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–>Read the first part of my debut novel La Gorgona here!
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Fernando woke the next morning naked and alone. He sat up stiffly from the rock. He pulled on his clothes and shoes which were mostly dry. His grandmother’s nightdress and warstaff were still laying there on the ground nearby him, but the woolen poncho was not. Outside on the bluff, the rain and wind had ceased. A pale sun was shining, a sickly seep of light through the haze.
He found her cowled under the indian poncho, sitting hunched on a flinty precipice nearby. One look at her, and Fernando
Bitterly, Fernando turned away from the fallen shack, in pursuit of his grandmother. The flashlight’s wavering beam proved next to useless, scattering wanly in the turbulence of the downpour. Attempting to follow his grandmother’s tracks proved vain from the outset. Whatever shallow depressions her doe feet had left in the mud had been swept away about as soon as she’d laid them. Even the route he’d seen her take before she’d faded from sight had been largely flooded out.
Head bowed against
Fernando woke with a start. His heart hammered wildly. He was damp with sweat, feverishly hot. Horribly and painfully aroused.
Furiously ashamed.
His hand stung, sliced open by an icon fallen from the shelf above his cot. The walls groaned, creaking. Shaking perilously under the strain of remaining upright against the stormwinds that assailed them. Rainwater fell in a frenzied staccato from rips in the thatching.
Fernando got up from his cot. Through the midnight gloom he searched for his grandmother.
In this dream of himself as a child, Fernando’s mother lifted one coffee-colored leg. She braced her foot on the edge of the vanity to paint her toes. Her dressing robe tented as she did this—a makeshift fort which no little boy could resist. He crawled under her chair, under her pitched-up skirt.
She was naked between the legs, though there wasn’t much for him to perceive then or now. A dark curling nest of hair that gleamed like it was oiled but wasn’t. A lone garter banded around
The skies grew dark well before dusk. Fell winds gusted, breathy and portentous. Hushed whispers of warning that skimmed the ear. The dense, damp air stirred like a broth. Grey-black thunderheads thickened as they rolled in above the lashing trees. Murky clouds churned slow and viscous overhead, like a cauldron of conjured night.
The old woman peered up at the growing tumult, the lines of her face shadowed with presentiment. “A storm is coming.”
Swiping a hand across his sweaty brow, Fernando
Fernando’s body creaked like the cot as he dragged himself out of it. His grandmother harried him, imploring him not to get up, telling him he needed to lie still and rest. Fernando brushed her off. He knew that if he lay here any longer in this bed he might never get out of it. It wasn’t the weight of his injuries he felt as he sat up and stood, but a burden of grief that oppressed him. Crushing and unseen, and all the more terrible for it.
He set tasks for himself around the homestead. He
Fernando lost track of the days in his convalescence. In the gloom of the hut day and night seemed to meld together, shadow for eclipsing shadow. Eventually, Chico and the others came to visit him. Whether they had spent the intervening time mustering up the nerve to cross the witch’s threshold, or bracing themselves for the sight of him that lay beyond, it was clear that their imagined fears had been worse than the reality.
Clustered around Fernando’s cot, his friends sat hunched together
Fernando watched the shadows play over the clapboard walls, chinked with cracked clay, packed with moss and palm floss. In the flicker of the oil lamp, the shadows bent and twisted, undulating salacious and sinister over the racks of dried herbs, the grubby tallow candles, the rough-hewn shelves of bones and beads and carved icons, the yawning seed husks and glowing amulets, the murky vials of potions and jars of insect wings, the clusters of tin crosses and the painted faces of the saints, sunken
“No way…you were laid off again?”
Emilia nodded dismally, chasing the olive in her martini glass around with a toothpick. “Yeah, it’s like dĂ©jĂ vu. Another year, another layoff.”
“Fuck, Emi. That sucks.”
“Tell me about it.” Emilia stabbed at the olive, which bobbed aside unscathed, as if it too were mocking her. She glowered. “I’m starting to think I’m cursed or something. The butt of some sick cosmic joke.”
“Definitely unlucky,” Stacy said, smiling
Fernando didn’t have long to wait. He was out smoking on the crumbling, graffitied overlook, surveying the motley sprawl of Cortez old and new, when Pedro’s crew-cab truck drew up beside him. Pablo sat in the backseat. Their looks were sober, grim.
“Primo,” Pedro said.
Fernando nodded to him.
Crushing out his cigarette beneath his bootheel, Fernando walked over to the passenger side of the truck and got in. Pedro ferried him away to a part of Saguero he’d never been. A graveyard place of