Of course, not everyone in his family had the Sight, which was sometimes a good thing. It was like how his uncle Marcelo had a crooked finger bone just like his great-granddad, and how his moms had the same beauty marks on her shoulder in the exact same spot as her father, and how his cousin Willie had the Macías ears but not the Macías nose. It was just another thing he’d been lucky enough to inherit.
Fabían was unique in his own way. Even though he’d never been to Ecuador, he had something from the Earth’s belt. Something no one could take away from him.
And he could see when he was getting a rat deal from the fairies in Central Park, when the mermaids were wearing their legs but didn’t hide their scales or strange ears and stranger eyes.
He could see when vampires tried to glamour themselves a tan. Creepy AF.
His Sight helped him survive the streets of New York City in a different way.
That’s why it was so tragic that the Sight, the very thing that should have helped him See, was the very thing that would lead to Fabían’s undoing. There is only one thing that can trick a gods-given gift like his.
Love.
* * *
Up in her tower Danaë could see the entire city and beyond. When she first came to be trapped inside its stone walls, she thought that someone might eventually come for her. But the only person who might have once remembered Danaë was her mother.
Decades ago, they’d gotten off a ship to Miami, taken a train to New York City, and finally hopped on the subway as far as 116th and Lexington and walked down to their apartment on 114th. They had one suitcase between the two of them, plus a handful of seeds her mother had smuggled in the hidden pockets of her skirts. They’d been wearing the same dresses for days. It was lucky that her mother was a seamstress, able to repair their rips and seams, their buttons that kept falling off as if even they didn’t want to be attached to the Santiago Aguilar girls.
Danaë could still picture her mother back then, with her thick curls carefully waved beneath a smart wool hat. Her dress perfectly fitted to curves that Danaë always believed she’d grow into herself. But over half a century later and Danaë was still stuck in the body of a sixteen-year-old.
She pushed aside the curtain, like that might erase the memories of her life as it had been. She could divide her life in two segments: before and after the tower.
Before the tower went as so: they rented a studio apartment in Spanish Harlem that had once smelled of urine and the carcass of an abandoned dog. Her mother always reminded her, “We might be poor, but at least we’re clean,” and soon enough they transformed their living space, polishing the wooden floors and adding a fresh coat of paint in a color that reminded them of the blush of spring. No rats or cockroaches dared sneak under their clean sheets. Even the ants that crept up the rusted fire escape avoided their space. Their little home smelled of bread after her mother learned to bake from a Polish woman on the second floor, who didn’t speak English either and didn’t seem to mind the mother and daughter who kept to themselves. For a time.
There was a moment in between the apartment and the tower: a bad bargain, a betrayal, a terrifying limbo where Danaë slept until she woke in a stone room so high above the city, she could eat the clouds for breakfast.
After the tower was an adjustment: there were months of screaming and tears. At least she had a soft mattress with silk sheets. At least the stones warmed in the winter and cooled in the summer. Danaë longed for a stove to bake bread. She longed for sugar to dissolve in fresh coffee. She longed for mangoes to bite into like a ripe, juicy heart. She longed for more than the three books the sorcerer had left on a single shelf, and the copper spyglass to let her peer at a world that was passing her by. Danaë was filled with so much longing, but none of the promise of possibility.
There was no possibility for her. She was like an insect frozen in amber, a fossil waiting to be unearthed.
All because her mother had made a bad deal, and Danaë had paid the price.
In the beginning, she used to cry. She cried so much that she thought she’d fill the entire room with her tears. But the space was too large. It turns out that tears only feel like a lot to the person crying them.
When she’d tire herself out, she’d stare out the window and feel terribly, hopelessly small.
After that, she would scream.
“Help me!” she shouted, in a city where everyone needed help. In a city where people got lost and killed and crushed and swept away in different ways. Who could help her when that city could not even help itself?
Still, it was a particular type of punishment that they couldn’t hear her supplication, but she could hear them. Their voices carried up to Danaë’s window. Lovers sneaking in the dark shadows of Central Park. People screaming. Police barking. Sirens wailing. Bands playing. It was all the same cycle of sounds. New York only changes on the surface, after all.
There were the occasional taunts from the solitary fairies and werewolves that lurked in the trimmed wilderness below. Her entrapment was a discovery of the magical world that existed in the betwixt spaces, the twilight, the midnight, the halves of the world. Unfortunately, her own magic was bottled up.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel! Let down your hair!” a gnarly troll shouted once. She couldn’t see his face through the foggy view of her spyglass, but he looked like he could be a troll. She wished she had something to throw at him, but mostly, she wished that someone would try to free her instead of chiding her.
While she possessed very little, the tower apartment did come equipped with some necessities: a bathtub, soaps and sponges, a gilded mirror, and a few dresses her mother had left behind.
Danaë had a very meticulous hair routine. When she’d first been locked in the tower, her hair was the fashionable bob of working girls. The year she’d immigrated to New York City had been 1946 and it felt like a new era. With hot curlers at the salon run by a fellow Dominican woman named Yennifer, she’d turn her ribbon curls into the sculpted waves.
The first week without her products had been torture. Being among the clouds meant there was nothing but moisture. The sorcerer, whom she’d met thrice (once when her mother made the deal, once when he’d collected his payment, and once more) had granted her a never-ending coconut oil vase and an ivory comb. Perhaps it was the magic he’d used, but she could never quite remember his face, only the strange weariness that overtook her when he was around. It was as if his power came from some long-gone god of slumber. Either way, for a time she was content with keeping her hygiene. She bathed every day and spent hours brushing tangles out of her hair, until, before she knew it, her hair was down to her ankles. She braided it, and as new buildings were erected and the city changed, her curls spilled in ropes longer than the threads of time.