Fernando’s body creaked like the cot as he dragged himself out of it. His grandmother harried him, imploring him not to get up, telling him he needed to lie still and rest. Fernando brushed her off. He knew that if he lay here any longer in this bed he might never get out of it. It wasn’t the weight of his injuries he felt as he sat up and stood, but a burden of grief that oppressed him. Crushing and unseen, and all the more terrible for it.

He set tasks for himself around the homestead. He worked life slowly and surely back into his stiff joints, strength and stamina back into his neglected muscle. He wore himself out daily. He ate like a fiend and slept like the dead. He drove himself on at a grueling pace, a cruel and relentless overseer deaf to his own inward screams of complaint. Under this regimen of self-inflicted punishment, his grief smoldered to a black and bitter rage which was like an old friend to him. He embraced it gladly as he toiled on.

He found no shortage of adversaries to contend with. He found savage satisfaction in contending with them. Now that he was spending so much time at his grandmother’s jungle abode again, it seemed that that the very forces of nature were conspiring against him.

The uncanny fecundity of the farm had taken a perverse turn. The sublime richness of the goats’ milk had grown strangely sour. The flock of fat hens which had lain such large clutches of eggs without ceasing was thinning in more ways than one. The garden which had flourished seemingly overnight, yielding its lush fruits in unheard-of abundance, was now withering and beset.

Systematically, and somewhat maniacally, Fernando set about ferreting out the causes of these various misfortunes. In the goat pen he discovered rank tufts of alien green shoots, tendrilled and vaguely fibrous, which he routed root and stem. Though there were no tracks to be seen, he reinforced the chicken coop against whatever slinking mystery predator was preying upon the flock. He lured the wary, skinny birds out with feeds that seduced them to abandon their shadowy huddle and put on weight again. He purged the blighted portions of the garden, replanted and watered and fertilized. He stood ferocious vigil against pestilences both insect and spore, which the rustling wind brought forth in redolent sighs—fell breezes from the bowels of the jungle whose dark and brooding depths loved him not.

Fernando didn’t need to believe in his grandmother’s evil spirits to sense the threat at hand. The preternatural malignancy of the jungle was real enough. It lurked forever at the periphery of his endeavors, forever standing in subtle opposition to him and seeking to undo the progress he’d made. Its appetite to reclaim was unfeeling, impersonal. Fernando told himself this, and still he took it personally, anyway. He couldn’t help it. This was the delusion he chose in order to nurse his own festering rancor.

His friends and acquaintances dropped by time and again, trying to persuade him to return to town. To civilization, as they saw it. Fernando refused. There was too much work to be done here. Until he’d beaten back the creeping wilderness sufficiently, he sensed that if he turned his back on it even for a moment, all his prior efforts would be undone. He told them this, and they departed, shaking their heads.

From the porch and from the yard, his grandmother watched him with a curious expression on her face. It was half-exasperated, half-pitying. Fond and forlorn all at once.

“Just like Miguel,” she would say, as she went about her mysterious way.

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy