ones on my cheeks?” she had asked.They were much like the flower garden, where I scattered seeds in no set grouping.“I admired our garden, its lack of order,” she laughed.I had planted blue vervain, blue flag iris, and swamp milkweed that held large clumps of blue flowers.This was the color of her eyes, which sparkled when she smiled.“I spun underneath the canopy of cirrus clouds in my bare feet.”I could see her in the sheer gossamer dress, wearing a necklace I had fashioned out of two dozen daisies.“You took me in your strong arms and held me momentarily, and then you pinned my favorite blue ribbon to my dress in a loop.The center held a narrow gold wedding band that kept moving to the rhythm of my beating heart!” Her voice turned into a gentle whisper as tears of contentment rolled down her face, and I grew to love every emotion, even those she tried to hide.

I grinned and nodded.Daisies a-plenty, there were, and dandelions–too many dandelions to count–amid fox tails and oak shadows, and the pond was so clear and water-skippers danced on its surface as sunlight heliographed secret communiques on breeze ripples, and salamanders in cool mud dreamed amphibian dreams.

Another memory lingered like a fiery sunset, layering the sky like frosting…

“Those memories have not faded, husband.Though I know these eyes are now ashen, no longer like the blue cardinal flower.”I had longed to see those shining cobalt-blue eyes again, but it made my heart ache to know that she recognized there was a slight difference in her appearance.“I still drown in your emerald eyes, husband.The earth, the slightly fishy smell, mixing with the fragrant scent of violets.I still elicit the intoxication of that day, each night, my love.”

“Do you remember the birds?” I asked.
She was silent, thoughtful, furrow-browed.“They were yellow,” she said, “and blue, and they knew…” and she turned away.

I closed my eyes and stared out the window of my mind.Gold finches, Stellar’s jays,
and she was right.Somehow they’d known.
…..

II. Daughter

“Come here,” I said, sitting on a hard metal storage crate beneath the glare of a naked tungsten bulb. “Let me tell you a story–a story about a little girl.”

“Is it about me, Daddy?”

“Of course it’s about you, silly.”

She sat beside me on the crate, too-thin hands folded demurely on her scrawny lap, her gaunt face tired, expectant, almost excited.

“Once upon a time, there was a silly little girl,” I said, and she giggled and her azure eyes twinkled beneath her mop of dirty blonde hair.

“Did she live in a bunker, Daddy?”

“No, sweetie, she lived in a little house in the woods surrounded by a magical forest with the tallest, greenest trees you’ve ever seen.”

“Daddy,” she said, “trees don’t grow here anymore,” and she gave me that solemn look that reminded me so much of her mom, the slight tilt of her head, wary eyes peering from darkened circles above pale cheeks, a doleful resignation no seven-year-old kid should bear.

I did my best to bury any signs of vulnerability.Tear ducts and oil glands that once flowed like rivers were now scarred.How I longed to weep, to release the pressure behind my eyes.My beloved wife created a gentle sway with her slender leg against the rough concrete.It brought our bodies close and provided a calm like the rocking of a boat upon the sea.Months I toiled to craft the makeshift hammock, and as our daughter suckled her mother’s chafed breast, our child grew.I apportioned more than half of my ration, yet my wife grew thin, like a seedling’s weakened limbs under heavy snow.Her voice in the darkness of the night was like the lighting of a dim candle, as our daughter’s cooing lulled me into joyous dreams.

“Daddy, please, please finish the story!”

“Well, this little girl lived long ago when trees were everywhere as far as you could see.”
“What kind, Daddy?”

“Oh, there were firs and larches, pines and spruces, oaks with acorns as big as your fist, and maples teeming with squirrels.”

“Squirrels don’t live here anymore…”

“I know, sweetie, but this is just–”

“Nothing lives here anymore…”That look again, and I felt my heart shatter once more.A momentary surge of rage threatened to spill from my soul, rage at what was and what should have been, a bitterness I couldn’t quite swallow that left my head and heart hurting.I considered my daughter, a waif of a girl, a mini-mirror image of her mother, and a brief recollection flashed into my head, the memory of mother and daughter and the clatter and rush and cries and antiseptic scent of the medevac tent as this broken world welcomed this little girl with arms of smoke and fire, a surreal mix of joy and panic on my wife’s face as she looked first at the tiny human in her arms, then at me, as if to say, My God, what have we done?

I created a canvas on which I painted a color-rich world where my wife and I had lived.Coffee-colored grass lay flat. The sounds of crickets and cicadas, which used their drum-like membranes on their bellies, had once filled the air with a constant chorus. In my stories, my daughter learned the cheerful «good morning» call of the wren and the slight, rhythmic tapping of the red-bellied woodpecker. Each flower’s crown, the magic of hummingbirds hovering backward and sideways, and bees with their tiny legs covered with pollen were visions my daughter had experienced through my eyes. Even ants who were gifted the strength to carry ten times their own weight made her eyes light up. It was almost difficult to express the overwhelming sound of the spring peepers surrounding the pond because of their miniature size.The dance of lights in the summer heat, which lit the sky with fireflies, and their magic. The smile on her face was enough for me to forget momentarily how ignorance crawled like an injured anole and stole this painting from my daughter’s own sight.

…..

III. Shed

The hazmat suit had lasted for years but now was held together with duct tape and prayers.It didn’t matter anyway.Nothing mattered anymore.
Time had run out.

The bunker hatch juddered open, rusty hinges screaming in the twilight, a banshee screech, the low sickle moon a shark fin on the horizon, looming, brooding.The pond was to the north, not that directions mattered at this point.Desolation as far as the eye could see.The blasted lands.

Nothing lives here anymore, my daughter had said, and she was right.Near the rancid, steaming waters of the pond, a rickety metal shed squatted amid blown sand and desiccated weeds.Its warped door surrendered noisily, ocher-tinctured rust particles dispersing amid dust motes in the cloying shadows.In the dimness, a jumble of old tools, broken glass jars that once held nuts, bolts, screws, an antiquated lawnmower for whom the taste of grass was an ancient memory…useless forgotten bones from a dead age no one would ever remember.
On a low shelf, behind a fried alternator for the gutted husk of a car that would never run again, I found my treasure.White, yellow, blue…the colors of life in a world undeserving of life.I grabbed the cans of paint and a dirty screwdriver, eschewing the useless brushes whose bristles crumbled to powder at the slightest touch.I would have to make due without them.Twilight was ebbing and I had one final task awaiting me.

The sickly pond, lifeless, the hue of bad dreams and uneasy regrets, fumed quietly, forever giving up its pallid ghost to the aloof heavens.With anguish stinging my dry eyes, I was drawn to a fleeting remembrance…

We sniff petrichor, my wife’s smile brighter than the morning sun. An early kiss of water on the green grass in fertile soil draws us toward a tender embrace. We interlace fingers and hold tight, clinging to this treasured happenstance. We hear the sigh of the oaks and see a white quilt of dandelions and daisies dotting our clear pond. Fish jump as frogs meander along the edge. Bass notes from bullfrogs cling to our ears as my wife begins to pirouette barefoot, and I am without words, enamored and in love with her grace.

Ghosts, my mind whispered, this is a world of ghosts, ephemeral, intangible memories that linger in shadows and call in soundless cries to no one.Where once was life, now there is only the torpid peal of silent bells amid an eternal night.

Up ahead lay my beloved.

There are wordless places, places where silence is sacred and razor-edged and one must take care not to slice one’s soul bloody.I stopped before the two low mounds of earth, scantily clad with the tiny pale bones of dead weeds and the fine gray patina of sand and ash that cloaked this empty world, and I listened—not with my ears, but with my heart—for the soft murmur of forgiveness I so desperately sought, release from the chains of my battered and beleaguered conscience.I would gladly risk damnation for one last whisper.

“I’m so sorry…”

Brittle weeds shuddered briefly in an errant breeze.There was no other sound in all the world.I knelt between my wife and daughter and gently pulled the weeds from their graves, thorns crackling between gloved fingers, then smoothed the rough earth, hands tarrying on the ashen soil.The birds had known, indeed–gold finches and Stellar’s jays flocking and fleeing as the horror smashed down upon us.And now, in this hushed denouement, there was no one left to usher in the end.The burden was mine alone.
….. Read More…. By MasticadoresHotel

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LatinosUSA

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