“Pimple?” he asked.
“Um, yeah.” Her fingers lowered from where she had been idly pinching the pressure point on her chin. “I guess all this sunscreen doesn’t agree with my skin.”
Maia ground her teeth and shaded her eyes, gazing up at one of the twin images of K’uk’ulkan, the serpent god, stretched in stone down the main pyramid of Chichén Itzá. The head of the serpent rested on the dirt, its mouth arching open, thick tongue protruding like a pointed file.
“You’ve got to use the Retin-A I gave you.”
She pictured the light-yellow cream falling in a wavy line into her sink bowl as she squeezed the tube empty. Little rebellions.
“You’re not using it, are you?”
The shape of the serpent’s stone eye projected anger.
“What time is it, Luis?”
He consulted the smart device on his wrist: “3:45. It’s starting right on time. Look!”
The rippling shadow rose up along the entire side of the long stone serpent. Sitting side-by-side on the grass, the tightly packed crowd murmured. Pointed fingers stretched snakelike toward the shadow. “Look! There it is!”
Maia was looking. She had been looking wherever Luis told her for some time already.
This trip was supposedly about making Maia’s dreams come true. Her namesake culture had possessed a fascination in her mind since grade school. But things could never truly be about her with Luis. This whole thing — them — was planned to a T, a sharpened pencil point. Just like the priests must have arranged with the master builders for the snake illusion — to prove that their god of wind, rain, and storms was pleased with them, pleased enough to descend from the heavens and slink his way down their pyramid to the earth, bringing blessing with him every spring.
It was amazing really, the show of it. A multitude of enthralled faces watched as the wavy shadow revealed the undulating, golden body of a snake. Finally, the sinking sun beamed fully onto the serpent’s head.
Luis rose to one knee on the grass beside her.
“Sit down!” A woman swatted a trifold brochure at him.
“Maia, will you—”
She should have seen this coming. Luis had requested she wear his favorite white sundress for when they met up today. But his pointed suggestion followed her monologue on the symbolism of wearing white on the equinox. She had thought it was her own idea. Knowing Luis, he probably had a professional photographer behind them capturing stunning shots of the engagement in the diffuse light of the magic hour.
Maia squinted at the stone serpent. When she turned back to Luis, beams of sunlight baptized his hard eyes, chiseled nose, and flat cheeks with a play of sun and shadow. The answer was blessedly easy.
***
As the sun finally plunged beneath the grassy plaza’s surrounding trees like the orb of the Maya ballgame, she watched it alone, squeezing at the pesky spot on her chin until it popped.
She bought a T-shirt from a vendor — not from a fellow hawking his wares but from an unobtrusive twenty-something scrolling on a cell phone in the back of his stall. She donned the shirt over her dress before watching the artificial lightshow splayed onto the grand pyramid in the dark. The shirt read “I survived Chichén Itzá.” It made her chuckle before it made her cry.
Lynn M. Rice enjoys processing life with the help of her Creator through the gift of creative writing. Her work has appeared previously on Every Day Fiction as well as 101 Words and is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine.
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