Excerpt from Other Evolutions: A Novel by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

October 7, 2025

Excerpt from Other Evolutions: A Novel (2025) by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia. Used with permission of ECW Press.

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia. Other Evolutions: A Novel. ECW Press. $24.95, 264 pp., ISBN: 9781770417267

THE STORY OF A DRESS

When I think of my grandmother’s death I don’t remember it with any particular sadness. Someone must have told me she died and explained death to me but it didn’t seem important at the time. What did seem important was that it was decided that I should have a new dress, having nothing appropriately funereal to wear.

While the planning and the grieving happened uncle Bobby ush- ered Marnie and Marnie and me to Marks & Spencer and left it to us to choose our dresses.

The Marnies chose complimentary black dresses with white Peter Pan collars, puffed sleeves and satin sashes. The only difference was Marnie (my sister) had a dress with black sleeves that trailed to her wrists and Marnie (my cousin) had short ones that pinched her upper arms. (My other grandmother, my abuela, would have called my cousin gorda, which is what she called me the first time she met me, pinching my upper-arm fat in a way that made my eyes water and made me repent of all the times I had never defended cousin Marnie when aunt Eshkie told her to put down that piece of cake for God’s sake.)

Left to my own devices, uncle Bobby hovering unhelpfully at the border of the little girls’ section, I quickly located a pink dress with a smocked bodice and a skirt of tulle that puffed out like a fluffy cloud.

I cannot, for the life of me, remember my grandmother’s face but by God, I can remember the exact pink of that dress, the soft pastel of cotton candy. Earlier that year I had declared pink to be my favourite colour and my sister had told me it wasn’t, it was her favourite colour and mine was blue. Then to seal this decision she had repeated it to my parents. Now everything bought for me, from shoes to toothbrushes to backpacks to the wooden Alma nameplate hanging from my door, was blue. I had white-and-navy-blue saddle shoes. I had blue-and-yellow cat’s eye marbles. I had a gingham quilt in shades of blue, and a fluffy beige teddy bear on my bed in a blue knit sweater. I was stuffed so full of blue that I would have been shocked to find out that the colour of my blood was red. I was so sick of blue I felt a physical pinch of dis-ease every time I was gifted something in that colour.

I saw that dress, pink like a blush, pink like bubble gum, pink the forbidden favourite colour that I kept in my heart. I wanted it.

It was of course a completely inappropriate choice for a funeral. But uncle Bobby, who was a nice man, who gave me chocolate when no one was looking and called me bubbeleh, was also one of those men who, through concentrated pretense, avow to know absolutely nothing about fashion except that little girls wear dresses and like pink, and I was a little girl. I was also a little girl who had just lost her grandmother, though I wasn’t particularly feeling the loss at that moment. He would have bought that dress for me, I know he would have, if I had asked.

I never got the chance.

Fortunately for uncle Bobby and less fortunately for me I was per- suaded away from my cloudish choice by Marnie, my Marnie. Perhaps persuaded is too gentle a word for what she did. I was fondling the pink dress between my fingers, feeling the scratchy way the tulle felt on my soft skin, at odds with how insubstantial it looked, when Marnie came and pulled me away. She had already chosen her dress and there was another one—in my size, and cream—tossed over her arm.

I knew who that dress was for and I balked at the idea of wearing it. When I wore white, adults told me how lovely and tan my skin was, stressing the word tan. I hated wearing white. I felt my eyes welling up, I felt myself preparing to put up a fight for pink and then I felt Marnie’s firm hand encircling my chubby child’s wrist, ushering me close against the bony flat of her chest in what, to adult eyes, would have seemed like a comforting embrace.

The planes of her poked at all my softness in a way that hurt but before I could wriggle away or protest she whispered in my ear, I will snap your arm like a twig if you try to get uncle Bobby to buy that dress. I whimpered and tried to pull away from her; her grip tightened. I looked to uncle Bobby who was no longer looking at us but overwhelm- ing a sales assistant by telling her that his mother-in-law had died and none of the children were coping with it very well.

I could see that the situation was helpless. My tears dried up, Marnie put a look of solemnity on her face and together we went over to uncle Bobby, the forbidden pink dress abandoned on the rack, the white dress clutched in my hands as if it had been my idea. We lined up beside him and Marnie said, Excuse me uncle Bobby, and saved the sales assistant who was embarrassed by our grief, so fresh and large and inappropriate in that well-lit store where everything was New! New! New! and had yet to die, and he gathered up our dresses in his big hands and went and paid for them.

If he noticed the sadness on my face, it was easily attributable to my dead grandmother.

The welts on my wrist were less easily explained but uncle Bobby, never one to cause strife, conveniently overlooked them.

Poor Marnie. Even though at the time she seemed terribly grown up, she was a child, just old enough to feel the loss of our grandmother in a way that was profound and real. I didn’t see it that way at the time. I was at that age when I thought that because she was five years older she was akin to a god. At that age, at all ages really, I was easily seduced by beauty and Marnie was, even as a child, extremely beautiful. Other parents were always remarking on Marnie ’s fair hair and pale skin, the pretty slope of her nose that was a little wide, the only trait carried from mother to child. No one, I thought, no one that beautiful could ever be unhappy.

There are no pictures directly from that time of loss, but in the years afterwards, Marnie’s green eyes reflected a sense of tragedy, giving her a serious look that was uncanny and striking on a child’s face.

Poor Marnie.

The dresses purchased, we went home to begin the long and com- plicated process of mourning. Tags were cut, dresses hung in the closet. The white dress, like a ghostly spectre, waited for me to merge with it. At night lying in bed I vibrated with the excitement of knowing that sometime very soon we would put my grandmother in a box in the ground and I had an appropriate dress to wear for this occasion.

TACTICS

What I remember from the day of the funeral was all the preening.

I was dressed first, by Marnie, who wrestled me into my white dress and, at my insistence, tied the white sash of the dress in a pleasingly large bow.

If you keep touching it, she told me, I won’t retie it no matter how much you cry.

Then she set about dressing herself, a private ritual which I was not allowed to witness. I was booted from Marnie’s room, just managing to remove my pudgy fingers from the door frame as she slammed it shut and narrowly avoiding an accident which would have left me, if not fingerless, in possession of several broken fingers.

There were no mysteries in my own bedroom except the ones I had placed there: A secret flashlight tucked between the mattress and the bedframe that I sometimes used to look at books in the dark. A hoard of candy left over from last year’s Halloween, growing staler by the minute, that migrated from my winter boots to my rain boots depending on where it was less likely to be discovered. But today the candy seemed unpalatable. Not because my grandmother was dead but because the white dress would surely stain with the signs of my candy crimes.

I made my migration across the hall to my parents’ bedroom.

My father was missing which I didn’t mind. Since his mother’s death he had become an unpredictable mix of sulky and overly affec- tionate. There were times when it seemed he was looking past me and there was nothing I could do to bring him back. Even pinching him with all my five-year-old force would only cause him to reluctantly turn his misty eyes in my direction, pat me on the head, and then float off to another room to continue misting in private.

And then sometimes he would come to my room and sit on the edge of my bed and tell me how lucky we were to have each other.

Life is so precious, he would tell me, looking at me intensely, his eyes no longer misty but a clear and fierce brown.

It’s a miracle we have the time we have together. You know the Nazis shot children your age. Younger than you. They took babies by the ankle and they bashed their heads into the wall.

I nodded and tried to look sad about the babies, even though I had heard versions of this story before.

Come sleep, I would say, patting the side of the bed and moving to make room for him.

Sometimes he would lie down with me but more often than not he would stay up and smooth my hair and cradle me in his arms and continue to talk about the war and about his father who had died when my father was a little older than Marnie and how he would do his best to not do that to Marnie when she reached that age.

I wanted to ask him to stay alive for me too but already I knew such a thing couldn’t be promised. Death was lurking around every corner. It was a minor miracle that I, at the age of five, had been permitted to live so long.

In my parents’ room my mother was sitting at her vanity in her slip, trying to do her makeup in the mirror of a compact because the mirror of her vanity, like all the mirrors in the house, had been covered with black cloth.

Is that allowed? I asked.

I don’t know, Almita, she said.

I also got the sense that she didn’t care.

She was a woman who cared about appearances, my mother, both her own and that of others. When we came in with the white dress, she had picked up the cloth between two fingers and rubbed it. She did this with all the clothes we bought. She always insisted on natural fabrics, cotton and linen and silk, soft on the skin. Polyester and synthetic blends to be shunned at all costs.

She made a little murmur of approval when she touched my white dress.

Who picked this for you? she asked. Your uncle?

Marnie, I said, meaning our Marnie, which she immediately under- stood to be so. We didn’t say it aloud in our family, but though we liked cousin Marnie a little of our distaste of aunt Eshkie had rubbed off on her. There was nothing wrong with her really, she was a very ordinary little girl with thick glasses and dull brown hair that frizzed in the rain. But that was the problem. Marnie, my sister, was like the sun. We all paled in comparison to her. At least I was different in every way, being younger, being browner and having a name of my own. In our family cousin Marnie was the shadow of someone who was quite extraordinary.

My mother with the white cloth in her fingers had looked at Marnie and then tilted her chin in a slight nod.

Very good, she had said.

Now she drew me onto her lap, something she seldom did when she was fully dressed, wanting to keep my sticky child hands as far away from her beautiful clothes as possible. But that day, the day we were putting my grandmother into a pine box and lowering her into the ground, she let me sit on her slippery silk slip and press my ear into her breast where I could hear her heart beat, clattering to let me know that she was alive.

Mama, I said. Another word for love.

I reached up to touch the gold oval pendant of Guadalupe which she always wore on a chain low enough so that the pendent slipped between the valley of her breasts, keeping her faith hidden and close to her.

I need to tell you something, I said. Obligingly, she lowered her ear to my mouth and I whispered to her, I’m not upset bubbe’s dead.

My mother sighed. She lifted her head and dropped the point of her chin onto my crown, letting the weight of her head rest on mine. It hurt, but I didn’t want to tell her. I wanted her to make me feel better about not feeling bad.

But she didn’t.

It doesn’t matter, Almita. One day you’ll be as old as I am and you won’t even remember this conversation.

I’ll remember everything, I said petulantly. I really thought I could. Time was still a confusing concept to me, stretching out infinitely long. I remembered so much of what had happened in the past. It was forget- ting that seemed a foreign concept.

Never tell anyone what you told me, my mother said.

She slipped me off her lap and while I tried to resist, tangling my fingers in the chain of her necklace, the silkiness of her slip was too much and I was sloughed off, my feet on the floor, my arms bereft of her, before I really understood what was happening.

Like a secret?

But my mother wasn’t tricked by this. She knew that at that age I was so excited by secrets that I spilled them in every direction at every- one who came near me whether they asked about them or, more often, did not. The mailman, for instance, knew that my mother’s hair was mostly grey and she had to have it dyed to maintain that glossy black.

Not a secret, my mother said carefully. Just tact.

I was feeling quite well about myself as I descended the stairs of our home and saw aunt Eshkie wearing a dingy black suit that was not really black but off-black, the kind of faded black that comes from washing a fabric too many times. Aunt Eshkie was pacing at the bottom of the stairs and biting at a fingernail, something I had been trained out of.

My mother, after saying the word tact, had had to explain what, exactly tact was. My vague understanding was that tact was withhold- ing information from people who were too delicate to understand hard truths.

Normally I was the one who was too delicate to understand things. Whenever something was too complicated to explain, like why some people starved and I never would, my parents would tell me I would understand when I was older. Marnie made a habit of teasing me for my stupidity, my inability to understand cursive or read the big books in the family library. Being the tactful one, the one who understood a truth and kept it coiled carefully in the folds of my brain, made me feel smugly superior.

I was superior to my father who was rattled by my grandmother’s death. I was superior to aunt Eshkie who, like my father, had lately been possessed by a grief that made her memory fog. Days earlier, after one of aunt Eshkie’s visits, Marnie had opened the fridge to pour me a glass of milk and had found, outside its native habitat, a gently cooling stapler perched atop an egg carton. Marnie had placed the stapler with a thunk down on the kitchen table and we had contemplated it as we ate cookies which, under normal circumstances we would not have been able to eat so liberally.

Remembering that she was losing her mind, I greeted aunt Eshkie with my most charitable smile.

Hello aunt Eshkie, I said. Are you looking forward to burying bubbe today?

Even being an adult, and knowing what I know now about grief and loss, I find it hard to understand what Eshkie did next and completely impossible to let go of my own personal resentment to approach anything like forgiveness.

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia lives in Ottawa, ON. An O. Henry Award–winning author, she has been published in The Threepenny Review, PRISM international, The Dark, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories (2023), was the runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and shortlisted for an Ottawa Book Award. Other Evolutions is her debut novel.