María Abenia

After the eruption of the Tajogaite volcano, on the island of La Palma, men and machines break, push and crush the rocks of the new "malpaís" (land of solidified lava).

There are people who spend their entire lives in the same house, their childhood home where their family history rests. Benigno, at eighty-eight years old, still sleeps, eats, and dreams in the home where he was born, the home that is rooted in the earth to reach for the sky. The house stands alone, alongside Benigno and his tortoise Totó, adrift in the limbo of memories, the ritual of daily life, and the anticipation of the final day. Adjacent to the house is his vegetable garden, which he visits daily to tend to his chickens and work the soil with the seeds inherited from his ancestors, which he ceremoniously catalogs and preserves.

Circe's daylife is quiet on top of a cliff. With a cave dug into the rock as a home and away from everything, she is known in the valley for her solitude mood, her pigs sheepherding and her witchcraft skills.

An unwanted pregnancy triggers the journey into adulthood for Makenya, a Dominican-Haitian teenager who lives in the Batey, a community surrounded by sugarcane fields.