Stingray
“Resplendent Reincarnation of Meanings” by Irina Greciuhina
I don't think I have an actual memory of this beyond what I’ve recreated from my mom’s story, but I treasure the synthetic memory nonetheless. The anecdote itself is simple: My mom shakes me awake in the middle of the night, wraps my sleep-easy body in a thick blanket and brings me to the balcony to look at the sky. There she sits me on her lap and together we watch the stars. Lima, the city where we live, has a sky thick with pollution, as starless at night as it is during the day. But Colán is far from any city—its virgin sky translucent and bright, the stars almost neon. In Peru we call the three stars that make up Orion’s Belt the Three Marias and as a child I thought they were named after me. My mother points them out to me. I can imagine this moment clearly. I look out at the infinite sky and the infinite sea below it, and grip my mom’s hand tightly beneath the blanket.
The beach community of Colán was founded on February 6, 1926 by my great grandfather Ernesto Garcia Wicks, and his brother, Fernando Garcia Wicks. They both lived in the city of Piura, capital of the Piura region, where the summer temperatures reached upwards of ninety degrees. They traveled towards the seaside to look for a place to spend those hot summers. They used to summer in Paita, a port town that neighbors Colán, but the growing fishing business had made it too populous for the brothers’ liking. Looking for a place close to Paita, they found an unclaimed beachy stretch next to a town named San Lucas de Colán, where they plowed a road and built the first two houses. They named this beach La Esmeralda de Colán—Colán’s Emerald—though everyone I know just calls it Colán. Over time, 150 other families from Piura would join them in building their own beach houses. Everybody knew each other, since Piura is a small region, and the capital is even smaller. My mom described them all as family, despite having no blood relation.
This is how I remember Colán: Most of the houses that line the beach are old and wooden, painted in various shades of blue. All of them are built on raised stilts, over six feet above the ground. Underneath the stilts, between the bottom of the planks that make up the terraces and the perpetually wet sand, exists an entire ecosystem. Barnacles grow like ivy around the wooden posts and hundreds of crabs scurry in and out of holes in the sand. This is where it smells strongest of the ocean, stronger than in the water itself. The houses are made to withstand the tide, which will recede so far it will leave a dozen meters of beach between the house and the water, only to rise up and lap at the houses’ patio floors a few hours later. When the tide is high enough, you can dip your feet in the ocean from the balcony.
The water is not clear, but a deep navy-green, pale yellow where the seafoam washes onto the shore. The current is strong. I was taught since I was young not to swim against it. Often you’ll enter the ocean right in front of your house and find yourself floating a hundred meters away a few minutes later. When I’m there, in summer, the sun burns. And in that sunlight, the sand is lit up with specks of gold. Even if it’s just pyrite, fool’s gold, it always seemed strange to me that no one has tried to collect it. You can see one end of the beach from the other, and if you time it right with the tide, you can walk all the way across. As you near one end of the beach you see a small handful of hotels, and beyond them the sand dunes where you can find tiny fossils of sea bugs calcified millennia ago. I think I once walked to the opposite end of the beach, but all I remember is the painful sunburn across my shoulders from the long walk back in the afternoon sun.
In the morning fishermen will throw their nets, then walk across the beach to sell their haul in the afternoon. Every day we eat fresh fish for lunch. Kids spend their days on the shore, digging for sea bugs or tossing balls of wet sand at tiny beach crabs. More than once I’ve seen dead dolphins, in various states of decay, washed up on the shore. Behind the first row of houses is a road, its orange dirt thin and loose, and the passing quad bikes and rickshaws constantly kick up massive clouds of it, giving the summer air a warm, opaque quality. On the other side of the road there’s an endless row of restaurants and four convenience stores. Those four stores are the only ones that you can get to without a car, but you can buy anything, from beer to yogurt to little butterfly hair clips or a water toy gun. They all used to be one store, but it was split into four when the owner died and her daughters couldn’t agree on how to run the business. Behind those is the town where year-round residents live. Up a long road into a reddish hill, a small church sits on the crest.
This church, which overlooks the town, is the San Lucas church, was built in 1535, making it the oldest Catholic church in South America. My mom was baptized here. When she was young, my mom would go to Colán from December to April, the hottest months of the year. All the mothers would carpool from Colán to the school in Piura, where classes ended early every day due to the heat. She says they never wore shoes, and that their feet would grow thick and calloused over the hot sand, making it difficult to fit them into their school Mary Janes.
When I asked her why this beach meant so much to her, she said it was the beach’s uniquely simple nature. How you didn’t need to wear a fancy dress to go have dinner at someone’s house. How you would wear the same bathing suit year after year, until it fell apart at the seams. This is how she described it to me: There was no electricity. Her grandfather bought a huge generator he kept in the back of their house, which needed three people at once to operate it. They had power from noon to 1 p.m. and from 7 p.m. to midnight. Each house had a single, bare lightbulb propped on its roof. When my mother saw the long string of bulbs light up every afternoon, she knew it was time to come home for lunch; when they lit up at night, it was time for dinner.
Back then, the ocean would recede so far during the low tide, the shore would become massive, so wide cars could drive between the houses and the water. Every Sunday, the ice cream man would drive up and down the beach in his truck, playing a tune to alert the kids. The stretch of beach was large enough to build what my mom refers to as “pools.” These were deep trenches dug into the sand and fenced with tall pieces of wood lined with a fine, strong mesh net. There, the kids could be in the water without worrying about the stingrays; my great-grandfather and his brother realized, soon after founding the beach, that the ocean was infested with them. My great-grandfather built a pool in front of his house as a remedy. Three more identical pools were built along the beach—one to the north, one to the south, and later, one in front of my grandfather’s house. For as long as those pools existed, my mom doesn’t remember anyone ever being stung by a ray. Now, the ocean has eaten too much of the shore.
***
El Niño—“The Boy”—is a climate phenomenon which affects the Pacific Ocean. Originally named El Niño de Navidad (“The Christmas Boy”) by Peruvian fishermen, due to its tendency to occur during Christmas time, El Niño causes tropical warm water from north of the equator to be carried south towards the Peruvian coast. This does not happen every year, but when it does, its effects range from mild to catastrophic. El Niño causes heavy rainfall in what is usually a desert country, leading to floods and landslides. Piura, a northern coastal district, is particularly vulnerable to this, for its infrastructure is not built to withstand any rain. Moreover, El Niño will cause the ocean to become warmer, which in turn draws more stingrays to it. Its sister phenomenon, La Niña, is responsible for cooling the water El Niño heats up, but is rarely enough to mitigate its effect. The ocean gets hotter with the passing years. I hypothesize that multiple El Niño events since my mom’s childhood in Colán are what have led to an increase in stingrays and subsequent stings.
***
Because the ocean in Colán is so infested with stingrays, many people, including my father, refuse to go in. Those who do, know to follow the rules. We repeat them to each other like a chant: Don’t go in the ocean when the tide is low. When the tide is high, enter slowly, dragging your feet across the sand, so the rays spook and scurry. As soon as the water is up to your thighs, dive and float. Don’t touch the sand again. Some people wear water shoes to try to avoid the rays, but it is usually in vain since they can sting up to the ankle. When I was young my mom would get huge tractor tires inflated like balloons, and we’d float atop them in the ocean. Getting out of the water was the most frightening, when you had no choice but to touch the sand, once you’d swum as close as you could to the shore with only a few inches of water between your body and the sand, scared that you would somehow touch a ray and send its loaded stinger flying into the soft skin of your belly.
***
My mom was first stung by a ray a few days after turning fifty years old. I was ten, and I guess I was deemed too young to keep her company as the wound was treated. The pain starts at your foot, where the sting usually takes place, then goes to your knee. Like any venom, it climbs up your body, looking for your heart. I remember my mom’s screams, which I could hear even as she lay in a bed in the furthest room on the second floor of the house, while I sat outside playing tic-tac-toe with myself on the sand. I remember a great-aunt coming over with a device meant to suction the venom from the sting. I also remember her almost giving my mom a deadly injection of paracetamol, not knowing she was allergic to the medication. The second sting happened a year later, a few days after my mom’s fifty-first birthday. I was in Europe with my father.
***
Rays are fish, closely related to sharks. Most live near the sea floor. Only the largest of them, like the manta rays, live in the open ocean. I’ve seen manta rays at aquariums a few times. I remember seeing one as a child in the Atlantis Hotel in a dark, underground glass corridor. It swam slowly up to the glass until it covered all of it, like curtains being drawn. I don’t think I realized that something could be that much bigger than me. Later I would learn that manta rays are harmless—they have no stingers, or even teeth. I’d already suffered the worst thing one could do: scare me. Manta rays have to swim to survive; this is how oxygen gets pushed through their gills. Even a moment of rest would cause them to asphyxiate. I grew to like manta rays, with their human-like ability to drown.
Stingrays are different. They favor warm, shallow water, and are mostly found in rivers. They like to be close to the seafloor. Their mouths and noses are on their bellies, so if you look at their undersides, they seem to be smiling. They hunt using electrical sensors, eating sea bugs, and anything else smaller than themselves that lives on the floor. When you see them out of water, their skin has a thick, oily sheen, like a jellyfish’s.
I’ve never seen a living stingray in Colán—the closest I’ve come is seeing them hanging off the side of a fisherman’s ship as he returned to shore, their dead bodies still flinching sharply. The water in Colán is too opaque to see through, and even if you could, stingrays are colored for camouflage, green and brown like a pair of cargo pants. All I’ve seen is the stingers they’ve left behind on my mother. The first was tiny, like the back of an earring, the second the size of a toothpick. The third one either didn’t leave the stinger in, or my mother shook it loose in her frenzied swim to the shore.
***
I remember the third sting the most clearly. I wasn’t in the ocean when it happened. By the time I realized something was wrong I was in the middle of things. Three of my aunts were rushing towards me, half carrying my limping mother. Saltwater dripped from their bodies. They had not yet taken off their lifejackets, and I went to grab my mom as one of them ran to get the car. My mom had gained weight over quarantine, making it hard to walk with her on my shoulder. My cotton sundress soaked up the water from her bathing suit. The backyard’s stone floor was hot and pebbled. I had not thought to grab my flip flops. We shuffled slowly across the house’s endless backyard and into the backseat of the car. There was no hospital nearby.
We drove to the nearest pharmacy. Usually, when someone is stung by a ray, you would pay a fisherman to hurry to your house, tie a piece of string around your leg, and suck the venom out of your wound. My mother had been through this twice already; I imagine she couldn’t fathom the pain of a third time. They say each sting hurts more than the last.
The inside of the pharmacy was small and dark; all the light came through the small entrance and a beverage cooler with a glass door. The only person working there was a young girl, incredibly pregnant. A long cot sat against the left wall, tucked behind the cooler. My mother lay down on it. I remember that she was sweating and crying, her grip on my hand punishing, but the memory is hazy.
The young girl begins treating the sting. She fills a rectangular plastic container with hot water and guides my mom’s foot into it. Every time the water begins to cool she adds another kettle of boiling water. She puts herbs in the water: oregano, rosemary, thyme. She makes soup out of my mom’s bleeding foot. Then she massages the foot and slowly presses the tainted blood out, drop by drop, turning the water red. My mom’s foot is swollen to the size of a papaya, the skin stretched and shiny. I can’t bring myself to look at the cut the sting left behind. She keeps telling me how much it hurts, like she needs me to believe her. I do.
In less than a week she is back in the ocean. It’s something I can’t completely understand. It’s one thing to swim despite the fear of being stung, when it’s just a possibility. I hurry across blinking red lights, fly on planes, and eat steak tartare, reasoning with myself that I can’t avoid every possible danger. But my mother has felt the needle-pinch of a stingray’s tail three times already and she happily risks a fourth. Can the water really be so sweet?
I’ve heard people say that the body can’t remember pain. This feels true to me. A few years ago I passed a kidney stone; people, men mostly, say it’s a process more painful than childbirth, although I don’t remember it being that bad. Still, even if I don’t remember the feeling of pain, I remember the circumstance of it. I remember lying on the cold bathroom floor for two hours before finally realizing that I had to go to a hospital. I begged my nurse for more painkillers, shivering and sweating on the narrow hospital bed, my body unsure of what to do. Even if you can’t remember how something hurt, you surely remember that it did.
I ask my mom about this. She says: To go to Colán and not get in the water is a sin. I arrive at the beach and I forget that I was ever stung by a ray. She then compares it, in passing, to childbirth. In Spanish, the word stingray is feminine: la raya.
***
Of course, my mom isn’t the only person who’s gotten stung by a ray in Colán. Once, it was my cousin, who hopped one-legged out of the ocean and refused help reaching his truck even as he left a bloody trail behind him. Once my mom’s friend, who’d come to the beach for my mom’s birthday, was stung while I was in the water with her. It took four people to get her to shore. The ray sunk its stinger between her toes, and they curled into each other like fingers crossed for luck. One of my many aunts got stung by a ray on her left buttcheek, so severely she needed stitches. Some said it was actually an eel bite, from swimming too close to the rocky pier. Either way, it was the ocean taking back.
My mom’s friend stayed in Colán for almost two weeks after the sting, and she never went in the water again. My cousin went in within days. My aunt took a little longer, but the next summer saw her back in the ocean, the crescent scar barely peeking out from below her bikini bottom. This makes sense to me. My cousin and aunt grew up with these waters, my mom’s friend did not. I’m sure this is what makes it possible for them to get back in.
***
I have complicated feelings when it comes to the sea. I enjoy the physical sensation of it—weightlessness, salt in your mouth, the gentle lull of a quiet tide, the shock of cold water on your sun-cooked skin. I’m also scared of the ocean. Simply looking at a picture of light blue water suddenly deepening and turning navy is enough to make me feel sick. I have nightmares about killer whales. I’ve often thought I have thalassophobia—the fear of deep bodies of water. Sometimes I’ll be floating in the ocean only to remember that I don’t know what is between me and the seafloor, or how far down it is. I’ll want to sink down until my feet touch the sand, but I’ll be too scared to find out it’s beyond my reach. If a piece of seaweed touches my leg, or the water shifts in temperature, I’ll feel a cold and immediate pain in my stomach. Even in the glassy waters of the Bahamas I felt sudden pangs of fear, thinking it didn’t matter that I could see through the water if there was something behind me, or out of sight. Fearing the ocean isn’t new to me. I understand better than most that the sea offers endless opportunities for danger.
Still, I love the ocean. I look forward to floating in it. Danger is something we spend our lives getting used to and learning to ignore. That feeling of weightlessness is enough to hold off the fear. Most of the time I can convince myself that, no, I wasn’t going to be attacked by a shark in the shallow water, but sometimes I would look out into Colán’s green waters and feel an overwhelming sense of dread. Even walking along the shore this feeling wouldn’t leave me. I’d step on the wet sand and wonder what might be underneath, worry that the tide might leap out and grab my ankle, pulling me in. At night I would fall asleep listening to the ocean, loud as the subway, feeling comforted and intimidated in equal parts. This ocean is unlike any other. The thick water that you can’t see through. The stingrays. The ever changing tide. The way it seems to pull people back to it, no matter what it puts them through.
***
In 1983, the most devastating episode of El Niño recorded in history occurred. Peru suffered the most brutal effects. It saw eleven feet of rain in areas where six inches was the usual and rivers carried a thousand times more water than they should. Along the coast of Colán, the temperature of the water rose over seven degrees in less than twenty-four hours. The rainfall and increased temperatures caused the tides to change. The water rose so high the stilts the houses were built on could no longer protect them, and the lassoing waves broke them down.
By 1983 my mom and her family had moved to Venezuela. My great-grandfather was long dead. They were all well out of the ocean’s reach. However, thinking of the water swallowing the house they once lived in is hard. Usually I think of the ocean as a danger one can choose to engage with, but this reminds me that sometimes the ocean chooses for you.
Every time I visit Colán, I go past the ruins of the old house. Despite having seen it many times before, it always surprises me, making my stomach curl into itself with dread.
Forty years after the disaster, the house sits on the beach like a half decayed corpse. My mom tells me it’s too expensive to dig out its base, which is rooted deep in the ground. Colán is not a luxury beach, so the investment would not be worth it to anyone. Still, it seems strange that the ruins have just been left there. Walking past them feels like visiting a graveyard and I have trouble reconciling the stories of my mother’s childhood in this house with the debris I see in front of me.
***
I came back to Peru after graduating college, in May of 2019. Four years away from home had changed me as a person, shortened the list of things I was willing to put up with. It took about ten monthsfor my father to suggest I leave his house. My mom welcomed me into hers. It was our first time living together in over a decade.
She turned her office into a bedroom for me. It had no door, only a short half wall, and you could see into it from the hallway but I didn’t mind. Cohabitation is compromise. Then the pandemic began, and we spent the next year exclusively in each other’s company. We learned to share a space—to have coffee together in the mornings, to play gin rummy at night. We both found distractions. My mom started drinking, I downloaded Tinder. We got a dog. We forgave each other for things that happened a dozen years ago and only had two bad fights. We weren’t unhappy.
We went to Colán together in May of 2021, after spending a year in her small apartment, mending our fragile relationship. I had taken the pandemic well; the isolation had had little effect on me. However, in late April, a switch suddenly flipped, and I’d told my mom that any more time in the apartment would drive me crazy.
We spent a month in Colán. Compared to the apartment we’d lived in for the past year, the beach was infinite. I worried briefly that the careful balance my mother and I had constructed would shift without the apartment’s walls around us, but my worries were unfounded.
Under the May sun, our relationship bloomed. Together we took long walks across the beach, looking at our footsteps in the golden sand. We ate fresh grilled fish and drank icy vodka tonics that melted in the heat. We swam in the ocean until the sun set, making everything yellow-orange-red. Even when my mom was stung by a ray, it didn’t sour the trip. Days later we were back in the ocean. She said the salty water soothed her foot.
***
Letting hot milk sit for too long, playing with the thick layer of scum that formed on the surface. Finding a wallet half buried in the sand during a long walk, keeping the money in it, throwing the wallet into the ocean. Walking into my grandmother’s room without knocking and seeing her sitting shirtless on her bed, her long breasts almost touching her lap. Bringing myself to orgasm for the first time, touching myself to a scene from The Last Kiss starring Rachel Bilson. All things that could have happened anywhere, yet seem all the more vivid for having happened here. The two pet ducks I got to have one summer, one of them pink in the breast, the other blue. Pulling hard blocks of condensed milk ice cream out of the deep freezer, making my tongue raw on them. Watching my dog touch the ocean for the first time, her hair weighed down with saltwater, making her no bigger than a cat. Riding in the back of my friend’s quad bike as she went faster and faster. Begging her to stop. Being furious and excited when she didn’t. Opening a bottle of beer with my teeth. Everyone asleep in the living room during a storm. I talk to my boyfriend about going to Colán when we visit Peru in the summer. It’s an important place for me, too.
***
When a woman gives birth, she must go through the worst pain imaginable. Labor can last for days. Her body splits down the middle. She shits on the bed. She curses whoever knocked her up, her baby, herself. She swears a million times that she’ll never do this again. But then she has a child in her arms and that child grows and the memory of the pain disappears. She’s ready for another. But the pain doesn’t stop. The child bites at her breast, vomits on her shirt.
The child grows into a girl, wakes her mother up night after night when she can’t sleep. She is short tempered in the mornings, doesn’t finish her breakfast. She grows cold. She starts to resent her mother, says she hates her and means it. Still, her mother welcomes her back into her house when she has nowhere to go, in the hope that she can once again hold her child in her arms. Her mother chooses to forget.
The child does the same. She forgets when you ran a comb too hard through her knotted hair, ripping it painfully. Forgets that you were ever hours late to pick her up from school. Forgets how often the fridge was empty. Forgets all the times you called her ugly, because it was the worst thing you could think to say to her. She chooses to remember instead the soft press of your lips against her forehead as you checked for a fever. Chooses to remember walking hand in hand down a crowded street, taking long sips from the same bottle of sauvignon blanc, huddling close, sitting on the patio when the lights went out and the entire block was dark.
You dip your foot into the murky water, hoping this time it will be soft and cool, a balm for your sting-swollen skin.
***
The last day I spend in Colán is the hottest of the year. I lie on the wooden patio and let myself cook in the sun. My mom sits in a beach chair next to me, her foot still swollen from the sting. The tide rises lapping at the edge of the patio. My mom asks if I want to get into the water one last time. Sure. She limps into the ocean. I follow. Together we swim towards the pale line of the horizon, stopping once the water is too deep for us to touch the floor. My mom grabs onto my feet and I make my body horizontal, floating, limbs spread out like a starfish. My body becomes one with the tide. Occasionally my face dips under the surface, and the salty water washes over my eyelids and into my mouth. My ears fill with water, making all sounds thick and staticky. The ocean smells like sulfur. Through my closed eyelids everything is neon red. I don’t think about what might be underneath me. My mom squeezes my foot and I float.
About the author
María Llona García is a 26 year old Peruvian writer currently living in New York, where she just finished an MFA in Poetry at The New School. She got her bachelor's degree in English from Skidmore College, where she was awarded their section of the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has been published in Rising Phoenix Review and Eunoia Review, among others.
About the Artist
Irina Greciuhina is a painter who lives and works in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova. She studied Painting in the Academy of Music, Theatre and Fine Arts in Chisinau, and she continued her studies in the Technical University of Moldova, getting a degree in Architecture and Urban Planning. Since 2007 she has been a chief of the Architectural and Design bureau in Chisinau, working on exclusive national and international projects and winning the awards in design and architecture.