Chikuatta |work| | Top 100 Extended |

It was also the only thing eleven-year-old Sofía’s grandmother said before she died.

“No,” Sofía said. “ Chikuatta. ”

“Your grandmother didn’t find this word in a dream,” her mother whispered. “She buried it. Forty years ago. When the loggers came.” chikuatta

She cracked the seal with a stone.

When Clara found out, she did not scream. She walked into the jungle alone for three days. When she returned, she carried this gourd. She said, “Chikuatta” —which, her mother now told Sofía, was not Yanesha or Spanish. It was also the only thing eleven-year-old Sofía’s

In the small, rain-soaked village of Alto Lima, the word chikuatta meant nothing. It was not in the old Spanish dictionaries left by the priests, nor in the surviving fragments of the native Yanesha tongue. It was a ghost of a syllable, a pebble that had no echo.

The old men with machetes and clouded eyes said no. The women washing clothes in the river said no. One toothless man selling oranges thought she was saying chicua , a local bird. “You want the bird that laughs?” he asked. ” “Your grandmother didn’t find this word in

Her mother shook her head, exhausted. “Nonsense. The fever talking.”