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–>Read the first part of my debut novel La Gorgona here!
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Fernando trudged back through the stiffening, sucking muck. Depleted, he sat down on the steps of the ruined porch. He felt useless to do anything else because there was nothing else. Nothing to salvage, nothing spared. What little the storm hadn’t leveled he would have to see leveled himself. But not today. Today there was nothing to be done except to watch the blaze devour the spoiled fruits of his labors.
Through raw, red-rimmed eyes, he watched the fire rage. He watched the flames spread
Fernando rested for a few hours at Chico’s home, then he returned to his grandmother’s property—or what remained of it, that was.
On his climb up the hill to the home site, muddy rivulets coursed past him sluggishly, like slow-clotting veins. He spied the shed he’d thought to take refuge in swept clear down the slope and dashed to jagged pieces in the ravine far below. A litter of his grandmother’s precious icons and other meager possessions poked here and there through the sagging ooze
Stuck in the dark purgatory of his ruminations, Fernando waited with Chico for the doctor to return. He didn’t want to think anymore about that hellacious storm and the fallout from it. He didn’t want to think anymore about anything. He hated how he couldn’t just stop thinking—even for one single goddamn second. He felt like a prisoner of his own mind. He told himself not to dwell on what had happened, that it was pointless. He told himself that the storm was over,
Allie’s wilderness retreat was drawing to a close. She’d spent the past two weeks in a picturesque log cabin situated in the heart of the Rockies. It had a been a whirlwind adventure of a trip, to say the least.
The end-of-vacation blues she was experiencing were particularly potent in this case. It was fairer to say she was positively dreading returning to her normal life in Denver. In fact, she could scarcely comprehend it. Was ‘normal’ life even an option on the table for her anymore?
Pushing two child’s cots together, Emmanuella made them up with fresh linens from the nicked flower bureau. The faded knit of the sheets was feather-soft with age. Fernando settled his delirious grandmother onto the bed. He averted his eyes as Emmanuella stripped off the damp scratchy poncho and clothed the little old woman in a billowy nightgown that dwarfed her even further. Smoothing the sheets neck-high around her feebly thrashing form, Emmanuella turned to Fernando. She smiled softly as
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