I first saw the woman with no face in the sugarcane field behind my house. I was thirteen. It was summer. They had just burned the field and I was taking pictures of the white egrets that poke through the ash, eating bugs. She was standing in the irrigation ditch. I thought I heard her crying. She turned her head towards me and I ran home with a bad taste in my mouth.


The woman with no face cannot be older than twenty-three. She is tall and slender. Her black hair hangs past her waist and shines in the sun. Her feet are small and white. She never wears shoes. The sheet of skin where her face would be is as smooth and pale as the surface of an egg. She keeps herself very clean.


In the spring, she is restless. The March I turned seventeen, she drowned a boy from my high school in the irrigation ditch. The newspaper said he had been swimming in the canal and got sucked into a tunnel by a flash flood, but I knew better. I found him just before the search party, not far from my house. I saw the woman with no face sitting in the young sugarcane plants with his head in her lap. Her fingers spread over his face like a school of pale fish. She was pressing her thumbs into his eyes. She broke his nose with a quiet snap and folded it flat against his cheek. She carefully tore the skin around his mouth and pulled it over his lips.

I knew she was looking at me, because no one else could see her. The firemen and the boy's uncles passed their arms through her chest and kneeled on her feet to reach the boy. She looked at me while they gasped and cried out and pulled someone's jacket over his ruined face. She looked at me when they finally carried him up off her lap, and she bent her arm at the elbow as if to smile.

The boy had been tall and good-looking, and everyone wept when they bore him back to town. All the girls went to the funeral heaped with flowers. They stared at the closed coffin and passed around snapshots of him. I tried not to look at the pictures, his crisp grin, his proud nose. I sat through the service with my arms crossed, rubbing my elbows.


My mother said the woman with no face was an evil spirit, a ghost who refused to die. She sprinkled salt in every corner of our house and told me to stay away from the cane field. I went anyway, a few months after the boy had died. The sugarcane was up to my waist. I found her walking slowly down the dirt road that leads to the mill, combing her hair with her hands.

"Why did you do it?" I asked.

She stopped and stamped a foot in the red dirt.

"Was it his face?" I asked. "Was it too good?"

She pulled her hair over the place where her eyes would be.

"I think I've been in love," I said, in my seventeen-year-old wisdom. "And it often feels that way."

She bent her head as if to nod. A sad noise came from her throat. She hugged herself around the shoulders, and sank to the ground. I sat with her for an hour, until she started growing transparent. I thought she would disappear, leave the living or whatever it is that spirits do, but the next day, I saw her sitting on the smokestack of the refinery. Her hair blew in the exhaust. She hasn't killed another boy yet.


Some nights, I see the woman with no face walking under the clothesline in our yard. She threads her long arms through my shirtsleeves. She tries on my dresses, and in the morning I find dead moths clinging to my skirts. We are the same size. I try to imagine how cold and flat the world must be to her. I stare out at the cane field for a long time without blinking. The stalks are seven feet tall, and drying out. They will be burned soon.