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 she touched his arm.
“Go on downstairs with Chico,” she said. Her hand dropped from him to tug a white wicker rocker closer to the bed. Tenderly, she dabbed the old woman’s clammy brow with a handkerchief, pushing aside the sweat-dampened, spidersilk hair. “I’ll sit with her until Dr. Jimenez comes.”
Outside in the upstairs hall, Chico stood leaning against the wall with his arms crossed before him. When Fernando met his eye, Chico nodded and followed him down the stairs.
They sat outside on the porch drinking beer next to the eternally dozing old man. As their bottles emptied, the waifish Mercedes appeared with more. She was careful not to look at Fernando as she handed one to him. Careful to keep her lips pressed tightly together and to only nod faintly when he thanked her. Chico sneered after her anyway.
After an indeterminate amount of time, Dr. Jimenez arrived. He looked harried and half-crazed with his huge black-rimmed raccoon spectacles and tufts of white hair frizzing out like he’d been electric shocked. Mounting the porch step, he braced his black medical bag on the weathered banister. He fixed Chico with a glare which the coke-bottle lenses of his spectacles magnified to absurd proportions of indignation.
“Well I’ve gotten my ‘bug-eyed old ass over here,’” the doctor groused, his glasses a-flash. Fernando understood then that Chico had intruded on Mercedes’ phone call in one way or another. “Where’s the patient?”
“Upstairs,” Chico answered nonplussed, taking another swig from his beer. “Second door on the left.”
The doctor grunted and showed himself inside. As Fernando watched after him, Chico clapped a hand to his shoulder.
“Don’t worry, primo. Jimenez’ll set her straight. He’s been our family doctor since forever.”
“He’s a quack,” the old man grumbled from beneath his frayed straw hat, then went on dozing again as imperturbably as ever.
Chico ignored this remark so completely that Fernando wondered whether he’d imagined it altogether. Setting aside his half-drunk beer, he kneaded at the stitch of pain lancing between his brows. At the arrival of the suspect doctor, Chico’s spell of reserved silence had broken.
“What happened?” he asked Fernando, eyeing him over in his beleaguered, mudstained state. “You look like you’ve been through hell.”
Fernando told him an abridged version of the events from the night before—the raging tempest, the torrential floods, the desperate flight for cover he and his grandmother had been forced to make as the storm had brought the house down almost upon their own heads.
“You’re kidding,” Chico said, aghast. “The whole shack is gone? We only had some rain and wind here. Nothing crazy.”
Fernando nodded. “I watched it go down myself.”
“Thank God you got of there in time,” Chico muttered, shaking his head.
Fernando nodded again. But recalling that vile dream he’d started awake from, he felt that God had no place in it.
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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy