Here Are Women and Angel Wings

Weep And Adelante, Mujeres

Review: Thelma T. Reyna. The Heavens Weep for Us and other stories. Golden Foothills Press, 2009(link)

Michael Sedano

La Bloga-Tuesday is happy to observe Women’s History Month 2026 with this review of Thelma T. Reyna’s The Heavens Weep for Us and other stories. Twelve stories focus on women’s lives, what they see and think when a woman faces whatever situation time has placed her.

Reyna’s stories come rich with ironies, tragedy, horror, love, and genuine people. The author is a master of structure and coherence, seeming divagations pull right back into the heart of the matter, flashbacks enrich many narratives. Weeping doesn’t fix nor build anything, weeping is a condition that’s better left to heaven. Here on earth, women face, fix, and endure.

In “White Van,” a woman without a name imagines a shared moment of grace with an elderly neighbor and builds an imaginary relationship based on her expectation of seeing him in passing.

In the title story—only three pages--a pair of small caskets lie in an open grave. An unnamed mother, fleeing abuse, abandons her children to the abusive man to be beaten and burned to death.

“Little Box” a mother’s fanciful imagination leaves a residue of disappointed expectations and demoralized suspicion. It’s as if an imagined woman has come out of that box and into being, fulfilling one woman’s fantasy and ruining another woman’s happiness like a perverse Pandora’s box.

One of the collection’s memory stories is “Marry Me,” featuring two women.  Marta is a middle-age woman reinventing herself. Kika is an 80 year old widow who recognizes her husband of 54 years in young Diego and asks him to marry her. For Diego, it’s harassment. For Kika the resemblance is ongoing pain of losing him every time she asks. And she keeps asking.

“Comatose” features a woman in a coma. Reyna posits the deeply comforting theory that patients hear and comprehend their surroundings. A couple have a fight over his infidelity. Paula leaves in distress, has the accident. Robert fills with remorse, stays at his wife’s bedside, begging doctors for hope only to be told to pull the plug.

Santa Fe Santana is the collection’s most perplexing woman. At 23 she prowls places indiscriminately picking up men for sex. Her bedmate mocks her for being married and named Santa. Faith, her English name, acts out of disappointed expectations. She expected “the one,” a lifelong companion and instead her military husband volunteers for overseas assignment. She fills his two-year absence with strange men’s beds and revenge sex. Disappointment feeds resentment leading to Faith’s unfaithfulness.

“KeiKei & Ollie” introduces a thirty-something solitary woman and a lonely immigrant bachelor with unspoken yearnings for one another. Joe sees Amy as serious, serene, alert, and kind. Amy sees exotic and outside the sameness of her lifestyle. The title characters are Amy’s dog and cat. When the dog is dying, Joe and Amy make a connection. Out of weeping, Amy will allow herself to love Joe.

“Fooled” is a second memory story, this one of cruelty. Maggie lives in early stages of a dementia. She depends on family members for news of  her three children especially her favorite child, Cora. Family decides the woman doesn’t have the right to know Cora died, making tiresome excuses why Cora doesn’t call. As the woman crosses to the Other Side, three souls await Maggie’s transition.

 “Victim” recounts how a lie explodes into more lies with substantial harm to others. Maria is having a crummy day. Her academic future is shaky, she’s broken a nail and there’s blood, and a cop stops her. Maria is scared shitless of her low-achieving husband, Al. Thinking to avoid confrontation with the jerk, Maria lies about a shadowy man in the parking lot and by the end of the story her husband, surprisingly tender, comforts Maria and the relieved Maria magnifies the lie.

Two old friends reunion in a dusty Texas bar. Manuel looks for his friend, Juana Macho, the story’s title character, as he travels around dusty Texas towns. Manuel is guilty that he looked with obvious revulsion at Juana’s fire-scarred body. Juana doesn’t like to see her body, breastless, stiff scar tissue. She flees Manuel’s approaches and he’s determined to make amends. Reyna offers these characters the possibility of a happy end.

Thelma Reyna displays masterful control of point of view in “Illusions,” following thoughts of cosmeticians Millie, Beth, Tina, and customers the blonde, and Johnnie.

The final story of the collection, “Saving Up,” is the book’s final memory story. The title refers to an unnamed woman’s memories of a lifetime’s crucial moments, good things dampened by painful ones for this character. She counts them: Intense sexual episodes. The birth of the boy who burned. Building their house by hand. The fire, her husband’s near death, the boy’s death. Memory is this woman’s way of compartmentalizing joy and neutralizing pain.

Readers will enjoy Thelma T. Reyna’s descriptive elegance, mot juste vocabulary, and story development. These thumbnail sketches only scratch the surface of Reyna’s developed situations, keenly felt moments, and insight into her characters.

The omniscient narrator doesn’t take sides nor pick at a character’s choices and motives. They just are and do. Reyna leaves it to her readers to decipher the exigencies moving her women. For example, is Faith unfaithful simply out of revenge, or is she hedonistic-- or nihilistic-- in her sexual pursuit of a substitute for “the one”? Are her expectations fair and reasonable? Does imagination call a spirit out of a small box, give it substance to linger and insinuate itself into other lives? 

I personally endorse Reyna’s proposition in “Comatose.” My Barbara was always present in the deepest days of living with Alzheimer’s Dementia when aphasia robbed her of comprehensible communication, then she stopped talking at all. Barbara was always there.

What those people do to Maggie in her early dementia is wrong and selfish, and a little bit evil and I wish they hadn't intruded into my space. 

Maggie’s transition rings true, they await us pa’lla.

On the Snow White Wings of A Colibrí

Last week's La Bloga-Tuesday (link) shared my ongoing photographic project I call Things With Wings. I photograph birds and insects, concentrating on hummingbirds and butterflies. This photographic project ordinarily engages miles of stalking things with wings, especially in the air. When I moved into a new home, ending my Eaton Fire regfugee status, it came with a wondrous hedge colibríes frequent.

I seek the perfect photograph of a bird in the air, wings rampant, eyes and beak and feathers sharply focused. Recently I experimented with movement. That is, hummingbirds with wings rampant but instead of wings frozen in mid-motion, the foto shows the wings in luxurious blur, moving, with the body of the birds más o menos stationary and in good detailed focus.

You probably can get these fotos with your camera phone, but I have no idea how. I use a Canon EOS 6D Mark II with a Canon 300mm lens. Usually I handhold the lens but for these exposures of moving light I mount the camera and lens on a tripod and pan and tilt with a steady base. Setting the lens to f32, even at ISO5000, slows down the shutter to 1/100, 1/125, and 1/160. With the camera set on aperture, the device adjusts the shutter speed based on the ambient light.

Click an image and your browser should treat you to a larger size image.

Sadly, camera shake plays havoc with feather focus but those wings, mira nomás!