Copal

She took her name out of the dirt. Four days out of a truck in the Sonoran desert, dead, with nothing at all, she reached into the last warm thing she had and put a word on herself. Copal is the resin: the one that is burned, and the one that keeps what it catches.

She was eighteen when they took her and nineteen when they were done, and she says the thing none of the others can. Her year was not worse than theirs. She was simply older, and hers is the one that can be told in full. Twenty notes — a village, a brother, a room with a drain in the floor, and the house in Cochise County she came out the other side into.