New Mexico Girl
by Svan Mura
I first noticed the girl following me as we drove back to Santa Fe from Taos.
I could feel that she had been walking next to the car for much longer than I had been aware of her. Like a mountain range–beautiful if you looked but usually lost in the background–she was a feature of the landscape that took special focus to parcel out.
She was small, with delicate bird bones, and at most five years old.
She wore a dress with red hemming, the same color as the dust staining the sides of the buckling asphalt; a shawl veiled her body behind smooth sand.
Her feet were bare. She stepped carefully through the dust on the side of the road, each footfall the same: heel down, then arch pressed, then the balls of her feet, then the toes. Her feet moved slowly and with purpose; their steady pace kept her up with our car driving 50 miles per hour down the highway.
She did not look at us, and it took a long time to see her; she revealed herself only after one proved themselves trustworthy through a few minutes of careful staring. But like a ghost or a flaw, she was impossible to unsee. She walked unfaltering behind our car for over an hour, only slipping back into the landscape as our car ground up Canyon Road and into modern Sante Fe.
She seemed to live in what was old and turquoise and adobe-packed, and she had her own business in this life. Sometimes it appeared that it was us that came across her and not the other way around. She was there in the morning, playing with children in the Plaza at Sante Fe, her laughter and lack of footprints clinging behind us as we wandered between coffee shops and kitschy tourist stands. In the afternoon we would walk home over the Santa Fe River, and she alone would be there, head bowed over the mud that curved its back out of the puddles at the bottom of the riverbed. At night when it snowed, I first noticed the flakes as specks of gray on her shiny head, and it was our queue to head back home after dinner. (We would never last as long as she could in the cold.)
But it was upon meeting her in Chimayo that I knew. Suspicion crawled up my back approaching the abode church spires, tugged at my ear as I passed the gravestoned front courtyard. Entering the church, I saw her dark eyes between the pews and she seized me.
I flew back to dark soil and chill rain three days later with no pictures of Chimayo, only the hollow cores of dead cane cholla someone with no footprints had left for me on our white adobe stoop. But there is no unseeing, even back on the land that’s my home. She is gone, but another boy found us driving home through the woods.