The Tale of
by: Valentino Incanto Profferi
©Valentino
Incanto Profferi 2009
The story told here is
utterly fictitious and any resemblance between the characters herein or the
events depicted and any true incident depicted by the Fairy tale is completely coincidental
and unintentional.
It was late in the night and it was
very dark at nearly midnight with no moon.
Marcella who was seventeenteen at the time was
dreaming about milking the goats in the little family heard. Her dream was only a memory recounted with a
greater clarity than there had been.
Before letting the goats out of the cramped barn built from palates, she
would set down her two pails and sit down on the stack of two cinder blocks
that held the door shut at night. For
each goat Marcella would sing a different song and it would come to her to be
milked.
In that dream that was not really a
dream, there would sometimes be a goat that was reluctant. Marcella would continue singing its song and
eventually the fairy Shepard would give it a nudging wallop on the rump. Marcella would see a bright little flash of
light by the reluctant goat like a star falling beside it. Following the encouragement from what was
actually a Dwarf Shepard that followed the grazing heard in the desert, the
goat came to her. Marcella had always
been especially careful with the tender or swollen teats of the reluctant
ones. More often than not, the loving
affections were enough to heal any developing blockage of infection as the magic
flowed through her hands into the disheartened goat.
A few times in her short life Marcella
had clearly seen the Fairies about the farm on the communal land of her village
in
Those hands had also taught her many
more practical and structural things as well, like making tortillas, cleaning
the beans and rice, tending to wounds, as well as other magic. Marcella’s mother, Patricia, had been sitting
inside the little cave of reddish earth for the last several hours with her
sleeping child, unable to sleep herself.
She and Marcella had been waiting with Pedro, the father, since the
sunrise, hiding within the earth itself.
The two day journey that had brought
them near the northern border had been pleasurable. An old man in a pickup had passed them on the
highway and offered to take them all the way across Baja California Sur and
through
The old man said he would be happy to
go the long way and drive around the gulf instead of taking the boat. Since they could not all sit inside, Pedro
had Patricia and Marcella sit with him while he had ridden in the pickup
bed. During the drive they told him
about how Marcella’s great uncle had immigrated to the
Finally, he had sent them a letter
asking them to come up. As they had been
unable to obtain the legal documents to gain passage into the
Pedro had been up most of the day and
most of the night keeping watch. It was
past midnight and there had been no sign of activity by any patrol along the
border for some hours. Pedro crouched
down in his old brown canvas carpentry clothes to tell them that they should
go. Marcella and her mother stood up and
waited for Pedro to climb out. Kneeling
by the opening, Pedro helped Patricia out of the fissure onto the ground and
then pulled Marcella up by a hand. They
drank the last of their water, had a piece of bread each, and started walking
There was no fence along the desert and
they crossed the border after walking a couple hundred meters. They saw and heard nothing more than the dark
earth, cacti, wind, and the scuttling of little creatures all around them for
some time. They were nearly a mile in
the border of the
They had walked down an embankment of
earth into what was a dry creek bed when Marcella heard the roar of an engine
start up. Startled, Marcella threw
herself down into the little ditch. Her
parents did not hear either the motor or the warning Marcella had called to
them in the sudden gust of wind that threw dust over Marcella’s back. An instant later there was gunfire and a deep
voice amplified by a megaphone telling them to surrender. She heard her parents run and lost the sound
of their feet beneath the squeal and squeak of the pursuing machine. Marcella did not move while she listened to
the chaotic chase.
Some moments later Marcella felt the
personnel carrier pass over her in the little ditch at the bottom of the
creek. This followed more gunfire after
which the vehicle stopped some distance away.
Marcella heard her mother scream, and then there was silence. She did not dare move and therefore remained
undiscovered and ignorant of what had happened.
For a long time she lay listening to the voices that were too far away
to make out what they were saying. The
door was then shut and the vehicle drove about for some time looking for more
people, but it did not find Marcella.
Eventually it left and Marcella was alone in the dark night in the
desert south of
What Marcella could not know and did
not discover for nearly five years was that her father, Pedro, had been shot
and died of multiple bullet wounds. Her
mother, Patricia, was taken to be interrogated.
While under scrutiny, Patricia was raped by a group of border control
officers which eventually resulted in Marcella having a little bastard
brother. After being raped repeatedly
over a couple of days by the
Nearly an hour later, Marcella stood up
slowly with caution. She scanned the
horizon about her and listened for any mechanical sounds. There was no activity though, and Marcella
began to walk northward toward the road that her uncle had mentioned in the
letter. It was supposed to be only a few
miles away which meant that Marcella would reach it before sunrise. When she could already hear the noise of
traffic on