They said he was dead, dead, dead, Delilah, and tried to hold me back. No one could stop me from falling to my knees beside him, or my frantic application of CPR, the brutal chest-pounds alternating with blasts of my breath blown into immobile lungs.

My thumping heart seized when my old-fashioned revival efforts brought Ric’s eyes open for a precious instant. Had my extreme efforts triggered a faint pulse of life in his ravaged circulatory system?

Minutes later, exhausted, even I had to admit that single eyelash flutter had been a postmortem twitch. I bent to bestow what I considered the Kiss of Death on his pallid lips, a final passionate farewell.

As my lips met his, I felt a deep primal pull in my belly… desire or a last spasm from my recent period, which always hurt like hell? We were linked by both pain and pleasure and love and loss and maybe now even blood-bonded.

Beyond all human and inhuman hope, Ric responded, bloodstained arms lifting to seize mine and curl fresh-bleeding knuckles around them. The voices that had urged me to give up went silent, astonished.

My passionate farewell kiss had become the Resurrection Kiss. From the interlocking forks of our bodies to the marriage of our mouths and the mated mantras of the past in our minds, I could imagine liquid-silver hope running like hot blood through my veins and into my beating heart, which sensed an answering rhythm in the body beneath it.

Now his dreaming mind stirred to fill mine as I shifted past the shards of my dream into his oldest nightmare…

… AND INHALED the scent of charred cedarwood. It masked the spoor of predator tracks in the sand. The air broadcast the musk of animals with hooves and coats rather than fur. I was glimpsing a scene distant in time and geography.

That’s when my dozing self realized that I wasn’t simply falling asleep. I was falling into Ric’s coma, dreaming his dreams. Eavesdropping on his nightmares was like watching his own personal oldie midnight movie.

THE DEVILS SLEEP inside their adobe shelter, their campfire only ashes. The great desert grows cold at night and coyotes always circle the camp, but I sleep against the warm, swollen side of Mother She-goat.

The human coyotes, the evil men who illegally cross the border to trade in their own kind, have noticed that the she-goat has adopted me. I hear them laughing into their tequila, threatening to slaughter her and her kids.

“Kids,” they call out so I hear and can’t sleep, not even in the dark and animal stink of the corrales. They use the gringo word for children. Me. I am one of the “kids” to be slaughtered. At least they want me to worry that I might be.

They suspect I know more English than I should, know more of everything than I should. I often overhear them dealing with the gringos for what I can find under the shifting sands.

The scent comes again, sweet as fresh goat milk, heavier than the cactus blooms that fade so fast within their eternal crown of thorns. Jesus had a crown of thorns. I think of the Passion of Jesus when El Demonio whips me and it is better.

“No!” a strange voice calls in my mind. “Sweet Jesus, no!”

This voice has a warmer, lighter tone than the shouts of the devils. I heard such sweet voices from the time before the devil coyotes came and took me away. I remember as far back as when I first walked. I always found toys around my casa, forked branches of mesquite wood I had to wrest from the dogs.

My toys. I remember laughter then, and eyes high above me, watching. Then the twigs were snatched from my small hands, scratching them. Big sandaled feet kicked sand at me, into my eyes.

“No!” the foreign woman’s voice is crying, murmuring now, growing used to things as they are, as I have already done.

Small Me is bewildered. My cheeks are wet as well as stung. I touch the dry, whole hide of the lizard my stick has found, hoping another poke will awaken it to play with me.

“No. Agua!” a deep voice shouts. “No. Agua,” a high voice shrieks. “No muerto.” More kicked sand makes my eyes squeeze shut. Blows hit my head and shoulders. I am “malo!”

I try to run away and finally do. I find only more forked branches. I can’t keep my hands off them. They quiver like live things against my burning palms. They hurt me. Holding them brings curses and beatings. Yet they are all I know.

“Oh, baby, baby, no!” the odd voice in my head cries in English.

I don’t fully know that language, but I hear the voice again now and understand it weeps for me. After that, the coyotes take me for theirs. They like what my forked branches find, the quiet, dry, dead things. The quiet dead people beneath the desert sand who walk after my pricked fingers bleed on the divided branch. They call them “zombies,” and laugh.

I don’t know where the visiting gringos take these quiet raised dead, but they pay well and ask no questions and when their light-colored demon eyes pass over me they are empty.

The Devil has a forked tongue, I heard once, but the only devils I know are here, all around me. I give them more and more of these People of the Depths, and they still don’t like me.

I run away to find people who will like me, but the desert is empty and the devils’ legs are always longer than mine. I am always caught and returned to the camp, thrown in with the burros they drag along and beat, and the goats they slaughter and eat.

El Demonio’s bullwhip, when they find me again, is longer than the farthest Joshua tree I can see is tall. His whip has a thirty-foot-long tongue he can flick into the herds to kiss me good night. If he misses me, a four-footed friend suffers instead.

I wear pieces of the clothes I steal from the People of the Depths. The flies buzz all day. I crouch beneath shit-caked tails to escape them. I smell worse than the goats, and that keeps the devils at a distance. Even El Demonio.

Yet the night is my time. The night brings peace to the burros and goats. Some nights the sweet smell off the desert almost covers the stink.

And then she comes, the Virgin of Guadalupe. She wears a white gown and a blue cape. Her arms are always outstretched. I know she would wrap them around me and shelter me in her cloak, only there is no room because the cape spills forth bloodred blossoms that smell sweeter than any goat milk, sweeter even than burning cedarwood.

The flowers fall at my feet as I sleep.

Then comes bright day again and the burning sun of Hell.

No, no, no, the distant voice is chanting. I don’t want this dream. Take this nightmare away.

I realize the Virgin is praying for me. I’ll never forget the pain and beauty in her voice.

THE VIRGIN IS angry with me. No… sad. She no longer comes to see me. I smell only filth and blood and death. My thoughts buzz like the big blue flies that torment my friends with hides. My thoughts also swarm with anger and hatred. I look at the wood in my hands that raises the Dead day after day and think how a bigger branch would gash the devils’ filthy heads. But the desert grows small brittle trees. I need metal to fell a devil, brown or white, and they have guns.

Despite them, I’m growing bigger, and hunch to hide it. Cabro-niño, goat-boy, they call me. Some always guard us stock when the others are gone. My escape plans now consider the comings and goings of the gringos. El Demonio is hardly here and hasn’t used his whip on me for months. I’ve learned to sneak close to their sleeping place and listen. I’ve stolen food they don’t miss, even a handful of shiny papers as brittle as cactus flowers I buried.

When I dig them up to study, the pages throng with naked people doing what goats and donkeys do to birth young. The animal young are so soft and smell sweet. I guard them as much as I can, but some are destined for slaughter and all for pain and servitude. Still, I know that these pictures do not celebrate new life but are as dirty as the looks the drunken demons slide my way. If I did not smell so bad…