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

IV

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