The short story contest finalist “Una Ofrenda: For I Too Am a Holy Child” is author Julian Toscano’s “offering to the trans ancestors who have bravely lived their lives as authentically as possible despite existing in spaces that deny our humanity.” The story features a young narrator attempting, with the help of local healer Gonzalitx, to undertake a spiritual journey inward, but bumping up against an all-too-common obstacle: Family.
My second spirit, mi nagual, stalked me through the obsidian mirror last night. The mirror, smoked volcanic glass cut in a symmetrical circle seven inches in diameter, rested on the altar within the stone chimney inside of Gonzalitx’s dark kitchen. Earlier, Gonzalitx had instructed me on how to wait in silence, cross-legged, staring into the whirlpool of polished stone until a reflection appeared. When my reflection did appear, it did not mirror the one that I had become accustomed to seeing in everyday mirrors or in any pools or puddles of water in the town of Las Flores. My brown eyes transformed into silver ripples of an ocean wave undulating beneath ripe moonlight. In one of the clothbound books that Gonzalitx had also instructed me to read as preparation for my initiation, I had read that ancient sorcerers in Mexico forged blades from obsidian in order to cut through the chest of a sacrificial offering to remove a human heart: the ultimate offering to the god Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca served as lord of the sorcerers, the underworld, and of the smoking mirror: obsidian. Other sorcerers, like Gonzalitx, used the mirror as a portal that gifted them the ability to shape-shift into both terrestrial and divine forms.
Despite the panic I felt as I looked at the entity in the obsidian mirror, I broke eye contact and lowered my gaze to see if my second spirit also possessed a body. It did. While I wore a faded black crew neck T-shirt, my second spirit wore no shirt. My eyes focused on a thick, jagged scar that cut into the torso’s heartspace that delineated both pectoral muscles. My second spirit smirked, almost enthralled by my discovery. What is my offering? I touched my hands to that same space on my own chest, enchanted, as my second spirit disappeared in the mirror.
