She wondered what that was like, trusting someone outside your family so much that they became family.
She wondered if all the sweet things people claimed about love and attraction were real, or just a very long bit everyone had committed to.
Pickings were slim in Hartsfield, the concept of having romantic feelings for someone felt foreign to her.
She didn't even know if she was straight or not, because there just hadn't been… anyone.
The romantic books she read were interesting at times, their fatal flaw she found was their predictability.
Living at Vasquez Manor - what Grandma Vasquez had called the relatively humble but attractive three bedroom mint green Queen Anne - had given Esme enough consistency for a lifetime. She longed for anything new at all. That feeling made her consider following the foxes at times. Then she would imagine her parents' reaction if she dared stray into the forest, and think better of it.
The foxes had always been about, for as long as she could remember she had watched them wind through the wheat fields into the pine forest or lurk behind farmer Jedidiah’s chicken coop.
Then last year they had started leaving dead mice or pieces of garbage they had scrounged from neighbor's trash cans on her porch, like house cats trying to please their master.
Recently they had become even more emboldened.
They would follow Esme on her walks home from the grocery store, stepping into nearby alleys seemingly beckoning her to follow. Then they started bringing her larger game. Just a few weeks ago they had left an entire fawn on her porch. Its neck felt nauseatingly limp in her arms as she lifted it to its grave. Esme cried over its small body as she buried it, feeling like its untimely death was her fault.
Then finally, the rabbit circle appeared. The road that led to Esme’s favorite swimming spot ran adjacent to that pasture. She walked there multiple times a week during the summer, and the foxes seemed to know that. So they left her a gift. She didn't bury them this time, in fear that Jedidiah might try to shoot her if he saw her on his property. They still laid there today, decomposing, no one brave enough to touch them in fear of being cursed.
Esme thought the foxes were a bit blood thirsty and ruthless, who kills a FAWN and puts it on your porch? What kind of gift is that? If they hadn't been foxes and she hadn't been her, she would have thought it was a threat.
Even so, she wondered what they wanted. Why they wanted her to follow them so badly. To what? To where? The pine forest? What was there?
Imagining her Dad’s red tear stained face tempered that interest.
After breakfast was finished, Esme and Raul cleaned up the kitchen while Miguel had a cup of tea. After the cleaning, Raul headed back to his study and Miguel went to shower. Esme decided she would finish a painting she had been working on.
Back in her bedroom the sun had risen high enough to shine directly through her collection of hanging prisms. Flat pieces of finely cut glass, strung across the ceiling with fishing twine, reflecting rainbows above her bed.
Despite the rooms decent size, all the knicknacks and art supplies strewn about the room created a somewhat cramped atmosphere. One wall displayed a mural that Esme had created when she was fourteen, it depicted a pack of wolves running across an unruly sea, moonlight shining down their silver backs, bright pink eyes cutting through the inky night.
Stars were painted into the black sky with glow in the dark paint, the edges outlined with gold glitter.
Everything was colorful in Esme’s room, from the floridly painted ceiling fan, to the rug that resembled a bright green meadow with pink and red poppies, to her golden duvet patterned with fall leaves.
She had many little drawers and small cabinets filled with paints, brushes, oil pastels, pencils, alcohol markers, different types of paper and canvas, little beads and other small wonders she enjoyed gluing to her paintings.
Once when Esme was eleven, her Father's had enrolled her into an art class taught by Mrs. Tabernathy, a middle aged woman who had originally lived in Kentucky, where she had gotten her degree in art history.
Esme was asked to choose one large project to complete during her time in class. She had chosen to create a clay pyramid with different paintings and etchings on each side.
One day, Mrs. Tabernathy had brought her into a little supply closet in the community center art room to pick out glazes for her pyramid. The tiny room had tall metal shelves against each wall, containing dozens upon dozens of boxes, piled high with poorly organized paints, brushes, bows and beads, small plastic toys and objects of uncertain origin or use.
Esme picked up a large blue plastic bead that depicted a sitting cat who looked quite proud of himself.
Esme told Mrs. Tabernathy that she wanted to place the cat at the top of her pyramid.
Mrs. Tabernathy frowned and asked why she wanted to do such a thing.
Esme, being in her Egyptian history phase of childhood, told her it was because she had heard that the ancient Egyptians worshiped their cats.
Mrs. Tabernathy shook her head and took the bead from Esme, placing it back into a box “That won't do.” She had said, grabbing a few glazes at random, then leading Esme out of the closet and away from any more unseemly inspiration that she did not approve of.
Esme wondered what Mrs. Tabernathys art history degree had taught her, if not that art was self expression.
When classes finished up a few months later, she was relieved to escape the policing hand of Mrs. Tabernathy.
An art show had been held at the town hall a week later to show all of the children's art pieces.
A few people complimented Esme’s pyramid, but mostly they swiveled away if they realized they were walking in her direction. Though slightly tall for her age, she hadn't reached her notable stature yet, the avoidance in those days generally came from who her parents were.
She never did attend another art class, however her love for art did grow, although she rarely touched ceramics. She loved to paint with acrylics, water colors and gouache mostly.
Recently she had also picked up an interest in dip pens, and had been illustrating comics about her days at Vasquez manor.
When she told Miguel and Raul she wanted to get an art degree, Raul was horrified and Miguel was surprisingly supportive.
“Raul what do you expect her to become? An accountant? A lawyer?” Miguel had said to Raul
Then he turned to Esme and said “Not that I don't think you could achieve those things sweetie, you know what I mean.”
Esme nodded, she did know, and she didn't care anyhow, she would have chosen a fine arts degree even if she had been normal.
“Miguel, there's no security in art!”
Esme frowned “Pa you're a linguist.”
“Yes but I am a foolish exception, sweetheart!” He said, walking in frantic circles around the room, his hands pressed to the sides of his scalp.
“Maybe I'll be a foolish exception too, I could become the next Picasso!”
Miguel and Raul frowned then “Picasso was a horrible person dear.” Raul said
Esme shrugged “Yeah, but you know what I mean.”
The conversation had mostly ended there. Now Raul only seemed slightly strained when the subject of fine arts degrees came up.
Esme approached the easel that stood near her bedroom window, it too was colorful, covered in years worth of paint speckles.
On it sat a nearly finished painting. A young man stood in the center of the canvas, surrounded by a dark forest. He held an amulet that reflected a brilliant viridian hue across his dark skin.
Esme thought the painting was just okay. The composition was rather poor, but she had a good time painting the amulet and the shadows of leaves and branches across the ground, an interlacing network of navy across a dark brown forest floor.
She grabbed a small paintbrush that had been languishing in a jar of paint water overnight - only feeling a little guilty - popped open her wet pallet, and continued to work on the young man's face.
He looked tired and unsure, like he had come a long way, yet he looked at the amulet with something similar to pride.
She wondered how he had gotten to this forest, to this amulet, and what he was going to do with it.
Esme lost herself in painting for an hour or two… or maybe three, until Miguel walked into her room.
Esme didn't hear him enter through her headphones, and jumped when he entered her line of sight.
“Dad! Knock before you come in please!”
“Dear I did knock, I even waited, you just couldn't hear.” He took a seat on an old red velvet ottoman that Esme wasn't sure the origin of.
“I’m surprised you can't smell me behind the door.” He joked
Esme glowered at him and went back to painting.
“What did you need, old man?”
“Hey, I’m only forty, I’m practically a spring chicken!”
“Oh, and I was thinking I was talking to a pile of dust this entire time.”
“Where’d you get your snark from young lady?” Miguel replied, hand to his chest in feigned indignation
Esme raised her eyebrow at him, and they both burst out laughing.
“I came in here to ask if you wanted to come to the farmers market with me.” He said glancing out the window.
“Pa doesn't want to go?”
“I think he really meant it when he said he doesn't feel like being gawked at today.”
Esme stared hard into the shadows of her painting.
“If I become a not evil Picasso and make lots of money, will you let me move you and Pa out of this hell trap.”
Miguel smiled at her wearily “Maybe.”
“I wish you'd say yes.”
“This place means a lot to your Pa.”
“What about you?”
“I care a lot about your Pa.”
Esme looked at him, pained.
She loved her parents, and they loved each other so much it nauseated, but sometimes she felt like their relationship was imbalanced.
Miguel had given up his bakery to move to Hartsfield with Raul, Esme was so young she couldn't even remember life before Pa.
Miguel said being a single parent in New York was soul crushing, and that being a single trans parent was even worse, that he was so glad he met Raul when he did.
But sometimes, when Miguel was baking for the neighbors or bake sales, she saw something in him screaming.
Just a little bit.
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