Momia

Because the crop was small, I slept only for a yearand a day inside the ground. I sleptwith my arms over my chest, my organs insideme, my jaw clamped firmly to my teethwith one of Doña Ernestina's shawls. I wishsomeone had asked the sisters for a sparehabit, brown maybe like a pecan or a tamarind,but death crept unexpectedlyand no habit could be gotten.No matter.

It would have yellowed like my skin, flakedaway from me as my gizzardswithered. I would have needed other dressing,an apron or reboso to cover dugs and pubic bonesbecause the dugs and pubic bones of old women are nothingfor tourists to gasp about. My neck bone

maybe—snapped by the need to turn my head when the worms bittoo hard, when the ground below me fell back, making megrunt as the cemetery workers pulledme out and stacked me in a pit. Maybe

tomorrow my neck will inspirethe young woman from León in makeup and a permto stand close enough to rub my feetand tell them, "This abuela wasstrangled by her children, who hidthe crime with cold lard massages to the throatafter she was dead." Maybe the woman will loseherself in the bones of my face—the sunken eye sockets and the smudges abovemy lashes—saying, "This grandmother drew her lifeto a close, hanging from a rope spun from anger and unrequitedlove, screaming till her lips were whiteand her bowels were clean." Maybeshe'll say, "This old woman was garrotedinto the hand of God after slicingthe throats of ten communists the decade they set fireto churches and priests elevated

the Host in secret." If she says that,the tourists and my grandchildren will gazesquare-eyed into my glass box, lookingfor their cheekbones in my cheekbones, their storiesin my open mouth. Instead,

"These aren't the mummies of Egypt," she says."Priests propped those in the desert, sittingupright so they could watch their kingdoms, robedin embalming crusts, but kings rotted,so priests cut the brains and innards out and later saltedand wrapped the carcasses like fish, a scarab workedfrom jewels beating in the cavitywhere the heart had been to remind them all

what life is. These are the mummiesof Mexico, preservedfrom mineraled soil, paupers' bodies,the bones of the unwanted, staring out into a futurenone would have conceived. This woman lyingin this first exhibit is the motherof children with empty pursesand empty vessels, who never wasted and never paid."