The Pitstop

By Manny Minaya

Check out a preview of Worldbuilding Magazine volume 7 no. 2. This issue’s theme is on philosophy. Below is one of our featured short stories “The Pitstop” by Manny Minaya. He was also one of our featured authors in Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology, which was a previous collaborative project between Dominican Writers Association and Worldbuilding Magazine. We hope you enjoy!

She was a Jumi, one of those wonderful creatures living on the edge of heaven where the road snaked past the gates into paradise. A place that teemed with gems growing out of mineral deposits and the niches of nature. Jumis were born with one of these gems somewhere on their bodies, which gave them magickal abilities found nowhere else. 

Like everyone else, unchecked emotions and the harsh realities of life afflicted Jumis. Like everyone else, their hearts would eventually break or their bodies would lose the will to continue. But unlike everyone else, Jumis were a proud and secluded people, their culture and traditions encouraging them to help one another instead of seeking comfort outside their communities.

She wasn’t like anyone else. She had come in the eye of a snowstorm. She ambled down the road, clutching her overcoat to protect herself from the biting wind. A ghastly howl swallowed all other noise. Visibility was dangerously low to be traveling, but Rregulle remembered how the baby blue gem on her forehead cut through the white like a determined lighthouse as she approached the garage with the humble café attached. 

Only her face managed to be untouched by it and if she would have gotten there just ten minutes later, she would have died. 

It had been past close of business, and the crew had already settled down for the staff dinner. They whipped into gear when she arrived. The garage, having been cleaned and organized for the next day, transformed into a disarray of tools and urgent bodies.

They cleared a long tool table and laid the Jumi on it. Aaruel and Yammie—the barkeep and receptionist, respectively—asked the men to turn their backs as they removed the Jumi’s clothing and threw it into an incinerator. Once the Jumi had been covered by a blanket, Rregulle and José, his assistant, were able to properly inspect the damage.

He had never met one before, but stories of the Gemmed Ones resonated across the land. Humans, or something similar, their affinities for the natural world manifested in the form of colored gems. Sociologists speculated that the gems had something to do with the elements until the Jumis made contact with the rest of the world and explained they did not know such restrictions. The Gemmed Ones simply “were one” with nature. That’s it. Whatever one wanted to do with their gem was their choice, as long as they upheld expectations as to what nature should do for them.

The gem on the Jumi’s forehead pulsed in a diminishing light. As the pulsing slowed, so did the snowstorm outside.

“Did she conjure the storm?” José asked as he traced the tender flesh around the gem with gloved fingers. 

“Maybe,” Rregulle muttered, exhausted after what had been a long day. He instructed Aaruel to boil a kettle of water for tea and Yammie to research whatever she could find on Jumis. Humanoid as she was, there might be something about their anatomy he had to watch for. 

“How’s the rest of her faring?” Rregulle asked Yammie. 

Yammie lifted the weighted blanket covering the Jumi’s feet. “The Frost is melting but not fast enough. We need to move.”

Rregulle nodded to José, the cue to begin the work. 

Both men removed their work gloves. In unison, they approached an apparatus behind the two auto lifts, recently wiped of any dust, oil, grease, and sweat. It featured two long cables, their ends splitting into three flexible wires with pads. Rregulle and José removed them from their hanging posts.

“Clear?” Rregulle asked Yammie.

Yammie was scrolling through a research paper on the garage’s computer. “One second.... Okay, it says something about how the gems are fragile and if it cracks, it could possibly kill them. Just make sure the pads aren’t near the gem. Put them right on her temples or else you’ll cause the gem to go haywire."

The men did so. Yammie rushed to the apparatus’ terminal. It sparked awake into a fuzzy picture. She typed madly at the keyboard, referencing the computer to see what the right coding to a Jumi’s memory was. 

“Damn it, what the—” Yammie seethed.

“Easy, breathe. You won’t help her by getting frustrated,” Rregulle instructed. Yammie was still fresh to the job, but she showed promise with her ability to code her way into a person’s mind in search of their fondest memories. She had even created her own presets to speed up the process; she found peoples memories all played back in a small range of wavelengths. A few button presses and she would be able to find exactly what the person needed.

Yammie slowed her typing. She stopped referencing the computer and allowed her mind to get lost in the Jumi’s world, in her coding. Images of vast places cycled on the screen in one-second spurts, a montage of a glistening sea and exotic plants and Jumis dressed in ceremonial garb, their gems catching the sunlight. There was a lot of sun in the Jumi’s memories, of oases lined by palm trees, and a snaking river opening its lips to meet that shining sea, all from the Jumi’s perspective. Yammie wondered how this woman could know what a snowstorm was, what frost was, to have been nearly killed by it.

The scene passed like a split-second thought, the dark image contrasting all the sun and glitter of memories. Yammie stopped coding and rewound. An alleyway came into focus. A man stood in the foreground with his back to the Jumi. The way the man spread his arms out implied he had been protecting her from something.

Or someone. In the background, a slender hooded figure stood. The figure held a dagger in one hand and pliers in the other. 

“Focus on that,” Rregulle said. 

Yammie typed another line of code. The apparatus whirred, and the pads on the Jumi’s temples glowed, as did her gem. 

“Please,” the Jumi groaned. Her eyes fluttered open to reveal a beautiful set of sky-blue pools. Three dots in a triangular formation surrounded her irises. 

Rregulle took his eyes off the apparatus’ screen and observed the Jumi. He froze. It was as if the frost had slipped off of her and crept up his skin. He felt goosebumps. Those soft eyes, glistening from her tears, unlike anything he had ever seen before, captivated him. 

José gave him a forceful push. “Snap out of it.”

Rregulle shook awake. A cluster of contradicting emotions washed over him. Feelings of love for this woman he had never met. Deep-rooted memories of his ex-wife, whose leaving him had led him to open this place in the middle of nowhere. He felt a long-lost happiness of basking in the sun—a far cry from the overcast skies that plagued this part of the world.

Yammie finished the line of code. The white noise of the one-second video cleared out to reveal the scene in full. Behind the hooded man, a crowd madly rushed in one direction. Dark splotches dotted the dirt road and chunks of sun-kissed bricks and debris had fallen all over. 

“Jumi eyes are dangerous,” the hooded man on the screen said, as if he was in the room with them. “Lucky, unlucky, wise, spelling doom….” The hooded man’s voice croaked. He brandished the knife. It gleamed in the sun. The flash of light shone on the apparatus’ screen, blinding the Jumi. A split second later, the hooded man was inches away from the Jumi’s protector. 

“One-thousand gold coins for one Eye of Jumi,” the hooded man said. “And to think the streets of paradise teem with such treasures.” He stabbed the Jumi’s protector. The man slumped against the hooded man and fell face-first. With the same bloody knife, the hooded man extracted the gem from his victim’s forehead.

“Two-thousand. Let’s make it two Eyes.” A smile scratched the hooded man’s pallid face. He stepped over the dead Jumi’s body towards the woman, who, on the table in the garage, fussed as if she was fighting him off.

On the apparatus’ terminal, the crew saw her extend her hands forward, palms out. A gust of wind tunneled down the alleyway and kicked up dust, dirt, and an unseasonable amount of snow. The gem on the Jumi’s forehead shone as she tossed and turned on the table. Rregulle and José pinned her down as snowflakes appeared on her palms and drifted down to the garage’s concrete floor. 

“¡Apágalo!” José shouted at Yammie.

A bang sounded off from one of the garage doors behind them. They turned to see a large dent caused by the gust of wind. A howl crescendoed, the eye of the snowstorm lingering above the garage ready to tear the roof apart to protect the Jumi. 

“Not yet!” Yammie yelled back. She aimed to let the video play out, hoping to see what could have caused the frost to nearly consume this poor woman. Without that knowledge, they could not help her. They would need to travel into hell, witness pain and hurt and despair and turmoil to acknowledge it, then to name it, then to properly diagnose it. Rregulle was the one who taught them that those who run away from conflict never evolve, never learn, never become more than what their comfort zone nurtured them to be. 

On the terminal, the Jumi ran with the crowd. People scrambled through the narrow streets of this unknown tropical paradise, their gems glistening like grains of sand in a rushing river. Around them—on the streets, on the roofs, behind them, in front of them—hooded figures picked them off with an assortment of weaponry. 

It was then that the Jumi found herself bundled up in a snowstorm of her own doing, her thoughts attempting to come to terms with the eradication of her people, with the death of a man she spent cold nights and warm days with, an entire community washed away in an instant by the greed of those foreign figures. Within hours, those figures—learned soon after from a news broadcast to be opportunistic gem rushers from the southern country of Tréas—mined the Jumi’s paradise into the bare earth. Veins of amethyst, diamonds, topaz, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and the like were tapped dry from the bodies of the deceased. From a helicopter’s camera, the desolate streets of the Jumi’s paradise permeated the homes of those without much in life, who at least offered their sympathies and prayers to the unfortunate. 

And the Jumi knew this would come. Laying on the table in the garage, surrounded by strangers soiled by oil and grease and the smell of fried food, she knew she was the last of her kind. This brought her an unbearable sadness which forced her eyes shut and pushed the tears out.

Rregulle wondered how one was to console this type of pain. Normally the patrons of their little pitstop dealt with more human concerns: heart breaks, financial losses, the death of a family member or loved one. The crew never dealt with pain this deep. 

The frost worsened. Rregulle and José quickly broke into a chant. They channeled their energies into a mantra to remind the Jumi of the beauties of life. But the Jumi had known beauty, had come from beauty, and so the mantra did nothing to keep the frost at bay. 

The two men switched quickly from mantra to mantra, as many as they knew from years of consoling. One by one, the Jumi shot down any remembrance of life’s graces. She muttered the name of a man, presumably the one who had tried to protect her. It was then that a tiny light broke through her fingers, held in a fist underneath the blanket. 

Rregulle carefully pried open her hand to reveal a red-hot gem. It pulsated in rhythm with the gem on her forehead. It then occurred to Rregulle that everyone’s trauma was different. The mantras and spells he had created over his years of service were designed for humans, people like him, who had worries and stresses in line with their reality. But reality sat at the core of a polygon with an infinite number of vertices, each point the perspective of infinite individuals. 

A Jumi must be cured with what Jumis know best, Rregulle deduced. He ceased his chanting and plucked the gem from the dying Jumi’s hand. 

Aaruel nearly dropped the tray of tea when she spotted him doing so. “Stop! Don’t touch that!” she yelled. 

“Why not?” José asked. “Nothing else works.”

She explained: a Jumi’s gem was documented to have left irreparable damage to non-Jumis. The appropriation of it was dangerous, having killed many people who tried to do so. The crew would see that within the next few hours when the same news helicopter would show the disfigured bodies of the Tréas invaders. 

At that moment, though, Rregulle did not heed Aaruel and suspected that finding another Jumi in that hell of a paradise would be impossible. “She will die,” Rregulle said with calm certainty. “Yammie, how do I use this?”

“You’re mad,” Yammie called from over her shoulder as she coded frantically on the terminal in search for an alternative memory that could be used instead of Rregulle’s self-righteous suicide. “There isn’t a lot of research on the gems. Jumis are born with them and use them as naturally as one would breathe.” She tapped the middle of her forehead. “The most spiritual in their societies are born with one on their third eye.”

Surely, that wouldn’t work, Rregulle thought. Humans were not in possession of such a sense, and Rregulle was not the most spiritual person. He believed in hard work. He did not observe a higher being but instead found answers in the things he could see and feel for himself. He believed in his father, whose hands toiled in the garage of Rregulle’s childhood home, tinkering with automobiles and building wooden furniture from scratch. His father’s hands were calloused, and Rregulle enjoyed watching the blisters form and heal ad-nauseam. The repetition of such a real thing presented him his faith early: that through one’s own hands and hard work it was possible to create a comfortable reality. Whoever created the universe, he figured, might have spoken Their intentions into existence but it was Their hands which molded the earth, the heavens, and all the beautiful little things in between. 

Rregulle looked down at his own hands, the ones he inherited from his father, the ones passed down through generations of cultivating the many reasons to live. His energy did not come from a gem like a Jumi’s. Human energy came from any point in the body, wherever they chose to place it. 

Rregulle pressed the red-hot gem onto the back of his left hand. This thoughtless action garnered a collective gasp from the crew. José would have tackled Rregulle if it wasn’t for the long table between them. Yammie wasted no time in scrolling through the computer to see if there was a cure for such recklessness. Aaruel placed the tray down and rushed to Rregulle and held onto his arm. “Do you have a death wish?! Are you mad?!” she frantically yelled. 

Rregulle gently removed Aaruel’s clasped fingers from his arm, noticing the skin underneath his coverall had dried and cracked under her grasp. A chill rose up his arm, prompting him to remove the sleeve to reveal a thin layer of frost. Vapor rose into the air. Rregulle exhaled a cold breath. The cold from the raging snowstorm outside battered against the garage, seemingly feeling the frost building up between Rregulle and the Jumi. It wanted to be let in, to consume everyone inside in its despair. The frost traveling up Rregulle’s arm quit its ascent at the shoulder as soon as the gem settled. A heat shot up his arm next, shocking him. When the heat settled, Rregulle felt an icy-hot sensation, like prickles underneath the skin. 

Only then did he understand the Jumi’s despair. A wave of memories crashed into the glen of his mind, drowning out the noise of the garage, the storm outside, the worried chatter of his crew. The sun-bleached streets of the Jumi’s paradise entered his vision. The soothing sounds of water from the surrounding oases serenaded him. He turned. The Jumi met his—or whoever’s memories he tapped—eyes. 

Rregulle felt like he loved this woman. And she loved him back. And he felt all of the man’s wishes and hopes and dreams and memories in the gem, perfect human worries and aspirations. He knew that although they lived in paradise, the contents of the male Jumi’s mind were filled with things that would soil such an Eden, and that he had worked tirelessly to create a paradise for himself and his loved one. 

He held the Jumi’s hand and let the gem do the work. The memories faded away from Rregulle, and in the short-term he quickly forgot what he had just seen. The memories and warmth and reasons to live traveled along their interlaced fingers. The frost melted off the Jumi’s body, starting from her soles and continuing up to the nape of her neck. The raging snowstorm outside simmered to a whimper, as did the Jumi, who no longer fussed or breathed raggedly. She slept. The apparatus’ terminal shut off. Yammie flexed her fingers and tossed herself onto a rolling chair. 

Rregulle carefully removed his hand from the Jumi’s so as not to wake her and probed at the gem at the back of his left hand. It had not killed him. He was not a Jumi but the gem did not take his life as it had all those hooded figures. The frost on his arm remained, he found, though its cold had not, nor had the painful memories that were known to manifest when it afflicted people. 

For three nights Rregulle braced himself for the worst of the frost on his arm. For four days the crew forced Rregulle to take time off to not scare the customers away. For three nights the Jumi slept in one of the rooms of the adjacent motel. Aaruel left the café in the care of José as she catered to the sleeping woman.

The Jumi awoke after closing on the fourth night, well after the crew had cleaned up, ate their staff dinner, and headed home. Rregulle ascended the stairs to his apartment above the café, carrying a warm tray of food. The Jumi stood in the middle of his living room, staring north out the window. The soft pink underbellies of the clouds on the horizon silhouetted her frail frame. She touched the windowpane. Her fingers gingerly slid off. She gripped the windowsill, ice spreading from her fingertips. The windowsill shattered under her grip, causing her to gasp and scramble to clean up her mess.

“It’s…it’s fine, you don’t….” Rregulle started. This shocked the Jumi, who turned and profusely apologized and promised to pay him whatever for the damages. 

Rregulle set the tray of dinner he made for himself down on the dresser by the door in conciliation. The Jumi stared at the food. Three days and three nights of sleeping made one hungry, he assumed, and she surely would need it more than him. Rregulle had figured her skin was pale because of the condition she had arrived in but as she voraciously ate and drank and her energy returned, he came to believe that it was her natural color. The Jumi was ice, in a way, the same white blue of frost.

“How are you feeling?” Rregulle asked.

“I’m better now,” the Jumi answered after she swallowed a mouthful. There was a serenity to her voice now that she wasn’t frantically sobbing or apologizing. It silenced all other noise around it. Low enough to demand people to listen, with a confidence that did not care if one chose to listen or not. “Again, I must apologize for troubling you and your staff. I thought I’d be wandering in that snowstorm until I collapsed.”

“You would have died from frost if you hadn’t come along. Please don’t apologize.” Rregulle paused. He contemplated whether he should break the news to her about the rest of her people. 

She read it in his downcast eyes. She knew the Jumis’ time in paradise would come to an end, she said. The illusions cast around their city would be broken, and the world would force itself on them. But she was only one Jumi, and a pot maker at that, endlessly working on molding clay and earth. As a Jumi attuned to the earth, she heard the omen from the trembles of pebbles. She had seen the hooded figures in the waters of her finished pots. She felt the earth warm and tried to warn someone but again, who would listen to a lowly tradeswoman?

This shocked Rregulle, who questioned how she could be attuned to the earth if her gem was the color of ice. She had arrived in a snowstorm, he told her, and it raged the more pain she was in.

That’s when he noticed the cracks in her pale skin. A bronze hue spread over her. The color of tree trunks and stems and branches rode the dips and turns of her curly hair. The more she ate and drank, the more vibrant her natural colors became until the gem on her forehead turned topaz. 

“How—?” Rregulle started.

The Jumi had been oblivious to her change. She gave him a tired chuckle when she noticed what had happened and gently explained, “We’re flexible people. Our gems and appearances change depending on the element we…‘feel’ I would say.”

“I should be the one to apologize then for your loss,” Rregulle said, thinking back to the snowstorm and how much pain she must have felt to conjure such a thing. 

The Jumi hung her head and Rregulle noticed frost spreading from her fingers again. He reached out to grab her hand. The left sleeve of his jumpsuit rolled up as he did so, and the Jumi spotted the gem embedded on the back of his left hand. The frost left as quickly as it had come as she tightly clutched his hand. She kissed the gem once, rested her own gem on it, then kissed it again.

“I…I had to use it to save you. If it was disrespectful for me to do so—”

The Jumi shook her head. “It chose you.”

“Pardon? I thought Jumis were born with gems.”

She shook her head again. “We are not. During childhood we undergo a ritual to determine our main element. Each gem is capable of flexibility, however. It changes depending on our moods or if we are in desperate situations and need another element to help us. It seems like for you, your element is fire.”

“But I’m not a Jumi….I should have died.”

The Jumi pushed Rregulle’s sleeve up to his elbows. She ran a finger across his blue, frosted skin. “The gems know. You’ve been through a lot of pain and so you needed it to save me. I’ve never heard of such a thing either.” It was then that Rregulle made to remove the gem from his hand to return it now that he was done with it.

“No,” the Jumi snapped. “Do that and you’ll die. The gem is the only thing keeping the frost back. Keep it.”

She rose from the bed and returned the tray of food to Rregulle with a bow. “Thank you for saving me and for the hospitality,” she said. She made for the door and down the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Rregulle said, chasing after her.

The Jumi turned at the bottom of the steps. “To find more of my own.”

“But they’re gone. The news reported it, the Jumis are gone. You’re the last one. Why don’t you stay with us? We can give you shelter, food, clothes, anything you need.”

The Jumi smiled at his ignorance, not expecting him or any other human to know that there were other Jumi towns, cities, societies situated in the far corners of the world. Heaven was all around them if they really searched for it, the Jumi thought, but humans were content in staying within the boundaries of what they could readily sense. She would search tirelessly, relying on the strength and flexibility of her gem to point her in the right direction. 

The Jumi headed westbound towards the snow-capped mountain ranges scratching against the dark sky. It would take her a while to find the next Jumi town, but she would find it nestled in the valleys there. Then she would soon travel to the next town and the next until she reached a city by a silken sea. And Rregulle would never leave her mind. The thought of a stranger who risked his life to save her—who managed to use the gem of a Jumi without dying—kept her going. It gave her hope that perhaps not all humans were bad.

“Promise me you’ll use the gem with good intentions,” the Jumi had said before she left. 

And since then, Rregulle never closed his garage doors. He figured there might come a day when someone like the Jumi, someone vastly different than himself, would come along and seek the same help. The gem had chosen him, granted him the element of fire and warmth to continue to combat the frost. He believed it to be his purpose and he would turn no one away at his doors.

Thank you for reading “The Pitstop” by Manny Minaya. You can read the rest of this issue of Worldbuilding Magazine for free in PDF format. 

Art is by RoadArchie, who can be found on Tumblr, X, mastodon, bsky, and Instagram under that name.

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Manny Minaya is a Dominican/Puerto Rican-American based in Denver, Colorado. Born and raised in New York City, Manny's writing leans on the magical realism canon as seen in Latin-American literature, intersecting with his lived experiences as person with a disability and the magics rooted in his family's history. Manny graduated summa cum laude from CUNY The City College of New York with a Creative Writing degree. Recently, his short story, “The Pitstop” was featured in the Worldbuilding Magazine. DWA featured his short story "La Tijana"  in "Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology." Manny Minaya is currently querying for his magical realism novel, "Where the Magick Flows."

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