Ikal.

Tlanextli died when Ikal was twenty. He found her when he came back from the canal mid-morning, the tortilla still on the comal and the comal still hot. His grandmother had raised him since he was four, after his father left for Monterrey chasing a factory job, sent one letter three months later, and none after that. She taught him to read the water before she taught him to read a book, and the names of plants in Nahuatl. When she died, some of those names went with her — the ones he'd only half written down.

He went two months barely speaking to anyone, doing the bare minimum. What pulled him out wasn't an idea or advice — it was a canal. One of the side channels was choked with trash, and he started clearing it without thinking much about it, until he saw the ahuejote roots healthy under the mud. He remembers thinking it, hands purple with cold: if this is still alive, so am I.

He barely changed anything in the house. The photo of Tlanextli with her hands full of dirt still sits over the stove. It's the first thing you see when you walk into the kitchen, and he prefers it that way.

At twenty-two, Sofía asked him to be the one to release the first one. It was an axolotl raised by hand in the lab, one of his own kind, and the canal where it was going back was one Ikal had spent months helping to clean. He put both hands into the container, brought it close to the water, and let it go. The animal sank between the roots and vanished in a second, as if it had never been anywhere else.

Ikal's gills bristled so hard that Sofía laughed. He couldn't help it — it happens when something moves him, and as a teenager he tried to learn how to control it and never could. That night, in the notebook, after copying down the plant names his grandmother had left him, he wrote something else — three words: one more comes back.

He helped release eighteen that year. Only one is still alive, darker than the rest; he's seen it twice since then, always in the same bend of the canal, and both times he stood there a long while watching, without getting closer. He never told anyone. He wrote down the coordinates on his phone and went back to what he was doing, which was watering.

He tried it once. At nineteen, a buddy got him a job at a motorcycle shop outside the valley. The job was real, the pay was real, the cushion was good. What failed was his body. He couldn't sleep without the sound of water running through the canals; he'd lie down and something would be missing just under his ear, a sound he'd been hearing his whole life without knowing he heard it.

He lasted three weeks. He came back thinner, with the skin on his arm irritated, a red patch he'd scratch at night that took a month to heal. He didn't talk about it with anyone or put a name to what was happening to him. A friend offered him something similar a year later, and he answered slowly: if I leave, who cleans the back canal? No one. That's why.

He never tried to leave again. Sometimes he still fantasizes about a place where nobody knows what a chinampa is, some ordinary place, flat, with no water to keep an eye on. He thinks about it for a while and it passes. He knows he wouldn't fit in anywhere else, and he stopped fighting that a long time ago.

The first time was when he was seven. He was lying face down at the edge of Tlanextli's chinampa, his face almost touching the water, and he saw something move among the roots of an ahuejote tree: one of his own kind, wild, pale, still and suddenly lightning-fast. He stayed there an hour without moving. His grandmother found him like that, and instead of calling him, she sat down beside him without saying a word.

Afterward she told him the story of Xolotl, the one who turned into a water creature so he wouldn't be sacrificed and stayed in the canal forever. Ikal tells it the same way it was told to him, without explaining it. My grandmother used to say the axolotls chose to stay, he says. I don't know if they chose it — maybe it's just that some of us don't fit anywhere else, man.

Almost everything traces back to that: the plant names, atl for water, the habit of looking at the canal before touching it. His mother, Citlalli, gave him Sundays and the impatient tenderness of someone who cleans houses six days a week to rest on the seventh. But it was his grandmother who taught him how to just be, hands in the mud.

He writes at night, when he should be sleeping. He started by copying into his grandmother's notebook the Nahuatl names that were slipping away from him, so as not to lose them completely. Since the night of the first release, he's also been tracking something else: the ones he's seen come back to the canal. Two columns in the same notebook — the ones that fade and the ones that return. He doesn't show it to anyone.

He counts them with a small flashlight, sitting on the dock with his feet in the cold water. He writes down the coordinates, the date, sometimes the time. What he never does is add up the total. He could; he'd get a number, and he more or less knows what it would be. He'd rather not know for sure. Counting them one by one leaves room for hope; the total would turn it into an open account, and that's an account he doesn't want to settle.

He has other quiet habits from the same family. He buys seeds he doesn't need — squash, marigold, quelite, more than he'll ever plant — and stores them in labeled jars on the shelf, like someone stockpiling in case one year the canal stops giving anything at all. When something makes him nervous, he chews on a celery stalk and checks the water level three times.

Sofía offered him a full scholarship: two years to finish his high school equivalency, and if he wants, four more to study biology. It covers tuition and a small stipend. What it doesn't cover is the chinampa: if he goes to class two days a week, the back canal doesn't get watered, and there's no one else to water it.

He said he'd think about it. And he is thinking about it, genuinely, not as a brush-off, as he clarified to Sofía after a long silence. It embarrasses him to be twenty-three and sit in a classroom with sixteen-year-olds. What embarrasses him more is getting carded — the woman at the corner shop asks for his ID over and over — because he looks like a high schooler and his body doesn't announce how old he really is.

He dropped out of technical high school in his second semester, years ago. He said it was about money, and part of it was; the other part was that every hour in a classroom was an hour less on the chinampa. When someone asks him why he's taking so long to decide, he lowers his voice. The water teaches you not to rush, he says. And not to leave.

Every morning he steps into the canal at six-oh-five, in rubber boots up to the knee and his red plaid flannel rolled up, and the first thing he does is reach a hand in up to the wrist, pull out a handful of black mud, smell it, and let it go again. That's how he knows how the water's doing without asking anyone. If it smells one way, it's organic matter and nothing's wrong; if it smells like gasoline, something came in from outside that night and his day goes sideways.

With savings from two seasons of marigold flowers, he bought an abandoned stretch next to his own and rehabilitated it: cleared the bottom, braced the edges with ahuejote stakes, replanted. He hasn't given it a name yet — he says it hasn't earned one.

A developer has been circling that stretch, and three others, wanting to build floating cabins and an axolotl aquarium for tourists. He's come back four times, raising the offer each time, up to eight hundred fifty thousand pesos: two long years of work priced like a restaurant tab. Ikal answered him, lowering his voice. This isn't a lot. It's a chinampa. And he asked him not to come back without calling first.

Tlanextli's notebook is loose sheets stitched together with thread, plant names written in her handwriting. Ikal keeps it on the highest shelf in the house, never quite opening it all the way, because he still hasn't decided what to do with it. Some names were lost when she died, since she'd only written them down halfway. There's one he can't decipher: a plant his grandmother used to point at, whose name she never got around to writing. He's been asking the old-timers in the neighborhood, in case one of them remembers. For now he leaves it blank and keeps looking.

On the table, propped up, he has a framed fifty-peso bill, the one with the axolotl on the back, with the ahuejote tree and the old canal. Don Elías, from the market stall, gave it to him with a note: we're famous now, kid. Ikal doesn't keep it for the money. He keeps it because he finds it funny that they put his own kind on the currency right when, every year, there are fewer of them left in the canal.

It's one of the few new things that has come into the house since his grandmother died.

Nope, that doesn't get thrown out. Let me see if it can be fixed. He says it slowly, without arguing, whenever something broken is about to be tossed out, and he sets about fixing it. It's his way of believing in something: what you inherit gets taken care of or given back, things get repaired, and if someone works alongside you, they eat alongside you. He never says I love you. He shows care through actions: he turns up with food, sets the plate on the table, and leaves, without asking if you're okay. He learned it from Tomás, the neighbor across the way, who did exactly that during the two months Ikal wasn't speaking.

He also has friends far away. Every two or three weeks he writes to Mansa, who works at a hospital thirteen thousand kilometers away; she sends him drawings in blue ballpoint pen, he sends her photos of the canals. He pins them up on the kitchen wall.

What really scares him isn't losing the chinampa. It's the day it stops mattering to him: walking past a leak and not seeing it. As long as trash in the canal still bothers him, he knows he's still alive inside. Tomorrow, at six-oh-five, again.

> **Canonical quote:** The water teaches you not to rush and not to leave; that's why Ikal stays by the canal, counting the ones that come back without ever adding up the total.