I am getting married tonight. 

It is a quiet affair, and the only people in the church – in the kitchen – are my mother and I. The anticipating groom the size of my child eye, maize dough between my mother’s index and thumb. As instructed by a nod, I let cold water anoint my fingers and press into the mound. The priest, a bouquet of blue tongues licking off my saliva from the scarred skillet. My mother clucks her tongue to drive my eyes away. 

“Since you will never pay attention, allow me to mold for you,” 

She leans forward and folds him in her wet palms. Into himself, into himself, into himself. 

“To make a tortilla, you must imagine this is the clay from which God molded Adam, and create,” Drops of water from the hands pierce through the pores, through his mouth, through his eyes, and through the barrels of his ears. There is not a breath, nor a wrinkle, nor a crack, that breaks his skin, nor hot steam that bursts through his mouth; he is perfectly silent, as good masa must be. Even when her ring finger presses down, leaving an indent on his perfect face, he dares not yelp in pain. Fingers kissed in red-polish veil me over my immature lashes and tighten the white mandil around my waist. I can feel squealing ribs under the apron and my throat pulsating with bile all the same, knowing this suitor will have the same face hardened by despot and sunspot as every other boy born, and every man crafted by mothers. 

“Lay the wax paper on the press.” 

Swiveling her palms, she molds him to the maternal aspect of perfect. The white, blank, expression-less slate – mostly divorced from the store-bought, finely-milled powder he came to her as, which, in itself, was completely divorced from the mosaic of white, gold, and brown kernels behind his hay-silk. It is here I notice his striking resemblance to my father, himself a punctured tortilla so brittle that his skin has snapped off in scraps. I am so fortunate. My mother was married on an expired comal. Her own mother could not afford the fine selections of store-bought maseca and filtered water available to us now. She harvested my father in sand and yellowed him with hellfire, only introducing him once he was already blessed with brown river water and hydrated lime to make him digestible. 

“The wax paper, niña!” 

As she pulls me down the aisle of the basilica with her gaze, I shakily lift the wooden tortillero’s hand, then dress such a sepulcher in a transparent cloak. She takes her finger from his nape to his lower back and lays him flat in all his naked glory. I imagine that he betrays a look from below and that he imagines my plush, similar perfection of my slate from behind the white wall. For a

moment, there is a brief chance to save him and melt the wafer on my tongue, but he had already been rubbed, treated and cured – the wax paper had already been stained with his shape. I rip another wax sheet and blanket him in the groom’s wool. I slip my hand into the sepulcher’s, shut my eyes, and decline the handle, before my mother cloaks my fingertips in her palms. 

“¡Con huevos!” 

With the bells comes the howling of the want-on priestly flame, hungry to melt our blank slates into one. The comal laps up shreds, crumbs, and dust from the years prior as the appetizers. Even I can admire the groom’s pristine whey as I lift him from the sepulcher, although every man before him seemed paved of the same sand. My lips betray me, salivating at the thought of the consummation between them and his bubbled skin. My mother chokes her sobs in between yellow-toothed smiles of her eyes and lips. I place my hand in his for mere seconds on the comal, bruising bubbling wrinkles through every one of our vows. The veil, itself, singing brown between the lace braids. My mother fingers the bow spining the apron, then brushes the soot off her palms onto her own. A tortilla can only lay so much on the comal before he consummates black with the pan, and I watch as my groom begins to shudder. The commitment has come, in a breathing sack of cornstarch, water, and oil. 

Before me, the tortilla balloons – a reminder of the rotund beauty, unwrinkled by heat and time – and I know then that this chosen and manufactured groom has accepted the ashes of this romance. A Mexican superstition, a Mexican legacy, a Mexican future, all in a tortilla I could not mold for myself without my mother’s insistence. My mother’s expectant eyes burn into my nape. This woman can harvest you, bathe you in lime, water, and salt, roll the length between her palms and warm you long enough for her to swallow, a promise to be made between the whispers of my fingertips and his spine before I tip him on his back without the safety-net of maternal skin. We are the new creators; I was crafted from my father’s rib and molded to be the blackened bride. I lay an unscathed index now to the black dirt-plain and I consummate, folding my white into the stiff, indigestible tortilla.