Today the children watch Mari’s face light up from the fire, her fingers charred with burnt corn kernels. She sucks a bite and laughs, lips pinked with warmth. Then she returns the sweet corn to be burned again. The children–bony-legged Jon Jon, shy Lala, and Luis with the plastic soccer ball tucked between his legs–sit enraptured by the scent, or maybe by her, because Mari, at sixteen, is the type of person that knows exactly what she wants to do in life. Long hair playing in the wind, Mari is firm, kind, immutable.
We live in a province that bends along the bed of a gray stream, our houses colorful against the sticky canopy of leaves. Mari tells me we paint our houses lantern orange because we want them to be beautiful in spite of the fact that they are dead and wooden, cracked open and sloping inwards. She tells me that our houses are not really houses; when she points to her book, the page yellowed like a blade of sun, she shows me houses that are straight and evenly lined, like teeth.
“But where will you find that?” I question. I kick a pebble into the stream, watching it tremble and disappear silently. There is a small satisfaction, I think, in the hard kick of something so small, in something so wide and fluid.
“I don’t know,” Mari answers. She clutches her old book to her chest. “I’ll go to Saudi, siguro. Or America.”
The water is smooth and blank before us, and I wrinkle my nose. The pebble is gone now. “Just for the straight houses?”
“No, for the idea, Kit.” Her voice is soft. “The idea.”

Mari is our class representative by day and a vendor at night. She wears her crisp white uniform in school, her shoes glossy from Old Navy, and she shakes her head at my untied shoelaces and crumpled blue skirt. She discusses the attendance with the teacher, distant behind her pale, ironed laugh. It is only in the night, her mascara clumped and illuminated by the fire, that she becomes alive and touchable. In the night, I squeeze the kernels behind my teeth and Mari laughs at the thin, burned stick in my fingers: here, stars point-tipped against the fabric of the sky, there is only us, our faces bright and close together.
Mari tells me that she is a vendor because of Manong Pedro and Manang Marilyn. “To pay them back,” she explains. She is the daughter of a fractured house, and where there were cracks, they used themselves, bone and skin and spittle. “I need the money to help them.”
“But then how will you go to America?”
The air stifles, and Mari is quiet. She only turns over the corn, pressing absently or maybe vehemently, until it is dark and discolored. “We can’t sell this anymore,” she responds simply. Then, she goes off to find a plastic bag.

In this province of crinkled wood and dirty bitter water, Mari hates the smoke. She wrinkles her nose at the tacky, sluggish traysikels, their metal wheels powdered with dust and grass, and she hides behind the wrinkled spines of her books. Mari’s face becomes softer when she reads, dreamy, without any of the hard cracks along her eyes. When I tell her this, she smiles. She says it is because in her imagination, she is in a world that is lined and pristine and perfect.
“What about you, Kit?” she asks me, intently. “What is your dream?”
I unbraid my hair and smile without my lips. I don’t tell her that I don’t have a dream: that my dream is the runny gray water and the sugary burnt corn and the broken, tired houses, and Mari beside me. That when I see her read, I hate her, sometimes, because she is there and not here, because she has already left us.

In this province, Mari has always loved the children. She feeds the infant Paulita and wipes the sweat off the restless running boys, leans into the girls who have no mothers, the ones who curl themselves into their hair. Mari is a bending, redactive force; with the children, she holds the sticks firmly and elaborately. Sometimes she turns to me, eyes softened, buttery.
Soot-faced, the children call Mari beautiful adjectives like matalino and maganda. All innocent smiles, they do not see the fissures in the province, and maybe they are all the better for it. They taste the sweetness of corn, of gusts of wind in glops of heat, and they laugh freely with their round, marble eyes. When I look at Mari, I think that once we were like them, our laughs evaporating from our mouths. Sometimes, we are still like them. At sixteen, we dream and wish like children: deeply, stupidly, completely.

Today, we sell our corn again. Our throats run red from screaming, marketing, fingering shiny copper coins and slipping them into our pockets. As the afternoon slides into night, the province dims and my voice quiets. Mari is tireless as I sink down, the fire burned to a low crackle, the boys playing basketball with their jagged legs and snapping wrists. Mari is tireless, and I wrestle with the night: how Mari is bright, and beautiful, and incomplete. How she flickers in this damp night, how I desperately stay still.
Mari glances at me, ruddy, sweat-stained. She curves our faces together, her breath sugary with sweet corn, and pushes my cheeks up with her hot fingers. “There.” She smiles, satisfied, and I remember that Mari is kind, always kind. In her steady eyes it is easy to dream about what she could be, if she was not in this province, in this country.
I bridge my fingers with hers and breathe in the smoke. Here, tonight, Mari is beside me, selling corn. Her past is bent and refracted, her future slippery and crackling. Her lit figure only a small, burning kernel in this wide, uncertain world.