Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

The comandante, pobrecito , poor little man, had a lot less imagination than Coyote suspected. He never guessed that it might be a trick, and he was white and shaking and moaning when he came home. He shut himself up in his study, where he paced the floors and shivered with fear. Finally, Valorosa came and tapped on his door. “What’s wrong, Papá?” she asked. “¿Qué le sucedió?” Her father tried to be brave for a few moments but soon he told Valorosa the whole story. “Why, Papá!” Valorosa exclaimed, “You can’t go! You are the comandante ! But I will go — I am your daughter, and I will tell this demon that he can take me in your stead! Surely la Virgen will protect me.” Her father cried out and forbade her to go, but Valorosa wasn’t paying attention. In her head, she was thinking: Won’t this be a grand adventure? I’ll show that demon a thing or two! But her father continued to protest, so Valorosa said no more about it.

That night, Valorosa snuck out her bedroom window, saddled her horse, and rode away across the desert toward the Indian village that her father had fled so quickly. She told herself that she was such a good daughter, so dutiful, so loving! But she knew that really, she was a bit bored of making tamales, and wanted an escape. ¡Aventura, mijita! Adventure! It calls to us all.

When Valorosa arrived at the spot where her father had met the demon, she let her horse go to find some scrub to eat, and called out: “ ¡Diablo! Demon! I am here in place of my father, and la Virgen Santíssima will protect me!”

Coyote heard her and laughed to himself in amazement. He came out from behind the mesquite bushes and circled the girl. “So you are the rosita , eh?” he asked, slyly. “You are not so fragile, not so delicate as my roses here.”

“Pah!” said Valorosa. “I am Valorosa, la valiente , the brave! I am not afraid.”

At this, Coyote became a bit annoyed, and he decided that Valorosa might do very well for a new trick. I’ll keep her here with me , he thought. Her family will think that she has disappeared forever, taken by the powers of the desert! I will send one of my bitches, my woman-coyotes, to walk through the girl’s village with a rose in her mouth. Hah! They will all think that I have turned her into a coyote. That will teach the proud and pompous comandante a lesson! And he grinned a big coyote grin.

Meanwhile, Valorosa was examining this big golden-gray beast with a curious eye. He could speak and he had managed to scare her father witless, which meant that he was no ordinary animal; however, Valorosa had a bit more imagination than her father, so she knew that this could well be a local spirit, perhaps even a god. Not every powerful thing in the world is either evil or Catholic, mijita . Remember that.

Coyote, who had come to a decision about his trick, told Valorosa his plans for her. He told her that she would stay with him as his servant to cook him good food and groom his dusty coat, and eventually he might release her.

Valorosa stamped her foot and stared him down. “Pah!” she said again. “I will have no part in a trick played by such a dirty little animal!” Coyote was taken aback. What did she mean? “Why, if you had any real power,” said Valorosa contemptuously, “you would turn yourself into a man! Don’t you know that humans are made in God’s image, so God must be a man? No real god would be a coyote !”

Coyote was now more than a little angry, though secretly he was also quite impressed. “Oh, yes?” he cried boastfully, “Well, hormiguita , my little ant, watch this!” And with that, he turned himself into a man — a tall, muscular, sandy-haired man. Frowning because he was starting to wonder if he might be the tricked one, he carted Valorosa off to his lair.

Many weeks passed. Valorosa was forced to do chores for Coyote, but she didn’t really mind; at least there was no embroidery! Coyote brooded to himself, wondering whether and when he should complete his trick, and mulling over the words that Valorosa had thrown at him.

Despite herself, Valorosa rather missed that trickster’s grin that he had worn when they first met on the hilltop, and even though she thought him quite handsome in his human form, she didn’t really like the change in him. Finally, she came to him one evening and begged him to turn himself back into a coyote.

Coyote smiled. “Oh? So you do not think being an animal is so bad after all?”

Valorosa looked at her dirty feet and said, quietly, “No, perhaps not.” Coyote changed himself back on the spot, and he and Valorosa went for a wild moonlit ramble out across the mesas.

Eventually, after many such runs in the moonlight, Coyote let Valorosa go; he did not want her to leave, but he knew that some things must be simply because they must be. That is wisdom, mijita .

Valorosa returned to her father’s mansion, where her father welcomed her with open arms and wept tears of gratitude for the mercy of God. Her mother, sensing that perhaps Valorosa herself might have had something to do with her return, simply smiled.

After a few months, a new man came to serve under the comandante , a man with an easy laugh and a good mind. He and Valorosa became engaged, and Valorosa was content. Just before the priest began the wedding ceremony, Valorosa’s mother gave her a little bouquet, a ramillete : two stems of sand verbena and a sweet wild rose. Tucked in between the rose petals were a few golden-gray hairs. Valorosa looked at her mother, who grinned her own coyote grin. And I’ll tell you, mijita , there were many times after that when people swore that they saw a girl and a coyote running across the mesas together under the moon, howling and yelping and grinning. If Valorosa’s husband heard about any of this, he didn’t seem to mind; maybe he went along. Which just goes to show you, mijita , that you should never marry a man who does not like coyotes.

Though TERRA L. GEARHART-SERNA has been writing short stories since the age of ten, “Coyote and Valorosa” is her first published work. It was written for an undergraduate class at the University of Pennsylvania and wound up in this anthology thanks to the encouragement of a truly exceptional English professor. Terra is currently a student at Yale Law School, where she writes legal essays consisting of more footnotes than text.

I originally wrote “Coyote and Valorosa” as a midterm essay for a college class called “Feminist Fairy Tales.” In order to give the story its bilingual/multicultural flavor, I paid a return visit to my childhood memories of reading both Western fairy tales and the bilingual cuentos of the much-loved Santa Fe storyteller Joe Hayes.

We tend to think of shape-shifting as a purely physical thing, but as a young Latina my experience of “changing shape” has been a constant shift between my mother’s Hispanic family in the West and my father’s Anglo family in the East, between English and Spanish, between the interwoven threads of New Mexico’s Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo heritage, and most recently between the deserts of the Southwest and an East Coast university. “Coyote and Valorosa” also seesaws between various identities and traditions: English and Spanish, Hispanic and Indian, male and female, pride and humility. Valorosa achieves her metamorphosis from child to woman as she struggles with a new and different cultural and life experience; given this kind of change, what does it matter if she becomes a coyote or if Coyote becomes a man?