The Blue Boy
Published in Flash Fiction Magazine, February, 2026
Arriving at the ornately carved door, Ángela looked like she’d walked through a brown sugar storm. It was April. Everyone in town had dusty feet in the driest month of the year which was also the month of her birth. She would celebrate the fiftieth April of her life in a few days. The thirtieth without Sebastián. Her friend Lourdes had told her about a man. The one she was about to see. As she walked through the portal, a young woman with long black braids and pink glasses appeared.
“¿Le puedo ayudar?”
“Yes, I hope so,” Ángela replied, wondering what kind of help you’d need to look for a missing limb. Would she leave here feeling more complete?
She pulled out the card Lourdes had given her. It was sky blue, containing only a name— Moisés—with an address and the word mago in raised gold script. She was led to a courtyard and asked to wait.
She sat down on a crude bench cobbled together with scrap boards, facing the remains of a garden under an old stone wall. With its peeling paint, the wall was a beautiful cornflower blue, but lack of water in the high desert had done the plants in. They stood like matchsticks after the fire, burnt and stiff.
On the wall above the garden was a nicho, holding the watchful vírgen draped in her indigo mantle, along with various adornos of flowers and candles. Although well feted, it was clear she hadn’t done her job. No surprise there. Her influence on Ángela had waned considerably once she became an adult. Nothing but a fanciful story of infinite love fed to children like candy to make them feel protected. Even living in the “land of Mary,” she knew better what to count on for magic. Being a twin for one. A well-oiled bond connected by shared womb water and an ancient language. Death had its own magic. After all, what was magic but a belief in the unknown, and surely death was the ultimate unknown.
Ángela stored a memory of Sebastián sitting alone in a box in their backyard. On this particular day she came outside to find he had painted the box cerulean blue. His body was also blue, and he had a blue crayon in his hand. That’s how she remembered him. The Blue Boy. Like Shiva. Or that old Joni Mitchell song.
Across the courtyard a door opened, and a portly gray-haired man appeared. He was dark and muscular, but otherwise ordinary. Nothing magical that Ángela could discern, but he did don a turquoise guayabera shirt that seemed to glow against his dark skin. She walked over to him and without ceremony, the man said,
“I’m Moisés. May I see your hands?” She liked that he was direct. Most people weren’t. Within minutes of meeting someone new, she often wanted to ask, how would you like to die? instead of small, empty pleasantries.
Without a word, she offered her palms to the old man. With his gaze over her shoulder, he groped the air a little to reach her and placed his hands on her palms. Her shoulders instantly sighed.
“Close your eyes, please,” he said, with the kind of mouth always poised for a smile.
He had friendly, umber hands that Ángela could imagine picking out fruit, tying a child’s shoelaces, or caressing a woman’s cheek. When he laid them on top of her own, she felt the sensation of a deep indigo blue flooding her body, like an ink wash. The same blue as el vírgen’s robe. The same blue in which her mother always dressed Sebastián. Ángela had been jealous of that blue. A color that had more weight than the pink her mother favored for her. Blue felt solid and dark like a womb, not pale and fleshy, exposed. She and her brother had loved the dark. They were always hiding in closets, under blankets, or in the woods at night.
“Like two spots of ink,” her mother used to say.
Supporting Moisés’s warm hands, Ángela imagined being cradled by fine thermal sand, the heated cure seeping into her bones as thoughts of death and loss tumbled through her mind like corpses through the bardo. Later, she couldn’t recall how long she’d stood there, but when she opened her eyes, she saw Moisés grinning like a fat Buddha.
He squeezed her hands and said, “If you don’t want to die, then you shouldn’t have been born. Ha!” And with that, he turned around to walk back through the door, laughing to himself all the way.
Ángela blinked as she gazed down, smiling at her indigo hands. She felt a tingling on her right side and when she lifted her shirt, she saw just above her hip, two circles perfectly tattooed and entwined, raised like braille. She laid her palm on the bands of blue and felt the indigo wash through her once again.
As she turned to leave, Ángela was aroused by the smell of jasmine and honeysuckle. She traced the scent back to the blue wall whose withered vines were now flowering amidst astonishing lush-green foliage. She stopped at the nicho and mimicked Mary’s outstretched hands, Ángela’s own now stained, a perfect match for the draped mantle. She inhaled deeply from the newly perfumed garden, wanting Moisés to know that she was glad to have been born.