Ashes By Arturo Cisneros Poireth, tr. Diana Sánchez Rivera
"Burning Embers" by mswern is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Ashes
When I woke up, the pillow was soaked in black. It was sweat, and it was black. I went to the bathroom, and in the mirror, I saw a dark stain on my ear, like a dried thread of blood, but it wasn’t blood. Ashes were coming out of my ear. I scratched with my pinky finger, trying to clean it with my nail, which came out blackened. Then I used a Q-tip, and the cotton came out black too. I washed with water, but nothing changed—now a thicker, darker water was running down my cheek, dirty, coming from deep inside me. Was I producing these ashes? Why did I have ashes inside me?
I woke my wife and told her what was happening. No, there wasn’t any pain, and I could hear just fine. But the ashes kept coming, I could scratch and pull out enough to sweep off the floor.
I took a shower, scrubbing myself with soap, using my fingertips everywhere, like trying to pop my ear from the air pressure after a flight. I cracked my jaw, let water fill my ear until it was blocked, and then tilted my head, and streams of ashy water kept flowing and flowing, like when you wring out the mop you’ve been using, and suddenly the invisible filth of your house appears in the water. It just wouldn’t stop.
In the shower, one starts thinking things, maybe too many things, imagining. Could it be a symptom of some illness? Is ear cancer a thing? Do I have a malignant tumor, or is it just dead cells? Am I scraping at the tumor with my nail, and is what’s coming out pieces of it? If that’s the case, could I scratch it until it’s gone and heal myself? Can you die from ear cancer? How would they operate to remove the tumor? Would they use tweezers and end up fragmenting it, turning it into dust to pull it out? And what if the ashes never come out and go to my brain? Would breaking down the tumor make things worse, spreading the illness? Am I sick? Would they have to amputate my ear to remove the whole tumor? Am I dying? After exhausting all imaginable medical causes, my thoughts drifted elsewhere: could some insect have burrowed in my ear, and these ashes are actually its crushed carcass, destroyed by my nail and my own body? Am I burning inside, and I haven’t noticed yet? Is it not something foreign to me, but me, disintegrating and leaking out through my cavities? Then I thought, maybe it’s not just my ear, but any orifice. I blew my nose with my fingers, and there it was: the ashes smeared on my fingertips. I finished washing my body and stepped out of the shower to search for clues, but I found nothing. There wasn’t a single person in the world who had described what I was experiencing, and no living being seemed to be suffering from it either. Suddenly, anxiety took over, and I started hyperventilating, as if I had just now fully woken up, realizing that something was happening to me and that my life was at risk. I don’t want to die, I thought, not yet. There’s still so much left for me to do. I needed answers, but what if the answers weren’t good? Or worse, what if there were no answers at all?
I got dressed quickly and went to the doctor. They are not pleasant visits; I always go feeling fearful, but in a hurry to get there.
“You have a dead person inside,” he said. “And it’s consuming you. Has anyone in your family passed away recently?” he asked my wife, who gave him a perplexed look and shook her head . “No one.” “I see,” he said. “It’s obvious, then. You are the dead one.”
Andrea and I didn’t understand what was happening as he explained everything, making sense of the symptoms, and it seemed like he was reading me inside and out better than I ever could have done myself.
“There’s nothing more to be done, then,” he said finally. “You just have to wait. Wait for everything to come out and for that mockery of a person you carry to disappear for good. The damage is already done. Blow your nose, cry, vomit if you need to. Only time will put an end to that silent fire. Time and resignation. Those dreams, those hopes will never come true. You are already a different person, no matter how unpleasant it seems to you. You will never be who you once were, nor who you wished to become.”
About The Author
Arturo Cisneros Poireth teaches modern and contemporary poetry. In addition to teaching, he writes and translates. His most recent book, Lo invisible en lo visible, was published by Alacraña in 2024. His essays and translations have appeared in various literary magazines, journals and anthologies. His most recent publications include the article “Rendering Visible Through Language: Writing Drawings and the Literary Portrait in Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours” and the essay “Poetry and Apartheid: Four Scenes of South African Poetry.
Diana Andrea Sánchez Rivera is an editor at Universidad Iberoamericana. She specializes in the translation of literary and marketing texts from English and French into Spanish. In addition to her translation career, she writes short stories and essays, exploring themes of identity, relationships, and the surreal.
