“The only homes they found during their journey were the small spaces and simple kindnesses of people along the way.”
They rode a train ominously called The Beast all the way from the scorched earth of El Salvador to the border of El Norte, what weary, broken migrants called the entrance to the promised land.
His mamí was pregnant with him.
A kind priest at a migrant shelter in Matamoros, Mexico connected them with an underground railroad that took them across the border to a church in Brownsville that gave them sanctuary.
The underground railroad took them all the way to Miami.
A car stopped in front of St. Mary's Church in the center of the city in the middle of the night.
The driver made the sign of the cross over them.
They stood on the street with nothing but tattered clothes and bare feet.
The abuelo lifted the iron knocker on the stained church door and let it fall back on it's tarnished plate.
He did this again and again until an old nun cracked open the door to them.
The nun had worked in the inner-city for many years and had seen many things.
But she had never seen the beauty and suffering she saw in the faces of his mamí and abuelo at the church door that night.
Their eyes were alight with beauty, the beauty of being, the beauty of bringing a new life into the world, for the time had come for Hilcias' mamí to give birth to him.
Their bodies were heavy with suffering.
They were covered in the dirt, sweat and blood of thousands upon thousands of miles of migration along the migratory road.
Their shoulders sagged under the weight of months of homelessness.
The only homes they found during their journey were the small spaces and simple kindnesses of people along the way.
They were still and very quiet.
The nun stepped out and wrapped her arms around them.
"I'm here," she whispered.
"Aquí estoy."
- Trevor Scott Barton, stories for a brown-eyed girl, 2020
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