Fernando had never cared much for girls, it was true. Almost without exception, he’d found girls his own age silly and uninteresting. Shallow, predictable and dull. Too lacking in worldly experience to have any savor to them. Once you got them out of their clothes, you’d seen the extent of all they had to offer.

But he did like women. He had always liked them—mature, older women with depth and complexity to them. Ones who’d been around the block a time or two. Ones who’d been bitchslapped by life, in particular. Seasoned by the years so that they wore the marks of their trials like battle scars upon them, both visible and invisible.

Women who presented more of a challenge to him. Women with more of a story to tell. Women who’d lived long enough to harbor some dark secrets, which he could tease out and pick apart layer by layer at his leisure.

Women like these…

He liked them much too much.

Many times he’d wondered why he was so attracted to older women. Maybe it was because of his mother, being raised by her alone. Naturally, he had fixated on her. She was all that he’d had. She had been his whole world—the world around which his own smaller one had revolved.

Her untimely death had left a dark, yawning void in the fabric of his existence. Inexorable and inescapable. An abyssal scar which he orbited still.

Or maybe it wasn’t her last act of abandonment which had cemented his preferences. Maybe it was just because of her, Carmencita—how she was, elusive and capricious and darkly enticing in her feminine allure. She had fascinated him, beguiled him. Tormented him with her indifference to him.

As a little boy, he had trailed her around their apartment like a second shadow, following after her wherever she went. Whenever she paused, so would he. In rapt stillness he would sit at her feet and watch her. Whatever she did was of all-consuming interest to him. But he had liked in particular to watch her brush out her long hair. In his mind’s eye now he could still see it: the dark waves sifting, gleaming under her languid brushstrokes like dark water rippling.

She was like this, too. Like flowing water or shifting sand. He could never hold her to him. She was always slipping through his grasp. All his attempts to keep her close were spent in vain.

He looked at women and saw something of his mother in them, something both to admire and to mistrust. He looked at adolescent girls and guessed what sort of women they would grow to become. There was the shadow of the temptress lurking there. A portentous curve of the lip. A sly, foreboding glint in the eye.

Women were chimerical creatures to him. Fernando wasn’t sure whether he loved them or loathed them. Perhaps the truth was something of both.

Only in the littlest of girls did he see that angelic purity of spirit still untainted. A divine femininity that hadn’t yet been curdled by deceitful nature. Toward these mortal angels he felt a fierce and futile urge to defend them, to shield them from what time would inevitably make of them.

Toward his grandmother he felt something similar. Though she was not a child, old age had purged the wantonness from her, rendering her into a woman defanged. Vain as it was, Fernando still wished to protect her—even from the slow creeping shadow of death.

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy