Goddess of the Brook

Author: Katherine Zhao

Katherine Zhao is a 16-year-old writer and artist from New York. She is the founder and EIC of the Chromatic Scars Review and her work can be found in the Blue Marble Review, TeenInk, Scribere, and more. Her work has won accolades from the National Council of Teachers of English, the Nancy Thorp Poetry Competition, Wildlife Forever, and more.

The glint of her gold hoop earrings casts a defiant diamond against the sky, beads of sweat from the overhead sun tracing the fault lines around her eyes. Fingernails glazed with a rushed layer of alizarin crimson, Ms. Rivera jams a small brass key into a rusted doorknob hidden in a back alley, uttering a few benign curses when it doesn't budge with her first few attempts.

It's 6:30 on a muggy July morning — most folks in the town haven't yet risen. But Ms. Rivera, they say, has the discipline of a stubborn rock that clings to the edge of a waterfall. She runs a snack shop on a street corner, just two blocks down from the movie theater and right across from the auto repair shop. It's called "Rosita's Delights," and its name is written in cerulean cursive on a curb sign out front. A tapering "HELP WANTED'' poster clings to the window front, right next to a selection of candied apples, beignets, and her famous Slurpee machine.
Ms. Rivera walks across the chipping wooden tiles of her shop, her black hair slicked into a young girl's swinging braid, a few stray locks framing the sun-baked skin of her face. The store's pathways are lined with selections of dried fruits, gummies, chocolate bars and bubble gum: baskets of offerings topped off with white laminated signs with prices written in fading Expo marker.
None of the adults in the town ever came here, just the kids with their pocket dimes and crumpled dollar bills. When a soot-faced kid in a tattered soccer jersey comes in clasping shiny pennies in his sweaty hands and forks over his treasure in exchange for a lollipop, Ms. Rivera never counts the money and just clinks the coins into the cash register.
"Her name means 'brook' or 'shore,'" said Mr. Whitman, who led an archaeological excavation in the Peruvian Andes twenty-something years ago. "It's Spanish and Italian in origin."
Ms. Rivera was never much of a conversationalist: the dried streams of her lips occasionally cracked into a delta of a thin smile, revealing the tar-stained teeth of a smoker. The women of the town speculated that she was mute — by choice or by nature, they couldn't decide.
"She may have the vocal timbre of a late-blooming baritone," Lesley huffed.
“Something very traumatic must’ve happened to her during her formative years,” Emily quipped. “She’s never wanted to speak of it since.”
"She probably has a tongue piercing or something decadent in her mouth," Gertrude said, wrinkling her pinkish nose.
"Maybe she's still learning our language," Betty concluded, folding her hands as if in prayer.
The women would then all nod and go back to stirring their Sunday afternoon tea, never to speak of the enigmatic red-skinned woman again until the next lapse of silence in their conversation. What they didn't know, however, was that Ms. Rivera had sat down with one of their sons after he’d wandered into her store, crying after a lost T-ball game. They also didn't know that Ms. Rivera had given him the words of affirmation he was missing in a perfect Midwestern accent — albeit with a few fell swoops of her consonants and subtle trills in her r's. She'd also clasped his wrists and pressed pieces of chewy caramels into his shaking palms.
As these boys grew older, they began to see Ms. Rivera differently — no longer did they simply see her bird-like face peeking over the counter above jars of raisin cookies, as most of them climbed dramatically in inches from the ages of twelve to sixteen. First, they began to see her swollen breasts through her flannel shirts. Then, they began to notice how her jeans were etched with Sharpie zigzags winding between checkered boxes. They also noticed how the designs became distorted when stretched around her supple hips.
It was almost Freudian how these boys continued to stop by her store, this time with tips from their summer jobs and allowances from good report cards. They'd grin with teeth fresh out of braces against a summer tan when they realized she still remembered their boyhood nicknames.
When these boys became men, they moved out of their parents' houses, marrying high school sweethearts and girls-next-door. While their wives would buy fresh produce from the supermarkets in the next town over, they would take their sons to Rosita's Delights, teaching them to stuff lollipops and peppermints in their overalls so their mothers wouldn't find out about their rendez-vouses with boyhood.
Thus began the rumors that Ms. Rivera, was, in fact, a Brazilian showgirl before coming to town who got involved with the wrong men and fled by the hair of her feathered crown. The kinder folks tended to believe that she was a South American beauty queen who gave up her crown for a quiet life of modesty, while others believed she'd deserted her family of three children after her husband lost his job at a local factory.
But none of this was true in the slightest: Ms. Rivera was never a beauty queen, nor an absent stowaway.
Ms. Rivera had, in fact, a remarkably normal upbringing.
She grew up on the fringes of the middle-class in a small suburban flat. Her mother was a waitress at the local diner and her father wore a tie and worked an ordinary office job.
When she was just nine years old, they both died in a car accident. Her aunt, who lived in the next state over, sent her off to boarding school, where Ms. Rivera would stay until her eighteenth birthday. Upon her homecoming, her aunt had been diagnosed with leukemia and lay in a hospital bed until her dying breath.
Ms. Rivera then took her aunt's rusted Buick and a satchel of her schoolbooks and began to drive with no end in sight, her skinny fingers clenching the wheel like a vise. When she ran out of gas, she docked her steed on the roadside.
Standing across from her was a cracking white building facade with discarded mannequins out back — probably a seamstress' former storefront. On its door was nailed a "FOR SALE" flier and a phone number. Ms. Rivera found the nearest pay phone and bought the property with the cash her aunt had stowed away in the Buick's glove compartment between cigarette butts and pharmacy receipts.
Thus began the story of Ms. Rivera, the unsung queen of summer's passably nostalgic delights and Sharpie drawings on faded jeans.
With the passing of many seasons, Ms. Rivera eventually grew streaks of white hair that she could not hide beneath knotted headbands and loose braids. Her breasts began to sag, and the crow's feet next to her eyes deepened, their lines expanding like cracks on a sidewalk.
Regulars at Rosita’s Delights started to realize how tasteless her cherry rock candy was, how doughy her beignets were, and how harshly packs of peppermints prickled their tongues. Pink lemon Slurpees began to feel lukewarm in their hands, the July sun’s rays soaking their contents through flimsy paper cups.
Summer became fall, and fall yielded to the bare trees of winter. If you listened closely at night, you could hear the babbling brook in the forest behind the town wailing.
Ms. Rivera’s name left the tongues of the neighborhood women during teatime. Much to the delight of the female schoolchildren, the boys began to take them to the movie theater after school instead of stopping by Rosita’s Delights.
When Ms. Rivera’s time came, she died in the church and was found by Father McClenney. Her face was buried in a woolen sweater as she curled up on the second pew from the altar. Her fingers were clasped around wooden beads and dried rivers climbed from the bloodshot corners of her eyes. Her face was serene like a sculpture molded of reddened clay.
She was buried behind the church the very next day. Father McClenney smoothed the creases of the single-page eulogy he had penned the night before with gloves caked in dirt. But there was no point — no one had come to the service.
As he approached the end of his speech, Father McClenney realized just how stupid he looked, talking to nothing and no one in the sparse graveyard behind the deserted church. His voice trailed off as he uttered a final few words of a sentence he realized meant nothing at all. He set the wasted eulogy atop Ms. Rivera's grave, and felt a lump rising in his throat. His lips began to quiver, and he nervously adjusted his spectacles.
Suddenly, tears began to pour forth from Father McClenney's eyes. The taste of dried, sickly-sweet caramel lingered on his saliva, the scent of fresh-swept floors forever ingrained in his nostrils. He hastily wiped his gloves on his pants, fingers grazing the outline of Ms. Rivera's beads, which he had stuffed in his pocket before placing her in her casket. He ran back into the church with his arthritis-stricken legs, black dress shoes clacking against the mosaic floors.
As he locked himself into the confessional box, he began to hear the noon bells toll.