Jaguar in the Lemon Tree
There was a jaguar in the lemon tree.
There wasn’t a jaguar in the lemon tree yesterday. At least, not that Emmy could remember. It is a possibility she could have missed it. Walked by, minding her business, and didn’t even glance in the lemon tree’s direction. There’s a chance the jaguar had been around longer than her.
The jaguar blinked.
She blinked back.
She remembered reading an article on what to do when you encounter a variety of wild animals. With black bears you back away slowly, with bobcats, you are supposed to yell and be loud to scare it off, and (if she remembered correctly) you’re supposed to keep eye contact with jaguars as you back away slowly to safety.
Unfortunately, her feet were refusing to move.
So she just kept eye contact with it.
She may starve here, or fall asleep and get maimed, but somehow her brain refused to produce epinephrine. She felt no sense of fear, dread, or anxiety. In fact, she felt rather at ease with the whole situation.
“Why do you just stand there?”
It talked.
It talked and… she didn’t feel that alarmed about it. It sounded masculine, but how could she truly be sure?
“Well, what else am I supposed to do?”
It chuffed, along the lines of a laugh. “Perhaps get an adult?”
She risked a glance to her left, towards her house. She did not move her head, but she used her eyes to look at the yellow exterior where three adults resided.
She moved her gaze back to the jaguar. “I didn’t want to run off and scare you.”
“You seem scared,” it challenged. “Even if your body doesn’t think it is.”
The jaguar had a point. Her body didn’t want to move. However, she could not get a firm grasp on her mind. It felt as if her thoughts were moving so fast she couldn’t even register she was having thoughts.
It would be rational to get her feet moving, or at least yell to someone that there was a jaguar. However, a part of her mind told her to not do anything rash; a talking jaguar is just as dangerous as a mute one.
“I am not scared,” she said, more trying to convince herself than it. “This is just an unusual situation.”
The jaguar lifted its head and tilted it to the side, like a confused dog. “The word ‘unusual’ seems tame in comparison to what’s going on here.”
“Is this situation unusual to you too?”
It stared at her, its eyes widening just slightly. Why they did that she wasn’t sure, it could have been from surprise, it could have been from amusement. Jaguars didn’t have the right facial structure to be all that expressive.
“What do you think?” She wasn’t sure how to respond, and after a beat of silence, it seemed to recognize that she was floundering. It sighed before resting its head on its paws. “I am just trying to occupy my time. It seems that there is nothing else to this land beyond these lemon trees and that home I assume you and your family reside in.”
“You assume correctly, my parents and grandfather are in there.”
“Just your grandfather? What about your grandmother?”
Emmy felt her rigid posture melt into a slouch but kept her head straight as she continued to look at the jaguar. “She passed. A few weeks ago.”
The jaguar tilted its head, one of its ears flicking as well. “May I ask how?”
She pursed her lips, truly unsure if she should even confide in this jaguar that may as well be a hallucination of some kind. However, what else was she to do? “She had an undiagnosed heart problem and died in her sleep.”
The jaguar hummed. “A peaceful death. If she were of Aztec descent she would go to Mictlan.”
Emmy scrunched her nose up. “She was white, actually. She’s originally from Wisconsin. We’re preparing to go visit her sister up there for a week.”
“And your grandfather?”
It took her a moment to understand what it was asking. “He is of Aztec descent. So is my mother’s side of the family.”
“So your grandmother married into an Aztec family, so she’d still be treated as such.”
Emmy, despite being three-fourths Aztec, did not know much about the culture itself. She spoke Spanish and celebrated Día de los Muertos, but she did not participate in the Danza Azteca like her mother or speak Nahuatl like her grandfather. She never really thought about those connections before her grandmother passed. Of course her picture would be added to the ofrenda in the coming celebration, but she wasn’t sure where her grandmother was going per se.
“How can you be so sure?” she decided to ask after a moment.
“How can you not?” it challenged. “You do not seem confident in your own history.”
“Well… I’m not,” she answered honestly.
“How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
The jaguar picked its head back up and shrugged its shoulders like it was stretching. “Back when the Aztecs ruled mightily, you would be required to attend a specialized school to learn weaving and medicine. That is, if you were unlucky enough to avoid being sacrificed to the Gods.”
Her eyes widened. “Did you say ‘unluckly’ enough to avoid being sacrificed? How would that be unlucky?”
The jaguar chuckled, actually chuckled like a human. “It was an honor to be sacrificed to the Gods back then. Blood is how the world ran, literally. Children would also be sacrificed to the rain God Tlaloc, to avoid droughts and whatnot.” Then the jaguar smiled like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. “He sounds like a well respected God, but if you ask his wife, she’ll tell you there’s another who knows how to deal with things.”
“What do you mean by that?”
The jaguar chuffed, still smiling. “You are too young, I will spare you the details.” It lowered its head back to its paws. “Either way, your grandmother is probably going through the nine trials to rest in Mictlan. However Mictlantecuhtli has gotten more relaxed in his rulings, so she probably just has to cross a few rivers in comparison.”
“You know a lot about the Aztecs.” She chuckled to herself. “You speak as if you lived through it too.”
“Maybe I have. How would you determine if I’m lying or not?”
“I’m still not totally sure this is genuinely happening, so I suppose I couldn’t prove anything,” she said, and there was a muffled alarm blaring in the back of her skull. She wasn’t sure if this was actually happening, and a talking jaguar was legitimately frightening; she should feel more anxious about this, but the way the jaguar spoke made it feel like she was talking to someone familiar. “Do you have a name?”
The jaguar picked its head up, seemingly surprised by the question. “You wish to know my name?”
She nodded. “I’ll tell you mine in return.”
Silence rang out between them for a long while. If the jaguar’s tail were not flicking lazily she would assume that time itself had frozen. “Tell me your name first,” it finally said.
She blinked, unsure if she should go through with it, but she had already come this far. “My name is Emmeline, but everyone calls me Emmy. I was named after my grandmother, actually.”
“That’s good then. The Aztecs liked having a namesake in the family as well.”
“Is your name a namesake as well?”
It smiled, but, due to the lack of actual lips, it appeared like it was warning her instead. “No, my name is as original as it comes.”
She frowned. “You’re not going to tell me your name, are you?”
“You truly are a clever girl.”
“Well, I don’t see how that’s fair.”
It chuffed out a laugh again, sounding even more human than the previous one. “You expected me to be fair? Not many things are fair in life.”
“Like life itself.” Her father was always a fan of saying the phrase ‘Life isn’t fair’ whenever Emmy complained about something.
“That’s incorrect,” it stated blandly. “Life is incredibly fair. Sure, you are hassled with mundane tasks like work and politics, but where else would you go to witness the ocean? Sunrises? Sunsets? Even the simplest flower growing from a crack in the sidewalk can be considered worth it in the end.”
“But it can be laced with miseries and death,” Emmy lightly argued.
“Miseries, yes. But what’s unfair about death? Many cultures believe in a life after death. Just because you cannot physically interact with a deceased person anymore doesn’t mean they aren’t still there. Every time you see a star, or a hummingbird, or even feel the wind in your face, is that not them trying to connect with you the only way they can?”
Like her connection to her culture, Emmy had never really given much thought to death. Her mother’s parents passed away when she was still too young to remember them, and they still had her childhood cat Mylo, who was old but still prowling about.
However, every time a friend of hers went through a death they would be devastated. She was devastated when her dear grandmother passed. Her father’s parents had moved in with them when Emmy was eight due to lack of funds. They were the ones to move their own lemon grove from outside of Austin to their small town of Carrizo Springs. When everyone else was busy with work, her grandmother would make it her goal to keep Emmy as entertained as possible.
She missed her dearly, and her death was so sudden.
However, the jaguar made a good point; there was a chance she could be enjoying a form of paradise, sending sweet-smelling winds to Emmy to cheer her up on the rougher days. She always said she would ride the wind to travel if she ever got the chance. Was death the chance she was looking for?
“Death will forever be a part of life. However, how you deal with death is solely your choice,” the jaguar continued.
“So I shouldn’t be sad?”
The jaguar tilted its head. “When did I say that?”
“Emmy!” her mother’s voice called from the house, echoing through the lemon grove.
Before she could think better of it, her head snapped towards the yellow house peeking through the greens and browns of the lemon trees. “Coming!” she called out, her throat suddenly tight and slick, threatening to make her cry. Why did she suddenly feel the need to cry so much? Did what the jaguar said affect her that much? She couldn’t even understand what it was trying to say in the first place.
The jaguar.
She whipped her head back towards the lemon tree in front of her, but no more jaguar was lounging in it. She turned in a full circle, trying to catch a glimpse of its body slinking away past the trees, but she saw nothing of the sort. How did she not hear anything? Surely she would have heard it at least jump out of the tree?
She rubbed at her eyes, now damp with the oncoming tears, and slapped her cheeks a little bit. Did she make that all up? It felt so real…
“Emmy!” her mother’s voice called out again. She was taking too long.
She turned on her heel and made her way out of the lemon grove, back to the small gravel path that led to her back porch where her mother stood waiting. She didn’t look mad, just concerned.
“Have you been crying, mi tesoro?” she asked once she got a clear look at Emmy’s face.
Emmy wiped her face with her hand before her mother stepped closer to cup her face. “I’m alright. I was just thinking about Grandma.”
Her mother frowned. “I bet, but once we get to Wisconsin to see your great-aunt we should be able to find peace for your grandmother.”
Emmy grabbed her mother’s hands and gently removed them from her face. “Do you think Grandma is in Mictlan?”
Her mother looked surprised; maybe she had made up that whole interaction with the jaguar. Maybe she had made up every single word it used and she just made her mother more concerned with her made-up Aztec afterlife terminology.
Instead, her mother surprised her right back. “How did you know about Mictlan? Did your grandfather tell you about it?”
She stared at her mother for a moment before smiling. “I’ve been doing some digging on Aztec culture. Do you think I could start learning more about it?”
Her mother smiled. “Of course. We’d be happy to properly teach you. We should have taught you a long time ago, but we were so worried about how you’d do amongst your white classmates… What a silly belief to have though, now that I look back on it.” She stood up straight and dropped one hand so they were holding hands. “Now come on, we have to finish packing for our flight tomorrow.”
As her mother led her back into the house to continue packing, Emmy looked back over her shoulder to the lemon grove. Their neighbor was coming over tomorrow to house-sit and take care of Mylo. However, Emmy doubted she would wander that far into the lemon grove.
When she got back, she’d look for that jaguar again.
Madelyn Hennig is a senior at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington studying creative writing. Originally from Vermont, she incorporates nature and space into her work as often as she can, as well as the relationships humans have with them. When not writing poetry or fiction, she can be found outside with her dog, at the gym, or playing video games.
