“Branded,” by Rebecca Ayala, issue 13
7/28/22: Into the Archives: staff member Daniel Dundas on Rebecca Ayala’s “Branded”
A good story knows how to hook you in with the first few lines. The short story “Branded,” written by Rebecca Ayala, published in Prism Review #13, drew me in with the title alone. To brand is to leave your mark on something, but that word carries with it a more powerful and impactful connotation than “mark” or even “imprint.” It is like the story is saying from the start that someone, or something, has been claimed or scarred, both of which happen.
The main protagonist, and main point of view, is a woman named Ramblin Rose Lukas who is in a sticky situation as her parents are trying to marry her off in 1975, a time when a woman of her age – twenty-three – is expected to be married by then. Her parents do this by introducing to her a few suitors on her birthday. What is interesting about her character is that she never explains why she does not care for the men. She is told she will be accused of being a lesbian if she does not marry a man, but we never get any indication that that is the case. Instead, she is just as confused about her situation as we are. The reader cannot make any more sense of this than she can which makes the story intriguing.
The story does not begin with Ramblin’s twenty-third birthday, rather her fifth, and it is here where we get our first case of being “branded.” “At my fifth birthday, I had not yet finished blowing out the five measly candles when James Darley thought it would be hilarious to smash my face into my birthday cake. Unfortunately, my head got sucked and half my left eyebrow caught on fire. I left the hospital with enough stitches to leave an everlasting near my eye.” This passage does a few things. First, it starts off with an action scene which is always good for hooking in the readers: James Darley shoving Ramblin’s face in a cake. Second, by saying her head was pushed into her cake, then the reader would most likely assume that James was behind her, so Ramblin did not actually see him do it which is important for later. Third, by specifying that it was Ramblin’s fifth birthday, we know right away that she was a child when she suffered the branding. It pulls on the heartstrings and makes us empathize with her.
The tension of the story comes to a head when just a couple of days after Ramblin’s twenty-third, Wayne Marshall Riggins, cousin to Ramblin’s friend, Pearl, dies in a motorcycle accident. Ramblin and her family attend the funeral where Ramblin sees Wayne for the first time, albeit in his coffin. When she sees him, even though he is dead, she cannot help but notice how ruggedly handsome he is. She starts wondering about him, even thinking about being married to him. “Ramblin Rose Riggins. I would have had a flowy name and he would have been my gorgeous excuse to out of Agua Dulce. For ages my parents questioned my sexuality because I never gave any of the boys I grew up with the time of day, and for the first time in all my life, I develop feelings for a guy that is lying in a coffin.”
She starts going out to the cemetery just to sit next to his tombstone and read to him. Soon they turn into all day trip, only for the mother of one of the suitors telling Rita, Ramblin’s mother, about it. She confronts her only for Ramblin to talk back saying, “The people that live there don’t yell at me as much as you and dad do. I guess they must really like me.” This brings to the forefront Ramblin’s strained relationship with her parents, and it also tells the readers a lot with a little. It was never implied until now that her parents yelled at her, and by saying “as much,” even though it could be a snarky comment in nature since corpses cannot yell, it could mean that the yelling is a frequent occurrence, possibly related to Ramblin’s marriage status sometimes. By following it up with saying that the dead must really like her, it suggests that her relationship with her parents is so far gone that she thinks that dead people like her more than her own family. Or it could be just another jab at her mother in the heat of the moment.
The story ends by introducing a twist that we do not anticipate, but it is something that was actually set up in the first paragraph. A good author knows how to make a twist work by setting it up in ways we do not notice at first. During the fifth birthday, Ramblin’s head was smashed into a cake by James Darley. Rather, she assumes it was James, but she does not say she saw him moving to do so. Not only that, but during her twenty-third, she tells us that James had yet to apologize. This could be because James probably forgot about it after eighteen years, or it could be because he was not the one who did it. Ramblin goes to Pearl’s house and looks through a photo album she finds. She sees a picture of her fifth birthday, but notices that where James should be with his hand on her head, it is someone else instead. She asks Pearl’s mother who it is, and she says that the boy was Wayne Marshall Riggins. It is here where we get our second brand, but instead of being scarred, Ramblin says she has been claimed. “So there it is. I did manage to meet Wayne Riggins before he passed away and not only did he leave his mark on me before he moved to Austin, he also left his mark on me before he left for good.”
Rebecca Ayala did a great job at Ramblin’s characterization, establishing tensions between her, her parents, and her feelings towards Wayne, and did the twist at the end well by leaving clues for the readers that they would not even know were clues. “Branded” is something I am glad Prism Review accepted; this was an excellent piece, and something I enjoyed greatly.
