In this dream of himself as a child, Fernando’s mother lifted one coffee-colored leg. She braced her foot on the edge of the vanity to paint her toes. Her dressing robe tented as she did this—a makeshift fort which no little boy could resist. He crawled under her chair, under her pitched-up skirt. She was naked

Fernando woke with a start. His heart hammered wildly. He was damp with sweat, feverishly hot. Horribly and painfully aroused. Furiously ashamed. His hand stung, sliced open by an icon fallen from the shelf above his cot. The walls groaned, creaking. Shaking perilously under the strain of remaining upright against the stormwinds that assailed them.

Bitterly, Fernando turned away from the fallen shack, in pursuit of his grandmother. The flashlight’s wavering beam proved next to useless, scattering wanly in the turbulence of the downpour. Attempting to follow his grandmother’s tracks proved vain from the outset. Whatever shallow depressions her doe feet had left in the mud had been swept away

Fernando woke the next morning naked and alone. He sat up stiffly from the rock. He pulled on his clothes and shoes which were mostly dry. His grandmother’s nightdress and warstaff were still laying there on the ground nearby him, but the woolen poncho was not. Outside on the bluff, the rain and wind had

Pushing two child’s cots together, Emmanuella made them up with fresh linens from the nicked flower bureau. The faded knit of the sheets was feather-soft with age. Fernando settled his delirious grandmother onto the bed. He averted his eyes as Emmanuella stripped off the damp scratchy poncho and clothed the little old woman in a

Stuck in the dark purgatory of his ruminations, Fernando waited with Chico for the doctor to return. He didn’t want to think anymore about that hellacious storm and the fallout from it. He didn’t want to think anymore about anything. He hated how he couldn’t just stop thinking—even for one single goddamn second. He felt like

Fernando rested for a few hours at Chico’s home, then he returned to his grandmother’s property—or what remained of it, that was. On his climb up the hill to the home site, muddy rivulets coursed past him sluggishly, like slow-clotting veins. He spied the shed he’d thought to take refuge in swept clear down the