Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,35

her sister: Ana, who wanted to fly away from Southtown. Ana, who seemed to always stand on the tips of her toes as if she could fly away from Southtown.

From up on the roof, Rosa couldn’t hear the television, but of course there were other sounds. There were shouts from backyards, from kids playing before dinnertime. Garage doors opened and closed. A couple of streets away, a construction crew was finishing up for the day, and she could hear the last few rapid-fire punches of nails from their guns. Above Rosa’s head came the roar of airplanes, taking off from or coming in to the nearby airport.

Rosa had just found a place to sit near the peak of the roof when she heard a rustle from the oak tree. The leaves then shook, but it was too small a shake to have been caused by a squirrel. Rosa took a step back down toward the tree. It was dim in the twilight, but she swore she could see dark red deep in the tree. Her first thought was that it was the wing of a lonely bird.

Rosa took another step and lost her balance. There was no traction between the sole of one of her shoes and the roof tile, so her right foot slid forward six inches. She fell on her left knee and caught herself in an awkward split. Rosa closed her eyes and let out a breath. Another airplane flew overhead. When she opened her eyes she saw the red again, deep in the leaves. Crouching, Rosa leaned forward as far as she could. She didn’t look down.

“I’m here, I’m here,” Rosa said, pressing the palms of her hands into the roof tiles to gain as much traction as possible. She wanted to be ready for anything. Then she said, “Play tricks.”

Iridian

(Friday, June 14th)

There was nothing like standing in the middle of the orange groves in the summer in South Texas. The scent hung so heavy it wasn’t even necessary to really breathe it in. It was there, always—that oily bite, that sting of citrus.

Iridian had only stood in the middle of the orange groves—the ones down in Mission that belonged to her aunt Francine—at two points in her life. The first time was when she was just over a year old and had walked without having to hold her mother’s hand. Of course she didn’t remember that. The second time was three years ago, the summer when she was thirteen, when Francine had come up to San Antonio to take Iridian and her sisters for a long weekend over the summer. There had been four of them. Ana had been alive then. The long weekend had turned into a week had turned into a week and a half.

Iridian remembered the smell of oranges most of all, but also the feel of the wind, in particular how that wind would blow dust that would then get caught in her hair—all the way from her scalp to the ends. She’d liked the gritty feel, and would go days without taking a shower.

Iridian also remembered the day Rafe came. There was no wind that day. The girls had just finished breakfast when they heard his truck approaching, rattling like a sick person. While Iridian and her sisters had stayed seated at the table, Francine went to meet Rafe at the door. There had been shouting. Iridian had plucked out a few of Rafe’s words: kidnapped, mine, no right. Ana had looked to her sisters and then had taken a bite of buttered toast.

“Don’t worry,” she’d told them, smacking crumbs from her lips. “We’ll come back.”

“We’d better,” Iridian had said.

In the truck, on the way back to San Antonio, crammed between Rosa and Jessica, Iridian chewed on the end of her braid, sucking up the dust and the bitter smell of oranges.

She wasn’t a writer then, or even that obsessive a reader, so she didn’t yet know the pure joy that came along with smelling the pages of books, how a new book smelled like chlorine or how a used book sometimes smelled like cigarettes or tangy breath. All she loved that summer was being coated in dust and the smell of oranges.

And now, it