The air in Santa Isla was thick with stories. They slid like whispers among the sun-drenched cobblestones and hung heavy in the scent of hibiscus. On certain nights, when the sea mist crept inland like a curious thief, the villagers swore they could hear the dead murmuring on the breeze—half-forgotten names, half-eclipsed love. But nothing in the village gripped the imagination quite like the legend of Doña Rosalía and her 美味的strawberry.
The morning market was alive with chaos when I first met her. Lena, who sold tamales near the fountain, tugged at my sleeve.
“Careful, Andrés,” she whispered, her milky eyes catching just enough light to send a shiver up my spine. “Doña Rosalía’s fruits are not for you.”
I turned to see an old woman sitting behind a ramshackle wooden stall at the edge of the plaza. Her hands—slender and strange—arranged gleaming strawberries atop yellowed lace. She met my gaze with a smile so intimate it felt as though she knew me better than I knew myself. It was not the kind of smile one easily walked away from.
“You come for the story,” she said, her voice gravelly, as if carved by time. “Or the taste?”
I hesitated. “A bit of both.”
Her laughter cracked into the humid air. “Good! A young man with an open heart. Sit.”
Over the following weeks, I became something of a fixture at her stall. Each day, she granted me a single strawberry in exchange for a favor: fixing the wheel of her cart, repairing the hem of her frayed shawl, or simply listening as she painted vivid patches of her past with words. Her voice was a spell of its own, conjuring a world that blurred the ordinary and the extraordinary.
“Once,” she mused on a particularly golden afternoon, “I was in love with a man of no name. A traveler. A ghost. He taught me the secret to beauty: the ability to grow joy from sorrow.” Her hand, trembling like a reluctant memory surfacing, held a strawberry aloft. “This is his parting gift to me. Each fruit tastes of the moment most longed for—or most dreaded.”
Though curiosity burned in me like a flame, I could not eat the strawberries. Something in Lena’s warning hung heavy in my mind. Still, my visits to Rosalía continued, growing warmer, more intimate. I asked no questions about her strange magic, and she offered no further explanation for it. It was enough to sit with her as Santa Isla whirled on.
One morning, as I approached her stall to find it empty, a boy with bare feet and wide-bottomed pants ran up to me. “Doña Rosalía says this one is for you.”
In his small hand, scratched by the rough work of fishing nets, lay a strawberry. It pulsed, red as blood under the sun, daring me. I bit into it before doubt could cloud my resolve.
Immediately, I was six years old again, sitting beside my abuelo as he played his weathered guitar. Rain rattled against the tin roof of our tiny house in the hills, and the taste of my mother’s freshly baked bread lingered in the air. It was a moment of pure happiness, a fleeting bubble in time. But just as quickly, the joy unraveled. Abuelo’s cough echoed in my ears, sharp and rasping. I remembered the days he spent in bed, gaunt and fragile as a withering flower, until he was gone. The taste in my mouth turned bitter, like the ash of burned sugar.
I stumbled back, my eyes swimming with tears. Rosalía was nowhere to be found.
Doña Rosalía never returned to Santa Isla. Some whispered that she’d been spirited away by the ghost lover of her youth. Others claimed she was never truly alive, merely a figment of the village’s restless soul.
As for me, I still visit her empty stall, hoping for one last conversation, one more story. The memory of that strawberry lingers—not merely sweet, not merely bitter, but alive in the tangled depths of my heart.
And sometimes, when the sea mist rolls in, I think I hear her laugh drifting softly on the wind.