People tell this story:
An elderly widower had a beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter with a serious eye problem that no doctor could cure. Time and again he had visited the healer’s house to ask for help, but the man had refused to see him. Eventually the girl went blind and the widower decided to make one more visit to the healer, who on hearing his story interrupted to say: “Take your daughter to the other side of the river. When you reach the center of the next town along, wait and listen to the street peddlers who walk up and down, crying their wares, each with their own particular tune. The peddler whose cry and melody you like the most is the one who will cure your daughter.”
The man did exactly as the healer said, and at the first light of dawn he and his daughter sailed on a raft across the still river that lay between the two towns; the straight line of water made him feel calm and steady, and he was drifting peacefully from thought to thought when they arrived in the next town. He left his daughter in a guesthouse. In the center of town he found a man selling wildflowers whose musical cry pleased him as much as the colors of the flowers, which were as bright as fireflies. He bought his daughter some tiny yellow ones, the brightest of all, and asked the man to come to the guesthouse that very afternoon with more flowers like them for his daughter. When the peddler stepped into the room, carrying the flowers on his back, the widower locked the door behind him. He began telling him what the healer had said, upon which the seller shouted: “I don’t care. Let me out right now or I’ll cut off your fingers like I cut these flowers in the forest this morning.” The widower, terrified, opened the door. The seller vanished and the young girl, instantly cured, thanked her father for the many yellow flowers.
People also tell this story:
A beautiful girl of sixteen was taking care of her melancholy widowed father. One night, the girl had an upsetting dream about searching for her mother in the forest until after dark. She came upon a swarm of fireflies in the tall, dry trees; as she watched the ones hovering among the low branches, all of a sudden she thought she saw her mother behind them, in the trees in the distance, but the fireflies’ movements meant she lost sight of her. The next morning, the girl didn’t want to make her father sadder by telling him her dream about not being able to see her mother again, so she kept it to herself. That night she began to have a serious problem with her eyes that no doctor could cure. There was a healer in the town, a short-statured man who liked a drink, often spat when he spoke, and was famed for his psychic powers. People knew that moonshine made from roots sharpened his powers, and that he ate mushrooms from the forest to refine them yet further. Time went by and still the healer wouldn’t see them and the doctors couldn’t find a cure for the girl’s problem, until one morning she awoke without leaving the dark night behind her. The father suffered in silence when he saw that his daughter had lost her sight. She wanted him to be as strong as a rock, but at the sound of his voice she knew he was broken. In her blindness, hearing became her guide, and one of those afternoons her father’s voice said, with gusto, interrupting her thoughts: “There’s a present I want to give you, my dear, but we must go to the next town. Tomorrow at the break of dawn we’ll cross the river on a raft.”
The girl did as her father said, and they sailed on a raft across the murky river that lay between the two towns. The winding, unsteady line of water put her on edge; she sensed the risk of falling, even submerged as she was in that darkness, as if she had always been in its midst, but she enjoyed the feeling of bobbing up and down, the unpredictable shape of their journey through the darkness, and the anxiety, she thought, of not knowing where they were going. She followed her father’s voice and they soon reached the guesthouse, where he told her to wait. The girl fell asleep in a chair, her head on a wooden table beside a still-warm hearth. Her arms were framing her face when the sound of a slamming door woke her: she saw a great many, too many yellow flowers, just like the swarm of fireflies in her dream that had kept her from seeing her mother again. As if despite her failure to see her mother again in the dream or at that moment, the blindness had been no more than a still, murky parenthesis. 
Born in Mexico City in 1981, Brenda Lozano is a fiction writer, essayist, and editor. She is the author of the novels Todo o nada (All or Nothing, 2009), which is being adapted for the screen, Cuaderno ideal (Loop, 2021), Brujas (Witches, 2022) and a book of short stories, Cómo piensan las piedras (How Stones Think, 2017). In 2015, she was recognized by the Hay Festival and the British Council as one of the leading Mexican authors under forty years of age, and she was selected by the Hay Festival in 2017 as one of the Bogotá39, a list of the most outstanding new authors from Latin America.
Annie McDermott is a British translator whose work includes Empty Words and The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero, Feebleminded by Ariana Harwicz (co-translated with Carolina Orloff), Loop by Brenda Lozano, Dead Girls by Selva Almada, and The Rooftop by Fernanda Trías. Her translations, reviews, and essays have appeared in Granta, The White Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote, the Times Literary Supplement, and LitHub, among others.
