Since Fernando’s grandmother wasn’t keen on him doing her chores for her—and since it hadn’t proved a fruitful tactic in wheedling more information out of her—he took to working on her shack instead. She protested this as well, saying that everything was fine as it was. Fernando ignored this. He needed something to do with his time. And if tacking scrap boards and sheeting onto the walls might mean a few less critters crawling over him at night, then that was all the more incentive.

Fernando was no carpenter, but he was resourceful. He approached the problem of the drafty shack like a puzzle to be solved. He scavenged the yard for supplies. Though the scattered tools he unearthed had gone largely to rust, he scraped them off and oiled them up and made do with what he had at his disposal.

Resourcefulness aside, he quickly ran out of patching materials. He’d only managed to seal off the most glaring holes in the shack. Pacing about the inside, he could still see slivers of daylight shining through chinks in the siding. He packed these cracks as best he could with moss and mud and left off with it.

Plenty else needed repairing beside the house itself. The shed was rotted. The yard was a wild, tangled mess. But the goat pen was an utter travesty. To learn that it hadn’t been mended since his grandfather’s time wouldn’t have surprised him.

Just a few wooden stakes protruded at seeming random in the upland clearing which must once have been a paddock. Bits of notched wire curled from the stakes like snapped guitar strings, the vaguest suggestion of a fence. It would explain why the number of goats around at any time kept changing. They seemed to range about wherever they pleased, half-feral at best.

Between these scattered goats, there was a lot of good milk and meat going to waste. The senseless squander chafed at Fernando—not least of all because it might give his indigent grandmother more than two pesos to rub together. But there was no point in even trying to herd the goats without a pen, so Fernando didn’t bother.

From the edge of the forest, he sensed eyes upon him. Turning around, he spied a black billy goat peering at him through the leaves in what seemed like open animosity. Despite the lack of a pen, Fernando found himself taking a goaded step toward the animal anyway. With a low bleat the horned goat turned tail and fled. It vanished into the depths of the jungle, melding seamlessly into the darkness beyond.

Fernando glared after. Standing at the periphery of the trees, he happened to see as he did a bunch of palm rushes that seemed like they’d make for good thatching. He was sorting through them, collecting the good ones of the bunch and dragging them back out into the yard, when his grandmother arrested him with a cry.

“What are you doing in there? You should not have passed the trees!”

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy