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The oldest woman in the village, Paciencia, predicts the weather from the flight ofbirds: Today, it will rain toads, she says, squinting her face into a mystery of wrinkles as she reads the sky—tomorrow, it will be snakes. Paciencia moves with the grace of a ghost, walking unnoticed down the roads lined with pleading eyes and grasping hands, clothed in the invisibility of her great age. Paciencia sucks the meat offigs with toothless gums; sleeps little—shuffling through empty rooms at night, makingorder, breathing in the dust careless youth stirs up in passing. She hums as she weaves an endless pattern of intersecting lines; she cocks her head sometimes, as if listening for her name in the wind— the dance of her bones evident through paper-thin skin as she works—like a bird trapped in a sack. And Paciencia does what Paciencia pleases, having outlived rules. She washes the limbs of the dead tenderly as babies being readied for a nap; comforts the widows. And while the world around her flames and freezes, she tends the graves of the ones she remembers, bending closer to the earth, like an old tree, giving shelter, giving shade. 90 Paciencia ...

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