One day Fernando rose well before the sun. In the premorning dark he went about fetching water from the well, milking the ornery old she-goat, and chopping and carrying in wood. At the first light of dawn, his grandmother stirred awake from her deep, death-like sleep, as though waking from a spell. Sitting on the edge of his cot, Fernando peeled and trimmed the last of the dried bulbs. His grandmother frowned at him. Peering around, she shook her shimmery head.

“What am I supposed to do with myself, now that you’ve gone ahead and done everything?”

Fernando set the pared bulb aside with the rest and fixed her with a level look. “You could tell me about my mother.”

His grandmother’s agate eyes seemed to spark. “What is there to say about her? She was a willful girl who never listened. She was like her father in this way. Bold and stiff-necked to a fault.” The old woman crossed herself, in reverse. Her dark glance pierced into his. “Know this, nieto: those who don’t bend are bound to break. Ten years ago to the day, a birdbone snapped beneath my heel, and I knew wherever Carmen was, she was dead.”

A chill crept up Fernando’s spine. The official record put his mother’s date of death two days from now. But this of course was hypothetical, an estimation based on when her body had been found. Only a cursory effort had gone into making this estimate, he knew. Today might very well have been the true day that she’d died.

Even if it was, Fernando told himself there were any number of non-mystical ways his grandmother might have arrived at this figure. Certainly María Luisa wouldn’t have bothered to communicate anything other than the official death date in her inquiries, if that. But maybe through the grapevine from Bogotá to Cortez, the death date had simply gotten confused, or his grandmother had confused it. Maybe this eerie pronouncement of hers was nothing more than happenstance.

His grandmother peered hard at him, as if in rebuke. “When your grandfather was taken by the jungle, I accepted that he was gone. But your mother?” The old woman shook her head again, bitterly. “When Joselito was taken, she could not accept it. I warned her, but she would not heed me. She told me she didn’t want to end up like me.” Her eyes flashed darkly. “She said that she would rather die.”

Setting the rest of these inscrutable ravings aside, Fernando asked, “Joselito?”

“Sí, Joselito. Su novio.”

Fernando nodded. He remembered what the dour churchwoman had said about Carmencita’s first love disappearing. It seemed there was some truth to that, after all.

“What ever became of him—of them? Joselito y mi abuelo.”

His grandmother gave him an impatient look. “What do you mean what became of them? They were taken, nieto. What the jungle takes, it does not give back.”

Fernando remained dubious of this. For obvious reasons, he felt. People didn’t simply vanish without a trace. His mother had ‘disappeared,’ too—before the authorities had found her washed up downriver. Maybe Joselito and his grandfather had gone into the jungle. Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe they weren’t even dead, but had just skipped town.

Or maybe the jungle had taken them in a sense. Maybe their lost bones were still out there, somewhere. Scattered and carious and crumbling into dust. Their owners the victims of misfortune who’d never returned home to the women who’d loved them. Wanderers who’d thirsted to death or starved to death from the result of some mishap, some mortal injury dealt to them out there in the indifferent wilderness which swallowed up man and beast alike, indiscriminate.

What might have ended these two men’s lives could have been anything. A broken leg, a poisoned fruit—

Or a snakebite, perhaps.

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy