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Literacy Journal > Story Display |
by NADIA MENCO, May 29, 2009
(Manhattan - Aguilar)
There was the most beautiful twilight marine breeze, when Dolores Simancas and her cousin Julisa Maria played and climbed up the tree branches. The trees had mangos, the most delicious of all Cartagena. The youngest wanted to pick some mangos to be sold to her schoolmates. Dolores was 11 years old. She wasn’t graceful, but she was nice and she wanted to write her dreams.
Over the next hour the cousin got down 159 mangos. Julisa picked the mangos off the branches and Dolores collected them very carefully. When her cousin got down from the tree, Julisa put her hands on the wall, and it fell down on top of Dolores. Julisa was saved and Dolores had the wall on her head. She didn’t feel anything when the wall fell down. She only heard screams and she saw some pictures of her life projected inside her mind. She lost consciousness.
The next day she woke up in a hospital with a big pain on her left eyebrow.
Dolores went back to her house, and she felt something unusual. She wasn’t herself, and she looked in the mirror and saw a scar on her left eyebrow.
During the next month Dolores had strange dreams. One day she dreamed about a friend who was eating flowers. The next day Dolores’ friend died of an allergy to astromelias. Her lungs were inflamed and exploded. Dolores felt very sad because she couldn’t tell her friend, and she didn’t understand anything about her dreams, but after that she believed that her dreams were telling the future. She went to talk with her grandmother, whom she told that she had a great power, and she wanted to use it to do good. It was a time in Cartagena when there was no rain and people were very worried about this drought. It affected her grandmother who was a maracuya farmer. Dolores was very sad about the situation. She forced herself to dream about rain which would fill all of Cartagena’s leaves. She dreamed it that night and it rained on the next day.
Since then, in Cartagena, people commented about that young girl who could control Mother Nature with her dreams. Dolores’ neighbors knew that she was young and they began to call her a witch. Dolores´ mother sent her to her aunt Maria Luisa, who lived in downtown Palenquito, which for years was suffering from a great drought. The Maria Labajas people were informed about Dolores. They went to see her and asked her if she could call Mother Nature. Dolores accepted and at night she dreamed about rain and the next day the sky became dark and it rained excessively, and all was full of water.
All the harvests were lost and the people began to accuse Dolores who was very sad about this. She escaped from them and she walked for hours over the harvests until she fell asleep on the wet ground and the ground swallowed her.
Dolores’ family never found her. In the same place where wonderful Dolores slept, grew a mango tree. It had the most exotic and delicious mangos of all Palenquito.
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