Adelita

Adelita 

The sun rises over the horizon and sets the prairie afire in the flickering dawn, like precious stones dancing in the fire light. Adela sits on her wicker rocking chair, her fingers knitting the long blanket spreading over her feet and crawling on the wooden floor. The cool air bites her cheeks and the sweet dew settles on her skin. She wets her dry and wrinkled lips as the sunlight licks the prairie with tongues of fire that reach out to her like tentacles. The spark of memory shines in her aged pupils as she watches for the figures that will soon appear. Shadows flicker in the red pearlescent light, and her fingers pause their knitting, resting over the needles. The knitting is almost done, it only needs the final touches: the last knot, and the satisfying cut of the scissors that will put and end to her life’s tapestry.

A nebulous cavalry appears in the distance. The soft murmur of hoofbeats evanesce with the sounds of waking life, the eerie cry of the peacocks, and the cock-a-doodle-doo of the rooster. Adela keeps her eyes fixed on the burning horizon with her fingers still paused on the knitting, and her mind hearkens back to that dawn decades ago, when she watched him put on his sombrero and mount his white horse.

“I’ll be back for you,” he said, and her eyes filled with misty tears, “then we’ll leave this place, and we’ll be together forever.”

She sat on her wicker rocking chair, knitting, as he galloped across the prairie, hurrying to join the cavalry cantering in the distance. 

A slight smile creeps across her wrinkled and dry lips, and her eyes shine with youth, as she discerns the shadow of the man that revolution ripped from her eons ago.

She sees him riding across the prairie on his white horse, with his sombrero on his head, and she holds her breath, expecting him. But the figure passes by and vanishes in the twinkling diamond of the fiery dawn.

Adela’s eyes fill with dew and her fingers begin to unravel the blanket strewn over her feet. Tomorrow they will start their never-ending knitting again.

“Next year,” she says to herself, “he’ll come for me next year.”

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