Heart-Song

Author's Note: Originally published in "Strange California" anthology. This is an earlier draft of the version published there.

Trigger warning for child deaths, and suicide.

The current staggered and fell, bleeding like a beast opened by a fine and deadly blade. The bulldozers bit into the banks and reared back their gnashing jaws to tear open the river on its eastern side. Its waters came as a rushing tide through the wound. They spilled out across the basin in an unnatural bleed, drowning ash and copse.

Birds shuddered into the air as the last gasp of the Santa Elena. The water roared into the flat land with a thunderous crash. Fish struggled in the shrinking pools beneath the heat of the summer sun, her last fervid heartbeats. Animals mourned in silent despair as her body ate their homes and kin in her death throes. The basin had become a shallow of death, bordered on one side by a thick dam that contained its killing rage.

The river left behind more than death. Its last shudder of life was its wrath. The spirit was born from the Santa Elena’s gouged innards, left to rot in the sun. She was raised in the mist of the evaporating and pooling waters. She had been born with the conscience of the brackish water that was now swirling around the cottonwood and pepper trees of the basin. She was the last cry to the earth.

She was her mother’s vengeful heart-song.

#

Mrs. Pilgrim had a most treasured daughter named Belle. Her speech was sweet and high as her namesake. Her voice was the ringing in her mother’s heart. It tolled for the little girl alone.

Small hand in large, Mrs. Pilgrim had taken her daughter to the new dam. It was the first major government contract for the firm since she had been named CEO. She held her daughter close as they stood on the concrete wall of the dam. In the middle of the wall it was possible to see all the way to the mountain range looming in the north and the vaguest outline of the shore to the west. The dam breathed with repressed rage that shook the woman’s feet.

Below the staunch edifice was dark loam, potent soil made thick with animal corpses and decomposed plant matter. The landscape was nothing but dark, rick earth waiting to be plowed and planted. The last lingering trees had been torn away the week before, days after the river had been re-routed and dammed.

“That is where the new orchards of Blanco-Fritz are going to be planted.” Mrs. Pilgrim moved her head slightly down to catch the briefest glimpse of her daughter’s wide eyes. She beamed in pride at the girl’s astuteness, and her own self. “They plant almonds, so this is going to help all the local people a lot with making money. We dammed the river so people could live here.”

She carefully kept a hold of Belle’s hand. The only thing between the girl and a deadly fall of a hundred feet or so was her mother’s grip. Her daughter shuddered to feel that tremor beneath her own feet, as if the waters knew they were being spoken about. It was a furious tremble.

“But there,” Mrs. Pilgrim pointed to an indeterminate spot in the west, “is where the town of ‘Heart-Song’ is going to be.”

The girl tensed at her mother’s side and looked up with wide eyes. The woman smiled indulgently. “Yes, Daddy and I are going to name this new place after you, my heart-song.”

Belle preened and giggled in delight. Mrs. Pilgrim stood taller in pride. The future seemed as a singular path across the bright horizon to the azure ocean. There was nothing that could break that glorious march to the sea.

The very same path the Santa Elena had once taken.

#

A year passed since the unceremonious death of the Santa Elena. The dam had been named after the bones of its predecessor, the only memorial to what had bled so that trees may grow. The earth was warming again in the same heat that had devoured the carcass of the Santa Elena. The damp heat drew out mosquitoes and Japanese beetles to hum along the dam.

The skeleton of the town was raised. The bones waited to be covered by its flesh of lumber, cement, glass and tile. That day Mrs. Pilgrim was discussing laying the pipework of not only the irrigation of the orchard but also of the grand fountain of the town square. The water of the dam was already being sluiced to bring potential to the weed filled fields.

Belle was again out of school and again by her mother’s side. Now the girl was permitted to spend the afternoon catching the emerald and buzzing beetles that flitted through the dry grasses that reclaimed what had been lost by the Santa Elena. She swatted at the biting insects that flew against her red cheeks as she upset them from their posts along the tips of the foxtails and sage. Mrs. Pilgrim was too busy designing her daughter’s namesake to pay attention to her heart-song beating through the summer air.

The girl came to the shadow of the dam. She at first only glimpsed the outline for a second out of the corner of her eye. She paused and turned on her heel. There was a woman standing in the shade. Her hair was long and dark, tangled with waterweeds. She was wearing a white dress of high lace around her neck and a mud-splattered hem that clung to her ankles. Her torso was vivisected by a red sash. Her face was dark, as if crafted from the loam the Santa Elena had left behind in her death throes. The girl’s breath caught to look upon her eyes, dark blue and soulless, like those of a dead fish.

Belle stepped back as the woman stepped forward upon bare feet. Water clotted on the grass she touched, doused by her sopping body.

“Are you, are you…La Llorona?” Belle asked, a whimper in her voice. She had heard about the ghost every Halloween, as the image haunted many local celebrations of the holiday. The woman looking for the children she had drowned to spite their unfaithful father. However, the specter gave no wail nor cry, her thin lips remained pursed as she looked down at the trembling girl-child. Yet the spirit could be no other than the one that dealt death at the waterway.

“I am Elena.” The woman’s voice was a whisper of rushing water. It flowed over Belle with a killing coldness. The girl cried out as a sharp pain pierced her body. She fell to her knees agony erupting from her innards. There was a feeling of a bursting from her right side. Belle expected to see a hand covered with blood when she looked down but nothing pooled from her other than anguish.

Then as quickly as the earth had opened to swallow her in blinding pain, it ceased. Belle climbed to her feet and found herself alone in the shade. She gasped as she startled from her waking nightmare. Yet one last thing screamed at her from across the void of terrified fantasy.

“For my mother.”

The girl turned and ran. She ran with all the life still in her. She recalled all the warnings she had heard of the mourning woman by the water. “She’ll push you in, she’ll drown you, take you as her own! Children must never go down to the river by themselves, or La Llorona will get you!”

Belle did not drown that night, but La Llorona had claimed her anyways. She returned to her mother’s side, but the heart-song found no more comfort there.

For the pain never ceased. What began as the dream of agony became reality only a few nights later. Belle was awoken from sleep by a pain so potent she vomited and collapsed in her father’s arms.

Her right kidney, inexplicably, had failed.

At first her father’s kidney gave the girl a few more days of life. Then like a diversion in the river of the girl’s life, her left kidney collapsed. The first river was dammed again as the foreign flesh was rejected. This time her mother sacrificed to save her daughter’s life. But as the days turned and turned in the hellish ride, the mother’s organ was rejected, attacked by the body it was meant to save. Putrid blood poisoned the girl’s body, filtered by machines, but nothing seemed to totally remove the brackish taint.

The cause was found to be a genetic abnormality that had laid hidden within their daughter’s body since birth. A few pairs of faulty genes suddenly turned on by unknown means had caused the failure of those vital organs and the rejection of imposters by the body. A donor was sought but none could be found. The Pilgrims watched their young daughter die inch by arduous inch. She was only twelve years old when she breathed her last.

But the songs of the hearts, human and river, continued to thrum across the universe.

#

The town of Heart-Song grew without any knowledge of its namesake. The only name that linked to its origin was that of the dam that held back what would otherwise kill them. The dam, and the dark soil beneath their feet.

#

Some years later, the town began to host a Heartland Scout camp outside its borders. One summer an eleven-year-old girl named Blanca La Rosa came with her troop for the annual jamboree. She couldn’t help but to notice the strangeness of this place with all its vague, disquieting nostalgia. It unsettled her but she could give no voice to her feeling other than her observation about the name of the community.

“Heart-Song is a weird name for a town,” she told her troop leader.

“Why’s that sweety?”

“Because…it’s what my Mom calls me.” She squirmed in some subliminal horror at admitting the endearment . The woman just shrugged.

“They chose it when it was built about sixteen years ago,” The leader informed Blanca before pushing her towards her group. The conversation was forgotten in the parade of festivities, but not the feeling of eyes upon her. Something traced her footsteps in the foothills, and followed along beneath the shadow of the Santa Elena dam as the troop hiked. Something, something, stalked her along the waterway and descended into her dreams. It was a cold tide that washed her spine and innards in a horrid shudder.

She dreamed of being washed away in a flood. She cried out to her mother but the water snatched away her words. A hand ripped into her right side, pulling out blood and viscera. Her body burst open and all her life bled through her open wound.

She awoke with a scream and a violent pain that made the world an agonizing crush. Her side had been torn open! She vomited and clutched her side, struggling against hot waves of anguish. Yet when she raised her hand, it was clean.

Her pain was encased within her struggling body, a dam containing all that would kill her.

#

As the first had died, so would the second.

This time the parents’ bodies had already been mutilated and there was no more flesh to give to their heart-song. A new kidney was set to grow in a lab, but even the mere weeks it would take would be too long for the girl. As her right kidney died her left immediately began its own death throes.

“This was supposed to be impossible!” railed the former Mrs. Pilgrim, now La Rosa. “We removed those genes when she was conceived! This wasn’t supposed to happen!”

“We know little about the health of clones,” the doctor said quietly. They were in the hallway, well out of ear-shot of the girl who had no knowledge she was such. Nevertheless, the doctor knew how far little ears could hear and was doing his best to spare her further agony, even in the face of her mother’s rage. Never in the doctor’s life did she think she would be treating the first human clone conceived in the state of California, one of only a dozen examples in the entire country.

“This isn’t the genetic issue that claimed the life of the daughter you cloned her from, but it may be a side-effect of her genetic structure all the same. There is evidence the genomes of clones are less stable than…others,” Dr. Park searched for a politically correct way to compare genomes when words like “natural” and “old-fashioned” carried their own heavy contexts. She wondered by on the look on Ms. La Rosa’s face if the now-revered Dr. Simons had ever warned her of this potential outcome. The healthcare of clones was only starting, the La Rosa child might be its first failure. Humans still answered to forces greater than themselves, even in this age of wonders.

The woman’s tears were caught by her hands as she began to sob, small wells of grief in her palms.

“I thought we would have a few more years with her, this time around!” The doctor could only pat her shoulder and offer a few brief words of being strong in the face of adversity that fell as flat as they ever did. Dr. Park could only try. It was all she ever could do. She promised to call Dr. Simons for further insight into the condition of the clone.

La Rosa’s ex-husband tried to comfort her next but she turned on him as fiercely as a rip tide with all its crushing fury.

“Why did you take her to Heart-Song? Why did you take her to that awful place?!” She demanded.

“I didn’t! I didn’t know her troop was going there for their jamboree!” He snapped. “They usually go to El Cajon!”

“You don’t read permission slips you idiot?!”

“You couldn’t keep the truth from her forever,” he countered in a deadly hiss.

“Fuck you!” La Rosa screeched. “You didn’t even want her! I had to sue you to even have her implanted! It was only after she was born you wanted to see her! And I let you! I let you…”

She collapsed against the door of her daughter’s death chamber. That day in the courtroom, she had re-defined what it meant to be human in the state of California. Blanca was a pre-existing person, she had the right to a life. The right to a life as much as anyone else.

“Stay away from her. Or I will have the cops down here I swear to god. You’ve never had formal custody you bastard.”

She looked away from his gaping mouth and pained breathing. She didn’t care! This was a man she had stopped loving when he refused to resurrect Belle. It was through her suffering alone that her daughter had been given this second life. It was by her will alone she had been given these extra ten years, an entire adolescence and young adulthood split between two births.

It was because of her alone that Belle was dying again, and leaving her mother behind, again. It was nothing but a recurring nightmare. One she had caught them both in.

She hated herself now. For the first time, she could no longer see the march to the sea. She was still standing in Heart-Song with echoes of death.

#

Blanca La Rosa died shortly after midnight, sixteen years after the bones of the Santa Elena had been laid bare.

Dr. Simons only returned the phone call in time to offer condolences.

#

Every late afternoon, the town of Heart-Song was shadowed by the Santa Elena dam. The Blanco-Fritz orchards had the more advantageous position of being farther from the dam and its darkening reach. Those who lived in the single road community were forever reminded what had engendered their town and livelihood as the shadows stretched over their houses and yards. It coiled around their ankles and raised to embrace their bosoms and heads. She held the town in a tight embrace that filled every crevice like a smothering mother.

In autumn, the shadow advanced towards the town earlier and earlier until its winter descent was as early as noon. It was in this season, two months after burying her daughter for the second time, La Rosa finally came back to Heart-Song. Though she had conceived of the place, and was surely its mother as much as she had been of Belle and Blanca, it was a neglected and hated daughter.

The grand Spanish fountain splashed in the middle of a small park off its one thoroughfare. It was a small adornment none of the other local communities had, as they had been haphazardly cobbled together by the constant ebb and flow of humanity across the land. It was the small touch of the founder upon the town. It was at this fountain that La Rosa rested as she contemplated her fate.

Nothing remained of La Rosa’s daughter but her memories of the golden fields where she had once played. These buildings and avenues had only been glimpsed by her second self. The original heart-song, however, had never seen her namesake in the time she had been alive. Like her mother, she had only dreamt of what could be. It was this ghost that had overlaid La Rosa’s eyes even as she had looked down into Blanca’s face. The two girls, different yet identical, were forever the same to the mother.

The bell of the church tolled and La Rosa was startled from her perch on the fountain. As she floundered in her recollections she was passed by a little boy skirting around her legs. His mother stood at the edge of the park with her hands on her hips.

“Ernesto! I hope you haven’t been by the dam again! I keep telling you about La Llorona!” She scolded in Spanish. The boy reached to take her offered hand, his answer lost in the second toll of the bell.

“La Llorona.” La Rosa had not heard that name in years. Yet she knew the story from her grandmother who had given her the same warning about the Santa Ana River of her youth. The weeping woman, forever mourning the children she had killed. La Rosa covered her mouth with a gasp and felt her stomach clench. A spirit that killed children.

As she had. She had given her daughter life to only have her die again.

She could still recall the threatening phone calls and letters written in blood. The accusation she was playing God. The screams for mother and child to both die. She had lost her job due to the harassment, and her marriage had long since died. Her life had only been rebuilt on the conviction that when she had looked upon Blanca’s face for the very first time that she deserved to live as much as anyone else.

Yet now she was dead. La Rosa was a failure of a mother. She hadn’t protected either one of her daughters. She had given her faith to a false miracle; nothing could stop death. Her detractors had been right all along. All she had done was played God, and she was hopelessly incompetent at it. All she had done was let her daughter die in agony once again.

She dropped her hand and turned towards the dam. She walked into the darkness, with no intention of returning, upon the path Belle had once walked. She would not clone her daughter again. She would not give birth again. She was no longer a mother. She was nothing more than a phantom haunting her last living daughter. She was living in the echo of her heart-song.

Within the darkness of the dying sun she met a black horse. It was a mare of heavy build standing in the shadow of the Santa Elena dam. Though the water was thundering behind thousands of pounds of concrete, the horse was soaking wet with water weeds in her mane. She raised her ears as La Rosa approached and gave a low nicker as the woman parted the grasses to stand before the steed.

As she hesitated before the beast, a thin wail reached he ears. She raised her head. It was the sound of an infant’s cry, originating from the top of the dam. She gave a low moan and reached towards that distant noise.

“My girl, my girl.” As she reached towards the sound it became more distinct. It was the high and sweet voice and Belle, with the darling undertone of Blanca.

“Mom! Mommy!”

“I have to get up there!” she cried. The horse fell to her front knees, a willing mount. There was no hesitation in La Rosa now, though she had never ridden a horse before. She clumsily swung up onto the creature’s wide back and hooked her knees into the mare’s shoulders. She grasped handfuls of mane, and as the sun vanished behind the horizon, the mare began her ascent of the dam.

It was a perfectly vertical gallop. The mare’s mane fell back into La Rosa’s face, obscuring her view and nearly drowning her in its weight and wet. The horse’s barrel expanded and collapsed between La Rosa’s legs. The sharp impacts of the hooves hitting the concrete were jarring. La Rosa realized for the first time that shaking she had always felt atop the dam had been the very breath of the water, as surely as that of the mare beneath her. Both were alive and furious.

The mare vaulted in a high jump of at least ten feet to clear the railings and walkway at the top of the dam. As her mane fell down along her neck, La Rosa at last was able to raise her head. She pulled to leap off the horse but found she was stuck in her crouched position as surely if she was caught in tar. In the twilight, she could see there was nothing at the top of the dam. The walk way was empty save for darkness.

Her children were nowhere.

The mare dove into the lake at the other side of the dam. La Rosa remained stuck to her mount’s back even as cold water crashed over her. She and the mare rapidly sank to the bottom of the Santa Elena Lake. She struggled to break free in the instinctive fear of death. Her limbs only seemed to sink further into the horse however the more she tried to pull away. Her arms were devoured to her elbows and her body to her waist. She became one with the vehicle of her death.

She opened her mouth to gasp and only invited water in to rush in. The pain that filled her lungs was tremendous and seemed to burst them within seconds. She raised her head to look towards the surface of the lake but not even light was reflected overhead. Her world was nothing but crushing darkness. She closed her eyes.

There was a feeling of slipping away. Of relief. Of comfort. Of the end of fear and pain. La Rosa opened her eyes to a bright light. She moved her arms and legs and found them free. As she raised her arms, they encircled two small bodies. She held her daughters to her breast and wept into the great expanse of the lake. They cried with her. Laughed with her. They were never to be apart from her ever again.

A shadow covered the indistinct light shining down from overhead. La Rosa raised her head and saw a woman floating above them. The lack of light made the details indistinct. She could tell she was wearing a white dress with a dark sash around her waist, and that her hair was dark and tangled with weeds. The mare came to mind immediately, and something even mightier, that flowed all round them.

“I am Elena,” the phantom told her in a tongue that probably only the dead and spirits knew. “I am what arose from the river you killed. It was I that killed your daughter twice.”

The spirit reached down and gently traced her fingertips across La Rosa’s face. She found no horror in it. There was something there, a familiarity. A shadow that had always walked behind her, her other half coming into the light.

“But I am what I am now, a lake. I wouldn’t have been born without you. You are in some way, my mother too.” The spirit’s expression was lost in the darkness but her stroking didn’t stop. It was a gentle, affectionate touch. “I am forded for now by the dam, but I won’t always be. One day your people will die, and I will live on. Even now, my waters are used to nourish and grow. I am as much of life as of death. I am no longer my mother’s heart-song, composed in death.”

The spirit took La Rosa’s shoulders in her hands and brought their foreheads together. The four females embraced in familial solidarity for the first time.

“Teach me how to be a mother, my mother; whose heart-song is of life.”

#

Ms. La Rosa’s body was fished out of the Santa Elena Lake some days later. Her death was ruled an accident and rumored to be a suicide. It was at this time the town finally learned why it was named “Heart-Song”, the requiem of a mother to a daughter. A mother who had followed her daughters into death.

It was ultimately decided that La Rosa would be buried in the town park, with a memorial overhead commentating her achievement and the lesson in her tragic life. Her body would become part of the dark earth shed by the Santa Elena, her legacy to all future generations who would live in the basin she had cleared.

No one, save the spirits, were aware that the shuddering of the dam, breathing as though it was alive, would continue to live long after they were all gone, that it was the final line of La Rosa’s heart-song.

It was of life.