(This is the beginning of a much longer story I'm writing. I'm going to post it in parts as I write it.)
Mariana’s hair was wild, and with one look you knew she was a child of the sea. When the sun set and she scrambled up the steep staircases that lead to her home, her mother would lovingly scold her as she pulled shells and bits of seaweed out of her daughters dark matted curls.
Her mother, Aliana, was a fisherman’s wife: small and round as a pearl, with a slight bow to her back and calloused hands from a life spent cleaning her husband’s catch. Her eyes were starting to wrinkle at the corners, but her hair shone black like an opal caught from the greatest depths of the Pacific. She had given birth to five children, but now she only had Mariana.
Their city was a menagerie of brightly painted houses, perched precariously on a hillside above the sea. The streets followed no system of order. To foreign merchants and sailors, who docked there before their final destination, the criss-crossed labyrinth of alleys and byways lead to more than one of them getting lost and left behind. The city was full of these men. Their drunken antics kept Mariana up at night, and Aliana would curse them under her breath in a language indigenous to her country. She blamed them for the trash and sin that had begun to pollute her city.
Her husband, Alberto Giron, felt the same way about the foreigners. He was a man who spent his life in the lonely expanse of the Pacific. He spent eight days a month with his family, mostly pacing though the narrow city streets attempting to reacquaint himself with the stability of land. Tall and rail thin, he walked like a ghost, running his fingertips along the stone walls. The neighbors whispered that he was an ahogado, drowned by sadness.
But most of the time, it was only Aliana and Mariana filling the small cramped house with songs and the sweet smell of mote.
Aliana woke up that morning, alarmed. She sat straight up in bed, startling Mariana, who was asleep next to her. She had been dreaming, a horrible nightmare filled with smoke and she blinked and shook her head several times, trying to shake the clouds from her eyes.
“Mama?” Marianna questioned.
“Oh darling, it’s nothing.” Aliana cooed, ignoring the persistent feeling of anxiety and began her morning routine. The one she had followed every morning since she had married Alberto. She dressed herself and Mariana, they walked together down to the well, where they greeted the other mothers and pumped water. They walked back to the house, hand in hand, where Aliana began cooking rice and beans and Mariana swept the spiders out from their hiding places. The house was simple, one room with four walls and a stone floor. The bed they shared sat in one corner. A wooden frame covered by a thin mattress and a thread barren patchwork quilt. A small (adjective) stone oven squatted in the opposite corner, and a small window above it overlooked the harbor. The other two walls were decorated with knickknacks that Mariana had picked up from the beach.
Aliana stirred the rice slowly, starring out the window as a large clipper ship pulled up to the coast. The routine was calming her down, but she still had an unexplainable feeling of anxiety. What had her dream been?
