All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories Of Queer Teens Throughout The Ages. Saundra Mitchell
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They twisted as though I was striking them down, so they could not be blamed for letting me rob Oropeza.
They had heard the stories. Las Rojas. They noticed the wisp of hair falling from my grandfather’s hat and onto my neck. They saw me as the poison girl I was, a daughter made of venom, even as I hid in my grandfather’s clothes.
I held on to Léon, leading him around the stricken men.
Oropeza and his friends would not die, not tonight. But they would thrash on the tile and the dirt until I was too far for my anger to touch them.
“Who are you?” Léon asked. His breath sounded short more from trying to press down his fear than from how fast I made him walk.
I cut the rope off his wrists and pulled off his blindfold and kissed him as fast as if I had more hands than my own. I didn’t care if the act would reveal me. My rage kept these men down like a blanket over a fire.
Léon’s lips recognized mine. He kissed me harder, setting his hands on my waist to hold me up.
“Go,” I whispered, my mouth feathering against his jawline.
Now he smelled like sweat, and the bitter almost-rust tang that I swore was the last trace of his fear. But under these things I found the smell I remembered. The warmth of flax and oats, things his family had grown for so long his skin carried the scent across the ocean.
“You have to run,” I said, my forehead against his cheek.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. His breathing came hard. I could feel his heartbeat in his skin. “Not unless I’m going with you.”
I pulled away so we could see each other as much as the dark let us.
“They took you because you stayed for me,” I said, still keeping my voice to a whisper. “I am poison. Don’t you see that?”
Léon set his hand against my cheek.
“Emilia,” he said, quiet as a breath. He meant it for no one but me.
The wind hid the strain of his breathing. The far lamp of the moon turned the gray of his eyes to iron. The sound of my name made me feel like the cloth on my body was blazing to red, my hair a cape as bright as marigolds.
“You are here and I am alive.” Now his accent turned sharp, not his practiced Spanish. “So tell me what makes you poison.”
He put his hand on the back of my neck and kissed me, this boy who wanted to belong to the girl I was, brown and small and poisonous.
To the men, we might have looked like two boys, one pressing his mouth to the other’s. Tonight, we would pull off our shirts and trousers for each other. Léon would be a boy, no matter the shape of his chest beneath his shirts. And I would let my hair fall from my grandfather’s hat and be the girl I had always been to him. For Léon, I would put on my best enagua just so he could push the soft cotton of the tiered skirt up my thighs. I would let my breasts lay against his skin. I would kiss where the rope had cut into his wrists and the cloth into his temples.
I wanted to protect his body as though it were mine.
But my own, I wanted these men to see it, and remember. I wanted them to know that I was my abuela’s granddaughter, that I carried the blood of poison girls.
The men still lay on the floor, gripping their chests and ribs.
I lifted my red poncho and my shirt, and I showed the men my breasts.
The moon lit the rounded shapes. It lit the fear on the men’s faces, the horror on Oropeza’s.
I gave them only that one second, just enough to let them wonder in the morning if they had imagined it, and then I let my shirt fall.
I reached for Léon. But it was not the men he was watching, or even me. He stood in the moon silver on the vestíbulo floor, looking out toward the hills. He lifted his face to the sky, breathing like he was taking a drink of the night itself.
And the wolves came. They came with their claws ticking against the ground and their muzzles stained with the blood of their last prey. They came with coats the same red gold as the hills they had run down from. They came with their backs streaked dark as the ink of the night sky.
I drew back from them, the wolves now crouching at the edges of Oropeza’s property. Then I caught Léon’s smile, slight but intent, telling me we had nothing to fear from them.
Léon took my hand, and we ran down the steps, the wolves filling the space behind us. They stood as guards, moving toward Oropeza’s men only when the men moved to pursue us. When the men lifted their heads to watch us run, the wolves showed their teeth. When they shouted curses at us, the wolves growled and snapped.
That was how Léon and I left them, both of us showing hearts so fierce these men considered them knives. We fled from the feigned cries of the men and women who worked for Oropeza but who loved us for defying him. We fled from the howls of men who wailed more for their pride than their bodies. We left them with the salt-sting memory of us, a brazen girl, and a boy with a heart so fearless wolves were his guardian saints.
Many stories found us after that night. Some said the French soldier known as El Lobo had called down from the hills a thousand wolves who not only scattered the men but ravaged Oropeza’s grapevines. Others said a girl known only as La Roja poisoned them all with her wicked heart, hiding the red of her hair so they would have no warning.
Some said El Lobo and La Roja were enemies, rivals, the girl capturing the French soldier just so she could have the pleasure of killing him herself. Others said La Roja stole El Lobo, only to fall in love with him the moment she first touched him.
When we hear word that every rich man who witnessed that night has died, I will tell the rest of the story. I will say what we have done since that night. What haciendas Léon has called wolves to destroy. What merciless hearts I have poisoned with the rage in my own. All that La Roja, the girl with the red hair and the red cape, and El Lobo, the boy as feared as wolves, have done.
But this is the part I will tell now. We rode off on Oropeza’s finest Andalusians, the wolves’ call at our backs. We vanished into the midnight trees faster than first light could reach us. We lived. We survived to whisper our names to each other even if we could not yet confess them to anyone else.
* * * * *
I grew up loving fairy tales. But as a Latina, I didn’t look much like the girls I saw in storybooks. Later, realizing I was queer, the loves I saw portrayed in those fairy tales felt even further away.
When I went looking to reclaim a fairy tale in a historical context, I could think of few better starting places than Leonarda Emilia. An outlaw in early 1870s Mexico, Leonarda had a short but infamous career that began when officials executed the French soldier she’d fallen in love with. Known to history as la Carambada, Leonarda wore men’s clothing, but became notorious for revealing her breasts to the powerful men she’d just robbed as she rode off.
Léon is a tribute to the many assigned-female-at-birth soldiers who have fought in wars throughout history; though in most cases history doesn’t give enough context for us to know what these soldiers might have claimed as their gender identity, Léon is imagined here as a transgender character. As this story’s interpretation of the Wolf, he, along with Emilia’s Red, are meant to embody the spirit of la Carambada. With much respect to the historical Leonarda, this story takes liberties in the spirit of reclaiming a well-loved fairy tale for the communities I’m proud to call mine.
For their thoughts, advice, and guidance, I owe much gratitude to Elliot Wake, Jayne Walters, Mackenzi Lee, Tehlor Kay Mejia, the trans boy I’m lucky to call my husband, and of course, editor Saundra Mitchell. Thank you for helping this story navigate the path between history and fairy tale.