Love and Other Poisons
Author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Date: 2014-09-08 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Short Stories; Horror; Fiction
Description: Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy. This collection of 18 speculative stories, including three never found in print before, explores the meaning of love, and, of course, of poison.
Publisher: Innsmouth Free Press

Copyright © 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without permission in writing from its author.

Published by Innsmouth Free Press
Vancouver, BC Canada
http://innsmouthfreepress.com

ISBN paperback 978-1-927990-04-9

ISBN hardcover 978-1-927990-05-6

ISBN e-book 978-1-927990-06-3

Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison.
The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.

— Paracelsus

CONTENTS

Introduction

Variations of Figures Upon the Wall

Man in Blue Overcoat

River, Dreaming

Distant Deeps or Skies

The Sea, Like Glass Unbroken

Kissing Frost

Enchantment

A Handful of Earth

Live Sho

Translucent Skin

Collect Call

Shedding Her Own Skin

To See Pedro Infante

Kaleidoscope

Abandon All Flesh

The River-Hag

Sublime Artifacts

A Puddle of Blood

There are a myriad of poisons in these tales. They taste like desire, dissatisfaction, indifference, and more. Sometimes there is also love — though not always of the romantic variety. And though love may be present, there are not always happy endings.

Love and Other Poisons collects some, though not all, of my early short fiction. I used to write quite a few short stories and amassed something like 70 stories in less than 12 years. These days, alas, I write mostly novels. Three stories appeared in print for the first time in the 2014 edition of this collection: “Kissing Frost,” “To See Pedro Infante” and “Sublime Artifacts.” The rest of the stories were published in several and sundry places. The closing story titled “A Puddle of Blood” inspired my novel Certain Dark Things.

Most of the online journals and indie magazines where my work appeared have vanished (Shimmer, for example, which gave me one of my first credits), and some of these tales have become difficult to find, a side-effect of our digital era. But here they are collected for posterity. I hope you enjoy them.

— Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2020

The maid slowly buttoned the dress, her hands inching along Rowena’s back. Rowena looked out the sole window in the room — a great sheet of unbroken, tinted Venetian glass — and across the desolate, green fields.

“What was the Lady Ligeia like?” Rowena asked.

The maid’s fingers stilled against Rowena’s back.

“She was a harsh mistress,” the girl said.

“How so?”

The girl did not reply.

After she had finished dressing, Rowena went outside to explore the grounds of the abbey, this bleak jumble of ancient stones her husband called a home. The building was stifling, crammed with odd trinkets, filled with heavy oak furniture, overflowing with tapestries, wall-hangings and the like. It was not the abode for a new bride, but then she did not think Quentin wanted a bride. Not that Rowena had desired a husband, though she bowed to her father’s wishes, but she had hoped for a gentle word, a friendly smile.

Quentin had no smiles, his lips pressed into a firm line. He reeked; the sweet, pungent stench of opium clung to his clothes. He stared at her across the table, his eyes following the motion of her hands as she ate.

Married only three days and Rowena already dabbled in misery.

She walked south of the abbey and reached a square patch of shrubs and beds of thorns. A rose garden, but it was autumn and all the roses were gone. She wondered what it might be like come spring and in her fancy she imagined a woman tending to the flowers. Raven-haired, tall. Ligeia.

She’d seen a small portrait of her in Quentin’s study. It was a poor portrait, the artist having little skill, though he’d captured the eyes. The eyes were the one element that burned, that truly lived, gazing deeply at the viewer.

The Lady Ligeia. Her passing had left her husband in gloom.

Anne left me, too, she thought. They all leave me.

She found comfort in this thought, that Quentin and her might have something in common after all.

Rowena paced around the garden, venturing back into the abbey when it began to rain, tiny droplets of water catching in her hair.

The bridal chamber was decorated with massive tapestries of cloth of gold, spotted with arabesque figures, which produced a curious optical illusion. They seemed to shift and change, an effect probably aided by the current of wind blowing behind the draperies. Shadows danced, one in particular moving slowly, ondulating, and seeming to drift closer and closer to Rowena’s bed.

Figures upon the walls crept towards her, then retreated. Crept and retreated. Like a tide.

Rowena turned her head and closed her eyes.

She awoke late, a scent of almonds catching her by surprise, though it quickly dissipated. Rowena shoved the covers aside and paused before the window, examining the slate-coloured sky.

It had rained that morning and her shoes sank in the mud as she went round and round the abbey, looking at the aged vines extending up the grey stone walls, sliding past the high Gothic windows. The window upon the left was the one to her husband’s study, where he spent most of his nights in a dream of poppies.

I and you, she thought.

There was no I, nor you. It was Quentin and Rowena. No. Quentin. Rowena. Separated, bracketed, at a distance. He in his study. She in her tower.

Like a princess from a fairy tale with no lover to ask her to throw down her hair.

A tune, which she used to sing with Anne, returned to her.

An outlandish knight came from the northlands;

And he came wooing to me;

He said he would take me to foreign lands

And he would marry me

Rowena walked around the abbey one more time, her right hand brushing against the ivy.

Rowena missed the piano, most of all. She missed the ivory keys beneath her fingers, the melodies she ripped from the instrument, echoing across the room. Anne, standing by the window, listening to the music.

Her fingers upon Anne, ripping a different kind of music from the flesh ...

The piano. The songs. Had she been able to drag the piano into this place ...

But not the piano. Nor Anne.

You and I are no more, she thought. Bitter, so bitter, this abandonment.

She could not phantom why Quentin had married her, why his eyes had paused upon her at a small gathering a few months before. She played the piano — this was her talent, her art — and when the piece was done she noticed him staring her. At her hands. Then his eyes drifted up, towards her face and he regarded her with … curiosity?

His courtship was brief; his gifts extravagant.

She wanted little of him, yet her parents insisted. Demanded.

And Anne was gone, wasn’t she? And this was what she was supposed to do, wasn’t it? To meet a man of stature, to wed, to birth children.

To be uprooted from home and transplanted — like a rose — into a different bed of earth.

Rowena dreamt about phantasmagorical shadows dancing around her room. A shadow horse detached from the window’s curtains and neighed, a shadow rider slipping from its back.

The tapestries shifted and someone leaned down next to Rowena’s ear, mumbling a word.

A caress upon her brow, the cold imprint of two fingers brushing her cheek.

Shadows upon the walls.

Rowena’s fingers pressed against the table sometimes, at dinner time, trying to trace phantom notes across its surface.

The piano, her piano. Left behind in her parents’ home, lid closed. All white and quiet.

Quentin watched her when they dined, a smirk upon his face. He watched her, his eyes half-lidded.

Rowena went still under his gaze, her fingers closing and resting on her lap.

And the he laughed — his laughter like a bark — and she sat still, under the flickering light of the candelabra.

The window in her bridal chamber could not be opened and all Rowena could do was to stare outside, to press her hands against the glass. To count the stars at night; to count nothing if mist veiled them. Or else, to run down the steps, to seek solace outside the walls of the abbey.

In dreams she also ran, dashing across a checkered landscape of black and white. The shadows drifted up, uncoiling from the ground, stretching their arms and catching her in a loving embrace.

Rowena tasted blackness in her mouth; the scent of almonds upon her tongue.

She’d been abed with a fever for several days, writhing and pulling at the sheets, her body burning like an ember. Quentin walked in at different intervals and watched her with detachment, his eyes showing little concern.

“This room is full of whispers,” she told him.

“What do you mean?” he asked, his voice loud and gruff to her ears.

“I keep hearing noises. And there, in the corner, that tapestry, that shadow.”

Quentin turned his head and shrugged. He turned to look at her again. His eyes were dull and pitiless. Rowena rubbed a hand against her forehead, sighing and shifting to give her back to him.

He cared not. He despised her.

They all did.

Anne too.

There is no you.

Rowena slept.

The hands fastened each button on her gown one by one, fingertips whispering against her bare skin, sliding up her spine, resting at her nape. A kiss, upon her shoulder blades.

Rowena whirled around only to find the maid on the other side of the room, busy making her bed.

The maid glanced at her.

“Lady? Are you well? Do you still want to go out today?”

Rowena had been sick for nearly ten days, the fever breaking only two nights before, leaving her weak and disoriented. Going out might be a folly, but she could not remain in that chamber a second longer.

“I am well,” she said.

She grabbed a stick and scratched words in the mud, by the dead rose garden. She was thinking of Anne, faithless and long gone, but instead of tracing her name she wrote LIGEIA upon the dirt.

Rowena looked at the letters for a good long while before she scrawled them away. Then she drew a tracery of flowers upon the dark earth, though the rain would erase her work soon enough.

It always rained in this place. Always rain and cold, and the gloom of the abbey.

Thunder crackled.

Rowena raised her head, staring at the clouds and then, at the abbey. She glimpsed someone standing at a window, looking down at her. She thought it might be her husband, but the thick glass veiled the observer, making the silhouette anything and anyone.

Rowena stared at the container of incense dangling from the ceiling, its light burning arabesque patterns onto the walls. The light shifted like a snake uncoiling. A snake shedding its skin.

A kiss upon her brow, so light the lips barely brushed her skin.

Rowena blinked. Her husband, who was sitting across from her, frowned.

“What?” he asked.

“Did you feel that?”

“Feel what?”

“I could have sworn ... ”

Her voice trailed into silence. He grumbled something under his breath. The rain pelted the dull windows of the tower. It sounded like fingers tapping upon the glass.

Fingers upon keys. Black upon white.

Rowena stared into the mirror, pressing a hand against her pale neck. A swan’s neck, Anne said. Her golden hair, like the hair of princesses in fairy tales. Anne had made a crown of roses for her, set it upon Rowena’s head.

But that had been two springs ago.

There was no you and I. There had never been. Rowena had imagined it.

A piano, the music. Anne’s hands falling upon her hands. Roses in a vase, upon the piano.

She was not sure she’d ever have roses. Perhaps roses could not grow in this quiet, dark place. The roses had died and would never bloom again.

And, as she looked at herself, she wondered what Ligeia might have thought of her, the white swan to the dark one.

Rowena brushed her hair.

Outside, it rained. Inside, in another room, her husband lay in an opium haze.

And here, here in the semi-darkness of her chambers, Rowena sat alone before her mirror counting the strokes of the brush.

Herself. Alone. I.

If I must doff off my silken things,

Pray turn thy back unto me;

For it is not fitting that such a ruffian

A naked woman should see.

Rowena paused, frowning. She had forgotten the rest. It would come back to her later no doubt. Her skirts were speckled with mud, her hair was wet. She’d been out for ... how long, she did not know. Round and round the dead rose garden. Round and round the abbey.

She climbed the stairs to the tower, undoing the laces of her gown and slipping out of her dirty clothes, leaving a trail of droplets upon the floor.

She stood before the mirror, naked, but it was not a full-length mirror and it cut her off at her mid-section.

Halves, she thought.

Rowena fell upon the bed. She dreamt that a shadow drifted from the walls, drifted under the covers, long, lazy fingers tracing the curve of her breasts and the line of her thighs. The shadow kissed her upon the mouth and it tasted sweet. Like almonds.

Jet black. The tapestry upon the walls was etched with figures of the blackest black. Jet black. If she closed her eyes, Rowena could see the shapes dancing behind her eyelids. Reversed. White upon black.

“Did you sleep in the study last night?” she asked, half-rising from the ebony ottoman.

“Yes,” Quentin said.

He came in and out of their chamber, slinked back to his study and returned to her. What for, she did not know. What was the point?

“I thought you might have come in. I heard voices ... and a noise.”

He shook his head. “You always hear things,” he muttered.

It was fruitless to speak to him. He thought her excitable and irritating. She’d gleaned as much and more, from the whispers of the servants. From his eyes, which accused her of silent crimes.

“There is something in this house,” she said and added nothing.

Nothing more could be added.

Her hands were so pale. If any roses ever bloomed in the garden, they would be white. Like her skin. Like the ivory keys of a piano, a dash of black upon them. Rowena shifted and glanced at the maid, who was tending to her.

“I must go for a walk.”

“My lady, it is raining.”

“I must go.”

Rowena, though ill, stood quickly and before the maid could bar her way, she was already down the stairs. Barefoot she dashed outside the abbey, her feet sinking into the muck.

It was raining very hard and the wind wailed frightfully. But it did not matter. Oh, no.

She stood by the patch of roses, staring at the thorns. Hands fell upon her shoulders, fingers gentle and soft.

“Lady, please!” the maid yelled.

Rowena turned and saw the maid, pitifully trying to shield herself from the rain, standing under the shade of the abbey.

She chuckled, for there was something amusing about the spectacle.

The fever was upon Rowena again.

They bid her change her clothes and put her to bed.

Quentin watched over her, though he did not really watch — half-dozing, half-gone.

It did not matter to her. She did not care for him. She never had.

A gentle hand pressed against her throat. A gentle caress. Like silk.

I and you. You and I.

As Rowena lay under the canopy of the great bed and heard the voice whisper, she understood. Us, together. She’d never be alone again.

She twisted and turned. Ligeia’s lips fell upon her lips, kissing her, embracing her. Like breathing mist and moonlight.

At last.

I and you. You and I.

Forever.

Something bloomed beneath her skin, blackness traveling inside her veins. She felt it bursting forth, like a rose opening its petals.

The white ivory key and the ebony key. One nestled upon the other. Never be apart.

The taste of almonds upon her tongue.

The taste of you and I, my love.

Does the devil ride the train? Her mother says the devil comes to town on a black mare, taking care to hide his hoofs from sight and conceal the hellfire in his eyes. But if the devil is unnaturally handsome — and in mother’s dire stories, he is — then the man in the blue overcoat who just stepped off the five o’ clock train from Miraflores fits the bill.

Eloisa forgets that she is in the station waiting for her cousins. She stands on her tiptoes, no longer scanning the crowd for signs of the boys, instead trying to catch another glimpse of the man.

And then, there, before she can grasp how, he is suddenly stopping right in front of her and taking off his hat.

“Good day, miss,” he says.

He puts his hat on again, leans on a cane and she notices a metal brace running up his left leg. A war injury? Is this some former revolutionary? Or does he have the extremities of a goat, as mother warned her. Mother, who runs a small pension and never lets the boys lodging there speak to her. Mother, who threw a fit when she caught her looking at a movie magazine showing girls with short hair. Bald sluts. Bad girls.

“Say, do you know what the fuss is all about? This place is packed like a can of sardines and I can’t find a car to drive me to El Monte.”

Eloisa frowns. “Don’t you know? Tonight is the feast of San Rafael.”

“Is that a big deal?”

“They take the statue of the saint on a procession around town, then sit him down in front of the church. There’s fireworks and music.”

And dancing. Most of all there is dancing. Eloisa has not been allowed to participate in the festivities. But this year is different. Her cousins are coming to visit and mother says they can all go together to see the fireworks.

“It sounds delightfully pagan to me. What’s your name?”

For some reason she has a childish impulse to lie, to deny herself. Why? What does a name matter? “Eloisa.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have an automobile, would you Eloisa?”

“No.”

“Too bad,” he says. “Hey, would you know of a place I can stay? If I can’t get an automobile I’ll need a room.”

There’s an empty room in her mother’s pension. She normally rooms men who work at the glass factory, but one of the boys has gone off and married, leaving his room behind just two weeks ago. However, she knows exactly how it’ll look if she returns home with a man — a devil, perhaps — in tow, after mother instructed her not to speak to any strangers. Mother, who is even angry when she reads poetry — father’s old books, the skeletal remains of his collection. Harmless words which deserve a beating. Why won’t Eloisa do something useful rather than sit on the front step of the house, daydreaming?

“You won’t find a room, not with the festival tonight. Everyone has come for the festival,” she says.

He smiles, as though he can tell she is lying and Eloisa feels a shiver go through her body, as if she’s just jumped into a pond.

“Well, then, I must find a mule or a cart or some way to El Monte. Take care, miss.”

With that he grabs the small suitcase he had set on the ground and the cane, limping merrily away.

Eloisa and her cousins, mother in tow, go to the town square. Eloisa is not allowed to wear ribbons in her hair, she is not even allowed to wear a nice dress. Grey are her colours and mother is always in black, though father passed away nearly seven years ago. But it doesn’t matter for there are purple, yellow and white papers adorning the buildings around the square and plenty of colour in the jackets and the skirts of the attendants.

Mother plops herself on a chair by some older ladies and refuses to dance, but she agrees that Eloisa may walk around the square — even dance — as long as she partners with one of her cousins. For a little while it is this way, she walks with a cousin on each side and they chatter and laugh. But eventually a couple of girls catch the boys’ fancy and even though they are not supposed to, they scatter away to dance with them while Eloisa steps back, standing under the arches that frame the town square.

“You were right. There is no way out of town. Not a blasted automobile for miles around and apparently mules are also scarce.”

The man in the blue overcoat is just a few paces from her, under the arches.

“It’s the festival,” she says. “Tomorrow you can ask one of the townsfolk to lend you a horse.”

“I’ll be damned if I can ride it. I’m a city boy, I ride the trams.”

She chuckles for it’s an odd thing to discover that the devil does not ride horses, after all.

“You find my predicament amusing?” he asks, smiling.

“No. So you have a place to stay for tonight?”

“Something of the sort.”

She nods. He checks his pocket watch and she wonders if the rule is true and he must leave by the time the cock crows. Because that’s how it goes. The devil rides into town, he asks a vain girl to dance and she dances — ignoring the warnings, never bothering to look at his feet — and when the cock crows he vanishes and she is singed. Hair burnt off, body smelling like sulphur.

Girls like that always end insane or dead.

She stares at him. He cocks his head a bit.

“What?”

“They say the devil comes into town on dance nights.”

“Does he? How do you know?”

“You recognize him by his hoofs.”

“It’s a good thing I’m not dancing, then,” he says, lifting his cane.

“Were you a soldier?”

“No. I’m the devil, remember?”

He’s making fun of her and she likes it. The lightness of his words and how he smiles.

She spots her mother coming across the square, fury in her eyes. She’s seen her. She knows Eloisa is not in the company of her cousins.

She grabs the man’s hand and pulls him with her.

“Come,” she says.

They rush through the narrow alleys. He moves fast for a man with a limp and his steps seem to draw no echoes. Her own footsteps are as loud as drums. When she stops to catch her breath he is laughing and the crackling of the fireworks echoes through the town.

“That was my mother,” she explains. “She wouldn’t want us talking.”

“Is she some evil stepmother who has you locked in a tower?”

“Sometimes.”

“Here, want to see a castle?” he asks and it is his turn to grab her by the hand.

They arrive at the doors of a large house and Eloisa frowns.

“That’s Mr. Carrasco’s house. He’s off in Mexico City until winter time.”

The man looks like he already knows this and he opens the door, walking into the house. Eloisa pauses at the threshold. Is this magic? Or is she in the company of a common thief who picked a lock and made himself a bed for the night?

Eloisa steps inside. She can’t see a thing, but he grabs her firmly and guides her through the rooms as though he can see in the dark. He stops and lets go for a moment. A light blooms and he sets a lantern on a table. The furniture around them is covered with white sheets. The man pulls a sheet and reveals a couch. They sit there while the dim noise of the fireworks seeps in through the cracks.

“What do you do in your tower, Eloisa?” he asks, leaning back and staring up at the ceiling.

“It’s hardly a towers. It’s just a little house. A pension. I do the things everyone does.”

“What does everyone do?”

“Help with the household chores. Read.”

“Anything good?”

“Poetry.”

“I only read the papers,” he says.

He proceeds to ask more questions, tugging stories out of here until she has laid her whole life before him: the town, her home, her relatives. It strikes her then that he is at an advantage and has revealed nothing, only vague hints which hover like smoke for a moment, then dissipate.

“I don’t know your name,” she says.

“Don’t have one,” he replies, sounding earnest. “You can make one up for me.”

“Really.”

“Give it a try.”

“How about ... Abelardo.”

“Eloisa and Abelardo. Isn’t that a love story?” he asks. “I think it has a nasty ending.”

It’s one of many tragic stories she found in her father’s books, amongst the silverfish. Great loves and great rhymes, a pressed flower — forgotten, left behind — to mark the pages. All those pages which her mother despised because father had been good for nothing, always with his head in the clouds and when he died, they had to turn the house into a pension to survive.

One of these days, mother said, one of these days you’re going to take a wrong step and break your neck from staring at the clouds. She believes this is precisely one of those days.

“I suppose,” she says.

He drifts closer and without a word plants a light, chaste kiss on her mouth. He smiles at her when he draws back, then repeats the motion. Lingering this time. Nothing chaste about it. His hand brushes her cheek.

She wonders if she should slap him. That’s what she should do. But she also shouldn’t be here at all, shouldn’t talk to men she knows nothing about.

Eloisa frowns.

“Can I look at your feet?” she asks.

“To make sure I’m not the devil in disguise?” he asks.

She stares at him. The smirk on his face fades. His eyes, now that she looks at them carefully, gleam with the hellfire mother warned her about.

“If I do and I’m the devil,” he says, carefully removing the right boot, fingers slow. “Then what happens next is you’ll scream. The house will mysteriously catch fire ...”

He stands up, switches his attention to the left leg. He works on the metal brace, removing the straps that attach it to the boot.

“... and only ashes will remain to mark the place. A memory of a folly.”

He takes off the boot, rolls up the pants legs and reveals a hideously scarred foot. Instead of five toes there are three, with dark nails resembling claws.

“Are you going to scream?”

She raises a hand and begins unbuttoning the grey dress. Eloisa stares at him and he shakes his head in a vague gesture she can’t recognize. He mirrors her, removing the coat, his shirt and vest, his trousers.

His leg is completely scarred, as is his torso. Ugly, puckered marks mar his skin, reaching the neck. Burn marks.

She steps forward, kissing the spot where his neck meets with his shoulder.

Ghost light intrudes through a gap in the curtains, waking her. She is on a sofa, naked, covered only by a blue overcoat. After she dresses she looks for him knowing already he’s left the house.

She walks back to the town square, which is littered with dozens of paper flowers from the night before. The church is a few paces away. Or she could spin west, to her house.

Eloisa thrusts her hands in her coat pockets and walks to the silent train station, sitting on one of the wooden benches and surveying the tracks. They seem to go on forever in this hazy dawn.

The station’s clock ticks and she observes the big hand move. Black like the man’s eyes.

And she already knows she is going to become a cautionary tale for other girls in town. They’ll say the devil rides into town on a train. They’ll say to watch out for men in blue overcoats.

The taste of ashes coats her tongue.

And she closes her eyes, smiling.

And there is the loud toot of a horn, making her frown and look at the source of the noise.

That’s Mr. Carrasco’s automobile, glossy, inky black.

“I’m heading to El Monte and I can’t ride a horse. Can you point the way?” he asks, as casual as casual can be.

“Did you steal that car?”

“Well, you stole my coat. Can I have it back?”

She crosses the tracks and tosses the overcoat into the back, then climbs in.

I think about you, my love, late at night when the neon light filters through the curtains, tracing shadow animals upon the floor. I feel your absence like a phantom limb.

Sometimes I pull on my jacket and walk the streets, stopping at every bridge to stare at the river. Alabaster fish swim in its green waters, along with the corpses of the suicides. Ghosts and stones whisper their stories as I lean against the railing.

I look for you among the pale corpses. There I see a maiden in a white shift and a wrinkled man in his shabby corduroy jacket. But you are not there, my love. Oh, no.

The river snakes and curls through the city and I follow its course. It trickles into streets and licks the foundations of tenements. It spreads under a starless sky.

A fog sometimes covers the river, cocooning it. I cannot see the suicides, but I can hear their laments, like the splash of a stone into the water. Like the splash of blood against cold glass tiles.

I think about you, my love, when I see an eye flash open under the river’s waters, when a scale catches the light, when a murmur floats up toward the night.

I hold my lantern high, to try to see better, to try to see you ... but you are not there. You are gone before the amber glow of the lantern can reveal your face, your body, yourself. You are gone, melting like a sigh into the green of the river.

I walk home, dragging the lantern behind me. I climb the steps to our little apartment and lay upon the cold sheets.

Sometimes, in the morning, there are muddy footprints outside my door and the scent of something damp and gone.

Esperanza was oiling the snake’s new tongue when the door opened and in walked Mr. Morales with a box in his hands and a homunculus behind him. At first she didn’t know it was a homunculus. She thought he’d met a dandy at the auction and dragged him to the shop.

He was tall, blond and blue-eyed with a face made of sharp, elegant bones. He stood still, observing the snake that rested on her work table.

“I bought some defective dragonflies at the auction. We can repair them and sell them,” Mr. Morales said, opening the box and showing her a handful of metal insects. “And I bought a homunculus.”

“What are we going to do with that?”

“Sell it, what else? It’s English, top quality.”

Their second-hand shop was not the best place for a high-ticket item. Clockwork birds and reptiles were one thing; a homunculus was quite another.

“Where are we going to put him?” she asked.

“In the back.”

“There’s no space there.”

“Go make some space then.”

Esperanza wiped her greasy hands with a rag, then headed to the storage area. She shoved her way through boxes, crates and metal parts until she reached the room with a smelly cot and a chair. Mr. Morales’ apprentice was supposed to live in the little room with the yellow wallpaper, but the last boy had left over three months ago. Mr. Morales’ nephew, Abel, was bad-tempered and he quickly drove away the young men the guild sent them.

It didn’t matter. Esperanza was able to handle everything without any help. Although she was supposed to only decorate the animals — the mechanical reparations and construction were strictly off limits and restricted to the automaton makers’ guild — she often dabbled in other areas.

Esperanza grabbed a broom and swept the floor. When she was done she called Mr. Morales and the homunculus.

The blond homunculus sat down on the cot and the springs squeaked. Quietly, the homunculus looked around the room, his knapsack still dangling from his left shoulder.

She arrived before seven. Mr. Morales would not show his face until eleven and then it would be a short while until he dragged himself out to play dominoes with his friends, then back up the stairs to the second floor for a nap and back out for drinks at the cantina. But she had responsibilities, and without an apprentice, and Abel off in Veracruz, there was more stuff to accomplish.

Not that she minded. Abel tended to lord her around. The apprentices were not as rude as Mr. Morales’ nephew, but she couldn’t do the work she was interested in when they were there for fear they might report her infractions. She was better off alone with old Mr. Morales.

Esperanza sat down at her workbench and opened a mechanical duck. She removed the silver belly, leaving its gears and levers in the open. Esperanza held up a magnifying glass in one hand and her tweezers in the other.

“Mr. Morales said you’re good at fixing automata.”

She looked up at the blond man. He was still wearing the fancy purple frock coat, cravat and gloves he’d had on the day before, a wealthy dandy’s outfit now wildly out of place.

“I manage,” she said.

“Mr. Morales said I should help you while he arranges for someone to purchase me.”

“I don’t need help.”

“Mr. Morales said —”

“What do you know about fixing automata?”

“Nothing,” he said.

She flipped her tweezers and went back to inspecting the duck’s insides. She felt his gaze on her and glanced up again. He was standing in the same spot, looking at her.

“You want to help?” she asked. “The floor needs a good scrub. All the stuff is in the back.”

He went away. A long time later he reappeared with a bucket and a brush in his hand. His trousers were soggy.

“You ruined your nice clothes,” she said, disapprovingly. “Why didn’t you change?”

“I don’t have other clothes.”

The homunculus got on his knees and continued scrubbing. The sloshing of the water and the tinkering of metal tools were the only noises in the shop. At last Esperanza put the duck’s belly cover back on and wound the animal up. It walked around the table, shaking its tail.

The homunculus also seemed to be done, a bucket dangling from his fingers. He tilted his head and stared at the duck with that curious, far away stare he’d used on her.

“What should I call you?”

“They call me Theodore.”

“I’m Esperanza,” she said, but did not offer him his hand.

“A pleasure to meet you.”

“Your Spanish is good.”

“I speak six languages.”

“You’re a translator, then?”

“I was employed in a magician’s act, but I’ve had other chores.”

He took his bucket and brushes and went away before she could ask him anything else.

“He’s weird,” Esperanza said. “You sure you want him sleeping here at nights?”

“Don’t be silly. Homunculi are well trained.”

“I’ve heard they’re frightfully strong.”

“They’re just pretty things.”

Mr. Morales stood up as she flipped the sign hanging at the front door.

“Close the shop,” he muttered, as though she were not doing exactly that.

“Mr. Morales, he needs some new clothes,” she yelled before he disappeared up the stairs.

Esperanza finished sorting her tools and walked home. The shop dangled at the edge of a respectable street, but Esperanza’s vecindad was further to the east, uphill. It was an ugly, squat building and the portera was a shrill woman who spied on everyone’s comings and goings, but especially distrusted Esperanza.

That night the portera was nowhere to be seen and Esperanza did not have to stomach her angry glares. She walked down a narrow corridor, past the altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and went into the room that was her home. She only had one small window, and the wallpaper decorating the walls was rotting with mould in several spots, but she covered these with diagrams of mechanical animals, a large calendar with flower drawings and pretty postcards.

There, piled around her bed were all the magazines and books about automata she collected. Mr. Morales, with his tired eyes and slightly shaky hands, did not read much anymore and he gave her many things he did not find useful or interesting.

She read frequently, but it was a slow and tedious process. Many of the publications were in English or French, and although Mr. Morales taught her how to read both languages — he said the very best automata came from Paris and London — she preferred working with her hands rather than sitting still and learning about the clockwork mechanism that simulated the purr of a mechanical cat.

Esperanza dug beneath a pile of papers until she found a slim, red little volume. There was a section in it about homunculi and she wanted to read it again.

Abel returned on Tuesday. He’d gone to visit his fiancée, and Esperanza expected him to arrive happy and content. He barged in to the shop in his usual foul mood, stopping at the table where she was sitting. Theodore was helping her sort gears into the appropriate boxes.

“We’ve got a new apprentice?” he asked, frowning.

“Your uncle bought a homunculus,” she said.

“And he didn’t tell me?” Abel asked as he walked up to Theodore, sizing him.

Abel muttered something and rushed up the stairs, no doubt to wake up the old man with a round of screaming.

“That’s Mr. Morales’ nephew. He hates it when the old man spends any money. He expects to own the shop and he doesn’t appreciate his inheritance being squandered,” Esperanza explained. “Stay out of his way. He’s a regular bastard.”

“He mistreats you?”

Esperanza traced the teeth of a gear with her fingers. She thought about the times Abel tried to paw her breasts and how he infuriated her with his criticism about her work. But neither of these mattered much. She moved away when he tried to touch her and ignored his comments.

“He’s not any worse than others. I came to Mexico City when I was thirteen and spent a whole year doing some sewing and it wasn’t any better than here. I get paid more with Mr. Morales and I get to do the things I like.”

“You like to work on automata.”

“I do.”

“But you’re not allowed to do it. Women are not members of the guilds. Women are not supposed to fix mechanical animals.”

She’d been fixing things since she was a child, starting with her mother’s sewing machine: a black and yellow Ward Arm & Platform. In Mexico City, the master artisans in the guilds did well and the automaton makers sold pricey collector objects to the people that went in their carriages down Plateros and bought fancy hats at the Iron Palace.

So she’d obtained a job giving new paint coats to Mr. Morales’ animals. He allowed her to learn some of the mechanical aspects of the trade, piling more and more work onto her shoulders while he went to the cantina. As a woman, as someone who was not a member of the guild, she was not supposed to acquire that knowledge. But the old man didn’t care because he did not pay Esperanza what he ought to have paid a man and she fussed less than the apprentices.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the guild,” she said, upset that something which was not even really human — the church said a homunculus was a sin of nature without a soul — was judging her.

“I meant no disrespect,” Theodore said with his slow and measured voice. “It was merely an observation. I find it interesting that you perform these functions.”

“It’s not like I’m doing something bad,” she pointed out. “It’s just sometimes you can’t do everything clean and open, you get it? Except in Baja California. It’s different there.”

His blue eyes had no depth to them. He blinked and tilted his head to the left.

“I don’t understand.”

“You know what Baja California is? It’s a state, up north. There’s nothing there. Only the desert. But that’s why it’s great. If there’s nothing then you can build anything. Anything at all. The laws are, I mean, there’s no laws. Everything’s starting there. That’s where my sister Lupe lives. She went there and it’s completely different from anywhere else.”

Esperanza had never seen Baja California, she knew it only by the smudged map tacked to her wall, and she had not heard from Lupe in nearly three years, but she had saved her meagre earnings. One day she would have enough to set up a shop there. But that would be after she went to Paris to train in automata making.

That’s where Abel had trained. He loved to rub it in her face. Esperanza had not finished primary school.

“Can you read poetry in Baja California?” Theodore asked.

Esperanza frowned. “That’s a dumb question. I guess you can read anything.”

“In London they did not allow poetry but John gave me his book.”

She was going to ask who John was but Abel came down and tossed a bunch of clothes on the floor in front of Theodore.

“There. My uncle says he got another outfit for this thing.”

“Thank you,” Theodore said with a perfectly polite voice.

He did not look offended. It seemed like Theodore was barely there with his neutral expression and his head tilted to the side. And yet his eyes acquired a shine to them, a flickering light similar to a jaguar’s.

His eyes, unlike the rest of him, were suddenly not placid or neutral. They fixed on Abel, just for a second, and Esperanza noticed Abel’s discomfort. He was a deer, surprised in a clearing.

She smiled. Not wishing to attract Abel’s attention, Esperanza glanced down quickly and focused on her work.

Abel said Theodore was another of the old man’s silly purchases, like the mechanical unicorn they restored only to sell it at a loss when nobody wanted it. Mr. Morales often spent money on trinkets they didn’t need, toys and automata that caught his fancy without much thought of how they would dispose of them later.

“I’ll talk to some of our old clients tomorrow and tell them about Theodore,” Mr. Morales said, but then he went out for a few drinks and napped the afternoon away and he never went to call upon their clients.

Abel told Esperanza he feared they’d be stuck with Theodore and panicked, muttering at her ear every morning.

“Good for nothing piece of trash,” Abel said. “They don’t let us make them in Mexico because they’re the devil’s work and that’s good and sound policy.”

But Esperanza only shrugged. She didn’t mind if Theodore stayed a little longer with them. With him around Abel kept his hands in his pockets. Abel was intimidated by the homunculus and it only made her like Theodore better.

“There. What do you think?”

Theodore did not answer. He touched the cheap calendar she’d gotten from the local grocer as reverently as if it were a fine painting. He ran his fingers over the sheep frolicking in a meadow and nodded.

“I thought you might as well have a little something to lighten up the room.”

“Why did you think it made the tiger and the lamb?”

“What tiger?” she asked.

He was quiet, and she figured it was one of those occasions in which he would halt mid-sentence and walk away, as though she were not there. Instead, Theodore pulled his knapsack from beneath the bed and took out a book.

“The tiger in Blake’s poem,” he said, handing her the book. “Why is the symmetry fearful? And why would someone make a tiger if it’ll eat the lamb?”

“I don’t read poems,” Esperanza said turning the pages. “Is this the book you were talking about?”

“It’s John’s book.”

“Who’s that?”

“John trained me and my brothers,” Theodore said.

“You mean the other copies? Other homunculi?”

“There were twelve.”

She tried to picture a dozen Theodores standing side by side with their shallow blue eyes and their tall cheekbones. She also tried to imagine the original Theodore, the human after which all the copies were patented. She wondered if they’d modified his copies much or if they were exact duplicates, and then she thought maybe Theodore had pieces of metal in him because she’d read there were homunculi who possessed hands of steel, though it didn’t look like he was anything but flesh and bone.

“It was not in our authorized reading materials but John gave it to me before they shipped me off to Paris.”

“Paris is the capital of automata development,” she said very proudly, repeating Mr. Morales’ words. “It’s the most modern city in the world.”

“In Paris we worked in an accommodation house.”

Esperanza had seen plenty of prostitutes, some young and some old, some men and some women, but she’d never thought he’d be one of them with his fine, aristocratic face and shallow eyes that sometimes glinted mysteriously.

“I thought you were an actor,” she said.

“My last owner had me perform in a magician’s act but I’ve had other chores. I provide entertainment.”

Esperanza, who fixed and made mechanical animals for this same purpose, nodded her understanding.

They sat on the cot, both staring at the lambs running under a bright orange sun.

“I’ll read your poem if you want but I don’t know if I’ll make any sense of it.”

She couldn’t talk to Theodore until two days later. Abel hovered around her, and if he saw her chatting with Theodore, he’d say she was lazing around and ask his uncle to cut her week’s pay. There was always a good excuse to cut her wages.

Esperanza looked down and ignored Abel. She’d been doing this since Abel arrived a year before from his fancy mechanical studies in France. He was only a minor annoyance, just like the apprentices who tried to boss her around, or the rude customers who swooped into the shop, tossing the carcasses of their clockwork pets for her to fix without a look in her direction.

So she waited until both Abel and Mr. Morales left the store. Theodore sat polishing a tiny butterfly, long, spidery fingers in motion.

“I read your poem,” she said.

It seemed he did not hear her. He continued his polishing without the smallest bob of his head.

“I didn’t understand it. But maybe it’s fearful because it’s so pretty.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’m not a poet, right? I just fix the animals. But have you ever seen how there are some animals that are really ugly? But even then they’re sometimes beautiful. Because beauty can be horrible. And you can never quite duplicate it, even when we make these fancy automata, there’s this awe and this fear in certain things you can’t copy with wire and metal.”

Theodore stared at her with his eyes like milk glass and she thought maybe the tiger was frightening because it was like the homunculi: so perfect, raw and empty. They hadn’t stuffed a soul in Theodore’s body and beneath the skin there lay the sharp edge of something inhuman and wild.

She was moving some boxes in the back area when Abel slipped next to her, his hand brushing her back.

“I’ve got work,” she muttered, pushing him away.

“You are an uppity bitch, you know that?”

Esperanza kept her head down, kept rummaging through a crate. He’d get tired of standing there after a couple of minutes and go out to find some food and drink and women.

“One day I’m going to be the owner of this place and you’ll have to do whatever I want or you’ll be out on the street with a snap of my fingers. You get that?”

He grabbed her arm and twisted it. It hurt, but the thought that flashed foremost through her mind was that if he injured it she’d be unable to do her work.

“Abel, don’t.”

His fingers dug harder into her.

“What are you looking at?”

Theodore stood in front of them. His face was blank but his eyes were open wide, as though he was analyzing every little movement they made.

“Nothing,” Theodore said. He smiled, a cat’s grin. It was frightening. It was not quite a smile but some bizarre approximation of it.

It must have unsettled Abel because he let her go and walked away.

“Fuck both of you,” he said.

He slammed the front door shut and the bell at the entrance jingled merrily. Esperanza rubbed her arm. She shook her head.

“He’s an idiot. But it’s not forever. Not forever at all. I’ve been here seven years and I’ll be damned if I’ll spend seven more. Not with him. One day I’ll go to Baja California and join my sister there. Do you know in Baja California everything’s different?”

But when Esperanza said this she felt she might weep and it was shameful because she was no little girl who would snap like a twig, especially in front of Theodore. She blinked the tears away.

“Give me a hand with this,” she said.

“Highest quality, of course. Direct from London,” Abel said.

The man smoked a cigar while the woman sitting next to him held a chain with her gloved hand. A Doberman lay at her feet, eyeing Theodore. Esperanza set a tray before them and poured some brandy.

“Our neighbours bought one the other day. But I’m not convinced it is a wise purchase,” said the man.

“There’s very few like this in the city. Even less at this price,” Abel said.

“What amazing eyes he has,” said the woman. “May I touch him?”

“Of course.”

The woman approached Theodore, a hand falling on his face. Her dog, sniffing the homunculus, growled softly.

“Does he talk?” the woman asked.

“Six languages,” Esperanza said.

“Say something,” the woman demanded.

The dog’s growling intensified but Theodore seemed oblivious to it and to the woman’s presence. His face was stiff, the eyes fixed on some faraway point. He wasn’t even blinking.

Esperanza wondered if he was used to this process. She wondered if it had been like this in Paris. Perhaps clients came to him, took a look, touched him here and there, before deciding if they ought to pay for his time.

“Oh, come on, say something.”

Theodore was staring at the dog and the dog bared its teeth at him.

“I don’t think your pet likes Theodore,” Esperanza muttered.

“Oh, please we should buy him. He’s adorable,” the woman said, ignoring Esperanza and turning towards the man.

The woman’s companion fretted and rubbed a handkerchief against his forehead. “I’m not sure it would look very proper. If it was a girl, well, it wouldn’t matter. But a man …”

“Except he isn’t a man,” Abel reminded him.

The woman continued to touch Theodore’s face, petting him as though he were a cat. Esperanza was sure Theodore didn’t like it but he did not move a muscle.

“He certainly looks like a man,” the companion said.

Esperanza felt like slapping the woman’s hand away.

“But he’s got the most darling eyes. Oh, please,” the woman pleaded.

The dog barked and the woman tugged at its chain. She wasn’t strong enough. The chain slipped from her hands. The animal rushed forward, furious, mouth open wide. But before it could sink its teeth into Theodore’s leg he kicked it, one swift, brutal movement.

The dog flew across the room. It crashed against the wall shelves. Gears and cranks spilled over the dog and the floor.

The woman started screaming. She ran towards her dog and screamed and screamed. The man was also yelling and Abel babbled something that did not sound like real words.

Theodore turned his back towards them.

He was locked away. Abel wouldn’t have Theodore around the shop anymore. He said it was for their safety. Esperanza knew it was because he had hated Theodore from the very beginning.

It didn’t seem fair to wall someone in like that. Even dogs and cats were allowed to venture outside.

But perhaps he was used to this. She couldn’t imagine he’d had much freedom in Paris or anywhere else he’d lived before arriving in Mexico City. It could be perfectly normal for Theodore, just like it was normal for Esperanza to dodge Abel’s advances during the daytime, walk home every afternoon and read her publications on automata at night.

There was no reason to worry about him and there was no space for worrying in Esperanza’s life, wound up tight as the clocks that ticked on the wall behind her worktable.

Her days, like a train of wheels, balanced themselves perfectly. Yet she thought about tigers in cages, lives spent in metal boxes.

He sat on his bed in the tiny room with one of his books of poems between his hands.

“I’m sorry. But you should have thought about what you were doing before hurting that dog,” she said, because she had to say something and he was not speaking.

“I always think about what I do.”

“I suppose you don’t regret it.”

“I do not.”

His fingers lay splayed upon a page but he was staring at the lonely calendar. It was drowning in a sea of yellow wallpaper.

“Why do you like poetry?”

“Because I don’t understand it. Words are complicated. They are not always what they appear to be. I want to understand.”

Esperanza sat next to him. He did not look at her, apparently fascinated with the frolicking sheep plastered on the wall.

“In Mexico we also have accommodation houses,” she said and paused to see if he might react. He did not. “They are selling you. Next week you’ll go live in another place.”

“I thought as much.”

Esperanza glanced down at her closed hands resting on her lap, stained with the paint she had been applying to a clockwork owl that morning.

“It’s not a tiger,” she said and slipped a metal dragonfly with onyx eyes onto his book. “It’ll have to do.”

The dragonfly sat on the corner of the page, flapping its wings.

“I don’t think I’ll see you again,” she whispered.

Esperanza locked the door but remained next to it, in the darkness of the storage area. She knew she ought to head home but at that moment home seemed very far and the walk stretched into forever.

“Why do you always disobey me?”

The outline of Abel’s body was blackness against grey but his voice was clear enough in its piercing anger. She undid the apron she was wearing.

“Didn’t you hear me?” he asked, walking towards her, blocking the light from the adjoining room.

“I apologize,” she said, neatly folding the apron.

“That’s not enough,” Abel muttered and snatched the piece of cloth, tossing it to the floor.

Esperanza glanced down, head bowed.

“May I go?”

Abel shoved her against the wall and she reacted at once, pure instinct, clawing his cheek. He responded with a hard blow that drew blood and a punch to her belly that made her gasp.

“Now you’ve done it,” he said. “This time you’ve done it.”

And he continued to repeat those same words over and over again as he stuffed his handkerchief in her mouth when she screamed, as she tried to kick at his legs.

“Don’t you dare,” he muttered, catching her leg, gripping her thigh and squeezing hard.

He pulled her down. One violent tug and she was flat on her back, her vision suddenly blurry and he was pulling her skirt up.

In the midst of it all, of the pain and revulsion building in the pit of her stomach and the blind panic, she heard something. The light warning of a cat hissing.

All of a sudden the weight of Abel was flung off her and she raised her head, pushed herself up in time to see how Abel’s skull was smashed against the floor, pounded in two violent strokes that sent blood spattering against her legs.

The homunculus bared his teeth, a predator’s snarl, and let go of Abel’s head, reaching out to her.

He pulled her up, his face quickly composing itself, mouth shut tight.

Esperanza’s mind, normally spinning fast, lay still as if a spring had broken inside her head. She could feel his fingers around her wrist yet at the same time she was not there, she was floating outside the room.

A dragonfly hovered before her and darted into a corner. The sound of its wings was as loud as a gunshot and she was back in her body, in the room, standing next to a corpse.

“It’s nearly six,” she said. “Mr. Morales will be back soon.”

Theodore’s flat gaze had returned.

“You’ve got to go.”

“Go where?”

She calculated the odds. That’s what she did best. She measured, she calculated, she predicted whether a golden peacock would be able to fan out its tail or would fall and lose its balance.

“Baja California,” she said, kneeling next to Abel’s body and searching his pockets. “There’s nothing farther than Baja California.”

“Why?”

Theodore observed her as she took Abel’s watch and his wallet. His cufflinks were worth two months of her salary.

She pocketed them and glanced up at Theodore. “Do you know what you’ve done? They’re going to kill you,” she said.

“I know.”

“Hey,” she said. “Did you hear me? Kill you.”

His eyes were flat like coins, a shade of ghostly blue. She remembered, for no good reason, that white cats with blue eyes were born deaf and were drowned in the tinaja of the vecindad.

“My book,” he replied.

Esperanza ran to get it and when she returned he had not moved an inch. She did not think he would. He was probably not capable of even considering an escape. She could lead him like a lamb to the slaughterhouse, to the police quarters; he would not object.

She considered simply dashing uphill, back to the safety of her room with the maps, the magazines, the postcards and her papers on automata. She saw herself like a line drawing melting into a vanishing point.

The dragonfly buzzed next to Esperanza’s ear. Theodore caught it with his left hand and stared at his closed fist for a minute before releasing it.

Then the dragonfly flew out of the store, its body glinting under the last rays of the setting sun. The sky above the city was purple and red. The streets were growing empty.

“We’re leaving,” she said. “Stay close to me.”

The door slammed behind them. They headed downhill and away.

Your absence chokes the words, ties a knot around my heart, drives me mad with longing. When will I see you? When can I join you?

I walk by the seashore and look at the waves, waiting for a sign of your arrival. The town is full of echoes and empty of you. The seagulls cry a sad lament.

Oh, my love.

I will go down to the beach and cut my palm with an ivory knife. I will then place this message in a bottle, hoping it reaches you.

It has been so long and not a sign of you. And now I know why!

I went to town today. The people looked at me in an odd, sideways way. Avoiding my gaze and whispering between them when I walked by. I felt a tension in the air and I quickened my pace, fear striking inside me; a sharp, disharmonious note. I tried to stop, to quiet the dread in my heart, yet it grew with every step.

Sweat began to bead my forehead, for it was a hot day. Too hot. Too hot to fish, the nets tangled and the fishermen waiting in the shade and the sea like glass; a still mirror, unbreakable.

I stopped and removed my hat, fanning myself, and that’s when I heard two women talking. They did not realize I listened to them, and listen intently I did.

They spoke of the lighthouse keeper’s daughter. She is young and beautiful and wears pretty, white linen dresses and her eyes are the shade of the sky after a storm. The lighthouse keeper’s daughter, with her beautiful voice that rises when we sign holy hymns. And her smile, which never fades, placid and pleasant.

They said she is to be your bride. She will marry you. She will wear seashells in her hair and a necklace of the finest gold, and she shall walk barefoot on the beach, while a retinue of a dozen girls make songs and music.

I’ve been cast aside.

I cannot believe. I shall not believe it. Three years ago I was promised to you.

They are wrong.

I shall speak to the priest.

Please, send a sign of your love.

The priest is an unpleasant, old man. He smells of rotten fish. His skin is a mottled grey. When I walked into church, he clasped my hand and the feel of his skin against mine was like sandpaper.

We spoke in his office, which is dark and stuffy and also has that annoying fish odour, though its coolness soothed me, for the long hot days extended one after the other. Each one warmer, each one more blistering. The nets and the boats lay abandoned, and even the seagulls seem to perch still, idle. Waiting.

The priest talked to me slowly and all the while I stared behind him, at the great mosaic that decorates the wall. It is a delightful picture of sea plants and fish and interwoven all around its edge is the symbol of the order.

The priest made small, slow motions with his hands until I boiled over, snapping, and asked him to get to the point of it.

The point is the women were right. The lighthouse keeper’s daughter has caught your fancy.

You want her instead of me.

We cannot hope to understand the plans and designs of our Great Lord, the priest said, but I would listen no more and rushed out of the office with a hand pressed against my mouth.

When I returned home, I wept. I have been weeping for hours now, for I never desired anything more than to be your beloved and for you to be mine. I cannot understand.

What has happened? How has she enchanted you? I can only assume that she has wickedly tricked you. I can picture her on moonless nights, tossing precious chains and jewelled rings into the sea.

Witchery and deceit.

You must not listen to her! I love you dearly and will cherish you forever. She is a cruel liar who only wishes to curry favour from you and exalt her family. They are an ambitious lot, her people, and she always looks at us with her chin up high, her eyebrows arched, that tiny little smile staining her lips. As though she knows she is better than the rest of the townspeople and now she can prove it, for she is your bride-to-be.

Please, please do not betray your promise! Return to me!

I am slashing my palm thrice and tossing this letter into the sea, knowing it will reach you.

There was much unpleasantness last night but I refused to be cast as the guilty party, for I have done nothing wrong.

For the past few days there have been preparations for a great feast to announce the betrothal of the light keeper’s daughter. I’ve seen people around town busy gathering wine and salted fish and sweet breads, and it is known far and wide that the lighthouse keeper has polished the silver candlesticks he inherited from his grandfather, and taken other precious trinkets out from the old trunks.

It would all be put on display for the town to see.

And so, as the sun sizzled and burnt, day after day, I burnt inside with anger, seeing them coo and prepare for the great event. Not a thought was spared for me. It was as though I had disappeared and did not exist. It was as though I had not been paraded in a similar fashion three years ago, wearing a veil made from fishermen’s nets, a veil decorated with starfish and sea urchins.

It was as though you and I had never been.

My father said there is no shame in it, for we have been fairly compensated for our trouble. A few coins! That’s how much a daughter’s dignity costs. That’s how much the priest thought of us.

Not only did he dare to toss those miserly scraps at my father, he hinted it was my fault.

The weather has been so hot and the fishing season has been bad, and perhaps I had been a poor choice from the start.

But you loved me! But you loved me so!

So when he said these things it was like a scorching dagger was thrust into my heart and it lay there, burning, as the sun went down. When night fell I rose and walked steadily, guided by the merry voices of the townspeople.

The feast had started. They were playing the drums and the pipes. They were chattering while the bonfire burnt. Everyone was in their best attire, wearing the finest masks they owned. The young people danced in circles, swirling, following the beat of the drums.

A very long table had been set upon the beach, complete with a tablecloth spanning the whole length. Fine porcelain dishes etched with blue scalloped designs were set at each place and the precious candlesticks were on display.

All the great townspeople were present. The mayor, the priest, the lighthouse keeper and, of course, the lighthouse keeper’s daughter sat at the head of the table.

She wore a fine blue dress and a golden mask. Though I could not see her face, I could tell she was smiling.

I walked up to her, but she was talking to someone and did not see me.

The piping and the drumming ceased.

And then she turned her head, as if finally sensing me, and raised her masked face towards me.

And then I spit at her. Spit at that beautiful, golden, serene surface.

The beach was silent as I walked away.

Later, the priest and some others came to talk to my father and father slapped me very hard.

Dishonour, he said.

Dishonour!

It is she who is dishonourable; they who have done me wrong.

For I have only loved you, loved you most intensely, fully, without wanting nothing but you. You captivated my senses and filled my soul, and I cannot see dishonour in my pain, nor my love.

I slash my palm five times and bid this letter reaches you.

It has been a week since the feast.

It rained yesterday. A strong, steady, rain. In the morning, the beach was spotted with many pink starfish which had been washed ashore. When the tide goes out, they shall all dry and die.

The fishermen kicked the starfish aside, boarded their boats and picked their nets. They set out to sea and hauled in their bounty. So many fish, a pile of silver, spilled from their nets. The women beheaded the fish and gutted them. They bled the fish, removing the gills and all blood vessels. They cut the fish, they split it or they left it whole if it was small. Then they began salting them.

I salted, too, though not fish. I dusted salt upon my body, from my hair to the soles of my feet. When I was done I walked to the beach.

I stand here now, with the waves tickling my toes.

I know you love me no longer. She is your love. She shall swim with you in the darkest depths, her pearly flesh resting against you, iridescent fish swimming in her hair. She shall lay upon a bed of anemones and bones.

I know this.

But despite it all, I wish to see you one last time. To behold your perfection. Perhaps, to be embraced, only for a moment, in your arms; the acid taste of your kiss upon my mouth.

I will slash my neck with this ivory knife.

I hope I reach you.

I stare at you as morning light filters through the dusty blinds. You are so still, skin colourless. You might be sleeping. You’re not, but it’s easy to imagine you are. It’s easy to pretend in this murky dawn that you sleep, that your chest rises a little, that your eyelids flutter.

(You used to love me.)

I rise and make breakfast. Saturday is the best day of the week because I can cook for you and we can sit together in the little dining room. I take out the blue placemats with the matching napkins, carefully arranging the cutlery. The cherry blossoms dot the trees and the smell of fresh coffee and eggs wafts through the kitchen. The cat rubs its head against my legs. Birds chirp outside.

On Saturdays, I tell you to sit and you sit in your place. You don’t eat. Of course you don’t. Your mouth is closed, stitched with invisible threads. But I place the plate before you and talk, filling the silence with the answers you haven’t asked.

(You used to be the talker.)

I do the dishes. I wish we had a dishwasher. You were the one who took care of scrubbing the pots and pans. I never liked it. But you didn’t mind.

(You used to hum when you cleaned.)

I read to you as a soft spring rain washes the windows. First, the poetry books you enjoyed. Then, when the clock turns and ticks, the newspaper. I finish with our horoscopes and solve the crossword puzzle.

(You used to like reading.)

I drag you back to bed. Feet so slow upon the carpet.

The sound of shuffling limbs.

Then you lay back upon the pillows. I trace kisses down your neck and chest. I rub myself against you, drag my nails across your neck. Faint traceries which draw no blood.

I slide my thumb against the amulet. A dove, decapitated, dangling from a black cord with three rusty nails sticking from its torso.

I kiss your mouth and it’s like kissing frost. I suck on your lips and it’s like sucking chips of ice. One winter, when we were coming back from a party, I took off my heels because my feet were aching so much. I walked barefoot upon the snow. Drunk and cold and yet my feet didn’t hurt.

It’s like that with you, with your cold, so cold, skin.

I touch the amulet again and it beats, following a rhythm. Your own heart can’t beat, can’t make music. It’s up to me now to be the conductor, raising and lowering the baton.

I raise and lower myself upon your body, upon the ice plain of your flesh.

(You used to want me.)

Dusk. The greyness of the room makes your lips chalky and your eyes silver. The house is quiet as the shadows stretch their arms across the hallways.

You lay wrapped under several covers, back to me.

I pull the covers off and stare at your back, drawing a line upon your spine with my index finger.

(You used to love me.)

There were no sentinels. Aikir looked for traps and found none. He didn’t spot any winged demons, either.

They reached the end of the staircase and an antechamber. Inside, moth-ravaged tapestries adorned the walls and the witch sat in an ornate chair. Next to her was a hawk in a cage.

She was clad in a worn, blue tunic. She was young and had pretty eyes, looking nothing like the wrinkled demon-witch they’d told him about.

“Vyro-Shana. Destroyer of empires, killer of kings. I am Aikir, and I have come to finish you.”

“Put away your sword. I am in a generous mood today, so I shall give you a chance to escape. Turn back before I transform you and your companion into dust.”

“Master —” mumbled Oshar, but Aikir pinched his squire, making Oshar swallow any questions.

“We have come here to destroy you. Surrender or fight me.”

“I will not do any of the sort. Get out,” the woman said.

The witch rose, heading towards a door that probably led to a terrible torture chamber. Aikir followed her and grabbed her by the arm.

“Are you going to cut my head, sir?” she asked. “An unarmed woman who has not raised a finger against you? A mighty hero you must be.”

Oshar looked at the witch and the warrior, heart drumming in suspense and expecting a thousand goblins and demons to leap through the air and attack them. But Aikir let her go, and she moved away.

“Leave now or you shall regret it. I have given you fair warning. You shall be dead by dawn if you remain here.”

Alone now, Aikir and Oshar both regarded the locked door behind which the woman had escaped.

“What do we do?” asked Oshar.

“We wait.”

“Master, maybe we could go inside. Just for a little bit.”

“No.”

They had camped next to the witch’s tower, in the ugly garden. Their small fire did nothing to dispel the cold, and their dinner was stale bread.

“Master —”

“We wait here,” Aikir said. “We wait until she makes her move. Stay alert. Sometime tonight she will send her winged demons to eat our hearts. We must be ready.”

“Yes, master.”

Oshar glanced up at the tower, squinting. But there were no winged demons coming out of it.

There were no demons in the morning either. Or the day after that. On the third day they spotted the witch heading out of the tower, but she had only gone to the nearby well and carried a heavy bucket away.

Aikir sharpened his sword and waited. Nothing happened. Winter might be near, but there was still some food to be had in the surrounding forest. It was sufficient, but Oshar still complained. The squire would have been happier if they had gone inside the castle to sleep at nights. Aikir would not allow it.

“She’ll have her minions waiting to trap us in there,” Aikir told Oshar.

“But I’ve seen no minions,” Oshar replied. “Why aren’t there any dark knights or headless warriors roaming this place?”

Aikir did not provide Oshar with an answer. He did not have one. Aikir could not understand why the witch had left them alone. She had not tried to kill them. No evil ghosts attempted to strangle them during the night.

For years armies, solitary heroes and wizards braved their way in to the witch’s lair. They were all defeated and spoke about Vyro-Shana, her cruelty, and how she kept men’s souls in glass jars.

Yet the witch did none of this. She ignored them.

Then snow began falling and the witch did summon him. But not for the reason Aikir had expected.

Aikir felt terribly uncomfortable when he sat in front of her and she offered him some wine. He’d come ready to slay monsters.

“You should take refuge in the castle. Winter is bad in this place. You’ll freeze to death if you remain outside. Your boy is also looking scrawnier by the day. We’ll see about the food. My provisions are not bountiful. It was a meager year,” she explained.

“We don’t need your assistance.”

“I won’t poison the food,” she said, and then she smirked as she glanced at his untouched glass, “or the wine.”

“I don’t think I should trust a witch.”

“If I wanted you dead, wouldn’t I have killed you by now? A whispered curse, a simple potion. It is not difficult.”

“Why haven’t you tried?”

Vyro-Shana stood and walked to the nearest window. She rubbed her hands together as she looked outside.

“Why are you still here?”

“Answering a question with a question is no answer at all.”

“Indulge me.”

“I came to fight you. I came to rid the world of your evil witchcraft. I will not leave until that is done,” he said simply. “I must challenge you and I must win.”

“You heroes,” she said dismissively. “You should get your squire and leave. Once winter is truly upon us you will not be able to go. The roads will be unmanageable.”

“It is very simple. Surrender, and I shall escort you as my prisoner to the king’s court where he shall judge you fairly. Or if not, face me in combat. Fight me. Unleash your demons against me so that I may defeat your dark powers.”

“I think I’d rather remain in my tower.”

“Then I shall remain, too.”

Oshar cleaned most of the cobwebs and chased away the spiders that made their home in a little room with a view of the witch’s tower.

Aikir had Oshar dress him in his battered armor every morning and patrolled the garden. In the evening he walked the steps up to the witch’s antechamber and issued his challenge. Every night she turned him away. A routine had developed.

For Oshar, another routine had also been born. Oshar helped the witch with some little tasks, carrying water up the tower as though he was her page and not Aikir’s squire. Aikir tried to dissuade him from this. However, the boy was stubborn.

“Do you want to hear a story about real monsters?” the witch said as she walked through the castle, Aikir’s squire at her heels. “It happened in this very place, in this very castle.”

“Are there knights in it?”

“No, but there is magic.”

“Really?”

“Yes. There was a wizard with a heart as black as coal. One night the wizard kidnapped a girl from a nearby village and took her to that very tower where he kept her caged. He planned to eat the girl once he fattened her up properly. But when he tried to behead the girl, she flung herself out the window and became a bird.”

“That is a sad story,” Oshar said.

“Oshar,” Aikir said, emerging from the shadows where he had been watching them. “Make yourself useful and go heat some bath water.”

“Yes, master,” mumbled the boy, running away.

Once they were alone, Aikir turned towards the witch.

“Demoiselle, he should be doing his chores, not listening to nonsense.”

It was not the first time he had caught her telling the boy stories. There was nothing wrong in the stories. They were little tales in which children got lost in the woods and met forest elves or princesses wore dresses of spun gold. But Aikir always felt incredibly uncomfortable when he heard them talking eagerly about such things.

“It is not nonsense,” she countered. “Besides, he’s only a boy.”

“He’s thirteen. Nearly a man.”

“I remember when I was thirteen my older sister told me the same stories, and I used to pretend I was a princess.”

“Your sister?”

She ignored his question and headed down a narrow hallway.

He had never thought her anything but a witch in the high tower.

Heroes are trained to deal with manticores and dragons. But she was not a mythical beast, and Aikir was left staring at the wall at nights. While the boy slept soundly, he paid attention to the noises that filled the castle. He kept his eyes open for a growl, a hiss, the footsteps of some horrid monster. He wished for it. Sometimes he hoped for the lighter steps of a woman, the rustle of a gown, her long fingers falling over his shoulder.

Nothing happened. The days faded away and as much as Aikir tried to remind himself why he had come to this place, he could no longer remember why he should remain.

Though Aikir did not say a word to Oshar, the boy must have suspected something was amiss.

“Aikir, you should ask her to give you a potion to make you sleep. She gave me an amulet and it keeps the ghosts away. I’m sure a sleeping potion is much easier than an amulet.”

“She gave you what?” asked Aikir, more upset at the boy’s use of his first name than the actual offense of accepting a gift from a witch.

“I was afraid of the ghosts,” mumbled Oshir.

“Afraid of ghosts,” Aikir said. “You expect to be a knight like that? You are a man. Keep your sword handy, and it won’t matter if it’s a ghost or a dragon.”

“Yes, but what if …”

“What if, what if. Get me my sword and let’s have some fencing. You are getting lazy from sitting around all day.”

Oshir skulked and nodded.

One night, Aikir entered the antechamber at the appointed time. She was at the window.

“Destroyer of empires, killer of kings. I am …,” he began.

“Come, look,” she said, interrupting him.

He looked outside. The moon was full. Snow blanketed the trees. It was all a glimmering, blinding white.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

Under the light of the moon she was beautiful, too. He found it more disturbing than any demons she might have conjured. Aikir glanced away, staring instead at a worn tapestry which depicted the hunt for a unicorn.

“Winter is the best season. No one comes near the castle. It’s all very lonely and very lovely.”

“I cannot understand how anyone can live in this place willingly.”

“I cannot understand how you can live out there,” she said. “Going around, chopping ogres heads and saving blushing maidens.”

“There are scarce few ogres and even less blushing maidens. It’s mostly bandits, outlaws, and their ilk.”

“That’s why it’s better here,” she said. “No bandits.”

“But some ghosts,” he jested.

“Ghosts?”

“Oshar swears the castle is haunted.”

“It’s only memories,” she said.

Aikir was unable to stomach the situation any longer. In the end he did exactly what Oshir had suggested. He decided to ask for a potion.

It was late, and Aikir grumbled all the way, but he made it to Vyro-Shana’s antechamber. He knocked. There was no answer.

After much muttering to himself, Aikir finally eased his way in. The witch was not sitting in her chair, but the door to her room lay open. He knocked again.

Aikir had never been inside her room, so when he took a hesitant step into the woman’s private chamber he could not help but look around in wonder.

The castle was damp and unkempt, but Vyro-Shana’s room stood in sharp contrast to the rest of her surroundings. There were embroidered pillows, a tall mirror, a large chest, a table with some fine glasses upon it. The tapestries here were untouched by time. The ceiling, he realized when he glanced up, was painted with a thousand tiny stars. A curtain half-hid an ebony bed.

“Demoiselle?” he said.

He had not thought she slept. Yet this witch did sleep, face buried into the pillow while her hawk kept guard over her in its cage.

He observed her for no more than a few seconds before she bolted upright, awake and alarmed. Then she recognized him and she smiled pleasantly.

“Aikir,” she said.

Her chamber had grown confining. The hawk stared at him. Aikir said a hasty goodnight, retreating back towards the room he shared with his squire.

It was Oshar who was ordered to deliver the challenge on behalf of his master from then on.

One day, sitting in the kitchen while Oshar went to fetch firewood, Aikir chopped turnips.

The rustle of a gown made him look up. Vyro-Shana was standing at the door.

“My lady,” he muttered.

“I was looking for Oshar.”

Aikir fixed his eyes on the potato he had been peeling.

“He’s in the forest. I think it is best you head to the tower. It may be some time before he returns.”

She was quiet, her hands smoothing the fabric of her blue dress.

“Why do you avoid me?”

The question was too direct. Aikir frowned, carefully setting aside the knife.

“We have been playing a game that has gone on far too long. I came here to challenge you, but you do not accept my challenges. Instead you force me to run around in circles.”

“I force you? I thought you would have left ages ago.”

“I swore you would surrender to me or I would defeat you in honorable combat.”

“Oh, such stupidity. Do you know how utterly ridiculous you sound every time you issue one of your silly challenges? Do you know how silly you look in that old armor of yours? Honorable combat. You are a blind fool.”

Vyro-Shana rushed out of the kitchen. Aikir tossed the potato away and hurried after her.

“Demoiselle,” he said.

“Go,” she said without stopping to look at him. “You are right. It’s been far too long. The whole story is unraveling.”

“What are you talking about? What story?”

“Your story. They all come for a story and I give it to them. They say they came and met a powerful witch and it makes them happy. But you stay and it’s destroying it all. Stupid man, do you really think I am a witch?”

They were both quiet. She was looking at the floor and he looked at her.

“Who are you?” he asked.

These were the right words. He had spoken to her every day, but he had never spoken the right words until now.

“I’m just someone who walked into a story.”

“What was the story?” he asked, edging closer to her.

She avoided his gaze.

“You’re ruining it,” she said.

“Tell me,” he said using the voice he had not used in a very long time. A hero’s imperious tone.

“I … There is a girl running and she needs a place to hide. So she arrives at a ruined fortress and walks up to a room, high atop a tower. There is a witch inside and she is dying. The girl … she has nowhere to go, so she sits next to the old witch. One day the witch’s heart simply stops. Now the girl is alone. She’s all alone in the castle and it’s good because she’s been running for so long. She can rest.

“But then people from the nearby villages come. They leave food and offerings for the old witch. The girl, she … she does not think there’s anything wrong in taking some of these things.

“One day a man arrives and starts screaming in the courtyard. He’s a knight. Others come, too. They come and yell and hold their swords up. Heroes. Only they aren’t really heroes. You should see them run. Very few actually make it into the tower.

“That’s the story.”

The woman chuckled, brushing her hair away from her face.

“They left very quickly, and didn’t bother me. But you remained … and now there is no witch and you’ve ruined it.”

“Then the warriors and the wizards that journeyed here, they lied?”

“They saw what they wanted to see. Everyone sees what they want to see.”

“Master, the horses are ready.”

Oshar was still tucking a couple of things away. An apple rolled to the floor and the boy grabbed it, dusting it off. Aikir pushed his chair from the table and grabbed his heavy coat.

He climbed the familiar steps and walked across the empty antechamber to the small room where he knew he’d find her. She was admiring herself in front of a clouded mirror.

“We leave soon.”

“Good,” she said.

She had picked a necklace from a wooden box. It sparkled against her skin, though it was only colored glass.

“You lied to me,” Aikir said.

“I did not.”

“Then half-truths. Either way I believed you were something you are not.”

“It is not my fault.”

“If I had known … I should have gone at once. There was no need for me to remain.”

“Well, you’ll be gone now, won’t you? There’s many ogres to trap and maidens to rescue.”

“I’ve never seen an ogre. I’ve never seen anything magical at all. But I thought you were real. I did think so.”

She turned towards Aikir and bowed her head very slightly.

“You should go. Your story awaits you,” she said.

His story, now that he thought about it, seemed so flimsy in the daylight. Nothing but some boy’s silly fancy.

“Pray tell what happens if the story goes amiss?” he said, carefully circling her. “If all of a sudden the witch should leave the tower?”

“It does not happen like that.”

She slid away, towards the hawk in its pretty cage, and looked at the bird instead of him.

“You don’t understand. She’s under a spell,” she whispered.

“No,” he shook his head. “Not a spell. At least, not that kind of spell.”

In a chamber of make-believe, with painted stars and unicorns dancing on the walls, a man and a woman looked at each other.

Springtime was barely in the air, but some flowers had begun to sprout stubbornly from within the hardened soil. A young knight in a crimson cape looked around the pathway he was following and tried to make sense of the map he held between his hands.

When he heard someone approaching he quickly stopped his musings, a hand falling on the hilt of his sword.

But it was not an enemy heading the knight’s way. A boy rode a rather ugly looking horse while a man and a woman walked on foot, pulling behind them a tired mare.

“You there,” he said.

The man stopped. The plain, worn outfit he wore and the sword he carried seemed the mark of some wandering mercenary looking for employment. It was not an uncommon sight, and the man with his family in tow held no menace in his eyes as he greeted the knight.

“I am looking for the castle of the mighty witch Vyro-Shana.”

“Then you are going in the right direction,” the man said. “Although you won’t find much there. I think the witch is gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“They say she turned into a bird and flew away,” the woman said, brushing a strand of hair from her face.

“Really?” asked the knight, surprised.

“Well, that’s what they say,” the man replied, tugging at his horse.

The trio kept walking down the pathway until they disappeared from view and the knight, dumbfounded, stood frozen, wondering what to do next.

He left, crates filled with earth, bound for England. Left us behind, promising to send for us. We believed him. But as the days went by, I realized he’d lied.

Live forever. Love forever.

Anca and Ioana looked to me for guidance, as they always did. Technically, they were older than me. I was the last one to be brought to the castle. Mentally, they were younger. Frozen in their teenage years, letting me mother them and lead. I’d had five sisters and watched over them. Authority came naturally.

My sisters and I had shared a single, cramped room. Some days, when I was tired of doing the washing and watching over the others — our mother died birthing the youngest child, our father was a strict man who filled my days with endless household tasks — I’d look out the window, towards the distant silhouette of the castle. It had no name. We simply called it “the castle.” High upon a cliff, edging towards the sky, while we lived beneath its shadow. I pictured myself going up its hundreds of steps, rushing through the hallways and dancing in rooms decorated with rich tapestries.

When he swooped from the towers, a piece of night detaching from the sky, why would I resist?

I had five sisters, but disease took them from us. Tiny little graves marked their passing, though I did not recall their precise location afterwards.

My father and I sat alone at the table. He was quiet, staring at a distant point.

We were already half-dead. The air stank, everyone rotting and melting away. So why not live forever?

I stood in the highest tower of the castle and tried to pierce the night with my eyes, to see beyond the mountains and the forests and gaze upon the distant shores he’d escaped to. I wondered if he thought of us or if the memory had been ripped apart.

Anca and Ioana were not twins. But they might have been. So close in looks and mannerisms, with the same glossy black hair and knowing eyes. Something about them always made me think of birds of prey. They flew easily, bodies light and bone-thin, their laughter streaming from the rafters.

Flight did not come naturally to me. My other shape was of a massive white wolf. Smaller than his own wolf body had been, but still a sight to see.

Anca and Ioana feared the outside; they spoke of arrows raining over a castle. There had been a great battle, though they could not recall if it had taken place in this fortress or another one. Either way, they would not venture with me.

I rushed through the forest, seeing all manner of things in the dark as I hunted for us.

He had kept us in our rooms, like the women in a Turkish harem I spied in the etchings of books, before the books were ravaged by moths and time. There we were to patiently wait for him, never stepping outside the walls of the castle.

There is death outside, he’d warned us.

Yet he’d gone out, beyond the safe limits of our home and aboard a ship.

I’d been right. He had never loved. He never loves.

Not that it mattered now.

There were Anca and Ioana to look after.

I ran through the forest, sometimes naked in my woman-shape, sometimes in the wolf’s pelt. I chanced upon a traveller or sneaked into a small house, creeping through the windows. Then I’d drink upon a sleeper, compel him to follow me through the night, and back to the castle. I’d let him ride upon my back, my wolf legs taking us swiftly through the darkness. Up, up. Towards Anca and Ioana.

In the daytime we slept in the old chapel, inside carved sarcophagi much more ornate than the graves my sisters had been given. Ioana once told me the castle was built upon an older castle and I thought this might be true, for the sarcophagi seemed of a style that did not entirely correspond to the ruined chapel, images of women holding garlands of flowers upon the lids. But even Ioana could not say how long ago the previous castle had stood, or who had been its master.

Not that it mattered. Now we were its mistresses, laughing as we swirled inside the empty chambers, decked in clothes of ladies who had long turned to dust, ravaged by worms.

He had not liked our liquid laughter, the way it bounced against the ancient walls. Hating it as though it might peel the bricks away revealing an older layer of stones. He was gone, and we laughed.

I braided tiny flowers into Anca’s hair while Ioana told us fairy tales from her childhood. Sometimes, she forgot the endings and we invented our own.

I was careful with my looks and attire. I’d compel Anca and Ioana to bathe with me under the cold rain. Or to pull water from an old well and fill a great copper tub. Anca always said I was the vainest of us all. Ioana said I was the fairest.

I knew I’d been his favourite and the constant ablutions, the ribbons in the hair and the heavy, old pieces of gold against my skin had been meant all for him. His absence had not altered my routine. I was still prim and careful with my clothes, my hair. Through the years, I had noticed that Anca and Ioana sometimes ignored such niceties, nails caked with dirt and blood. As though they had forgotten, or did not care, to keep any semblance of life.

When they were in this state — and they sank into this miasma, deeply upon his departure  — they might remain still for several days. Not a muscle twitching. Nothing. Just a deep silence interrupted by bouts of terrible ferocity. They sometimes gnawed at each other, not a pup’s nipping, but a full-blown attack.

In those moments I did not know them and I wondered if this was a sign of their true age. Or simply the vast melancholy that clothed them.

Either way, I reeled them out of this state. Reeled them into little dances and the clapping of hands. The castle vibrated with our voices.

And whenever I’d catch myself thinking of him again, my hands running over the maps he had left behind, I’d seek their comfort and their smiles.

It happened as it was meant to happen. The spell shattering abruptly, as it must.

Ioana dreamt the castle crashed into the river far below. I held her in my arms as she wept, speaking of a terrible omen. I convinced Ioana and Anca to play hide-and-seek with me, like I’d done with my sisters when we were little. We rushed through long corridors, sneaking beneath archways and laying still, as lizards and slugs crawled besides us. Night creatures, the lot of us, out to play.

The wind and rain whipped the castle, lightning striking nearby, and we giggled.

I raced up to the tallest tower of the castle, wolves howling, wind screeching, and stopped in my tracks feeling a tug and a pull inside my skull.

I knew he was returning home.

Emboldened by his nearness, Ioana and Anca  agreed to step out of the fortress some nights later. We looked for him in the coldness, in the dark, hoping we might encounter his carriage. Instead, we found the woman and the strange man. The woman bore his mark upon her, glowing like an ember. Another sister for our tribe.

The man was untainted. Strongly-built and blue-eyed. He reminded me vaguely of my stern and resolute father and I stared at him for a long time. I thought of the night I slipped out of my house, headed up to the old castle, and the distant cry of surprise I must have imagined — I must have — springing from my father’s lips, escaping the desolate, little white house.

We can never look back or we will be turned into pillars of salt. I suppose that is why Anca and Ioana remembered very little of their youth. Perhaps that is why they forgot themselves some days, growing fierce and empty.

I stared at the man and he stared back at me while Anca and Ioana laughed.

I think my silence, my eyes upon him, were my salvation.

I do not know why he did not kill me. Though he tried. He did try. But the stake did not lodge firm against the heart. Distraction? Weariness? Perhaps my own power over mortal minds, woven in that long look, shielded me. Perhaps he felt pity.

Whatever it was, I woke to the icy knowledge of Anca and Ioana’s death. I did not even have to look at their sarcophagi to know. But I did look. Empty. Not a bit of hair, not a speck of bone. Nothing but dust.

I knew he was dead too. I felt his absence. I had not been this alone in years upon years. Centuries even. The loneliness reverberated through my body.

My shift was stained with my own blood upon the breast, where the stake or a knife bit the flesh before he pulled away. I let my usual sense of cleanliness escape me and did not change my dress, eating millipedes and insects for three whole days.

I feared leaving the chapel. I thought his enemies might return. On the third day there was a great murmur through the fortress, a rumble that startled me and had me pressed against the wall in terror. When I ventured out of the chapel I realized a section of the castle had collapsed. The old bricks had finally given away, groaning and plunging into the river below.

The sight roused me. I no longer felt safe in the chapel.

I turned into a wolf and leapt beyond the castle walls, not knowing where I’d go. The icy night air cut my hands, my feet.

It was easy to find my sisters’ graves. I had not forgotten the location. I had merely buried it away, and now dug through layers of memory until I arrived at the plot of earth that kept their bones. My father’s remains might be there too, though I did not know for sure.

I curled upon the ground and crossed my arms upon my chest.

He had never loved. But I had. I’d loved Anca and Ioana. Their little smiles and their games. Their sweetness and their cruelty, and the way their black eyes shone in the darkness, as if burnished. It was all gone and I couldn’t even muster the energy to crave revenge.

My fingers dug into the earth and I thought I might bury myself with my sisters. Rest my bones against their bones. Cradle them once more. I would not be alone then, for their ghosts would keep me company.

I lay like this for a very long time and then, finally, I stood up and ripped my shift off. I fashioned a simple pouch out of it, scooping earth into it and tying it close. I thought of returning to the castle for some of the valuables there. Perhaps one of the maps. I discarded the idea.

Years later, I wonder if I shouldn’t have returned and scooped a trinket, a map, after all. My recollection of those days has grown dimmer and dimmer. I sometimes wake up with a vision of two dark-haired women, but their names escape me. I wonder if a memento might help pin the memories in place. Or perhaps it would not make a difference. Perhaps we are all meant to wander with nothing but a handful of earth in our hands, never looking over our shoulders.

We walked by the sex shop but would not dare venture inside. Good, well-behaved Catholic kids in their school uniforms don’t do such things. Our steps slowed down, we whipped our heads towards the leather and lace on display, egged each other on, then scattered home.

There were six of us, all twelve year olds. I was the girl of the group and had earned my place with bravado and persistence. Our leader was Jaime, witty, good-looking and more confident than any kid our age had any right to be. His only contender, Dario, threatened to snap the reins of our group by sheer force and brutality. But Dario, despite his size, was not smart enough to engineer a coup; thus we followed Jaime.

That afternoon we’d gone for ice cream and idled at the arcade, then walked the shortest route home. The route that took us by the sex shop. We stopped to look at the display and the sign advertising “toys lingerie magazines performances.”

“The sell foam vaginas in there,” Lalo said. “Not a doll, just the vagina.”

“And how would you know?” Dario asked.

“My brother saw it.”

“What would he be doing there looking at vaginas? Your brother’s a fag.”

“He’s not! He’s seen one! I’ve seen it too!”

“You’re a fag too.”

“Oh, leave him alone,” Jaime said, rolling his eyes.

It went like that. Dario picked on Lalo, brought him close to tears, Jaime intervened. We patched it up quickly, the way only youth can.

But Dario was not willing to cede that day. He stood up straight, taller by a head than any of the boys and glared down at Jaime.

“He’s lying,” Dario said.

“Am not. I saw it right there, right inside,” Lalo protested.

“Liar.”

He was. We knew it and with the lie the uncomfortable idea that Dario might be right about the other thing, that Lalo was a fag and we just … there was no room for such things then.

“Hey, let’s chill and walk home, alright?” Jaime said.

“I’m not,” Lalo said, turning to me, pleading, hands spread out.

“If you’re not then let’s go in all together.”

It was as though Dario had dropped a bomb. Nobody said a word or moved a muscle. Finally, hesitating, I spoke up.

“You’re joking, right?”

“No. We’ll go in and Lalo can prove he’s cool. After all, you’ve been inside before, no?”

“Don’t be a jerk.”

“I’ll go in,” Lalo said.

I glared at Dario. I wanted to punch him, even if he was a gorilla, even if it hurt my knuckles. But there was no point, not now that Lalo had spoken and maybe Lalo should have punched him, but he’d spoken.

“Good. You coming in, pretty boy?” Dario shot at Jaime.

I wanted to say don’t go.  But this was all codified. Jaime had to take the challenge or lose his seat.

Stupid rules. Stupid boys.

“Sure,” Jaime said with his usual ease.

“Anybody else coming?” Dario asked.

The other two boys did not answer, hands jammed in their pockets.

I raised my hand, like a good girl in class. “I am.”

Dario and Jaime both stared at me. I thought they might object. Then Dario shrugged, nodded and pushed the door to the sex shop open.

A little bell rang, announcing our arrival and we stood near the entrance, looking around. There was a couch shaped like a pair of gigantic red lips, dildos on the walls, racks of magazines with naked girls on them, posters showing women with gigantic breasts. We had no Internet in those days. Pornography came in magazines. But when we went by the newsstand we didn’t dare to buy them, just as we didn’t dare to purchase cigarettes or enter the shop. The sudden onslaught of so many naked men and women caught us by surprise, but slowly, quietly, we realized the employee behind the counter was not even looking at us. Our parents were not going to burst through the doors. We were alone in the shop.

We spread out, walking by the displays and looking at the shelves. I stared at a blow-up doll with a slash of red across her face passing for lips, wrapped a pink boa around my neck and poked a giant penis upholstered in purple.

We giggled, relaxing, finding the fun in this. All the silly things for sale and the absurdity of some of the products, some of which remained a mystery to me.  Plugs? What were plugs?

Jaime and I elbowed each other, and then Dario spoke.

“Look.”

He pointed at a sign with large, black, stencilled letters which announced “LIVE SHOW PERFORMANCES EVERY DAY. ”

Actually, it said “SHO” because a letter had come off, but we got the message.

“What?” I asked.

“I want to go in,” Dario said.

I stared at the sign and the red curtain next to it. I shook my head. I didn’t want to go to the back of the shop.

Dario was already headed there. Jaime followed him and I would not let Jaime go alone — I felt he needed me. I wanted him to need me. I’d go where he’d go.

Like dominoes toppling each other, Lalo rushed behind me.

We pulled the curtain aside and found ourselves face to face with an attendant. I thought this would be the end of it. He wouldn’t let us go through. But the attendant pointed to another sign displaying the price of admission. We handed him the money and walked down a hallway.

The hallway curved and we saw rows of doors with a green and red light on top of them.  A man, walking a bit ahead of us, opened one of the doors and closed it. The light atop turned red.

We glanced at each other. Dario took the initiative. He slipped behind one of the doors. The light turned red.

Lalo, Jaime and I kept walking. I realized, as we shuffled forward, that the doors were sandwiched side-by-side in a circle. You could walk around and around eternally, lost in a loop without purpose.

I looked at the red lights atop the doors, winking like an eye, and shuddered.

I heard a latch slide and turning around I realized that I was alone. Jaime and Lalo had already ventured behind the doors. Biting my lip I approached a half-open door with its green light blazing and stepped into a tiny booth.

My sneakers stuck against something gummy and unpleasant on the floor. I swallowed and quickly locked the door behind me.

It was warm in the cabin, like the belly of a beast, but I did not take off my sweater.

The cabin was lined with red curtains, one on each side and one in front, and there was a chair. I tugged at one of the curtains on the left and discovered that beneath it there lay a dark plexiglass partition. For a moment I wondered if one could look into the adjoining booth and thought Jaime might be there; I might glimpse his face for reassurance. Then I remembered there might be someone else. I dropped the side curtain.

The cabin had an unpleasant, rancid smell. It was also quite dark so that the overall impression was of being hoisted into a coffin.

I sat down on the one chair.

I waited and wondered if I had to do something but then music began streaming in through a battered speaker; the curtain in front of me lifted.

There was a big window, also of plexiglass, allowing me to see a large bed.

My window was tinted and as I looked at the room — empty, but for the bed — and noticed the other dark squares across from me, I realized the patrons could not see each other. Jaime might be there, behind one of those black squares, or he might not. The boys might have left already, played a prank on me and I might be the only one sitting in the booth.

A woman stepped into the room. She was quickly followed by a man wearing a black raincoat. The woman sat on the bed and the man proceeded to divest her from her garments in a quick, economical manner.

The bed they sat upon began to rotate, spinning slowly. Off came her boots and her skirt, then her shirt and her bra. The woman did not hinder the man, but she did not actively participate. I wondered if she was drunk or drugged, or simply tired of this work.

How many times did she have to step into the room? How many times did the curtain lift for her? How many times must she be stripped of her clothes and pose upon the bed? The ticket price for the show had been cheap. It was hard to image she made anything out of this.

The bed turned and the woman showed her genitals to the audience. She had coarse, dark pubic hair and down there she looked … odd.

A few months before they’d shown a special film at school, shuffling us girls out from our class and into the auditorium. It was an old one, probably made in the 50s, showing neat little drawings of the vagina and explaining “the miracle of birth.” When it was over we all got sample feminine towels. Three weeks later I began bleeding.

The woman’s genitals did not look like in the dainty pictures. Furthermore, the drawings had no hair. When the bed began to turn I saw that the woman had burn marks and welts on her ass. Those had not been in the film either.

The music changed. The woman was now completely naked. Her dark nipples jutted out as she sat on the centre of the bed, her face like iron.

The man was still dressed.

Was it his turn now? Were they supposed to have sex?

The man took something out from his pocket. It glinted.

A knife.

He sliced off the skin from the woman’s chest, exposing her muscles. Blood trickled onto the bed.

I pressed a hand against my mouth.

He continued to cut and pull, tearing the skin. The music piped to a quick tempo while the blood made strange patterns on the bed.

I stood up, stepped back, towards the door.

I fumbled with the lock. It would not click open.

A tapping on the plexiglass partition made me raise my head and I stared at the crimson curtains. Fingers slid upon the glass on the other side, nails scrapped the plastic surface.

The skin from the woman’s arms fell loose and she tugged at it, ripping it as though she were taking off a pair of gloves. He cut at her legs and she tore the skin with the same indifference she might employ if she were removing her stockings.

I rattled the door, pounded my fists against it. It would not budge.

I grabbed the chair, ready to smash it against the door, but it was welded to the floor.

The tapping against the partition increased. Somebody was trying to get through, to burrow a hole and reach towards me.

“Hey! Hey let, me out!” I yelled.

There was a gash near the corner of the cabin, a small opening, and an eye blinked and looked at me through it. Other holes were unplugged or suddenly revealed and a dozen eyes blinked.

The music had turned into a loud piping, a cacophony that was not music but still retained some bizarre rhythm to it. I covered my ears and squeezed my eyes shut, that’s how loud it was.

And then I opened them to see the fleshless woman, dripping red, in the center of the bed. The muscles were slicing off her body, pooling at her feet.

Though the window separating me from the show was black, and though one could not possibly see from the outside in, the woman seemed to stare at me. Then her companion, who had his back to me, turned around.

The latch slid. I stumbled from the cabin, rushed past the doors with the red lights. I stumbled and almost fell when a stray, yellow dog which had wandered inside bumped against my legs. The dog panted and had a man’s head.

All around me in the darkness of the hallway a thousand eyes opened like night flowers, piercing me with their white gaze.

I kicked the dog away and I ran, stumbling into the street where the two boys who had not gone inside waited for us.

I wept and one of them hugged me. Eventually the others came out.

Their faces were cool and composed. Faces I’d never seen before. I looked at Jaime and rubbed my eyes.

“Did you see it?” I asked. “Did you see it?”

“It’s just a live show,” Jaime said.

I felt as though he’d just slapped me. He smiled his golden smile and turned, leading our path home.

When we reached the block where Jaime and I lived — the others had already spread through the city and gone their way — we slowed down but did not speak.

I stared at him from the shadow of my doorway as I regained my voice.

“What did you see in there? What did you really see?” I asked.

He opened his mouth, his eyes were bright and earnest. Then his tongue went still and the eyes narrowed. He paused and scratched his head.

“Just a show,” he said. “Just some skin show.”

He chuckled. I watched him step away, towards his own building; watched the light brown hair and the slim silhouette I knew so well receding until I stood alone.

And after that day we never spoke again, never walked together back from school, never paused in front of the sex shop with its neon letters and its sign which read “toys lingerie magazines performances.”

Vancouver is a young city, and a city of few ghosts. The dead have had little time to find purchase among its blue skyscrapers. Yet that morning I looked across the street and saw Ana standing under the rain, water droplets sliding off her translucent skin. Dead more than ten years and still wearing her little yellow sundress with the heavy, laced boots.

I shook my head and added another sugar to my coffee. I’d have to move. Ghosts may follow the living, but the farther you go, the longer it takes for them to arrive. I had not seen Ana in three years but she was persistent in life, and persistent in her death.

I stepped out of the coffee shop, avoided looking at her and headed to work.

Ana was there the next morning, rather wretched and wet, head bowed, her hair dripping onto her shoes. The little yellow dress looked frayed, the boots were caked with mud.

She looked silly haunting this street, so busy and bustling, no hint of Gothic in the architecture. Though, if you think about it, where can a ghost haunt in Vancouver? Yaletown, in the industrial buildings turned ritzy abodes? Or Gastown, the original heart of the city, the one place where brick buildings rise in orderly fashion across the streets? Without a European backdrop Ana resembled the party girl who has arrived four hours late after everyone has started putting on their coats.

A dog tied outside the coffee shop began to bark and I knew it could see Ana. I felt embarrassed. I thought — though it’s impossible, only I can sense her — someone was going to politely tap my shoulder and ask me if that was my ghost. Sir, would you please leave and take the ghost with you.

I tried to read my book. Sometimes, if you ignore the dead, they go away. When I looked up after twenty minutes she was still there.

I searched for plane tickets online and tried to calculate how many boxes I’d need to move my things, but by the time I got home the desire to escape had been reduced to a simmer.

She might leave. Perhaps.

I have no pictures of Ana. I burned them long ago: physical possessions of loved ones may draw them back. I have literally nothing of hers. Not her CDs, nor her clothes, not even the ferns she bought for the apartment.

I have nothing of Ana but she returns to me, like the tide, always begging for a kiss.

When Ana was alive, I told her I loved her one April Monday. It was not my doing. I do not like those three words and I was not truly, really, in love with her. But Ana insisted. First she had asked it as a joke: “Tell me you love me, won’t you?” When I did not answer it turned into pleading, later a threat, it devolved into a fight and I ended saying it.

Sunlight streamed through the curtains and the air smelled of lemon, and I said it and then she asked if I’d love her forever.

I promised I would.

Ana stood outside the coffee shop all week, sniffling in the rain, her skin growing more crystal-like with each day. Her heart and lungs glowed a soft green and showed through her dress, pulsating to the rhythm of my watch.

Ghosts can acquire the semblance of life. Their flesh can have the appearance of muscle and bone again and they may even taste, breath, feel the world. All it takes is a kiss. But every kiss from your phantom lover is a bit of life trickling out your body.

When I exited the coffee shop Ana raised a hand towards me, as if reaching for my shoulder.

I walked away, hands in my pockets.

Ana and I did not share similar tastes in books, movies or music. Convenience and youth brought us together. We met in the standard way: university, through friends. Four semi-dates later we were living together.

I left a year later out of boredom and no-good reason, which was as much as I could stomach.

By the time she died in a car accident we had been separated for nearly six months. I did not expect her ghost to roam into my room. She tiptoed in one night, snuggling next to me under the covers. Her skin was like a block of ice and had the grayish appearance of meat that has been freeze-burned. But she looked so damned sad, shivering and pouting and begging me to hold her because she wanted to feel alive again.

I kissed her and she pressed a hand against her chest.

“I think I feel it again,” she said. “Yes, it’s there.”

Her heart, she meant.

She’s been following me ever since.

I saw Ana on the bus, late one night. It was almost empty and she was not hard to spot, even half-visible. She was sitting at the back, holding her head between her hands, and rocked back and forth at certain intervals.

When I prepared to step down she stood up, almost looking happy, and spoke.

“Do you remember that summer we went to Amsterdam?” she asked. “We went with Alto and the others and you got sick at that little restaurant. Remember?”

We had never gone to Amsterdam. She was remembering wrong, a sign of her worsening condition. Maybe she’d fade for good, soon.

I did not reply.

Ana followed me home like a stray dog, standing guard outside my apartment. I looked outside and saw her with her head bowed, shivering though the rain should make no difference to a ghost because they are never warm.

She cried in the way ghosts cry, without tears, crystal face turned up towards the rain.

I wondered what it might feel like to kiss her thin lips, cool as glass, and breath warmth into her icy limbs.

I felt old and tired.

When I used to kiss Ana she came back to life for an hour, for two; maybe even a day. She’d sit in my kitchen and have a cigarette and she’d speak just like Ana had spoken, forgetting she had died, talking as though time had turned back and we were together.

I’d watch her, sitting at the edge of the couch. I’d watch as the colour drained from her body and her skin grew translucent and then she cried, she knocked my paintings down and rattled the furniture like a cheap poltergeist. I sat at the edge of the couch, rubbed my jaw and wondered why she’d decided to haunt me.

I went to Granville Island and she was there, standing in the aisles of the public market, lurking in the corners, sitting on a bench next to a solitary seagull.

I sighed and thought about kissing her and giving her the minutes of life she craved. She would be cold like ice, like a window pane in winter, and her smile would glimmer in the dark. She’d wrap her arms around me, smelling faintly of lemon and the grave, sorrow and stagnant water, and I’d comb my hands through her thin hair.

I stretched out my hand. Ana lifted her head and stood up, as if to meet me. Her green, throbbing heart glowed and she opened her lips.

My fingertips rested against her chest and I shoved her back.

She shattered like sugar candy, little gleaming shards spilling all over the ground.

The gull shrieked and flew away.

I opened my umbrella and walked home.

I read a photocopied copy of the Necronomicon in Mexico City when I was in junior high and living on the fourth floor of a building which smelled like garbage.

The neighbours used to dump their trash bags outside their doors and there was always a broken light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Which was not so bad. The other apartment buildings around us were even shittier. La Bola’s elevator, for example, had a big hole in the floor that nobody fixed. One night, one of the hobos that used to sneak into the building got his leg stuck in it, then made a bloody mess trying to pull himself out and they had to call the cops.

Some kids said they had to amputate the man’s leg when he got tetanus from the cuts. La Bola got a good laugh out of it.

He was the one who found the Necronomicon.

I knew nothing about Lovecraft until this fat dude who liked to smoke a lot of dope and watch foreign movies lent me a copy of At the Mountains of Madness. I was in my Poe phase back then and the dude — his name was Leonardo but we called him La Bola — had seen me thumbing through it.

He circled my desk, shark-like, as I read “The Fall of the House of Usher” and told me that if I liked Poe, I would really like Lovecraft.

Now this dude, he wasn’t friendly. The other kids teased him with some creative nicknames. The nicest one of them was La Bola, because he was so big, but he got called much worse.

La Bola had a pierced ear, which was a no-no at our school, and he carried magazines of girls with big boobs and heavy metal music tapes inside his knapsack. In short, he wasn’t my sort of friend.

I was the nerd with the glasses and the baggy uniform. My mom had bought it two sizes bigger because she thought she’d save some money if I could grow into the clothes. I never did grow and remained short and skinny, rolling up my sleeves all year long so I could see my fingers.

Anyhow, he gave me the Lovecraft one Friday and on Monday he asked me what I thought.

“It was cool,” I said.

“Wasn’t it,” he said as he sat next to me, giddy with excitement. “You want to read another one?”

That’s how we became friends. It was a good friendship. La Bola lent me books and I fed him. His mom, just like mine, worked until late at night and there was rarely anything to eat in his house, so I kept inviting him to have supper with me and my sister. Then we’d rush to my room and listen to some of his music while we chatted about horror stories.

On our way back from school La Bola purchased copies of La Alarma, which was a thin, yellow newspaper with graphic crime stories and a naked chick on page five. “Followed Murdered Raped!” screamed the front page.

My sister Marilu loathed the crime rag and she did not like the fact that La Bola ate huge portions of the chicken she cooked for us. However, she was willing to keep her mouth shut about him as long as I did not tattle to mom about Marilu’s boyfriend.

Marilu’s boyfriend had gone off to the States a few months before and was working in Texas. He phoned her once a week, collect call, and they chatted for a good hour. Mother had forbidden her from accepting his calls and told me to hang up if anyone called collect, but I always passed the receiver to my sister and feigned stupidity when the bill arrived in the mail.

I did not bother Marilu and she did not bug me, and La Bola continued to come over to eat my sister’s food and talk about horror stories.

And then there was the whole mess about the book and La Bola stopped visiting.

One morning, when were on our way to school, La Bola stopped to talk to a hobo. We were following our usual path, zipping next to rundown 19th century buildings, art deco apartments with tiles falling off the facade and modern monstrosities shaped like boxes built in the seventies. Some neighbourhoods had turned their old buildings into fashionable nightclubs. There was a colonial church now transformed into a spiffy bar. But not ours. Factories jutted next to vecindades, buildings that had gone up during Iturbide’s empire served as a backdrop for prostitutes, and a sad park with more concrete than trees stood as the heart of this grey collage.

The hobo stumbled through a garbage-littered corner just as we left behind the park. I knew him — or knew of him — he sold all kinds of trinkets: old magazines of girls with big titties and drugs were the most crucial items for kids my age, but rumour was he could get any merchandise you wanted.

I stepped aside, pressed myself against the wall to let the stinky fellow go by. But the man recognized La Bola and started cooing, talking to him like they were old friends.

“Hey, long time no see,” said the man. “I got some new stuff, some nice stuff for you. You want to take a look?”

He probably meant drugs. I didn’t do drugs and there was a strict no pot rule at my house for fear that my mother would belt my ass red if she smelled it. But La Bola bought drugs, smoked cigarettes. He liked to demonstrate his superior sophistication with his knowledge of stimulants.

“Can’t right now,” La Bola said.

“But this is big stuff. Good stuff. It’s that book you wanted. The N.”

“Maybe a peek.”

“We’re going to be late,” I reminded La Bola.

He ignored me and started following the panhandler, and I in turn followed La Bola until they crawled inside the abandoned pantyhose factory where some of the kids liked to have sex. The old building had tons of shattered milky-white glass panes and it was easy to sneak inside, but I did not like to go in there, and when La Bola insisted he didn’t want to go alone, I said I’d keep watch from outside.

I didn’t dare to crawl in.

Through the glass plane I made out two murky figures, shadows, Bola and the man talking. There was a noise, a cry. Not a scream. A cry. Might have been a “no.” Might have been nothing at all.

Stuff happens at the old factory and you’ve got to be careful. Just look away. That morning I put my hands in my pockets and rushed to class, left Bola alone. Left him behind.

I saw nothing.

La Bola was late to school.

A few weeks later, La Bola talked about the invocation and showed me the grease-stained photocopies then man had given him.

It was October and the Day of the Dead was right around the corner. The streets were filled with sugar skulls and pictures of death in a long Porfirian dress. We were walking next to the offices of Telmex when La Bola suddenly stopped in the middle of the street — it was the same street where the whores gathered at nights to ply their trade, causing my mom to pull my arm very quickly whenever we were out late — and said we should try to put the Necronomicon to good use.

“Like seriously,” he said. “We should call Cthulhu.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. We went to sit in the park and I opened my math book so I could do a bit of studying while La Bola went to get some sodas and chips from the corner grocery store. The daughter of the store owner was a plump, gap-toothed fifteen year-old who had a crush on La Bola on account of his “dangerous” earring and the inverted-star drawn on his backpack with red marker. La Bola would spend some ten minutes sweet-talking her and she would give us the junk food for free.

But instead of lining up behind the construction workers who were buying beer and tortas, La Bola sat down. He pulled out some photocopies from a yellow envelope and gushed about how he had purchased an authentic facsimile of the Necronomicon from the man we had met on our way to school.

“It’s the real deal,” he told me, very seriously.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Lovecraft made that book up.”

“That’s what some people say. But other people claim he merely used a coded name for a real book. This book. The true Necronomicon.”

“Yeah, so even if it’s true what the hell is a copy of the Necronomicon doing in the hands of a panhandler in Mexico City? Shouldn’t it be in Boston or New York or some shit like that?”

“Olaus Wormius made a Latin translation and somebody wrote a translation of that into Spanish. This is a copy of the Spanish manuscript, written in Zaragoza and carried by a Spanish scribe to Veracruz. Somebody sold it to Porfirio Diaz and then during the Revolution it got lost, but it was in the library of the UNAM back in the seventies when this dude photocopied it and then someone else made more photocopies.”

I shrugged an answer. We had a math test next day and I was more worried about getting a bad mark in Calderon’s class than whatever weird shenanigan La Bola had cooked up.

“It looks like gibberish to me.”

He plucked four pages, placed them smack on top of the math book I was trying to read.

“These are authentic aetheric keys. They can be used to invoke all sorts of stuff like Cthulhu and shit. We can call him.”

I shoved the pages inside the book and rolled my eyes.

“Why would we want to do that?”

“Because it’s neat,” La Bola concluded. “Come on, you’ve got to help me.”

“We’ve got that test.”

“So?”

“So I can’t play Lovecraft right now.”

“Who’s talking about playing?”

“Are you going back to the factory?”

“I can’t invoke nothing in my place,” La Bola said.

“Will that dude be there?”

“Who?” he asked.

“You know,” I said, but I didn’t say the hobo’s name and La Bola pressed his lips together and shook his head.

“I’m not talking to him anymore,” he muttered.

“Why?”

“Because, he’s a damn cultist that adores Dagon and he wants to sacrifice me to the Elder Gods. Who cares?” He grabbed his envelope, zipped it into his backpack and huffed at me.

“You’re always saying stupid shit like that. There’s no monsters hanging ‘round the park.”

“There’s monsters,” he assured me.

Stupid La Bola. Still dicking around with horror books wrapped in garish covers and little-kid ideas about things from the stars.

I was conscious of the realities and hardships of everyday life. La Bola took photocopies from drunkards, like a modern Jack waiting for his beanstalk to grow.

“Whatever, asshole,” I muttered. “You’re nuts.”

“I am not! You’ll see! I’ll show you!”

“Nuts.”

“Aren’t you coming?” he asked, plaintive eyes, voice quivering. “I don’t want to go alone.”

“No.”

I went home, concentrated on my studying. Tried not to think about the Necronomicon, La Bola going to the factory by himself.

Cultists.

What if the hobo was hanging around the factory?

Monsters.

A strangled cry.

And I had seen something through the greasy, milk glass window panes, that one time.

Two figures …

and then I had rushed to class. Don’t be, don’t be late.

But back there, in the factory.

Back there …

I saw nothing. I saw nothing. I saw …

My mother arrived from her late shift a little before midnight. I was still up, reading my textbook in the kitchen.

“Big test tomorrow, huh?” she said.

“Yep.”

“Did you finish the spaghetti?”

“Yeah, Marilu warmed it up for me.”

My mother took off her shoes and rummaged through the refrigerator. The phone rang. I picked it up at the first ring thinking it was La Bola. I was feeling kind of lousy about our fight and I wanted to apologize.

I held the receiver next to my ear. It was one of those yellow Western Electronic Princess Telephones that my mom had owned forever and sometimes the damn thing did not work right.

“Hello,” I said very loudly. “Hello.”

There was no answer. Just a crackling, which was not unusual. What was unusual was the other sound I heard. Only it was not really a sound. More like a vibration which went up and down my arm.

“Bola?” I whispered.

I didn’t think it was him. Or it was not only Bola.

There was something else trying to get through the line.

The receiver, as I held it between my fingers, felt rubbery and pulsated.

I dropped it. It dangled from the cord, brushing the linoleum floor.

“Is that Marilu’s boyfriend again?” my mother asked. She picked up the receiver quick as lightning and yelled into it with a loud, stern voice. “You stop calling here! You hear me?!”

She slammed the receiver down, grumbled about Marilu and made herself a sandwich.

I went to bed.

I did well in my exam the next day. La Bola missed it, but that was his tactic. He tried to miss as many exams as he could so I could tell him what the test had been all about, and he could get a decent grade when he took it the next week.

I was not too concerned about his absence. And I was not too worried when he did not go to school the day after that. He was probably still sore at me, nursing his wounds by staying in bed and watching TV all day long.

But he did not go back to class. We heard he had been expelled for drug use. Someone had found him dealing pot or coke or some shit inside the pantyhose factory and he was kicked out of school. Other folks said he went nuts and killed his whole family, then microwaved the cat. I did not think that was very likely because it would have made the front page of La Alarma and I did not see La Bola’s wide eyes staring at me from the newspaper stand.

One lady who was a friend on my mom said it was a mental breakdown and she mentioned the pantyhose factory, and the guy there and there was … maybe she said pederast. Maybe she said nothing. I like to believe she said nothing.

And then my mom, she asked me pointed questions about La Bola and I didn’t have the answers, so I shook my head no.

No.

Somebody called a few days later. Heavy metal music played in the background. But the caller didn’t say anything and I hung up.

Nine years later. Enough to misremember.

I had long finished my bachelor’s degree and moved out of my mom’s place and into a little apartment. Overall, things were going fine and I was considering applying for another scholarship, this one for a master’s degree.

Marilu was married and living in Monterrey. She had just had a second baby. My mom was going to go live with her and watch over the grandchildren. Mom told me that she was getting rid of everything in my room and I better go help her throw out my old crap.

I put a few precious things aside, then piled my old books into a box, including the horror paperbacks La Bola had given me in junior high. I took them to one of the used stores where they buy books and newspaper by the kilo, and got a couple of pesos out of the whole effort.

When I was handing the guys who bought the books and newsprint my stuff, I discovered that at the bottom of one of the boxes there were a few photocopies of La Bola’s Necronomicon. I folded them and took them with me. Out of a sense of nostalgia I walked through the old neighbourhood, patting the wrinkled photocopies.

The area was still shitty but they were starting to build nice condos here and there. Gentrification was creeping in.

I stopped at street with the pantyhose factory. That block had not been touched by the cranes and construction crews. The old buildings remained stubbornly in their place, peeling paint and all. The factory itself was even more ruined, dirty and with more shattered glass panes.

I glanced at the photocopies I was carrying, at the building and then back at the squiggly lines that passed for writing.

I heard the tinkering of glass bottles and a panhandler sleeping nearby shuffled to his feet.

“Hey,” said the man and I raised my hand to tell him that no, I didn’t have any cash to spare but I stopped.

The man was very, very skinny. Bone thin and he looked at least a decade older than me, so he couldn’t possibly be La Bola. But he looked like him, only hungrier, his dark eyes very large and fixed on me.

“Hey, long time no see,” said the man. “I got some nice stuff for you. You want to take a look?”

I was born and raised in a neighbourhood with its fair share of drunkards, hobos and hookers, and none of them ever scared me, but this man who looked a bit like La Bola sent me shivering like a five year old; and I swear I could feel a cold, cold rubbery thing slipping around my neck when La Bola stared at me.

I tossed the papers in the air and ran away, only pausing once to see if the man was following me. He was too busy picking up the pages that I had dropped, fiercely clutching them against his chest and mumbling something I could not make out.

Three blocks from there I hailed a cab. When I was boarding it, my cell phone rang. I answered it, but the line was quiet. I thought I could hear someone breathing on the other end. There was expectation in the air, like the pause after you say “I accept” during a collect call. Then there’s a little click and you are connected.

I threw the cell phone out the window and told the driver to go, just go. Where? Not downtown, to buildings and streets three centuries old, not through the old colonias like la Roma. To the outskirts of the city, past Santa Fe, past the DF and into the places where condos and houses are barely going up.

Sometimes the phone rings in the middle of the night and I wake up, and I think I’m a kid again back in the apartment with the hallways smelling of urine and if I look out the window I might see the shadow of the old factory.

Strange things happen there and there are monsters.

I think then, still wrapped in the haze of dreams, that somewhere, Bola’s dialing my number, trying to connect. And I’m never taking that call. And I never did.

And I shouldn’t have run away.

And I didn’t see anything.

And I cry sometimes, but I don’t remember why.

“You can never trust a nahual,” her mother said, “because you cannot be certain if you are speaking to the animal or the man.”

When the chickens disappeared her mother placed her scissors under the bed to ward off the nahual. Her four brothers were more practical, and after consulting with their uncle, their father having passed away the previous summer, they grabbed their rifles and set up watch next to the chicken coop every night.

Even though Teresa was fifteen and a girl she was allowed to keep watch during one of the nights. Unlike her older sister Asuncion who liked to help out in the kitchen and tidy their home, Teresa preferred to go hunting with her brothers. She was a good shooter and an even better rider. Because of this Teresa did not scream and run away when she saw the nahual.

She spotted a fox creeping in the shadows. Teresa pretended to be asleep while keeping a strong grip on her firearm. When she was sure she could get a good shot she spoke.

“If you move I’ll kill you,” she said.

The nahaul stared at Teresa with bright eyes, and she stared back.

“Please, do not hurt me,” said the fox, with a voice that was much too human and made her pause.

“We’re tired of you stealing our chickens. We’ve got enough to worry about with the soldiers to have a nahual also taking our food.”

“But what is a chicken once in a while?”

“It is too much.”

“If you put your gun down and let me go I’ll give you a gift.”

“What kind of gift?”

“A little golden medallion with the image of the virgin. Very pretty. But it’s for a girl and I have no use for it. If you let me go I’ll return in a week and bring it to you.”

“You’re just trying to trick me.”

“No. I give you my word I’ll return.”

“I ought to call my brothers and let them beat you and cut your pelt,” she said, but she’d already felt sorry for the bony fox with its ratty coat. “Don’t steal any more chickens from us or I will shoot you next time.”

The fox trotted away and Teresa sighed, feeling she’d been tricked.

There were rumours that soldiers were moving through the area and this had her whole family in a constant state of alert. If soldiers were indeed nearby they’d have to take the animals and hide them in the caves. Her older brothers, Asuncion, and Teresa would also have to hide in the caves. The soldiers not only stole food and valuables; they took any young man of fighting age with them and the women they hauled off to serve as soldaderas. They said that’s exactly what had happened to their cousin Esteban, that he’d been taken by some soldiers. There had also been some rumours that Esteban had been shot by one of Villa’s firing squads.

People could be killed just because they were related to the wrong person and neutrality was key to survival. Their mother was not taking any chances. She denied both stories and told everyone in Nogalera, the nearest town, that Esteban was away in Mexico City with some relatives. As a result, Esteban’s name had become a taboo and a precise protection system had been established. If soldiers came to Nogalera, all the older children would run away and hide while their mother was left behind with the younger boys and girls.

“God damn pelones,” Teresa’s uncle would say on those occasions and claim that the federal soldiers were the worst of the lot.

To Teresa they were all the same and here in the middle of nowhere the only thing that mattered was that men would come to steal their pigs and rice and guns. Their little farm was located far from Nogalera and that was good because it spared them from much trouble. Still, they waited for word of any approaching soldiers. But nothing happened and Ramon came over to tell them the rumours had been unfounded, no soldiers had made their way to town.

Ramon was courting Asuncion. This meant their mother immediately invited the young man to stay and eat with them. It did not please Teresa as she was required to be on her best behaviour and wear her nicest outfit in front of their guest and it was very hard to be good and proper when Ramon was such a bumbling, cross-eyed fool. Asuncion insisted his eyes were fine but when he was nervous, and he was nervous whenever Asuncion walked by, Ramon’s eyes would clearly cross.

“Don’t make fun of him,” her sister had told Teresa. “It’s not polite. I may marry him one day.”

Teresa did hope Asuncion would get married and go live with Ramon. The sisters shared a bed and Asuncion was always kicking and squirming. When she was not asleep, Asuncion would sigh and read silly poems or sad love stories about dashing highway robbers who fell in love with beautiful young heiresses.

It was very upsetting and it had gotten worse since Ramon started coming around the farm. Asuncion would blush, Ramon would stammer, and Teresa would make a brilliant joke that had her brothers laughing and her mother glaring at her.

Teresa was on night duty again when the nahual came, this time in the shape of a young man. He was bony thin even as a human and when he moved it was with a fluid, liquid quickness.

“I keep my promises,” he said handing her the medallion.

“What if it is not gone? What if it comes while we are asleep?”

Teresa was braiding Asuncion’s hair. It was a part of their nightly routine that also included prayers to the Virgin and their guardian angel, even though Teresa usually skimmed over the prayer part.

“Don’t be silly,” muttered Teresa. “The nahual has left us alone.” Their mother attributed their successful battle against the creature to the scissors under her bed and the fragrant romero she had placed throughout the house, thus ending the need for their nightly watches.

“But what if it comes to eat us tonight?” Asuncion said.

“I’d grab the gun and shoot it in the face. That’s why I keep it under the bed.” Teresa did in fact conceal a firearm under their mattress. It was a necessary precaution, the revolution also making it necessary to hide money behind loose bricks.

“Don’t say that. You wouldn’t.”

“Of course I would.”

Teresa did not mention that she had already been presented with chances to kill the nahual. It would have been embarrassing if anyone knew that. After all, Teresa was the brave girl, the machorra, the proud antithesis of Asuncion and the bane of their mother’s existence.

“If it comes we’ll yell for Alvaro,” her sister muttered. “I think it would be a bad thing if you killed a man, even if it’s a nahual.”

Teresa shrugged. Men were getting killed left and right all over the country so what did one more matter.

2

Their mother’s birthday was nearing and Asuncion was busy embroidering a handkerchief as a gift. Teresa was also trying to embroider little yellow flowers that she thought would look much better than her sister’s pink roses. She sat under a fir tree and looked at the flowers but the results were botched. She pulled and cut threads once more.

“That looks very boring,” said the nahual, standing tall before her in his human shape.

She’d seen him during the past few weeks, slinking around in his fox form and sometimes looking as he did right now, a normal man with a wide grin. Teresa did not know his name. He must have one yet she had not asked about it. It was already bad that she knew a nahual and it would only make it worse if she actually knew his name. That would mean they were friends.

“I have chores to do. Unlike you.”

“I have chores.”

“Running in the fields and stealing chickens?”

“You should come with me some time,” he said.

“To steal chickens.”

“No, to run in the fields after dark.”

“My mother wouldn’t like me running outside at nights with a man.”

“I’ll show you how to shed your skin and that way you won’t be a woman and I won’t be a man. There is an animal inside all of us wanting to be free.”

Teresa frowned, looking at her embroidery. “That’s a lie.”

“It’s not.”

“Go away. I’m busy.”

He obeyed, slipping out of sight quickly. But he’d be back.

Teresa guarded the secret of the nahual, knowing her brothers would shoot him and her mother would beat her bloody if the family ever found out she spoke with his kind. But Asuncion’s pretty, curious eyes followed Teresa and one time when they lay in bed at night and by all rights Asuncion should be asleep, she started talking.

“I saw you with a boy near the noria yesterday. Who is he?”

“I don’t know. Some man who was lost,” Teresa said. “He was asking for directions.”

“I thought he was good-looking.”

“I didn’t pay attention.”

“Teresa, tell me,” Asuncion pinched her sister’s arm. “Tell me.”

“It was no one. Go to sleep.” She would be rather upset, Teresa thought, if she found out there was no secret admirer but just a fox that came to beg for scraps and sometimes sit at her feet.

So when the nahual appeared, scratching at her window shutters late at night, Teresa immediately panicked. At first she thought Asuncion must have heard the noise and would discover the truth. But Asuncion lay fast asleep.

Teresa hurried out to the stable were the nahual awaited her in his human shape. He was sitting in a corner holding his arm and she saw that he was hurt, blood staining his shirt.

“What happened?” she asked.

“A farmer tried to catch me with a clever trap. It didn’t work but I am injured.”

“You were stealing from him?”

“Please get me some bandages.”

She cleaned his wounds and bandaged them as she had done before for her brothers.

“You should stop turning into a fox and get an honest job and work for your living like everyone else does.”

“The world is very dangerous for a man these days. There’s too many eager soldiers. I’d rather take my chances as a fox.”

“You’re going to get shot if you continue like this. And over what? Poultry.”

“Not poultry,” he said, producing a pair of pearl earrings from his left pocket with an exaggerated flourish and a smile. “Your neighbours hide their valuables in the chicken coop.”

“You take it back,” she said, holding her hands up and refusing to touch the pilfered goods.

“What? After all the trouble I went to get them? I thought you liked these trinkets.”

“When they’re not stolen.”

He seemed to be puzzled and held out his hand towards her again, but Teresa shook her head. She wondered if she was a hypocrite, having taken the little golden medallion but refusing this new offering. It was not the source of the earrings that made her pause. Rather, that she would be indebted to him.

“I’m not returning them,” the nahual said, the earrings still resting on his open palm. “I’ll throw them away.”

“Give them to charity then. Take them to Father Macia’s parish.”

“To the fat priest? He’ll eat them.”

She glared at him and he rolled his eyes, stuffing the earrings back in his pocket.

“Fine.”

“Fine,” she echoed.

She thought this punctuated the end of their conversation but he was suddenly standing closer to her, closer than any decent man should have been.

“Come run in the fields with me tonight. I’ll teach you magic and show you the secret places where I hide.”

“Magic is nonsense.”

“No, magic is like a dream. It makes everything possible and beautiful.”

“You are such a liar.”

A funny little smile tugged at the corners of his lips. She stared back. Asuncion would have blushed as she always did when any man happened to glance at her but Teresa glared back. If he tried anything she would punch him in the face like she had done to Roberto, the youngest of the Contrera’s boys when he had attempted to kiss her the previous summer.

When the nahual kissed her Teresa did not pull away, did not kick and scream or mock him, kissing him back instead. Perhaps despite all her protestations there was an animal inside her too, for Teresa thought she felt something claw at her chest. But this feeling was gone quickly and when they looked at each other again Teresa closed her fists. This was the Teresa who was quick with the rifle and quicker with words, sharp-tongued and sharp as steel.

“Don’t come back. I’ll shoot you if you come back,” she whispered and headed towards the house.

The next day Teresa knew she was evil. She was as bad as Nogalera’s infamous Ana Marina, or as her mother preferred to call her, that “buscona.” All day Teresa expected her mother to yell and tear her hair out. But night fell and Teresa’s indiscretion remained a secret, no one the wiser. Her hair was still in place and all was well.

And nothing was well at all.

This time it was her turn to toss and turn and kick in bed, finally poking Asuncion awake.

“I need to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Can you go to hell if you kiss someone?”

“Teresa,” her sister muttered, now wide-awake.

Asuncion was the one who always said her prayers right and spent her days in the shadow of their mother and so Teresa figured that if someone had the answer it should be her.

“Well? Yes or no?”

“I don’t know. Don’t think so. Not if you’re in love.”

Teresa frowned wondering why in Asuncion’s world everything had to end in love.

“Is it that boy I saw you with?” Asuncion whispered.

“He is not a boy.”

No. He was a nahual, a fox, a dirty warlock-animal slithering through the corn fields with pockets full of stolen goods. Perhaps Asuncion might have even found that romantic.

“Who is he?”

“No one.”

“Is he from Nogalera?”

“Go to sleep.”

“You were the one who woke me up,” Asuncion said.

Teresa turned away from her sister, towards the window and closed her eyes.

“Don’t tell mother,” she said.

“Of course I won’t tell mother.”

Teresa knew that her sister would have told everyone the next morning if she hadn’t been warned not to say a word. Unlike Teresa, Asuncion did not easily keep secrets.

A month, then two went by. Her eldest brother got into a terrible fight and hurt his arm and mother screamed at him for being such a fool and then cried because she feared he would die just like their father had died.

Stories of the war crept here and there and Ramon came every week to sit next to Asuncion and blush. He would blush and then she would blush and they would continue like this for so long that Teresa wanted to scream at them both. Then her mother would call for Teresa and tell her to help in the kitchen, scolding her for some reason.

Day after day she waited and day after day the nahual did not come. She was glad. Teresa was not Asuncion. He was probably shot and gutted, and deservedly so. Except there was this nagging feeling inside Teresa and it made her count the days.

They hanged three men in Milpa Vieja. Alvaro and their uncle went to look at the corpses dangling from poplars; the bodies were mangled and pecked by crows. The rumours were true. It was cousin Esteban hanging from one of those trees.

Where he’d been and why he’d died remained a mystery as no one could recall who had ordered the hanging. People paid little attention to executions these days and Alvaro did not want to attract much attention with needless questions.

After this incident, Teresa worried even more about the nahual’s fate. He’d never taken this long before. She dreamt of blood one night and woke up crying for no reason.

When the nahual appeared, thinner it seemed, she rushed forward to hit the man, not embrace him.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“I thought I wasn’t wanted around here anymore after our last meeting,” he said.

“My sister is getting married,” she said, as she might to a neighbour who has stopped by for a drink and some gossip on a hot summer day. “Ramon finally asked for her hand in marriage and mother said yes.”

“I always love a good wedding.”

“I’ll bring you a slice of wedding cake, then. Unless you’d prefer to go to the wedding itself. Of course, as a man.”

“I don’t think so. Crowds make me nervous. It comes from being an animal for too long. Sometimes you even start to forget you were ever human.”

“I didn’t think you’d return this time.”

It seemed to amuse him, these words but he said nothing in return. Teresa remained silent, for once shyly studying her feet and hard as she might try she wasn’t able to pretend this was some random neighbour, that this was some detached, polite conversation.

“Do you have a name?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said. “But that’s a secret and I can’t tell it to you while you remain human.”

“I like being human.”

“Run in the fields with me tonight. In the dark, the stars talk to you and the trees bend down to whisper secrets. The world is different and we are different too.”

“I won’t go with you.”

“And I won’t come back after this time. The wind is changing and I must head to other places. This is the last time I’ll see you. Run with me tonight.”

“I can’t.”

“Teresa, if you remain you shall be unhappy. These are dangerous days to be human. It is best to run free in the fields, far away from men.”

“I can’t just leave.”

She wanted to go. She did. A part of her was ready to cast all wisdom away and escape with this stranger. The other part remembered her mother, her brothers and Asuncion. The sound of the farm in the morning and the laughter of her uncle at nights as he told stories.

Teresa was no Asuncion dreaming of highwaymen to steal her away. She was rooted to the ground, practical and determined and she was old enough to know the romantic stories you read in books are fabrications and wise enough to understand the trinkets the nahual was offering would turn to dust in the morning light.

“No.”

“Then I must say goodbye.”

Teresa pushed up on her tiptoes and this time was the one to kiss him. Quickly, almost an afterthought, but nevertheless a kiss.

3

Her brothers and her uncle had gone hunting and only Alvaro remained behind, his arm still not good enough to hold a rifle. It was unbearably hot and Teresa muttered and wiped the sweat off her brow with the back of her hand. She was supposed to feed the chickens but instead she sat next to the little pond that was near their house. She was angry because she had not been allowed to go hunting with the boys and in retaliation she was attacking the water, hurling twigs and rocks like a small child might do. Soon her mother would come looking for her and pull her into the house.

When she heard a noise behind her Teresa sighed and turned, expecting the hard figure of her mother.

“Teresa. Come quick,” said the nahual, hurrying towards her, no mother in sight.

“What are you doing? You’re not —”

“Soldiers. Teresa. It’s time. Come, run with me.”

She looked at the fox and then back at the outline of the house against a clear blue sky.

“Come quick,” he insisted. “This is my final offer. Come now.”

The house. Mother. She must be cooking and Asuncion would be watching the little ones and all the men were off hunting except Alvaro, sitting in his room.

“Death is waiting for you there,” the nahual said, grabbing her chin, making her look away from the farm and straight into his eyes. “Forget it and run with me.”

Instead, Teresa grabbed her skirts and ran towards the house.

“Teresa!” yelled the nahual.

She did not listen, scrambling through their backyard, and as she made it to the parlour, bumping into Alvaro, she discovered it was too late. The men were already there, taking what they could and making a mess. The small children huddled against their mother’s skirts. Asuncion, pale as a ghost, held on to Teresa.

Teresa thought about cousin Esteban swinging from the poplars and Father murdered on the road to the capital and the bad dreams filled with blood. She bit her lip. Asuncion’s fingers were digging deep into Teresa’s flesh and Teresa wanted to yell that she should let go, that Asuncion was hurting her, the half-moon’s of Asuncion’s fingernails making imprints against her skin.

The captain, grabbed Asuncion and pulled her aside like a rag doll, hurling her towards one of the bedrooms.

For a moment Teresa just stood there, unable to understand what had happened. Understanding came quickly and she turned to her brother.

“Alvaro!” Teresa shrieked.

But a man, he raised his gun, pointed it straight at her brother’s face and her brother swallowed hard.

“If you move I’ll kill you,” said the soldier.

Just like Teresa had told the nahual. Only she hadn’t meant it, not really, and this man was aiming with all the joy and intention in the world.

“Don’t move. None of you move,” said her mother and she had never heard her mother use that tone of voice before, a hushed iron-whisper.

Teresa remained still, turned to stone and frozen until she heard the gunshot. She tore herself from her mother’s side then and ran rushing towards the sound. Another gunshot made her jump and Teresa stepped into the room.

“The bitch killed the captain!” someone was yelling.

Indeed, a man lay turned into a tangled bloody mess upon the floor. But on the bed, her dress pulled up, thighs and chest smeared in red lay her sister with her eyes staring at the ceiling. Her limp hands cradled a gun.

Teresa screamed and kicked and scratched at the soldier standing by the door and he hit her hard, splitting her lip. She did not care and continued to scream.

In the span of a single day they had become pariahs, eyes evading them as Teresa and her brother walked through the streets. She knew that they were whispering behind closed doors and that through every street and every miserable alley the story of Asuncion’s death had been repeated many times. That they would have killed Teresa and Alvaro, had their mother not fallen to her knees and offered her wedding ring and her own body, must also have been cause of much whispering. Oh, how they whispered and the whispers followed Teresa as she walked behind her brother.

Father Macia refused to perform the service. He was afraid, as was everyone else in Nogalera. Nobody wanted trouble and nobody was willing to help.

When Teresa reminded Father Macia how many contributions her family had made to the little church and all the chickens, pigs and goats father Macia had enjoyed at their expense he rolled his eyes and said there was nothing he could do. Asuncion could not be buried in the church’s graveyard. There was no space for suicides there.

They dug a hole near the house instead and wrapped the body in some old sheets, a makeshift cross to mark the grave. They had no money left to pay for a coffin, everything of any value stolen.

That night their mother said they must pray the rosary. Teresa’s mouth felt dry and she forgot the words.

When she woke up it was raining, the first storm of the season. Barefoot she walked out, her body wandering on its own. Dirt, water and wind mingled with her skin.

Teresa stared at the darkness and from the darkness melted a figure, a man with yellow eyes. For once those eyes were not smiling.

“Go away,” she said.

Teresa found a jagged rock and flung it hard. The man evaded it easily.

“Go away!”

She hurled another rock. This one hit home on the arm and he grimaced. Teresa found satisfaction in this, already reaching for another rock.

“You knew, didn’t you?” she muttered as she threw the rock hard. “You knew they were coming, you knew and you didn’t do anything to stop them!”

“Sometimes animals can sense things before humans can.”

“Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you say something?”

“Because you cannot tell everything to a human. And because it would have done no good.”

He was very close now. Teresa clutched a rock and held it up in the air, ready to bash it against his head.

“I should have killed you that first night I saw you.”

“You still can.”

She wanted to. She wanted to hurt him. She wanted blood and she wanted death and she wanted nothing because there was nothing left inside her except a vague numbness.

She sat down, covering her face with her hands. Eventually he slid his arms around her and Teresa pressed herself against the nahual.

She listened to the rain and his breathing and just lay there in silence.

“You should come with me. The land is hard and life is harder here,” he said, at length.

“I won’t leave,” she whispered.

“You will. Curiosity will get the best of you and you’ll want to know my name. You’ll shed your skin and follow me into the night.”

“You sound very certain. Can you sense that too? Is that your animal magic telling you so?”

“No. That’s just my hope. Plain hope.”

Teresa didn’t know if she had any hope left. It was difficult to tell if beneath the layers of muscle and bone there still lay anything inside or if she’d been left hollow and pitch black.

She didn’t reply and he shifted, rising and then helping Teresa to her feet. She was tired, drenched and wished nothing more than to return to bed.

“I should go,” he said.

She might have attempted a decent farewell, an appropriate shake of hands but her throat was dry and she was shivering.

“Come back soon,” she whispered despite herself and it was the first time she had said such a thing to him.

“I always do, don’t I?”

He smiled confidently and she thought that in some vague way, though she’d never said it out loud, she had willed him to return; a silent magic slowly woven between them.

“I know,” she replied.

He nodded, his fingers briefly finding her own in the dark.

“Pedro Infante has died!” someone yelled. “His plane went down in Yucatan! They said it on the radio!”

Cecilia stood by the window, a ream of paper in her hands, and her soul flew out of her body.

Cecilia met Pedro the previous spring, at the offices of Lic. Luis Barragan.

She was pretty and the fastest typist on her floor. She also exuded an air of superiority which kept the other secretaries far from her and made the young men quiver.

Despite resembling a delectable sphinx, Cecilia grew up in a grey vecindad where the women had catfights next to the lavaderos while their laundry flapped in the wind. The men came home late, reeking of booze. Children with dirty fingernails stared at passers-by while their older siblings picked a few pockets and went to play at the billiards.

Everyone lived in one bedroom apartments, no matter the size of the family. Six, five, even eight kids piled in these tiny abodes and had to watch as their parents fucked or fought or did anything at all.

Cecilia averted her eyes and leafed through movie magazines, pasting pictures of her favourite stars on the wall, hiding the mould and the cracks dotting the worn plaster. Her desire to flee this miserable abode manifested in the odd ability to flow from her body and into the body of another. It first happened in high school when her essence spilled into a boy she fancied, but was too afraid to approach. Cecilia often slipped out of herself as she rode the tram, hair pinned up, so shinny it seemed to be lacquered, looking straight ahead while the teenage neighbours tried to pinch her buttocks.

On her way back home Cecilia would wait for the tram and stare at the large billboard across the street which showed impossible worlds she could never reach. Worlds where women wore pearls at dinner or rode shiny new cars. While she stared at the ads she breathed one, two, three times and lost herself in someone else’s flesh for a few minutes until the sound of the approaching tram pulled her back into her body and she boarded the vehicle.

The day she met Pedro Infante they had just changed the billboard. A model, nylon-encased legs crossed together, advertised stockings. Sheer beauty, the display type exclaimed.

Cecilia glanced at the ad, then marched into Barragan’s office together with the wave of fellow stenographers, clerks and assorted employees.

Barragan’s office was very large, with heavy wooden furniture polished bright, many typewriters neatly arranged upon rows of prim desks and an air of luxury that Cecilia had never seen except in the movie theatre. Her father worked at the local tortilleria and came home covered in flour with his white cap still on his head. No desks nor ties for him.

Cecilia typed all morning. By lunch time, she sat perched very straight on her chair, wearing the nicely tailored clothes her mother — a brown little seamstress of scant physical attractiveness — copied for her. She always made a point to watch her posture, even when it was her lunch time and she was leafing through a magazine and eating an apple. Unlike the other girls who went to eat tacos at the corner stand, their fingers coated with grease as they ate and laughed, Cecilia did not patronize the street sellers. It seemed very déclassé — she had picked this word from the magazines — to eat this way. To laugh so loud. To look so impudently at men as they walked by and whistled at the young women in their nylons and slit skirts.

Cecilia read and ate at her desk while the office remained empty and quiet during the lunch hour. Barragan walked in — she recognized him by his heavy steps — and sweeping past her desk, called for her.

“Cecilia, bring your notepad,” he said.

Cecilia raised her head and saw that her boss was not alone: Pedro Infante accompanied him. He looked better than in the movies, if that was possible. He had a trimmed, little moustache and a dashing white smile, which he flashed at her as she rose like a somnambulist and clutching her notebook with both hands followed them.

Barragan sat behind his desk, grumbling about something. He picked the receiver, his fat fingers pulling the dial.

“Hi. I’m Pedro,” he said, extending his hand. “What’s your name?”

“Cecilia,” she muttered.

“Been working here long?” he asked.

“Two years.”

“How you like it?”

“It’s fine.”

“Pedro, take a seat,” Barragan said, hanging up. “Cecilia, take note.”

She bowed her head and began to scribble. Fifteen minutes later she was dismissed and managed to make it back to her desk where she slowly sat down and stared at the typewriter.

Pedro exited the office, smiling at her.

That evening she went to the movies with Federico. He worked as a clerk in another office two floors beneath Cecilia. Bland and insipid, wearing thick glasses and with his hair combed back, he was, nevertheless, the most promising suitor Cecilia had managed to attract. Oh, there were plenty of young men willing to leer and chat with her, but Cecilia considered herself a serious girl and behaved in an almost militaristic way when it came to her dates. Even Federico, who’d taken her out half a dozen times, had not earned anything more than an impersonal hug.

Despite her distaste for public displays of affection and her contempt for the girls who let themselves be smooched and fondled in the cinema, Cecilia, entranced by the gigantic black and white image of Pedro Infante streaming from the projector, found her hands moving, like spiders, towards Federico.

She closed her eyes and swooped far, slipping into Pedro Infante’s skin.

She sat there, nestled cozy in a corner of his mind, a half-empty glass of whiskey in his hands. She rubbed her thumb against the smooth, cool glass.

In the movie theatre, Federico was shocked to discover the young woman touching his leg, but he decided not to question this sudden change and rubbed back, his hands searching beneath Cecilia’s skirts while she stared at the movie screen, mouth slightly ajar.

Later, as she lay in the bed she shared with two sisters, Cecilia stared at the ceiling, mouthing dialogue from the movie she’d just watched. She slipped once more into Pedro’s body, into his sleeping shell, and wrapped herself snug inside him.

The day Pedro Infante returned to the office Cecilia took special care with her dress and makeup, dressing in the tightest, shortest skirt she had and donning a pair of black heels that made her tower over every woman in the packed trolley.

As lunch time approached, Cecilia’s nervousness mounted. She slipped out of her body half a dozen times and into the body of the elevator operator, trying to see if Pedro was coming. When she finally spotted him, she hurried back to her body.

Cecilia sat still, fingertips pressed against the edge of the desk, trying to slow her breathing. Pedro stopped, peering down at her.

“Hi,” he said. “I was wondering if Mr. Barragan is in.”

“He is,” she replied. “Do you want me to announce you?”

She stretched a hand towards the telephone, fingers grazing the disc.

“You know what,” he said leaning against her chair with a mischievous smirk, “why don’t we run away for a bit?”

Cecilia looked at him in confusion. “Let’s have lunch,” he said. “I hate having lunch with Barragan and if I walk in right now, he’s going to make me go eat with him. I’d much rather eat with you. What do you say?”

Cecilia saw some of the secretaries clustered by a window. When she walked by they grinned at her, white teeth; the canines of cannibals. She slipped into one of their bodies to hear what they were whispering about and was rewarded with rude words about herself.

Went off with him just like that.

Slut.

Irritated, Cecilia forced the cow that had just spoken to bump into a desk, bruising her shin.

Cecilia typed invoices in triplicate. The carbon paper stained her fingers and she wiped them clean with a handkerchief, then ventured downstairs for a cigarette and stared at the model’s nylon-encased legs.

“I heard you had a friend come in to visit you today,” Federico said.

It was the end of the day and Cecilia was trying to duck out without bumping into Federico. News of her lunch with Pedro Infante had spread through the whole building like wildfire and she was tired of the stares it garnered her.

“He was in the offices, yes,” she replied.

“So?”

“Nothing,” she said shrugging.

“Look, I don’t like you going out with other guys. I don’t care if it’s the guy handling the mail or a movie star. You get it?”

“You’re not my boyfriend.”

“I’d like to be your boyfriend.”

“Oh, go away,” she said.

He grabbed her arm and opened his mouth. Cecilia slipped into his skin, shut his mouth so quickly he bit his tongue, and made him shuffle back three steps.

She returned to her body and hurried away, heels clicking against the hot pavement.

Halfway through dinner, while her mother was complaining that the lady from Number 3 had yet to pay for her daughter’s communion dress and how this meant there would be no new shoes for the girls, Cecilia excused herself from the table.

Cecilia locked herself in the bathroom. She sat on the floor and closed her eyes. She willed herself out, into the night sky. It was always a bit scary to exit her skin and move long distances because she feared she might get lost. But that evening she swooped far, slipping into Pedro Infante’s skin.

He was having dinner with his wife and the sight of the woman startled Cecilia, but then she recovered and swept into his wife’s body so she could get a good look at him. She brushed a crumb from her dress and tilted her head.

She’d never dared to talk to anyone when she stole into a body but the urge to speak was enormous. She licked her lips and opened her mouth to say something

There was a loud knock on the door.

“I need to pee! Are you reading your magazines again?!” one of her sisters screeched.

Cecilia slammed the door open and shoved her sister aside.

Awake, that night, she journeyed back to his house, to his wife’s body. She lay next to him as he slept, staring at Pedro for a long time. She dared, just for a few scant breaths, to hum one of the songs she’d heard him sing on film and then — exhausted by the effort, by the distance her soul must travel — returned to her own body and was late for work in the morning.

He returned a month later. The model with the long legs and the nylons was gone. Instead, there was an ad for Tabu: The Forbidden Perfume, featuring a woman with long white gloves in an evening dress. Cecilia stood outside her office, waiting for the trolley, while her mind lay hidden inside a fat, rich woman who had come into Barragan’s that morning. The woman had just left and was buying jewellery at a shop nearby. Cecilia stared with interest at the emeralds and diamonds and gold.

The claxon made her jump back into her body. She blinked.

Pedro Infante, driving a Harley-Davidson, was right in front of her.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he said. “Let’s go for a ride.”

From the corner of her eye she could see Federico, who had also been waiting for the trolley just a few steps away from her. She rushed to sit behind Pedro. Federico looked very small in the rear view mirror and as the motorcycle sped away he grew diminutive and disappeared.

The sky was indigo and the motorcycle was fast and for the first time in her life there was nowhere else she’d rather be and she hoped against hope that the credits would just begin to roll and it would fade to black, because there was no better finale and she did not want the moment tarnished.

But it did end and he did not return.

The perfume ad disappeared. It was replaced for an ad for cleaning products. Then one about suitcases. Then it changed again.

Federico walked hand in hand with a secretary from one of the other floors.

Cecilia walked alone, with her file folders pressed against her chest, looking straight ahead.

And sometimes, late at night, she slipped into his wife’s body to look at him as he slept and she wanted to speak, words lodged deep in her throat. But speech, it seemed, was impossible. So she flew back into her body and promised herself she’d search in Barragan’s files and find his phone number and she’d phone in her own voice, in her own self, and ask “Remember me?”

The ad changed once again and she didn’t phone.

One day in April Cecilia was walking towards her desk when a co-worker rushed into the office.

“Pedro Infante has died!” he yelled. “His plane went down in Yucatan! They said it on the radio!”

Cecilia stood by the window, a ream of paper in her hands, and her soul flew out of her body. It flew right into a young man who stood watching the conflagration fuelled by the twisted remains of a small plane and the debris of several houses. The stench of fish, fuel and burning flesh bore into her nostrils.

Cecilia’s soul flew from the young man’s body and back to the office building where she stood by the window and she saw herself, the papers escaping from her hands and flying up in the air, taken by the breeze.

And she saw below the grey, dirty misery of the streets, heard the clanging and the din of the tram, the screams of street sellers and the wails of women. And there, below, she’d never again be able to gaze into the face of Pedro Infante.

Instead of swooping into her body Cecilia’s soul flees up, into the air, following that same breeze, unwilling to sit in her cage of muscle and bones. Up and up it flows reaching towards the stars. Never to return while Cecilia’s vacant body tumbles out the window.

In this universe, the last time we talk is when I return the basketball I borrowed from you. We are seventeen. We’ve known each other for seven years. We’ve vivisected each other all through high school, intent on playing games of cruelties and making up, because it’s how wild animals play and we are nothing if not savages in denim and sneakers. We are always friends and always enemies, though on this day probably more friends than anything. You’d think we’d kiss this once, to seal a parting.

We never kiss. I wave goodbye and you move away.

You become an artist and I see photos of your work on the Internet.

You never send the postcard you promised.

We fight the undead with machetes and rifles. You’re bitten when we’re hiding in an abandoned supermarket. David, who studied medicine in this universe instead of dropping out of school, amputates the hand.

I wipe the sweat off your forehead, but you are very weak and gangrene is setting in. I cut your throat because we can’t afford to shoot the rifle. We abandon your corpse to the zombies.

In New Aztlan, you are a priest of Tlaloc, responsible for making the crops flourish. You place offerings of jade and shells before the shrine of the deity and offer sacrifices. When we happen to walk by each other, in the tlatoani’s palace, your eyes always look forward, dark, pretending to ignore me. Pretending, because when I look away I can feel your gaze.

We do not speak to each other.

We dwell underground, in a great city that extends deep into the crust of the Earth, only rarely venturing up near the thick glass domes that allow us to glimpse a scorched, barren redness.

I scuttle up and down the tunnels, a courier bearing messages. You stand guard by a pair of double metal doors.

Things hide in the dark, in the tunnels, things that slide and leave black trails of slime. You open the doors each day, that I may descend, and one day I do not return.

We are pupils in the same school. You are bored in class, drawing on the margins of your books.

In this universe I am the one who goes away, to be married to a merchant, a trader of salt and spices. My dowry includes silks and gold. Your wedding gift to me is a drawing, which my sister intercepts and rips apart.

I never know what you drew.

There are no antibiotics or vaccines. I contract polio and my legs are twisted, atrophied, hidden under my long skirts. I cannot chase after a basketball, so we don’t meet in the courtyard.

You do meet Gaby and she’s as pretty as she always is. So you love her — as you’ve done before, in other places — and marry her.

Again, David is a doctor and he tends after my deformed legs. One afternoon when I’m leaving his practice you walk in.

You hold the door open, glance curiously at me, the corners of your mouth lifting into a smile, and I step out.

In this universe, they organize an exhibit of your work and I make a point to attend. I hold the glossy catalogue between my sweaty hands and scan the room, glancing at your paintings.

There’s a drawing of David, a little sketch of pen and ink. There’s a great big canvas showing Gaby in full colour. There are buildings that resemble the buildings you’ve glimpsed in other places and faces that have drowned in strange oceans.

Everyone and everything, a kaleidoscope of lives one upon the other.

I look for my face, but I do not find it. Instead, I stumble upon a rough sketch of a woman showing shoulders and neck and hair and a hole where there ought to be a face.

I stare at this non-woman.

I turn and see you standing across the room, speaking to a small group of people and holding a drink between your hands. I stare and you snap your head in my direction.

I walk towards you, intent on asking why you never sent the postcard.

You said you’d write.

I charge forward and you’re still staring at me, like that time we duelled in a jungle of carnivorous flowers. I killed you, that time.

“Hi,” I say and the people around you stop their chattering, take half a step back.

“Have we met?” you ask.

The way your mouth curves reminds me of our youth. I wonder if you don’t recognize me or if you’re trying to play another one of our games, pretending not to know me so it’ll hurt.

It’s the second. I’m glad we killed you when the zombies attacked.

(Somewhere, in some other slice of a world, I’m probably killing you again).

“No,” I say, “I must be mistaken.”

Your face is just like the face of the Aztec priest, obsidian knife in hand. “I thought so,” you say.

I nod and walk out of the gallery. It’s raining outside.

In another universe, you rush out of the gallery with an umbrella and we walk together, heads down, in a cryptic silence that does not break until we reach the subway and we both ask a startled question at the same time.

In this universe, however, I simply pull up my hood and splash through the puddles. We never kiss, in this universe.

The chamber of horrors. The cobwebs and the torture instruments and the lights. And Jack. She loves Jack most of all. He stands in a corner, past the mummies and the witches, in his cape and stylish top hat. Black satin. Gloves. Right hand raised, knife gleaming. He sports a wicked smile.

If you stand in front of Jack all you can see is the smile. The angle of the hat wraps the rest of his face in rich shadows. However, if you move to the side and step a bit forward, against the velvet ropes, you can look at him up close.

The quality of the wax sculptures varies. The older ones are good and the newer ones are less detailed. But Jack. Jack is not good, he is great. The one who crafted him did so with exquisite detail, labouring over the eyes and the skin, striving to approximate life as much as one can within the confines of a wax mold. The result is a face that seems alert, capable of speech, of drawing a breath. The fingers curl around the knife with true strength, the body tenses, ready to leap down from its dais.

Even the background of this exhibit is flawless. Behind Jack there is a bed, unmade, the sheets splattered with blood. The subdued lighting reveals a brick wall and a shuttered window.

Julia stands in front of Jack and touches the sleeve of his jacket. She is fourteen. During class she draws skulls and dragons in the margins of her notebooks. In the afternoons, she does her homework with more haste than effort. Twice a week she walks the wax museum, pausing before Jack and admiring him.

Her father works for the museum. He spends his days in a cramped, windowless office. Julia brings him his dinner on Mondays and Thursdays. Sometimes she also visits on Fridays, if mother is too preoccupied with the twins. Julia suspects father does not take his meals at home in an effort to avoid his six children, not because he is too busy to depart from his post.

Julia sets down the tin containers filled with food and goes behind the ropes, standing on her tiptoes to look at Jack. It’s Monday and the museum is closed but father still goes to the office. It’s Monday and it means there is no one to interrupt her. She removes Jack’s hat. She sets it on her head.

She tilts her head and stares at him. She brushes the knot of his necktie.

Finally, she sets the hat back on his head, jumps down and continues on to father’s office.

The teacher speaks of the Aztecs. Speaks of sacrifice. Of the tonacayotl, the spiritual flesh-hood. We only exist thanks to the sacrifice of the gods. There is a constant cycle of death and rebirth. The Aztecs pierced their body with maguey thorns, drawing blood from their tongues, their ear lobes, their feet, their genitals. Offerings written in blood.

Julia draws a snake. It curls on the page of her notebook, growing in size. She adds details: tiny little crosshatches for the skin, a forked tongue.

The teacher assigns partners for a project. Julia will work with David.

David lives four blocks from Julia’s house. His father owns a small convenience store. Julia has seen the boy there, with a green apron tied around his waist, assembling pyramids made out of soup cans.

David proposes that they consult his leather-bound encyclopedia for the project and Julia agrees. Julia sits on the floor of his living room while he turns the pages. An image of a sacrifice taken from a codex catches her attention and she places her palm upon the page, staring at it.

David turns on the radio. He pours her a glass of soda.

He has no siblings. The music echoes through his apartment without the wailing of a baby punctuating it in the background. She finds that odd.

While she looks at the picture, David’s hand falls upon her knee, brushing the hem of her skirt.

He should not touch her and she should remind him of this. She makes no effort to move the hand away. The touch irritates her, but she is also curious. She wonders whether he will attempt to move his hand higher. The hand remains at her knee and eventually she stands up, tossing the remains of her soda in the kitchen sink.

David walks Julia home a few times. She does nothing to encourage him or to refuse him. They walk together but she feels as though he is at a great distance. Curiosity and indifference mix together.

Twice a week David’s father has him come in to the store to work the cash register. One afternoon, David gives her a grand tour of the premises. He takes her to the storage room and they sit behind a pile of cardboard boxes. He runs a sweaty palm across her knees, touches her. Julia stares at a box filled with tuna cans. She leaves half an hour later, after purchasing milk and coffee for her mother.

In her bed that night she thinks about the tonacayotl. Everything is but one flesh. The world is but an illusion. Omeyocan. The dual space, the dual time. Everything is immaterial, innate, eternal, without beginning or end. We are but the manifestation of the gods, a fleck in the double pupil of Ometeötl. Everything dies, everything is abandoned, everything exists again and remains.

If time and flesh are an illusion … well, then …

Julia lays still upon the bed and relaxes her limbs. She breaths slowly, until her body feels very light. Until her body seems to drip onto the bed, through the bed, down. It sinks. The sounds of the city morph into sounds of carriages and horses. An unusual cold drifts into the room. She hears the patter of the rain upon cobblestones. Her bedroom window seems narrower and fog whirls outside, hiding the buildings and the sky.

A shadow drifts across the room, towards her. He stands in the ghostly light that filters through the yellowed curtains.

She knows his face. She knows his smile.

He lowers the knife, plunging it deep into her stomach.

She screams.

In the morning she wakes to find blood on her thighs. Her period has arrived.

She showers and when she emerges the bathroom is filled with steam. The mirror has clouded. She traces a serpent upon its surface, then wipes it off with the palm of her hand. She observes her reflection.

The bodies of war captives were carefully handled. The locks to the captor, the heart to the Sun, the head skewered onto a skull rack. David’s encyclopedia provides facts, words, pictures, but no knowledge.

Julia sits cross-legged, turning the pages. She asks David for the J volume, asks him if he’s heard about Jack Ripper. David turns the volume of the stereo higher, making the walls of the apartment reverberate.

He rubs her legs and touches her arms. She feels like a doll that is being maneuvered into different poses. Her body feels like it is made of rubber or wax.

She asks David if he believes that all flesh is but an illusion but the music is loud and he isn’t listening.

Julia sinks into the sheets, drowns upon the bed. Her whole body dissolves, ceases to be, is assembled again. She resurfaces in the room she’s seen before — his room — to the scent of incense, the sound of rain upon the streets.

He comes into focus, a blurry figure at first, his face growing clearer. Jack’s eyes narrow when he sees her.

She breaths slowly.

Her mouth is dry.

He nicks her with his knife. He cuts her arm. Tiny, sharp, little cuts.

But she doesn’t mind. This is the art of sacrifice. Thorns and bones and blades to make the body sing.

There’s an anatomical illustration of a man and a woman, their skin removed, that she enjoys looking at. The illustration consists of several layer of acetate that you can flip on or off. Flip and you reveal the muscles. Flip again and see the veins. Flip to see the naked skeleton.

Peeling layers of reality. This is exactly what the Aztecs understood.

David looks at her with a bored expression as she spreads his books on the floor. He has no use for books. Those are his parents’ things, tomes that contain no useful lessons for him.

Julia agrees. The pages cannot hold knowledge. Only the body — fragile, immaterial as it is — can hope to transmit a hint of truths.

David understands only the body. She does not fault him for it. The language of hands, nails, tongue, is as honest as any saga upon the printed page.

But David only understands the first layer. The skin and the flesh. He cannot peel the acetate to reveal the muscle and blood. He does not see the shape of her skull beneath her face.

Perhaps she should be content with this one layer of truth, this slim understanding.

She can’t. She just can’t.

She takes David to the museum, to see Jack. David acts like he is not impressed by the chamber of horrors. He laughs at the mummies and snorts at the witches. When they reach Jack, Julia tells him about the crimes.

David has been all laughter and bluster, but as they stand in front of this wax figure, he seems to shrink a bit. What are we doing here when we could be at the movies, he asks. Beneath the irritation there is a hint of dread.

Julia says nothing. The feeling of distance, of disinterest, invades her once more.

He runs his hands down her arm. He wants to do something fun. He wants to make out. Sex. It’s all David understands.

David understands nothing.

“Not now,” she says, her eyes upon Jack.

David kisses her, wraps his arms around her. His insistent hand palms her breast, as if he were kneading dough.

She bites down on his lip. She bites down until it bleeds. David yelps like a puppy.

He shoves her away and rushes out of the chamber of horrors with an angry curse.

Julia stumbles and falls in front of Jack, bruising her knees. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

David walks another girl home. Julia watches them with the same vague indifference as before. Her mother sends her to buy eggs at the little store and when she comes in David ignores her, busy rearranging some cans.

When she returns home her mother tells her to cook some eggs. Mother is busy with the twins and the other children are hungry. Julia cracks an egg. It is bloody in the centre. She stirs it with a wooden spoon, as though she were scrying. The egg burns.

She touches the tiny points on her arm where Jack nicked her with his knife.

Julia pictures the universe like an infinite, incessant assembly of fractals branching out into forever. She sinks into them. Cahuitl, the Aztec’s word for space, derives from the word for abandon. To abandon oneself. And so she abandons herself upon her bed — which is no longer her bed. She opens her eyes to a room that is not her room.

But in the currents of time and being, here can be there.

The light from an oil lamp washes the scene in warm yellows and browns. A sweet, pungent scent clouds the room. A man rises from a chair and gazes at her with familiar eyes.

She peels off her nightgown and prepares for the knife to nick her stomach. He spreads open her legs instead, digs his finger into her flesh until he draws bruises.

The scent in the room is the memory of altars and incense.

The rains have arrived. Julia watches the water swirl into the sewer grate. She waits under her umbrella until David walks by. He hasn’t spoken to her in several weeks, but he turns his head when she calls his name, like a charm.

It’s Monday. The museum is closed, but she always has access to its wax figures and its hallways.

She asks him if he’d like to go with her.

He looks reluctant only for a second. She knows, by the way he smiles, that he’s been expecting this. In some corner of his mind he’s thought she’d pursue him, grovel, beg for his renewed attentions.

She takes him to the chamber of horrors. She goes behind the velvet rope, behind Jack, and sits on the bed. David’s eagerness has subsided.

Yes it’s dark here, she says. No one comes here. No one can see us.

He hesitates. She casts off her sweater and her shirt and David follows her to the bed. He pinches her nipple, tries to get on top of her.

Julia reaches beneath her and clutches the knife, making a firm cut. Warm blood splutters upon her chest. She strikes again. Again. Again. And David slides down, wriggling, twisting.

Julia holds up her hand. It’s stained crimson. She rubs her hand against her lips and heads towards Jack. She stands on her tiptoes and kisses him. She can feel the acetate film of the here and now peeling off, like a dead skin.

His waxen flesh grows warm.

His mouth tastes of incense.

When she first saw the man she thought him a ghost and even though she knew ghosts were dangerous and could drag people down into the water, she still moved closer to him. When she knelt by his side it was clear he was still alive, but barely.

“Brock! Come and help me! There’s a man injured!” she cried.

Brock grumbled and approached, staring at the man lying between the rushes.

“Come on Brock, we’ve got to get him home,” she urged him.

“What for? The fellow’s almost dead.”

The man did look pale but Andry had pressed her hand against his chest and felt his heart steady beneath her palm.

“Well he’s not dead yet,” she said. “Come on, give me a hand.”

“He’ll be dead in the morning.”

“And leave him here in the meantime? With no proper burial?”

“The river will grant him a proper burial.”

“Give me a hand,” she repeated.

He sighed and complained and they dragged the man onto their little skiff. It started raining shortly thereafter. Brock whistled a merry tune while Andry looked at the man next to her.

“He’s probably a brigand or a deserter,” Brock said once they were sitting in front of the fire, the smell of fish stew filling every corner of the little abode.

“He is not,” Andry said. “Those are good clothes. A gentleman’s clothes.”

“When he dies, could I have his dagger?” asked Brock, turning towards the corner of the room where Andry’s mother was tending to the stranger’s wounds.

“Why would you need such a silly trinket?” said the older woman, covering the pale man with yet another blanket.

“To gut fish.”

“He’s not going to die yet, Brock,” Andry muttered as she handed him a bowl with stew. “You’re such a greedy fool.”

Brock shrugged. “You take what the river gives.”

“The river didn’t give you anything. And if he does die we’ll bury him with his things so his ghost won’t come back looking for them, isn’t that right mother?”

“That is right,” nodded the woman, sliding away from the bed and the pale stranger and towards the fire.

“Well I think it would have been more merciful if we’d just left him back there. Now the fellow will be tossing and turning for a few hours before he’s dead and bothering you with his moans,” Brock said.

Andry placed a cool rag against the stranger’s forehead and made a charm of ferns and twigs to drive evil spirits away.

He was handsome, this waxen man, and it was more out of admiration than compassion that Andry watched over him. She did not reveal this to her mother or Brock, knowing they would botch snicker at her childish fancy.

It was not odd though, considering the circumstances, that Andry should find herself entranced by a half-dead man.

There were tiny towns speckled throughout the area, but none close to them. When her father had been alive commerce was decent. Theirs was a prosperous hamlet. Travelers had often gone down the river on their skiffs and life was good. Brock’s older brothers also had skiffs and fished and traded along the river. War came and many homes were burned or sacked. Her father and Brock’s brothers were unwillingly recruited by a group of soldiers passing through the area just like all the other men of age. Brock was lucky; he had only been a small child or they might have taken him too.

Their tiny hamlet had dwindled down to nothing. Only elderly fish folk, some widows and a handful of dirty children remained.

With his brothers lost Brock could have headed over to his aunt’s home, a strict and stiff faced woman he despised. But Brock stayed. He felt safer than in a bigger city where the soldiers might easily choose him as an unwilling recruit. Brock was, after all, now a grown man of seventeen.

A grown man and the only person her own age for many leagues. Her mother worried about this situation and tried to put away some money for a dowry. There was, she had told Andry, a nice, suitable butcher’s son over at Azun. When Brock heard this he laughed and told Andry the butcher’s son had a hare lip.

Still, she supposed hare lip or not she could expect to be married to him one day. Or to Brock, but Brock had nothing, was nothing and Andry’s mother hoped for a better match.

In the meantime Andry peered at the stranger and dragged the wet rag across his forehead.

“He needs medicine,” Andry said. “We should get him some medicine.”

Her mother and Brock stared at her.

“It’s not a good time. The rains are coming. The river-hag will be outside,” Brock grumbled.

“She comes on the cold, misty nights from the water. If you cannot see her she cannot harm you, so hide well under the covers,” Brock had said when they were children. “If a single toe peeks from under the covers she will grab you by it and pull you into the river.”

The river-hag. Brock’s favourite tale used to skilfully torment Andry. It still worked. For a moment Andry felt like stopping her arguing but then she swallowed her fear and spoke.

“Not yet,” Andry said. “It’s still four days until the full moon.”

“We’d have to go to Azun. It would take five days back and forth.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Well, I’m not willing to go anywhere. What are we going to get out of it?”

“It would be the decent thing to do.”

Brock crossed his arms but Andry turned to her mother and tried to sound as confident as she could.

“We can do it. He doesn’t have to die. We could be back in four days. We could also use some supplies for ourselves. Please? It would be unkind if we didn’t.”

“It would be unkind if we didn’t. Yes. Look at all this rain! It hasn’t stopped raining since we stepped out.”

Mist drifted between the trees and blotted out the sun. They were reaching a large outcropping of rocks. Samsia’s Throne. It was a sacred place and a strange one.

“Hush,” Andry said as Samsia’s Throne came into view.

Legend said the great kings of old sat and observed the world from Samsia’s Throne. Beneath the rocky outcropping were a number of chambers, nothing more than holes, small caverns, where the priests had placed offerings to the water, the sky, the gods of old.

The river-hag lives near, Brock said when they were children and Andry had believed him. She feared this place even though the child was gone and left a young woman instead.

Andry and Brock regarded the rocky formation in silence. As they drifted away Andry looked into her leather bag and found a little bundle of flowers and herbs, tossing it into the water.

“That may not be enough if the river-hag follows us,” Brock said, still trying to frighten her after all those years

Andry hurried towards the boat, handing Brock several of the bundles of herbs, provisions and ointments she had purchased along with her leather bag which contained charms and special items.

“You took too long,” Brock said. “We’ll have to spend the night in Azun.”

“No we won’t,” Andry said. “We can still travel for a couple of hours.”

“I would appreciate a good roof over our head,” Brock said as he looked at the dark sky.

“Looks like more rain.”

“We head back as fast as we can, remember?”

“Andry  . . .”

“Come on Brock,” she said, tossing him an oar.

Brock grunted and started cursing under his breath.

The bad weather did not relent and Brock’s mutterings increased with the rumble of thunder. As for Andry, she did not complain and ate a piece of cheese and drank her water, watching the trees with indifference. Her arms ached from rowing and she was cold.

“We should switch,” Brock said. “I am hungry.”

“I haven’t finished my food.”

“Andry, give me.”

Andry handed Brock the bottle and he drank a liberal amount, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“I wonder if she as beautiful as they say, eh?”

“Who?” Andry asked.

“The river-hag. She’s supposed to be the most beautiful woman a man has ever seen from afar, but then she gets up close and turns old and ugly and drags you to the bottom of the river. What do you think? Beautiful or horrid or both?”

She shook her head.

“What does it matter?”

“Don’t be dull. I’m trying to talk to you.”

“Talk about something else,” Andry said because she knew Brock was trying to scare her with talk of the hag. He’d tormented her with tales of the supernatural since the age of seven.

Soon he would start telling the stories of the men that had been dragged down the river into the hag’s clutches. He would tell her how in the old days the priests offered sacrifices of flesh and blood near Samsia’s Throne to appease the hag, and how the hag might sometimes give them gifts of fish and gold in return.

“But where would she get the gold?” a younger Andry had asked. “She takes the rings from her victims’ fingers,”  Brock replied. “Look! There she comes!”

And Andry the child would run into her home in fear. As an adult, for all her bravado on dry land, she still feared the hag when they were on the skiff.

“What should we talk about? The water? The fish? The weather? I could be having some beer over at old man Cothlo’s tavern.”

“And sinning with the bawdy women there too,” Andry replied.

“Ah, what do you know about bawdy women?”

Andry did not know much except that even though her mother said such women were bad, some of them owned fancy jewels and beautiful embroidered shoes. Andry only wore shoes during the winter and these were ugly and too big for her feet.

Sometimes Andry wondered what it might be like to go beyond Azun, to the great capital-city, and wear pearls in her ears and meet handsome men like the young stranger who was beautiful even in his waxen sickness.

Beautiful and far removed from the hare lipped butcher boy of Azun or even Brock with his ugly, crooked nose and messy hair.

“I know enough,” Andry said without much conviction. “I’ve even spoken to one or two of them.”

“I’m going to tell your mother,” Brock teased.

Andry turned her face away, irritated by his comment, and gasped.

“What is that?” she asked.

Brock frowned, looking in her same direction. He paddled towards the shore and they both disembarked. The reeds whispered as they pushed their way forward and stood still.

“Soldiers?”

“Deserters, most likely,” Brock muttered.

Two corpses piled on top of each other and left to rot next to the river stared at the grey sky. Both men had their throat slashed and their hands tied. Brock and Andry watched in reverential fear.

“We must go,” Brock said.

“Shouldn’t we do something? A burial? Their ghosts will be angry.”

“Let them. Come, we must go.”

“Damn the soldiers. Damn the king’s men,” Brock muttered.

The trees glided past them, Brock paddling madly while the sky rumbled above. Ill weather. Ill day.

“I’ll luck,” Andry whispered, thinking of the angry ghosts.

“Damn you for putting me through this,” Brock yelled. “I swear, they must be looking for him. Your deserter.”

A loud thump startled Andry. She thought they might have hit a rock but before there was a chance to assess the damage the skiff swayed violently, tossing Andry into the water.

The river’s pull was strong. Andry swam up, fighting the current and then she felt something, a strong tug. Something was pulling her down. Andry kicked and hit the surface, bobbing up for a breath of air before being pulled down again.

Cold fingers wrapped around her wrist and the water swallowed her scream. She thought of the river-hag, its clammy flesh against her. Or perhaps the angry ghosts, outraged at their unkindness. But when she emerged Andry saw it was only Brock holding her, helping her move towards the shore.

Brock shoved her unkindly onto dry land. Andry rolled onto her back and stared at the sky, her breath shallow. As soon as she was able to breath properly she sat up, scanning the water.

“The skiff,” she said.

“Gone,” Brock said as he tossed Andry her leather bag.

“The medicine,” she whispered, clawing at the bag at once and finding that the carefully packaged bundle was still there. “Praise the gods.”

“Praise the gods again. Maybe they’ll send us another skiff.”

Andry clutched the bag and started walking, her feet sinking in the muddy ground.

“Where are you headed? Azun’s the other way,” Brock said. “We need to get old man Oteh to take us down river.”

“We’d never make it in time. He’ll be dead by then. We need to walk home.” Brock blinked.

“Are you mad? We have no blankets, no food or drink or  —”

“My tinderbox is still here and my knife,” Andry said holding up her bag. “If we follow the old path we can spend the night at the abandoned inn and if we move fast  —”

“Andry, there’s men near hear. Soldiers.”

“Don’t be a coward.”

“I’m going to Azun.”

“Coward!”

Brock walked away. Andry watched him for a few moments, wanting to follow and knowing she could not, before heading in the opposite direction.

Andry reached the abandoned inn before dusk and gathered some wood. After several unsuccessful attempts she managed to start a fire and sat before the fireplace.

She wondered how the stranger waiting at her mother’s house was faring and whether they might return in time to save him. Perhaps Brock was right and it was futile. Useless.

She fell asleep quickly and dreamt the young stranger was a prince from a far away land. To thank Andry he showered her with gifts and they drifted down the river in a golden barge, beyond Azun and the world she knew.

When Andry woke it was to the rumble of thunder and the hard floor of the inn. The barge and all her other dreams of luxury and happiness had vanished.

There was a noise nearby, the creaking of wood. Andry’s hand slipped towards her knife.

She thought of bandits, or even worse, the river-hag sneaking up behind her.

“Andry, it’s me.”

Brock stepped into the light, dripping of water and splattered with mud.

Andry’s heart, which had been beating wildly, grew still.

“You’re here,” she said, jumping to her feet.

“I thought you’d be dying of fright without me.”

“Would not,” Andry muttered.

They sat down on the bare, dirty floor and looked at the fire in silence.

“You shouldn’t do things like this, Andry.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“You know.”

“I told you I’m not afraid.”

“One day you’re going to get hurt doing something stupid like —”

“Like saving someone’s life?”

“Precisely,” Brock leaned forward, giving her a stern look. “That man’s a deserter.”

“Be quiet.”

“The forest is crawling with deserters.”

“So what if he is? Don’t we have a duty to help him?”

Brock shook his head. They stared at the fire again and Andry wanted to hit Brock because he was such a selfish, idiotic man but then Brock reached into the folds of his clothing and handed her a salty hardtack.

“I thought we had no food,” Andry said.

“I lied,” Brock said. “One for you and one for me.”

Andry shook her hair and tried to chew the biscuit without breaking a tooth.

Andry dreamt the water-hag sneaked next to her during the night and whispered into her ear, telling her she would gift her a pretty strand of pearls if Andry would allow her a bite of flesh, a sip of blood. But when Andry lifted her head it was only Brock, his body warm against hers.

She gave Brock a hard shove to wake him up and he cursed and demanded that they sleep some more, but he got up eventually and they were back on the road that led home.

They had not walked far from the inn when they noticed three men heading their way. Even though their clothes were muddy and tattered, Andry recognized the crimson outfit of the king’s army.

“Ah, the hag take me,” Brock cursed. “Let me speak. They’ll go away fast.”

Soon enough the three men were up close and looking at them curiously.

“Good morning,” said one of the soldiers, a tall, wiry man.

“Good morning, sir,” Brock muttered politely.

“Could you assist us? We were traveling to Ridra but we’ve lost one of our companions. A tall lad, fair haired. Perhaps you’ve seen him?”

A deserter, Andry thought, recalling Brock’s words. For a moment she was afraid he would speak and tell the truth. Brock just gazed at them blankly.

“No, sir.”

“He might be injured. A bit confused maybe.”

“No, sir. It’s just us here. Just traveling. To Soto, sir.”

The soldier observed them for a moment, then seemed to dismiss them shaking his head and turning towards his companions. But then he turned his attention back towards them.

“River folk, are you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, a good, strong river-boy you are, aren’t you? And a girl. Look at that pretty hair.”

Andry bowed her head and stared at the ground.

“We could use a guide,” the soldier said. “Someone to lead us around these parts. We are unfamiliar with the area.”

“I’m not a guide, sir. We’re just river folk. We fish and we sell the fish at the market. That’s all.”

“Come, come now. Walk with us some of the way.”

“I’m sorry, sir. We’re wanted at home.”

“We’d like you to come with us.”

Another soldier raised a crossbow and pointed it at Brock.

“Be pleasant,” the tall soldier said. “It’s best this way.”

Andry recalled, dimly as if in a dream, the coming of the soldiers upon their home and the disappearance of her father a decade past. Or perhaps these were merely deserters who had turned to robbery and murder. Either way, what lay in Ridra was slavery. They would be sold to the highest bidder. That is, if they did not kill them for the sole sport of it.

“Please, we have done nothing,” Brock said, grasping Andry’s hand.

“Shut up. Tie them up.”

“Oh, sir, please. We beg you.”

Brock’s voice was a scared whimper, but Andry felt his fingers quickly untangle from hers. A quiet gesture. A signal.

They were river folk but they were not foolish. Growing up together they had developed their own secret codes, their own silent signs. And now the sign was clear for Andry: run.

Brock held his hands up for the soldier to tie together but then, before the cord could be firmly knotted, his fingers flew into his sleeve and Brock pulled out a knife. The soldier jumped back, startled.

Andry, her own knife tucked inside her boot, elbowed the man approaching her and he stumbled, skidded and fell upon the muddy ground.

They ran. Andry leapt forward with all the might she could muster and rushed through the mud, the trees and puddles and branches. She heard the loud screams of the men but Brock just yelled for her to keep running. So Andry ran.

She ran until she could not breath anymore and as she leaned against a tree, Brock stumbled into her and they both lost their footing.

“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t.”

Then she saw that his eyes were watering and he was clutching the side of his body, blood staining his fingers.

“Brock,” she whispered. “Oh, Brock, come. Keep going.”

“I can’t. I can’t walk.”

“Yes, you can,” she said her throat dry as dust. “Please, you have to.”

“It’s too far.”

“It’s not far. We’ll go to Samsia’s Throne. To the chambers. Yes? It’s not too far.”

“Andry . . .”

“They won’t follow. They can’t follow. It’ll rain soon and the rain will wash away any tracks. Come Brock. Please, please.”

They ran, with Brock half-doubled in pain, and later on they walked, his hand on her shoulder, until they reached the dark silhouette against the dying sky that was Samsia’s Throne.

Andry had bandaged Brock’s wound by tearing off a piece of clothing from her skirt. Then they sat at the back of one of the small chambers and Andry piled her cape upon Brock and huddled next to him.

“Brock, don’t sleep,” she said, pinching him.

“Andry, I hate you.”

“Fine,” she said, pinching him again. “Just don’t sleep. Don’t. Tell me something.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Tell me anything. Please?”

“Are you afraid?”

“Yes, I’m afraid of the river-hag,” she lied, because she was really afraid Brock was going to faint and die; he was shivering and he was very pale and if it weren’t for her they would be home. Safe, warm and away.

“Andry, you are so gullible. Remember when I used to make footprints in the mud and tell you the river-hag had come out of the water and into your house?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’d run crying to your mother and then she’d tell my brothers and I’d get beaten silly because I scared you again.”

“I remember.”

“Then when you learnt how to make charms against the river-hag and such you said you were going to hex me and I pretended the hex worked and for a whole day you thought I’d been turned into some kind of animal.”

“It was a spider.”

“True.”

Brock shifted and winced.

“You should go ahead without me. They want me. They need to replace the man they lost.”

“Brock.”

“No, you were right. I am a coward,” Brock whispered. “I should have gone to my aunt’s home a long, long time ago. But I was afraid they’d take me away, like my brothers. Her three sons, they’re all off fighting. But what can you do? The soldiers will come anyway.”

“Not this time. Not here,” she said. “I promise.”

Andry waited until Brock was asleep to make her way out of the chamber and towards the river bank. It was madness, to venture out alone.

She knelt by the river and tried to recall the many stories Brock had told about the river-hag. Spells. Magic.

Moonlight and water mingled together. Andry bowed her head and began speaking as well as she could. Her voice was shaking. She spoke to the river.

Andry remained rooted to the same spot even with tendrils of mist coiling and unfurling around her, making everything terrifying and unseen. She sat there and slashed at her own palm, blood staining her knife and then she hurled the knife into the water.

In the darkness the wind whispered and it mixed with Brock’s voice inside her head. Old whispers, old muttered stories in the dark and she not understanding all of what the stories meant, yet having memorized each word. She followed the stories diligently.

At one point she thought Brock’s voice was eclipsed by another voice, a female voice that was low and steady. It might have been her own voice yet Andry thought it was someone else.

Dawn came and when Andry raised her head, exhausted, she heard the murmur of the water and another murmur. The talk of men.

She did not move, not even when she was able to see them, stepping from between the mist. The soldiers, having successfully found their trail, now smiled and pointed at her.

“There’s the girl,” one of the men said.

Andry waited, immobile. The men approached but she remained in her place.

Yet there, in the tail of her eyes, some movement. Something pale.

“Come here, you,” the tall soldier said, pulling her forward.

Andry bent like a reed, watched him with scared eyes as he tossed her towards another one of the men. Only she wasn’t scared of him. Of them anymore. Andry could smell moisture, leaves, mud and something else. Something dank and old.

“Where is the other? Where is the man?” someone asked.

Andry could not speak for there again, in the corner of her eyes, something white. It flitted and danced, between the mist and the water. She knew it. Knew her and it knew her back in turn.

Blood and water and wishes. Brock’s nightly fairy tales made flesh. Come to life.

“Are you stupid? Come on, speak.”

Danger. Around them and they could not see. Did not seem to see or fear. She feared. She feared what she had done; what she had called forth in her desperation.

At last she heard one of the men gasp, his voice hoarse.

“What is that?”

Andry knew. Andry closed her eyes.

If you cannot see her she cannot harm you, Brock had said and Andry wanted to believe this part of the story was true.

She felt the man that had been holding her, his hands releasing her and the other yelling something. She closed her eyes and a part of her said she was foolish, that she ought to run. But another part remembered the stories, half-forgotten yet never far from thought.

She clung to the stories.

Andry thought she heard one of the men scream, far away, and then a sudden, loud splash. Then there was nothing.

A drop of water fell upon her head, then another. Rain.

“Andry?”

Brock’s voice and now she did snap her eyes open as he stumbled towards her.

“Andry, what are you doing?” he asked.

Her voice seemed to have escaped her and she looked up at him, mutely.

“You’ve been crying,” he said and she realized as he touched her cheek that this was true.

The rain fell more steadily.

Andry watched the stranger as he slept, lulled by the medicine they’d brought, and felt Brock watching her at the same time. She smoothed the covers of the man’s bed and rose.

“Will he live?” Brock asked, almost casually. His chest was all bandaged and he had dark circles under his eyes, but looked rather lively.

“My mother says he will.”

“It was a mighty foolish thing to do.”

“I know.”

She left the small hut and sat outside. It had not rained that day and the sun shone for a change.

Andry observed the river and noticed something glittering in the water. Knee deep she stood and bent down.

It was a ring.

Angry held it in her palm, watching the pretty golden circle with interest and wondered how far she might get with it. Surely farther than Azun, maybe as far as the great capital-city where she could wear pearls in her ears and sail on a barge.

Andry contemplated the ring and the possibilities before tossing it back into the river.

Away it went, dragged by the current along with a bunch of dead leaves and some twigs. When she turned around there was Brock leaning against the door of the hut, looking at her.

Neither of them said anything.

“We need more firewood,” he finally told her.

Andry nodded and went towards him, her skirts dripping. But the day had some warmth to it and her clothes would dry off quickly.

Her fingers are stained black with tobacco residue. When Marina goes home at night the aroma of tobacco clings to her clothes and her hair so that she never seems to leave the factory. The intense scent made her eyes watery when she first stepped into this room, but that was a long time ago.

Marina sits in the rolling room, takes the flat tobacco leaves and rolls them, pausing to wipe her forehead with the back of her hand. Each day Marina rolls up to ten atados, each containing fifty cigars. She is paid by the number of cigars she assembles, and her fingers are quick. But today it is uncommonly hot and she feels sluggish.

Marina rests a hand against the swell of her belly. She’s eight months pregnant and soon enough she’ll have to pause her constant rolling of cigars to give birth. But not yet. Not for a while, yet. Still, she ought to rest for a tiny bit.

Marina pulls out a folded piece of paper from her apron’s pocket. She smooths the paper upon her table with the palm of her hand and stares at all the big words printed on it. She can’t read, but the man who handed it to her told her there was an airship show with dirigibles and flying machines from many countries. Far off places like Canada and Japan, and other countries with names she can’t even pronounce.

Sublime artifacts from around the world, he said. See airships powered by the rays of the sun. The amazing brass cyclocopters. Witness the wonders of mechanics and flight!

Marina can’t read the words, but the pictures are clear enough. There’s one big ship shaped like a cigar and beneath it others that look like spheres with tiny baskets dangling from them. She also spots one aircraft that resembles a fan and another that, she could swear, is a gigantic fish with shiny scales.

Cata, who works on the table next to Marina, glances at her. The older woman coughs. It is a permanent cough caused by years of inhaling tobacco dust. If Marina keeps working in the factory one day she’ll have a similar cough. But work is work and cigar making is better than cigarette making. It pays more. Besides, Marina has steady work. At larger tobacco factories, like El Buen Tono, work can be haphazard. Women line up in their rebozos outside El Buen Tono in the morning, starting at five am, and wait for the factory’s mistresses to inspect them. Each morning the mistresses has a set number of workers that will be allowed inside. Once the quota is reached the factory doors close. Marina is lucky to be a trusted employee and to work with cigars. She is called back in every day. The big factories, she’s heard, have electric lighting and big windows, but if work ebbs and flows then she prefers the steady security of her small site. She prefers the cigars. She prefers rolling to pressing, grading or sorting.

“There’s an airship show today downtown this evening,” Marina says. “There will be 50 different airships from 30 different countries. There’s ships that can change color. They go from yellow to red to blue. There’s ships that glisten and ripple, as though they were made out of water.”

“That’s nice,” says Cata. She’s an old woman, Cata. Her hair is going white and she wears it neatly pulled back. She dresses all in black, as befits a widow, though her husband has been dead twenty years. Marina thinks Cata wears widowhood like a mark of pride.

“It’s a bit expensive, though,” Marina admits. She ought to be saving all her pesos for the baby and the trip back home, but the airships seem so exciting and she doesn’t think they come to Mexico City that often. Not that many, at least. This sounds special.

Cata shrugs. She is busy rolling her cigars, applying a touch of gum at the tip. Her wrinkled hands fly.

“If I roll half a wheel by three o’clock I could ask permission to go home early and see it.”

“You think the mistress will let you leave to see balloons?”

Marina glances at the mistress, who is standing on the other end of the long room. All the cigar rollers are women and so are the mistresses who supervise them. There are men at the factory, but they work in the storage and moisture section, handling the large bulks of tobacco leaves. In the big factories there are copper automatons that can stack heavy crates. But automatons and men can’t do the fine work of cigarette rolling. Rolling requires small, dexterous hands. Marina’s department, tobacco rolling, is a feminine land.

“It’s not balloons and I wouldn’t tell her I’m going to see them, anyway.”

“You could tell her you’re about to give birth and she wouldn’t let you go,” Cata says.

When Marina started working at the factory — she was fourteen that first summer — there used to be a reader, paid collectively by the tobacco workers, who sat on a stool and read the newspaper or a book to them. It was pleasant to hear the stories about battles and swords and people doing heroic deeds. One time, a man fought a giant squid, piercing its enormous round eye with a harpoon and Marina almost felt the ship sway beneath her feet as the reader described the violent waters, despite the fact that she had never been on a boat, not even the little canoes of Xochimilco. But the mistress didn’t like the reader and now they work in silence.

This mistress is strict and Marina knows she’s already on shaky ground with her. Marina is, after all, pregnant. Soon she’ll have to take a week off to give birth and take the baby to live with her mother back in Xuqila. Marina works six days a week, twelve hours a day. She won’t be able to see the baby except maybe during Christmas and Holy Week, if she can gather the money for her train fare.

When she thinks of Xuqila and the distance between her and her mother’s home, when she thinks about the baby growing up to call someone else mama, to know Marina only as a stranger who comes to visit a few times a year, her heart aches. But Marina works at the factory. Cigars must be rolled.

“The mistress looks like she’s in a good mood today,” Marina ventures.

“Why shouldn’t she be? She’s getting married. Didn’t you hear?”

Marina glances at the mistress. She can’t quite tell how old she is, but Marina would wager she’s bordering on thirty while Marina is just twenty. The mistress is an old maid, but apparently still fit for a wedding. Marina feels both jealous and hopeful. She knows she is pretty. The little mirror in her room has confirmed this truth many times. If the mistress can wed, maybe there is hope for Marina. Maybe even though Marina is just a workwoman, a cigarrera, she can also become a decent lady and have a little wedding. Arturo might even come back to her and wed her, and Marina can raise the baby; they can be a family, though this possibility seems as distant as the airships that must be slowly circling the city.

“Is he a nice fellow?” Marina asks, hopeful. Perhaps this is a love story. Perhaps when she was walking home one night the mistress stumbled onto a pleasant man. It started to rain and he offered to share his umbrella. Perhaps he even offered his carriage. How nice that would be, to have your own carriage. Or, Marina looks down at the piece of paper with the nice pictures, your own airship.

How much does an airship cost, Marina wonders. If I had an airship I could visit my baby every week. It wouldn’t have to be an airship of silver and ivory, I’d be happy with one made out of tin.

“Does it matter?” Cata says.

“Well, I’d think she’d want to marry someone who treats her well.”

“Men never treat women well. At least she gets to leave this place.”

“Not all men are nasty.”

Cata chuckles, eyeing Marina’s belly. Marina tries to ignore her laughter and she touches the flyer advertising the airshow. Cata’s an old, bitter hag. What does she know? There’s a whole world of possibilities out there. There’s iron ships that can go beneath the water. And people can wear heavy suits and walk upon the ocean floor, gathering pearls. And there’s the airships too, blazoned in their beautiful colors, some of them even glow at nights, like gigantic fireflies.

“She’s marrying Eulalio,” Cata says.

Each morning Marina is handed the raw material to make the cigars. The tobacco and the paper are weighed. At the end of the day she gives back the raw materials left, if any. All workers much be inspected before they depart, to make sure they haven’t stolen any tobacco. One of the persons who does the searching is Eulalio, a foreman. He pinches the girls and if they protest he’ll say they have been stealing materials, and they’ll have their wages discounted, losing up to twenty cents. A month ago Eulalio made Marina take off her stockings and her shoes, to make sure she wasn’t stealing tobacco. He did it simply because he felt like it, for there was no reason to think Marina might steal. She has been with the factory for more than five years and rolls a prodigious amount of cigars. Still, she had to obey him. She had to sit down upon the dusty floor of the patio, slowly, for her great belly made it difficult to maintain her balance, and pull off her shoes and her stockings for everyone to see.

The mistress is marrying Eulalio. Well, if that’s the case Marina doesn’t envy her. She’d much rather have an airship than a smirking, mean man like that.

Xuqila would be just around the corner. Airships go real fast and it wouldn’t be any trouble to fly there each Sunday, Marina thinks. I could take the baby with me for a ride and we could look down at the city, which I’m sure is like looking at tiny ants running around an anthill. And we’d laugh, because there’d be pretty clouds and a light breeze.

“You should come with me to see the airship show,” Marina says.

“Are you still going on about that?”

Marina shrugs and stands up. She folds the flyer and tucks it back in her pocket. The mistress is at the other end of the room and that is where Marina goes, pausing to smooth a lock of hair back. How hot it is today! Her palms are sweaty and her flesh feels like it is being dragged across a hot, cast iron comal.

“Miss Núñez, I wanted to ask if I could possibly leave early today,” Marina says. “I can try to roll half a wheel before three o’clock.”

“Before three? You think you can even get close to half a wheel?” the mistress asks and Marina can’t help but notice that the dress the mistress wears is of a nice deep gray, with brass buttons, and it looks so much better than Marina’s own dress, the blue one her mama made for her.

“I’m very fast, miss.”

“Nobody is that fast,” says the mistress. “And even if you do, you can’t.”

Marina returns to her station. She sits down and rolls her cigars, her body feeling as heavy as a rock. She drowns in her work, rolls for a long time, and then comes the lunch break. The doors of the factory only open at morning and night. The workers must eat their meals inside. Marina takes her little food stash and walks to one of the small, high windows lining the right side of the room. She’s very short and she can’t see much but she tries to look at the sky. Perhaps, if she is lucky, she might glimpse the belly of an ivory airship as it sweeps majestically towards her.

The sky is a perfect, uninterrupted blue. There are no airships in sight. Just the sun, lazily licking the factory.

Marina dips her hand into her apron’s pocket. She holds up the flyer against the window and presses her other hand against her belly.

Sublime artifacts, she thinks, and wonders what sublime means.

Six dismembered bodies found in Ciudad Juarez. Vampire drug-wars rage on.

Domingo reads the headline slowly. Images flash on the video screen of the subway station. Cops. Long shots of the bodies. The images dissolve, showing a young woman holding a can of soda in her hands. She winks at him.

Domingo waits to see if the next news items will expand on the drug-war story. He is fond of yellow journalism. He also likes stories about vampires; they seem exotic. There are no vampires in Mexico City: their kind has been a no-no for the past 30 years, around the time the Federal District became a city-state.

The next story is of a pop-star, the singing sensation of the month, and then there is another ad, this one for a shoulder-bag computer. Domingo sulks, changes the tune on his music player.

He looks at another screen with pictures of blue butterflies fluttering around. Domingo takes a chocolate from his pocket and tears the wrapper.

He spends a lot of time in the subway system. He used to sleep in the subway cars when he was a street kid making a living by washing windshields at cross streets. Those days are behind. He has a place to sleep and lately he’s been doing some work for a rag-and-bone man, collecting used thermoplastic clothing. He complements his income with other odd jobs. It keeps him well-fed and he has enough money to buy tokens for the public baths once a week.

He bites into the chocolate bar.

A woman wearing a black vinyl jacket walks by him, holding a leash. Her Doberman must be genetically modified. The animal is huge.

He’s seen her several times before, riding the subway late at nights, always with the dog. Heavy boots upon the white tiles, bob cut black hair.

Tonight she moves her face a small fraction, glancing at him. Domingo stuffs the remaining chocolate back in his pocket, takes off his headphones and follows her quickly, squeezing through the doors of the subway car she’s boarding.

He sits across from her and is able to get a better look at the woman. She is early twenties, with large eyes that give her an air of innocence which is quickly dispelled by the stern mouth. The woman is cute, in an odd way.

Domingo tries to look at her discreetly, but he must not be discreet enough because she turns and stares at him.

“Hey,” he says, smiling. “How are you doing tonight?”

“I’m looking for a friend.”

Domingo nods, uncertain.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” he replies.

“Would you like to be my friend? I can pay you.”

Domingo isn’t in the habit of prostituting himself. He’s done it once or twice when he was in a pinch. There had also been that time with El Chacal, but that didn’t count because Domingo hadn’t wanted to and El Chacal had made him anyway, and that’s when Domingo left the circle of street kids and the windshield wiping and went to live on his own.

Domingo looks at her. He’s seen the woman walk by all those nights before and he’s never thought she’d speak to him. Why, he expected her to unleash the dog upon him when he opened his mouth.

He nods. He’s never been a lucky guy but he’s in luck today.

Her apartment building is squat, short, located just a few block from a busy nightclub.

“Hey, you haven’t told me your name,” he says when they reach the fourth floor and she fishes for her keys.

“Atl,” she replies.

The door swings open. The apartment is empty. There is a rug, some cushions on top of it, but no couch, no television and no table. She doesn’t even have a calendar on the wall. The apartment has a heavy smell, animal-like, probably courtesy of the dog. Perhaps she keeps more than one pet.

“Do you want tea?” she asks.

Domingo would be better off with pop or a beer, but the girl seems classy and he thinks he ought to go with whatever she prefers.

“Sure,” he says.

Atl takes off her jacket. Her blouse is pale cream; it shows off her bony shoulders. He follows her into the kitchen as she places the kettle on a burner.

“I’m going to pay you a certain amount, just for coming here. If you agree to stay, I’ll double it,” she says.

“Listen,” Domingo says, rubbing the back of his head, “you don’t really need to pay me nothing.”

“I do. I’m a tlahuelpuchi.”

Domingo blinks. “You can’t be. That’s one of those vampire types, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s vampire-free territory in Mexico City.”

“I know. That is why I’m doubling it,” she says, scribbling a number on a pad of paper and holding it up for him to see.

Domingo leans against the wall, arms crossed. “Wow.”

Atl nods. “I need young blood. You’ll do.”

“Wait, I mean ... I’m not going to turn into a vampire, am I?” he asks, because you can never be too sure.

“No,” she says, sounding affronted. “We are born into our condition.”

“Cool.”

“It won’t hurt much. What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I mean, do I still get to ... you know ... sleep with you?”

She lets out a sigh and shakes her head.

“No. Don’t try anything. Cualli will bite your leg off if you do.”

The kettle whistles. Atl removes it from the burner and pours hot water into two mugs.

“How do we do this?” Domingo asks.

Atl places tea bags in the cups and cranes her neck. Her hair has turned to feathers and her hands, when she raises them, are like talons. The effect is disturbing, as though she is wearing a curious mask.

“Don’t worry. Won’t take long,” she says.

Atl is a bird of prey.

The first thing Domingo does with his new found fortune is buy himself a good meal. Afterwards, he pays for a booth at the Internet cafe, squeezing himself in and clumsily thumbing the computer screen. The guy in the next cubicle is watching porn; the moans of a woman spill into Domingo’s narrow space.

Domingo frowns. He pulls out the frayed headphones wrapped with insulating tape and pushes the play button on the music player.

He does a search for the word tlahuelpuchi. Stories about gangs, murders and drugs fill the viewscreen. He scrolls through an article which talks about the history of the tlahuelpocmimi, explaining this is Mexico’s native vampire species, with roots that go back to the time of the Aztecs. The article has lots of information but it uses very big words he doesn’t know, such as hematophagy, anticoagulants and matrilineal stratified sept. Domingo gives up on it quickly, preferring to stare at the bold headlines and colourful pictures of the vampire gangsters. These resemble the comic books he keeps at his place; he is comfortable with this kind of stuff.

When an attendant bangs on the door Domingo doesn’t buy more tokens. He has more money than he’s ever had in his life and he doesn’t know what to do with it.

It is nearly dusk when he finds his way to Atl’s apartment. She opens the door a crack; stares at him as though she’s never met him before.

“What are you doing tonight?” he asks.

“You’re not getting any more money, alright?” she says. “I don’t need food right now. There’s no sense in you coming here.”

“You only eat kids, no?” he says, blurting it.

“Yeah. Something in the hormone levels,” she waves her hand, irritated. “That doesn’t make me a Lucy Westenra, alright?”

“Lucia, what?”

She raises an eyebrow at him.

“I figure, you want a steady person. Steady food, no? And ... yesterday, it was, ah ... it was fun. Kind of.”

“Fun,” she repeats.

Yeah. It had been fun. Not the blood part. Well, that hadn’t been too awful. She made him a cheese sandwich and they drank tea afterwards. Atl didn’t have furniture, but she did have a music player and they sat cross-legged in the living room, chatting, until she said he was fine and he wouldn’t get woozy and told him to make sure he had a good breakfast.

It wasn’t exactly a date, but Domingo has never exactly dated. There were hurried copulations in back alleys, the kind street kids manage. He hung out with Belen for a little bit, but then she went with an older guy and got pregnant, and Domingo hadn’t seen her anymore.

Atl lets him in, closing the door, carefully turning the locks.

The dog pads out of the kitchen and stares at him.

“Look, you’ve to get some facts straight, alright? I’m not in Mexico City on vacation. You don’t want to hang out with me. You’ll end up as a carpet stain. Trust me, my clan is in deep shit.”

“You’re part of a clan?” Domingo says, excited. “That’s cool! You’ve got a crest tattooed? Is it hand-poked?”

“Jesus,” Atl says. “Are you some sort of fanboy?”

Domingo shakes his head. “No.”

“Why are you here?”

“I like your dog,” he says. It is a stupid answer. He doesn’t have anything better. He wonders if she’ll go with him to the arcade. He went there once and drank beer while he tried to shoot green monsters. It would be cool. Maybe she is too old for arcades. He wonders what she does for fun.

“It will bite your hand off if you pet it,” she warns him. “I’ll give you a cup of tea and you leave afterwards, alright?”

“Sure. How come you drink tea?”

She doesn’t reply. Domingo is about to apologize for being crass, but he isn’t up to date on tlahuelpocmimi diets. Except for the kid part.

A knock on the door makes them both turn their heads.

“Health and Sanitation.”

“Open up. Don’t tell them I’m here,” she whispers, moving so quickly to his side it makes him gasp.

She goes towards the window and jumps out. Domingo rushes after her, pokes his head out, and sees Atl is climbing up the side of the building, her shoulders hunched and looking birdlike once more. She disappears onto the roof.

Domingo opens the door.

Three men waltz in, faces grim.

“We have a report there’s a vampire here,” one of them says.

Domingo, with the experience of a master liar and a complete indifference to authority, shrugs. “I don’t know. The guy that’s renting me the place didn’t say nothing about vampires.”

“Look around. You, I’m going to check you, give me your hand.”

Domingo obeys. The guy presses a little white plastic stick against his wrist. It beeps.

“You’re alone?” the guy asks him.

Domingo takes out a chocolate bar and starts eating it. The dog is sitting still, eyeing the men.

“Yep.”

“What are you doing?”

“Sleeping.”

Domingo can hear the other two men opening doors, muttering between themselves.

“It’s all empty,” one of the other men says. “There’s not even clothes in the closet. Just a mattress in there.”

“You live here?” asks the first guy, who hasn’t moved from Domingo’s side, carefully cataloguing him.

“Yeah. For now. I move around. Been working for a rag-and-bone man lately. I used to wash windshields and before that I juggled balls for the drivers as the stop lights, but this guy I worked with beat me up and I’ve got the rag-and-bone gig now.”

“Just a damn street kid,” says the man, and Domingo thinks he must have an earpiece on or something, because he sure as hell isn’t speaking to Domingo.

The men leave as quickly as they’ve come. He locks the door, sits on the rug and waits. Atl doesn’t fly in — not technically — but she seems to jump in with a certain grace and flexibility that is birdlike.

“Thanks,” she says. The feathers disappear, leaving only pitch-black hair behind.

“How’d you do that?”

“What?”

“The bird thing.”

“It’s natural. We all do it after we hit puberty.”

She goes into her room. Domingo stands at the entrance, watching her pull up floor boards with her bare hands, taking stuff from under there and tossing it into a backpack. She rips the mattress open and begins to throw some money and papers in the bag.

“It’s been nice meeting you. I’ve got to find another place now.”

“What sort of trouble are you in? What do those guys want?”

“Those guys aren’t the trouble,” she says. “That’s just sanitation. But if they got word there is a vampire here, that means the others aren’t far behind.”

“Who are the others?”

Atl gives him a narrow look. “One month ago my aunt’s head was delivered in a cooler to our home. I left Ciudad Juarez and headed here before I also ended in a cooler.”

“Who killed her?”

“A rival clan. It’s part of our territory fights. We were trying to kill a certain clan leader and botched it. She’s got a big scar across the middle now, and she’s mighty pissed at us. I hope you can appreciate the situation,” she says, zipping her jacket up.

It sounds very exciting to Domingo. He’s only seen the gang fights from afar. Mexico City has managed to insulate itself through the conflict, partly because it keeps the vampires who are waging the wars out of the city limits, and partly because it is so damn militarized. The drug dealers in Mexico City are narcomenudistas; petty peddlers, small-scale crooks focused around Tepito and Iztapalapa. If they kill each other, they have the sense to do it quietly, without attracting 20 special forces ops who are ready to put a gun up your ass and shoot before bothering to ask for identity cards.

Atl goes down the stairs. Domingo follows her.

When they reach the front door she turns to look at him and he thinks she is going to tell him to beat it. Her hands tighten around the dog’s leash. She takes a step back.

Thirty seconds later Domingo is in a comic book.

Half a dozen men pour in. The dog growls. Somebody yells. “Stay the fuck still. Stay the fuck still,” they say. Big bubble speeches.

A guy grabs Domingo by the collar and drags him out, pinning him against the ground and putting a plastic tie around his wrists.

Domingo doesn’t know if these are cops, or sanitation, or narcos. All he knows is he can hear the dog barking and he is being dragged against the pavement, then kicked towards the trunk of a car. They’re trying to stuff him in the trunk.

Domingo panics. He tries to hold onto something. The guy punches him and Domingo folds over himself.

It doesn’t really feel like he thought it might feel. Action. Adventure. Comic book manic energy.

The guy pulls Domingo by his hair and Domingo gets a glimpse of teeth, half a smile, before Atl pulls him off Domingo with a swift, careless motion that breaks his bones.

Domingo, on his knees, looks up at Atl. She cuts the plastic tie and the dog comes bounding towards her.

She’s got three sharp needles sticking out of her left leg. Blood puddles next to her shoes.

She vomits. A sticky, dark mess.

The dog whines.

“Come on,” he says grabbing her arm, propping her up.

He tries not to look at the bodies they leave behind. He tries not to wonder if they’re all dead.

If this is a comic book, then it’s tinted with red.

She’s awake. He knows it because the dog raises its head. Domingo looks at her. Sure enough, her eyes are open, though he can’t make her expression.

“How you feeling?” he asks.

Atl looks down at her bandaged leg. He knows he didn’t do a great job, but at least he took out those weird needles.

“My bag. Do you have it?”

She clutched it all the way there. There was no way he could have left it behind. Domingo nods.

“There’s a blue plastic stick in it. Small. Hand it to me.”

He does. She presses it against her tongue and shivers.

She unwraps the bandage around her leg. The skin looks odd. Blackened, as if it were stained.

“What’s that?” he asks.

“Anaphylactic reaction from the silver nitrate. Lucky for me they didn’t want me dead yet.”

Domingo blinks.

“It makes me sick,” she explains.

“You’ve been out for about an hour.”

Atl brushes the hair back from her face. She looks around at the little room and the piles of old comic books, hybrid personal protective clothing, and all the other assorted junk he collects and sells together with the bone-and-rag-man.

“Where are we?”

“My place. It’s safe. We’re in a tunnel downtown. It’s very old. I think the nuns used it. There was a convent nearby. Benito Juarez closed it fifty years ago.”

Atl chuckles. “You’re talking about the mid-19th century.”

She gives him a funny look. Domingo frowns. He doesn’t know lots of stuff and obviously she does. He doesn’t like it when people make fun of him. It’s unpleasant. Even Belen was rude at times, though there was no reason for that.

“It’s cool,” she says. “This works. It was smart thinking.”

She opens her arms and the dog rushes towards her, pressing its great head against her cheek. She scratches its ear and smiles at Domingo.

“How come your dog’s so big?” he asks.

“Cualli’s a special breed. He’s an attack dog.”

“Were those the gangsters?”

“Those were freelancers. Health and Sanitation must have tipped them off that there was something odd going on. Or somebody else did.”

“You were fast. Like really fast. Are all vampires like that? I’ve read a lot about the European ones and the Chinese, and how there’s all the infighting with them up north and if you go to Mexicali it’s like all run by the Chinese. But they say they’re all stiff, no? Jian shi and they can’t really be green, can they? I don’t know much about your type. Funny, it’s probably —”

“Please. Stop,” she says, pressing her fingers against her temples. “I don’t want to talk about vampires. Or gangs.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Nothing.”

Domingo wants to talk about everything. He sits in front of her, brimming with questions as she curls up and closes her eyes.

This is like a vampire sleeps. Not in coffins. Curled up, with a dog by her feet and a boy watching her.

He gets up early and goes above ground. It’s raining, so he ties a plastic shopping bag to his head as he heads to purchase food. He buys bread, milk, three cans of beans, potato chips and pastries. He feels very happy as he pays for the stuff, like it’s Christmas.

On the way back, he scans the screens at the subway in search of news. There’s nothing about the confrontation of the previous day.

As he stands in the subway car, listening to the tired music on his player, he conjures a story in which he’s making breakfast for his girlfriend, and she’s real pretty and they live together. Not in the tunnels. In a proper place.

When he returns to the tunnel he’s humming a tune.

She’s sitting, back against the wall, browsing through a bunch of magazines. When she looks up at him, the tune dies on his lips.

“Where did you go?”

“I went to get us breakfast.”

“I don’t need breakfast. It was stupid of you. Someone might have seen you.”

“Sorry,” he mutters and then, tentatively, to diffuse her anger. “How do you like my collection?”

“It’s great,” she says quirking an eyebrow at him and jumping up to her feet, showing him the cover of a comic book. “Not a fanboy, hu?”

It’s an old-style thing with a guy in a Dracula-kind-of cape. She picks another one. This is a recent clipping from a magazine he stole a few weeks before. It talks about the narco-vampire fighting in Monterrey.

He wets his lips, struggling for words. “Why are you angry?”

“I am not a goddamn hobby.”

“Who’s talking about a hobby?”

She shoves the magazine against his chest, pushing him back.

“Do you like vampires? Hu? You like reading about them? You like looking at the pictures of dead vampires?”

“Yeah, well ... it’s exciting.”

“Do you know how long my kind can live? Three-hundred years. You know what’s the average lifespan of my kind? Thirty years. Do you want to know why?”

Domingo does not answer. She’s grabbing him by his shirt, holding him up.

“Because we’re all getting massacred. Before I arrived in to Mexico City, I was at the market in Ciudad Juarez. The decapitated body of a vampire bled onto the pavement, right next to a food stand. People kept eating. They bought soda. They were more bothered by the heat than the corpse.”

She sets him down. His feet touch the floor.

“I’m going to be a puddle of blood.”

He’s scared to say a thing. She sits down, folding her legs and staring at the wall. Eventually, he sits next to her.

“What are you going to do?” he asks.

“Hell if I know,” she whispers. “I need to eat. I need to sleep. I need to think.”

He pulls up his sleeve, offering his arm to her. She smiles wryly.

“You’re going to get hurt one of these days,” she tells him, “if you keep helping strangers like me.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he replies.

She presses her mouth against his skin.

Domingo is groggy when he opens his eyes. Atl’s still asleep. He doesn’t try to wake her. He flicks a battery-powered lantern on and looks at his magazines, feeling odd when he runs his hands across the vivid picture; the splashes of red.

The dog growls. Domingo lifts the lantern and listens. He doesn’t hear anything. The dog growls louder. Atl shifts her body, fully awake.

“What is it?” he asks.

“People,” she says.

He still can’t hear anything. Atl grabs her bag and pulls out a switchblade.

“Cualli, stay,” she tells the dog, then raises her eyes towards him. “Don’t move. The dog will keep you safe.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to take a look,” she says.

She runs out. Domingo crouches next to the dog, trying to listen for anything odd. The tunnels are quiet for a bit, then he hears loud sounds. Might be gun shots. The sounds seem to be getting closer. He’s nervous, heart beating very fast. He twists the dog’s leash between his hands.

Atl returns; she’s running and her face is very tense.

“Lead me out of here,” she says.

Domingo scrambles ahead of her, holding his lantern. He turns left and finds himself face to face with three people wearing masks and goggles. They raise their guns. He blinks and is yanked back, thrown against the floor. The air is knocked out of his lungs.

There’s the zing of bullets; the loud blast of a shotgun. Domingo covers his ears. One of them lunges past Atl, towards him. Atl plucks him back, her claws and teeth tear the protective mask apart and she bites into the man’s face.

The man is trying to escape and Atl bites into his face like he is a ripe fruit.

The dog is also biting, tearing.

Domingo looks dumbly at all the blood.

“The place is crawling with them,” she says, angrily. “They must have followed you back. You’ve got to lead us out.”

“We’ve got to keep going straight,” he mumbles, picking the lantern off the floor.

The light illuminates a shadow, the figure of another man with a mask coming just behind Atl.

“Look out!” he yells.

The man’s head rolls onto the floor.

It literally rolls onto the floor.

Atl’s fingers are stained crimson. Brains are splattered over her jacket.

It’s his turn to vomit.

Dozens of mariachis in charro costumes litter Garibaldi Plaza. They’re waiting for someone to hire them to play a song and do not pay attention to two dirty beggars with a stray dog. That’s what Atl and Domingo look like, covered in grime and dirt after running through the tunnels.

“I’m heading to Guatemala, kid,” Atl says, her bag balanced on her left shoulder.

“Do you have friends there?”

“No.”

“Sure. I’ll go,” he says.

She stares at him.

“You’re going to need to feed,” he says. “You’ll need someone to watch your back.”

“I don’t need help.”

“I can shoot a gun,” he blusters.

“You’ve almost died twice in less than a week.”

“The life expectancy of a street kid isn’t much higher than yours,” he says, knowing he’s got nowhere to go. There’s nothing but forward.

She smirks. “Find another way to commit suicide.”

She slips a couple of bills into his hand.

“Atl,” he says.

“Keep the dog,” she replies, handing him the leash. “It’ll slow me down.”

She takes a couple of steps. The dog whines.

“Stay with him,” she orders.

“Atl,” he repeats.

She walks away. She doesn’t turn her head. He tries following her, but the square is crowded at this time of the night and he loses her quickly. She must have flown away. Can vampires fly? He’ll never know.

She’s gone.

A trio sings “La Cucaracha” while the rain begins to fall. He sniffles, eyes watery.

He pulls his plastic bag from his pocket and ties it above his head. He’s out of chocolate. He’s out of luck. He pats the dog’s head.

“Variations of Figures Upon the Wall” Where thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Poe, 2013.

“Man in Blue Overcoat” Handsome Devil: Tales of Sin and Seduction, 2014.

“River, Dreaming” Shimmer, 2013.

“Distant Deeps or Skies” Expanded Horizons, 2010.

“The Sea, Like Glass Unbroken” Whispers From The Abyss, 2013.

“Kissing Frost” original to this collection.

“Enchantment” Reflection’s Edge, 2008.

“A Handful of Earth” Expanded Horizons, 2011.

“Live Sho” silviamoreno-garcia.com, 2012.

“Translucent Skin” Solstice Magazine, 2012.

“Collect Call” Expanded Horizons, 2012.

“Shedding Her Own Skin” Fantasy Magazine, 2007

“To See Pedro Infante” original to this collection.

“Kaleidoscope” AE — The Canadian Science Fiction Review, 2014 .

“Abandon All Flesh” Tales of Jack the Ripper, 2013.

“The River-Hag” Coyote Wild, 2008.

“Sublime Artifacts” original to this collection.

“A Puddle of Blood” EVOLVE Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, 2011.