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
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.
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