Sharing Tamales
Aurelia O’Brien | Young Artists Issue | Poetry, Winter 2026
My suitcase wheels skid against the gravel driveway I always used to skin my knees on as I walk up to her house. I pick out the fakest-looking rock from the succulent pot by the door and slide it open, pulling out the spare key. The door creaks open with a nudge of my knee at the right time to open the lock correctly. As I walk into the living room, leaving my suitcase behind me by the first door, the smell of slow-cooking pork and cheap candles with AI-Jesus printed on the side chokes me in the way only a childhood memory can. I walk into the kitchen, see the short woman with hair a bit grayer than the last time I saw her, tied up into a tight bun, and tap her shoulder.
“Abuela!”
She turns around and smiles, red lipstick parting to reveal uneven teeth, and she kisses me on the cheek before hugging me tightly. I can smell her signature perfume, a mixture of orange blossom and bergamot that’s cloying in a sentimental way.
____________
I never know why, exactly, I remember that night. We must’ve had a thousand like it, not remarkable in any way, but it always sort of stuck out. I think I was six, maybe seven when my mother had a night shift and dropped me off at Abuela’s house to spend the night, although it was a Friday, so we all knew it would turn into a weekend at her house.
We were eating dinner, leftover tamales from the night before, and we sat in front of her small, grainy TV to watch her show. It was a show called Persiguiendo una Estrella, “Chasing a Star”, about a woman named Estrella on the run from her abusive husband who leaves her life behind to start fresh and meets a mysterious stranger. It had the usual plot twists of secret twins and people dying and coming back from the dead; a cookie-cutter telenovela, but it was her favorite. She was braiding my hair—it was longer then, down to my waist. As she worked,
slowly, coiling my hair, she asked me about school and how my friends were, and we talked about elementary school drama.
She sighed, pointing to the male love interest on screen, confessing his love without knowing it was really Estrella’s twin sister. “He looks just like your Abuelo when he was younger. All the other girls at my school had, eh—what’s the word?”
“Crushes?”
“Ah, si, crushes on him, but I was the one who eh—gané?
“You won?”
“That’s it. I won, and we got married when we were nineteen.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I got pregnant with your Mamá, and we wanted her to grow up here. It was, eh, bad in Mexico when she was born.”
“And?”
“I had a cousin who got me a job here so I could get my green card, and your Abuelo was going to come over once he found a job. I was going to wait there with him, but I wanted to give birth to your Mamá in the US. ”
“So when did he come here?”
She didn’t respond, just focused harder on braiding my hair, grasping tight ringlets that pinched my scalp. After a few minutes, she tied off the braid and looked back at the man on screen, now confessing his love to the right sister. She sighed again and pointed a red fingernail at the screen.
“Someday you’ll marry a nice man like that, Eva. Only he’ll be richer. Don’t you settle for a man who can’t buy you what you deserve. That’s what I came here for. So you and your
Mamá could be happier than I was. And marry a rich guy.”
I giggled. “Abuela! I’m not getting married to a guy like that. Boys are gross anyway.”
She laughed. “I’m sure you’ll change your mind about that.”
____________
Bringing me out of my memories, Abuela sets herself to work making dinner, and when I insist on helping, she gives me some garlic to mince.
“So, how is the college? Did you make friends? Did you find a boyfriend yet?”
I laugh. “It’s good so far. Lots of time doing math, but when I have a break from Calculus, my roommate and I hang out a lot. I think her friends are becoming my friends too.”
She smiles. “And?”
“And?” I ask.
“And the boyfriend?”
“I don’t have one, actually, I uh-” The oven timer goes off, stopping me before I can explain how that question will disappoint her.
Abuela goes and pokes at a few pots sizzling on the stovetop until whatever she needs to tend to is no longer urgent.
“Dinner in 10 minutes. Go put your suitcase away.”
I unpack, setting folded piles of clothes into old drawers in my childhood bedroom, all painted pastel colors. I send a few quick texts to my friends, asking them if they made it home, and see one come in from Emmy, asking me how my trip was and if I made it okay. I respond, telling her about the delay in the flight but that I had gotten there about thirty minutes ago. We talk for a few minutes, her asking me about Abuela and how does she seem, and I ask her about
her parents before she asks what I had been waiting for. The blue bubble of her text pops across my screen: did you tell her?
I type out, No, but I will, then erase it down to just No before sending it.
When I get into the kitchen, I see that Abuela has turned on the TV in the living room, the one that you can just barely see in the kitchen, to another telenovela. She hands me a paper plate of tamales and gestures towards the table in the corner. The table sits about four feet from the nearest wall, and when I was ten I would run circles around it in the summer when it was too hot to play outside, and Abuela said I needed to burn off some energy. We sit and start talking about how everyone at home is. She tells me about her old friend Ruth who hustles people at bingo at the community center, and about how she’s added another family to her garden gnome collection, then starts prying about college.
“So, tell me about these girls you're friends with.”
“Oh! Uh—they’re nice, mostly in science stuff like me. We have a group of five, kinda, but sometimes this other girl joins us. There’s the twins, Victoria and Nicole, and they go by Vic and Nic, although I don’t know why. If it were me, I would want the different names, but anyway. My roommate is Clara, she’s really nice, she introduced me to the rest of the group. And there’s Emmy. She’s uh—she’s my girlfriend.”
“Aren’t they all your girlfriends?”
“No, no, not like that. I mean, we’re like—dating. You could meet her if you wanted to.”
She looks like she didn’t hear me for a second, her warm brown eyes tilting up at me in confusion, her painted red lips, slightly smudged, hanging down in the corners. Then it’s gone, and with a little shake of her head, she looks back down at her plate, peeling the corn husk off of her second tamale, which releases a little cloud of steam into the air. Red seeps out of the
corners, bleeding over into the masa. We eat the rest of the dinner in silence, only the faint words of the people on TV making a sound, their grand confessions of love and melodramatic murder scenes filling the air between us.
I wake up early the next morning, planning to meet up with some friends from high school who are also visiting for the holidays, or some who never left. The sun is just peaking over the horizon when I tipto to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. Abuela sits in a chair with her back turned to me, sipping a mug. She pours out another cup of coffee for me and hands it over, gesturing at the seat next to her. The coffee pot has a dent in it on the corner of the upper lip from where I dropped it when I was trying to be an adult and make coffee. I think about how I sat on the floor crying until Abuela found me and made a cup of milk and sugar with a drop of coffee in it for me to try, while I sip from the mug, waiting for something.
“Today I have garden club at the center,” she says. “Come with me?”
“Oh—” I say, surprised that she’s back to talking like nothing is wrong. “Sure, I’ll go with.”
“Good. I’ll find you some extra gloves, and go put on longer pants. Many bugs out there. Get the spray from the shed too.”
An hour later, we walk into a community garden and start weeding, digging out roots that don’t belong, watering the ones that do. We sit side by side, each focusing on one plot, feeling the warm sun beat down the chilly winter air. We don’t talk, although I don’t think we need to. We just listen to the sounds of kids playing at a nearby playground, the shouts of “Tag! You’re it!” and the occasional buzz of a bee on the way to the flowers planted a few rows down. After a while, we move down to the next plots and continue like that for a few hours until a woman approaches us. She has long, dark brown hair tied up in a messy ponytail that swings as
she walks. Grey roots that poke out of her scalp and deep-set smile lines help me guess she’s just about in her early fifties.
“Hey, Fransisca!” she shouts at my Abuela, who waves back.
“Ah, Eva, I wanted to introduce you to Maria. She runs the garden project. She also invited us over for lunch after we finish up here.”
I smile and give a little wave to Maria, who smiles back.
After a few more hours of working in the garden, the sun hangs directly over our heads, and we drive to a cute little house painted dark blue, with ivies and sweet-smelling honeysuckles growing up and down the walls. Maria leads us inside and shows us towards a dining room table before heading into the kitchen and starting to work on a broth, which smells like chicken stock and spices.
After about an hour, she ladles soup into four bowls and sets one down in front of me and Abuela and two down on the other sides of the table.
“Just a second, don’t wait for me!” she calls and walks off, up a set of stairs, and starts talking to someone too far away to hear. Two sets of footsteps come back down, and she enters the room with a man about my age in tow. He has messy hair and looks surprised that anyone else is there, although we had been talking loudly for the past hour. “This is my son, Luca.”
He waves over at us before sitting in the only available seat across from me. Abuela prods me with an elbow. “I wanted you to meet Luca. He’s a very nice boy, and he’s a doctor. And he’s only, what, twenty-three?”
He nods and laughs. “I’m not a doctor yet, y’know. I just got into med school a year ago.” “Well, close enough. See, this is the kind of boy I’m talking about. Someone you could
settle down with. And he’s single, right, Luca?”
He glances over at his Mom. “I mean, I guess so, but…” He gives me an apologetic look and mouths, “I didn’t know they would do this.”
“Come on, Eva, single, doctor, at least give him your phone number. What’s that school you go to again?”
“I go to Johns Hopkins Medical School.”
“See! That’s a good school, he goes to the Hopkins. And she’s smart too. Eva’s going to be a rocket scientist, you know. Think of how smart your kids could be.”
“Abuela!”
“Well, it’s true. Why don’t you just talk for a minute, think about it, okay?” Before we can respond, Abuela and Maria stand up and all but run out of the room.
We sit in silence for a minute. “Rocket science, huh?” Luca says.
“Yeah.”
“You wanna walk on the moon?”
I chuckle. “Absolutely not. I’m good here on earth. Medical school though?”
“What can I say? I just love helping people because I’m a great guy.” He opens his arms in a gesture that looks like it’s trying to convey his benevolence.
“So it’s for the money?”
“Duh.”
We laugh, then go quiet again. “So, what do we tell them? Should we pretend we exchanged numbers, or…?”
He shakes his head. “Oh, my Mom will check. She knows I have a girlfriend but doesn’t like her and keeps trying to sell me off to random girls. Sorry, I don’t mean that in a bad way about you, but you know how it is.”
“Oh no, I get it. I told my grandma last night I had a girlfriend and in, what, eighteen hours she’s got me here.”
He chuckles. “That window opens all the way if you wanna sneak out the back.” “Tempting, but I think my grandma might actually kill me.”
When we get back home, Abuela starts heating up another round of tamales from last night for dinner. The familiar smell wafts through the house as I sit down at the dining room table. It has a plasticy table cloth that’s a reddish-pink color, and old creaky chairs that scream every time you sit down, and I think of Emmy sitting next to me, jumping at the shriek of the chair against the scuffed floor. Abuela sets down a plate in front of me, and I could almost see her handing one to Emmy, too. She could sit down on the third corner of the table and tell Abuela anecdotes about her family of eight and all the things her little sisters get up to. I think she would like Emmy. Maybe not at first; she never really likes anyone at first, but she would eventually. She would learn Emmy’s favorite kind of cookies and make them every time we visited. Maybe one day we would get engaged, and she would sit in the front row and sob the whole time just like she does when they get married in her telenovelas. She would quit complaining about how my hair is too short now to braid because Emmy’s long blond hair would be the perfect length for elaborate four-strand braids. I know if she came to visit, if Abuela would give her a chance, she would understand. If she would just give her a chance.
Abuela’s voice breaks my overly idealistic train of thought. “Tomorrow I’m going to go see some of my friends on the other side of town. We have a game of rummy going. You’ll come with me?” She says it like it’s a question and a command at once. “Two of them are going to bring their grandsons with. Nice boys. I just want you to meet them.”
“Okay.”
She smiles at me, and all of the crooked teeth I inherited from her show, and I almost wish that I could like those boys just to make her happy.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“This piece is my trace fossil because it is representative of my love of short stories and realistic fiction, and draws on my experience, like my main character, as a queer girl, and as the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants. I think it is the piece that is most representative of me, where I see the most of myself in my character.”
Aurelia O'Brien is a sophomore in the Creative Writing program at Charleston County School of the Arts, which she has attended for four years. She has always enjoyed writing fiction since she could first write, and particularly likes realistic fiction.
Sharing Tamales
Aurelia O’Brien | Young Artists Issue | Poetry, Winter 2026
My suitcase wheels skid against the gravel driveway I always used to skin my knees on as I walk up to her house. I pick out the fakest-looking rock from the succulent pot by the door and slide it open, pulling out the spare key. The door creaks open with a nudge of my knee at the right time to open the lock correctly. As I walk into the living room, leaving my suitcase behind me by the first door, the smell of slow-cooking pork and cheap candles with AI-Jesus printed on the side chokes me in the way only a childhood memory can. I walk into the kitchen, see the short woman with hair a bit grayer than the last time I saw her, tied up into a tight bun, and tap her shoulder.
“Abuela!”
She turns around and smiles, red lipstick parting to reveal uneven teeth, and she kisses me on the cheek before hugging me tightly. I can smell her signature perfume, a mixture of orange blossom and bergamot that’s cloying in a sentimental way.
____________
I never know why, exactly, I remember that night. We must’ve had a thousand like it, not remarkable in any way, but it always sort of stuck out. I think I was six, maybe seven when my mother had a night shift and dropped me off at Abuela’s house to spend the night, although it was a Friday, so we all knew it would turn into a weekend at her house.
We were eating dinner, leftover tamales from the night before, and we sat in front of her small, grainy TV to watch her show. It was a show called Persiguiendo una Estrella, “Chasing a Star”, about a woman named Estrella on the run from her abusive husband who leaves her life behind to start fresh and meets a mysterious stranger. It had the usual plot twists of secret twins and people dying and coming back from the dead; a cookie-cutter telenovela, but it was her favorite. She was braiding my hair—it was longer then, down to my waist. As she worked,
slowly, coiling my hair, she asked me about school and how my friends were, and we talked about elementary school drama.
She sighed, pointing to the male love interest on screen, confessing his love without knowing it was really Estrella’s twin sister. “He looks just like your Abuelo when he was younger. All the other girls at my school had, eh—what’s the word?”
“Crushes?”
“Ah, si, crushes on him, but I was the one who eh—gané?
“You won?”
“That’s it. I won, and we got married when we were nineteen.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I got pregnant with your Mamá, and we wanted her to grow up here. It was, eh, bad in Mexico when she was born.”
“And?”
“I had a cousin who got me a job here so I could get my green card, and your Abuelo was going to come over once he found a job. I was going to wait there with him, but I wanted to give birth to your Mamá in the US. ”
“So when did he come here?”
She didn’t respond, just focused harder on braiding my hair, grasping tight ringlets that pinched my scalp. After a few minutes, she tied off the braid and looked back at the man on screen, now confessing his love to the right sister. She sighed again and pointed a red fingernail at the screen.
“Someday you’ll marry a nice man like that, Eva. Only he’ll be richer. Don’t you settle for a man who can’t buy you what you deserve. That’s what I came here for. So you and your
Mamá could be happier than I was. And marry a rich guy.”
I giggled. “Abuela! I’m not getting married to a guy like that. Boys are gross anyway.”
She laughed. “I’m sure you’ll change your mind about that.”
____________
Bringing me out of my memories, Abuela sets herself to work making dinner, and when I insist on helping, she gives me some garlic to mince.
“So, how is the college? Did you make friends? Did you find a boyfriend yet?”
I laugh. “It’s good so far. Lots of time doing math, but when I have a break from Calculus, my roommate and I hang out a lot. I think her friends are becoming my friends too.”
She smiles. “And?”
“And?” I ask.
“And the boyfriend?”
“I don’t have one, actually, I uh-” The oven timer goes off, stopping me before I can explain how that question will disappoint her.
Abuela goes and pokes at a few pots sizzling on the stovetop until whatever she needs to tend to is no longer urgent.
“Dinner in 10 minutes. Go put your suitcase away.”
I unpack, setting folded piles of clothes into old drawers in my childhood bedroom, all painted pastel colors. I send a few quick texts to my friends, asking them if they made it home, and see one come in from Emmy, asking me how my trip was and if I made it okay. I respond, telling her about the delay in the flight but that I had gotten there about thirty minutes ago. We talk for a few minutes, her asking me about Abuela and how does she seem, and I ask her about
her parents before she asks what I had been waiting for. The blue bubble of her text pops across my screen: did you tell her?
I type out, No, but I will, then erase it down to just No before sending it.
When I get into the kitchen, I see that Abuela has turned on the TV in the living room, the one that you can just barely see in the kitchen, to another telenovela. She hands me a paper plate of tamales and gestures towards the table in the corner. The table sits about four feet from the nearest wall, and when I was ten I would run circles around it in the summer when it was too hot to play outside, and Abuela said I needed to burn off some energy. We sit and start talking about how everyone at home is. She tells me about her old friend Ruth who hustles people at bingo at the community center, and about how she’s added another family to her garden gnome collection, then starts prying about college.
“So, tell me about these girls you're friends with.”
“Oh! Uh—they’re nice, mostly in science stuff like me. We have a group of five, kinda, but sometimes this other girl joins us. There’s the twins, Victoria and Nicole, and they go by Vic and Nic, although I don’t know why. If it were me, I would want the different names, but anyway. My roommate is Clara, she’s really nice, she introduced me to the rest of the group. And there’s Emmy. She’s uh—she’s my girlfriend.”
“Aren’t they all your girlfriends?”
“No, no, not like that. I mean, we’re like—dating. You could meet her if you wanted to.”
She looks like she didn’t hear me for a second, her warm brown eyes tilting up at me in confusion, her painted red lips, slightly smudged, hanging down in the corners. Then it’s gone, and with a little shake of her head, she looks back down at her plate, peeling the corn husk off of her second tamale, which releases a little cloud of steam into the air. Red seeps out of the
corners, bleeding over into the masa. We eat the rest of the dinner in silence, only the faint words of the people on TV making a sound, their grand confessions of love and melodramatic murder scenes filling the air between us.
I wake up early the next morning, planning to meet up with some friends from high school who are also visiting for the holidays, or some who never left. The sun is just peaking over the horizon when I tipto to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. Abuela sits in a chair with her back turned to me, sipping a mug. She pours out another cup of coffee for me and hands it over, gesturing at the seat next to her. The coffee pot has a dent in it on the corner of the upper lip from where I dropped it when I was trying to be an adult and make coffee. I think about how I sat on the floor crying until Abuela found me and made a cup of milk and sugar with a drop of coffee in it for me to try, while I sip from the mug, waiting for something.
“Today I have garden club at the center,” she says. “Come with me?”
“Oh—” I say, surprised that she’s back to talking like nothing is wrong. “Sure, I’ll go with.”
“Good. I’ll find you some extra gloves, and go put on longer pants. Many bugs out there. Get the spray from the shed too.”
An hour later, we walk into a community garden and start weeding, digging out roots that don’t belong, watering the ones that do. We sit side by side, each focusing on one plot, feeling the warm sun beat down the chilly winter air. We don’t talk, although I don’t think we need to. We just listen to the sounds of kids playing at a nearby playground, the shouts of “Tag! You’re it!” and the occasional buzz of a bee on the way to the flowers planted a few rows down. After a while, we move down to the next plots and continue like that for a few hours until a woman approaches us. She has long, dark brown hair tied up in a messy ponytail that swings as
she walks. Grey roots that poke out of her scalp and deep-set smile lines help me guess she’s just about in her early fifties.
“Hey, Fransisca!” she shouts at my Abuela, who waves back.
“Ah, Eva, I wanted to introduce you to Maria. She runs the garden project. She also invited us over for lunch after we finish up here.”
I smile and give a little wave to Maria, who smiles back.
After a few more hours of working in the garden, the sun hangs directly over our heads, and we drive to a cute little house painted dark blue, with ivies and sweet-smelling honeysuckles growing up and down the walls. Maria leads us inside and shows us towards a dining room table before heading into the kitchen and starting to work on a broth, which smells like chicken stock and spices.
After about an hour, she ladles soup into four bowls and sets one down in front of me and Abuela and two down on the other sides of the table.
“Just a second, don’t wait for me!” she calls and walks off, up a set of stairs, and starts talking to someone too far away to hear. Two sets of footsteps come back down, and she enters the room with a man about my age in tow. He has messy hair and looks surprised that anyone else is there, although we had been talking loudly for the past hour. “This is my son, Luca.”
He waves over at us before sitting in the only available seat across from me. Abuela prods me with an elbow. “I wanted you to meet Luca. He’s a very nice boy, and he’s a doctor. And he’s only, what, twenty-three?”
He nods and laughs. “I’m not a doctor yet, y’know. I just got into med school a year ago.” “Well, close enough. See, this is the kind of boy I’m talking about. Someone you could
settle down with. And he’s single, right, Luca?”
He glances over at his Mom. “I mean, I guess so, but…” He gives me an apologetic look and mouths, “I didn’t know they would do this.”
“Come on, Eva, single, doctor, at least give him your phone number. What’s that school you go to again?”
“I go to Johns Hopkins Medical School.”
“See! That’s a good school, he goes to the Hopkins. And she’s smart too. Eva’s going to be a rocket scientist, you know. Think of how smart your kids could be.”
“Abuela!”
“Well, it’s true. Why don’t you just talk for a minute, think about it, okay?” Before we can respond, Abuela and Maria stand up and all but run out of the room.
We sit in silence for a minute. “Rocket science, huh?” Luca says.
“Yeah.”
“You wanna walk on the moon?”
I chuckle. “Absolutely not. I’m good here on earth. Medical school though?”
“What can I say? I just love helping people because I’m a great guy.” He opens his arms in a gesture that looks like it’s trying to convey his benevolence.
“So it’s for the money?”
“Duh.”
We laugh, then go quiet again. “So, what do we tell them? Should we pretend we exchanged numbers, or…?”
He shakes his head. “Oh, my Mom will check. She knows I have a girlfriend but doesn’t like her and keeps trying to sell me off to random girls. Sorry, I don’t mean that in a bad way about you, but you know how it is.”
“Oh no, I get it. I told my grandma last night I had a girlfriend and in, what, eighteen hours she’s got me here.”
He chuckles. “That window opens all the way if you wanna sneak out the back.” “Tempting, but I think my grandma might actually kill me.”
When we get back home, Abuela starts heating up another round of tamales from last night for dinner. The familiar smell wafts through the house as I sit down at the dining room table. It has a plasticy table cloth that’s a reddish-pink color, and old creaky chairs that scream every time you sit down, and I think of Emmy sitting next to me, jumping at the shriek of the chair against the scuffed floor. Abuela sets down a plate in front of me, and I could almost see her handing one to Emmy, too. She could sit down on the third corner of the table and tell Abuela anecdotes about her family of eight and all the things her little sisters get up to. I think she would like Emmy. Maybe not at first; she never really likes anyone at first, but she would eventually. She would learn Emmy’s favorite kind of cookies and make them every time we visited. Maybe one day we would get engaged, and she would sit in the front row and sob the whole time just like she does when they get married in her telenovelas. She would quit complaining about how my hair is too short now to braid because Emmy’s long blond hair would be the perfect length for elaborate four-strand braids. I know if she came to visit, if Abuela would give her a chance, she would understand. If she would just give her a chance.
Abuela’s voice breaks my overly idealistic train of thought. “Tomorrow I’m going to go see some of my friends on the other side of town. We have a game of rummy going. You’ll come with me?” She says it like it’s a question and a command at once. “Two of them are going to bring their grandsons with. Nice boys. I just want you to meet them.”
“Okay.”
She smiles at me, and all of the crooked teeth I inherited from her show, and I almost wish that I could like those boys just to make her happy.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“This piece is my trace fossil because it is representative of my love of short stories and realistic fiction, and draws on my experience, like my main character, as a queer girl, and as the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants. I think it is the piece that is most representative of me, where I see the most of myself in my character.”
Aurelia O'Brien is a sophomore in the Creative Writing program at Charleston County School of the Arts, which she has attended for four years. She has always enjoyed writing fiction since she could first write, and particularly likes realistic fiction.