It’s impossible to gauge the depth of a hole you’re in until you begin to climb out. I’ve felt this way in the most challenging times of my life, usually when suffering loss: death, divorce. I remember the worst moments in discordant flashes—sobbing in a closet, inhaling a scarf; dive-bar gin and curvy roads; lying beside my bulldog, whispering “I’m sorry” in his ear. Moments of grief and despair whose dimensions I didn’t fully understand until they lifted, revealing a terrible edge from which I didn’t know I’d fallen.

One of Medlin’s biggest regrets is the 20-year break she took from volksmarching after she and her husband, an Air Force officer, returned to the U.S. from Germany. In 2010, while stationed in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Medlin saw an advertisement in the paper for an April volksmarch in the Garden of the Gods, a park accented with sandstone formations. “Darren,” she said to her husband, “let’s do this.” They dug out their old distance and event record books and never looked back.

I first wrote to my children before they were born: my daughter, at 36 weeks gestation, and my son, the night before his birth. Time was a doorknob turning in the darkness, a pulse of movement soon to change everything, and it felt urgent to capture where we were right then. It became a tradition. On each of their birthdays, I write them another letter. I tell them about themselves, about us, about our lives that year. I think of the letters as memory-keeping, as loving artifacts…

In the hospital parking lot, I pulled a stiff painter’s mask over my nose and mouth. I took a selfie on Snapchat, sent it to my brother and sister. My brother responded: “Whoa. That’s apocalyptic.” This was mid-March 2020, when we feared COVID-19 the way you fear an animal’s yellow eyes in the dark, not the way you do when you’ve felt its teeth.

The sun rises on a cloudless day in mid-October. On North Padre Island, a barrier island near Corpus Christi, my husband, Adrian, and I pack our striped beach bag with bright plastic buckets and trowels, fruit pouches and bottles of water. By 8:00 a.m., we’ve buckled our kids into their car seats. We’re on borrowed time, determined to make it count.

That’s where I was at four weeks postpartum: sleepless, bleeding, raw, so desperately in love and hormonally out of whack that all I could think about was my baby dying. And I was lucky.

Samuel Buentello was 14 years old when he left the Rancho Nuevo in South Texas, the only home he’d ever known. In 1945, the road to nearby Hebbronville, a ranching hub 56 miles southeast of Laredo, wasn’t much more than dirt. All Buentello had was a paper sack of belongings and his mother’s tearful blessing.

It’s nearly midnight in San Antonio, Texas, on Sunday, February 14. The temperature has plunged to 10 degrees, but my husband, Adrian, and I are not yet worrying about how we’ll keep our toddler and baby warm if the electrical grid fails, which it will within hours. We’re not thinking of the hill outside our neighborhood, which will become so dangerously ice-slicked it will effectively trap us in our home. We’re not taking stock of our meager food and water supply, calculating how long it will last. We're laughing.

It wasn’t as though I’d forgotten the danger. To ride, whether in the front or the back of a bike, is to enter into a contract with yourself: “Yes, I understand the risk, and I accept it because if the worst were to happen, I would leave this earth in the midst of experiencing the best parts of it, and isn’t that the most any of us can ask for?

The quartz is made to resemble marble: thick dove gray veins, their edges blurred, snaking through a background of spilled cream. You look through other samples, small heavy squares excavated from wire shelving, but you return to the first. I prefer these thicker lines, you say, running your fingertips across the veining. Your husband agrees, and the discussion shifts to the edges and corners of your future kitchen island—straight is more modern, but with a toddler and a baby on the way.

At the flour-dusted kitchen counter, Ñaña hands us each a smooth ball of tortilla masa. The rest are stacked in a mixing bowl, tucked beneath a frayed dish towel. A film of cling wrap seals the bowl itself, which Ñaña pushes to the corner where it will wait for two hours until the masa is ready to be rolled.

The sky is as pink as our daughter’s socks as we leave the restaurant. She is 17 months old, holding my husband’s hand as we cross the street. Her wild chestnut curls are sticky with peanut sauce. In front of Urban Outfitters, three uniformed police officers surround a white man whose shirt reads: “Y’all Need Jesus.” Their cruisers are parked in the street, blocking traffic.

On the side of a busy road, I called her name: Lola! Lola! Flaxen weeds blew at my knees. Traffic a blur of painted metal. She could be anywhere. And then I saw her — a black pug parting the grass, running toward me. I took her into my arms and pressed my forehead against hers, relief stinging sweet. I told Adrian about the dream with my eyes still closed. We had only been living together for two weeks, since he’d moved to San Antonio from Sydney to be with me. We’d known each other since we me

As a birthday gift, my mom wanted to take me shopping. I had one leg deep in a black over-the-knee boot when my phone rang. My mom, still smiling, took a fraction of a second longer than I did to realize: This could be the call we'd been waiting on. The results of my biopsy.

All day I’d been waiting—something unexpected cracks me open every year: the smear of September rain on a window, the realization that I can no longer remember the shape of Nanny’s teeth. Tonight it was my daughter, recognizing the name I’d given her because I couldn’t give her the woman herself.

The first time I breast-fed my daughter, I was surrounded by strangers. Someone had helped me slide free of my delivery gown, slick with my daughter’s newness. Someone else had helped me into a new gown. There were hands everywhere: first pressing my tender, flaccid abdomen; now sliding a new pad beneath my hips; now holding my newborn to my breast. The hands — blue-gloved, shiny — squeezed my flesh, guided it into her mouth. My husband, Adrian, stroked my hair. I didn’t know what to do with my own hands. I watched, like the most unnecessary stranger in the room.

“Make it spooky.” My daughter’s bubblegum-toothpaste breath tickles my cheeks. She lowers her voice, wiggles her fingers. “Make it super We are curled up on the gray upholstered recliner I bought before she was born. At four, she likes to hear about “grampires” and witches, mummies and zombies and ghosts. Her fawn eyes widen, and she stares at the middle distance as scenes unfold in her mind. She wants bony fingers shifting sand as they prod up from the earth. She wants sharp teeth.

During a panel at the recent Texas Book Festival, I laughed along with the rest of the (mostly female) audience when Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites, joked that she knew what “auto-erotic asphyxiation” meant before she’d even gotten her first period.

In a time when anti-Latinx rhetoric is painful and unavoidable, and anti-Latinx violence hits close to home, it’s unacceptable that Latinx literature occupies such a small space in the U.S. literary canon. If the language of white supremacy attempts to dehumanize us, to erase our value and the richness of our contributions to this world, it’s more critical than ever to celebrate our voices.

The first time I went across, I was a senior in high school. We had all borrowed outfits from our one friend who had going-out clothes, so we looked like a string of paper dolls: four slips of girls in tight black tops and low-slung jeans. Straightened dark hair, slivers of hips and belly, the wink of silver chain belts.

The Need made me shiver with recognition. In Molly, I saw myself, and in the intruder, who knows and covets Molly’s life so intimately, I saw the version of me who might exist should the worst come to pass. The Need felt like one of my terrifying midnight ruminations, only extended, exaggerated—the potential for catastrophic loss the very heartbeat of this book.

The early nights felt like this: the peaceful lull of skin on skin, puffs of milky breath. My mind wandering, circling, ruminating. My body—unfamiliar and reconstituted, still bleeding. I felt scraped open, raw, exquisitely receptive to the world. Sometimes I thought, I am somebody’s mother. The thought shook me, rendered everything else unrecognizable. I sparked with creativity.