ancestors

Ashes by Jennifer DeLeon

Ashes by Jennifer DeLeon

Graciela Ana Fernandez remembers everything, including her birth.  She can still see the honey-colored walls of the sticky clinic birth room in Mexico where a dozen women in various stages of labor formed an L shape with their cots. Some shared the company with their own mothers clutching their hands.  A few had no one but an indigenous nurse to trace the length of their brows with an ice cube.