Anaranjado

To eat an orange is not to prophesy, but years before my guelita sucked an orange section as her last meal on earth—sweet sacrament—my wife ate three, four, five oranges daily, slicing the skin from pole to pole and pulling back the peel as if unfolding a love letter. She would sometimes say, there should be so much more.

Of how terrible orange is, and life, I want to say, because I am remembering when my guelita was young and ate the oranges her mother offered to the Virgin, and how Spanish has two words for orange, so that to say the setting sun looks anaranjado is to say someone has oranged the sky, dressing it with fire to meet the night, like my sisters and mother and tía bathed and dressed Guelita each day, combed her white hair, rubbed lotion in each wrinkled joint, to make the end burn cleanly, sweetly.