The gorgon’s seductive smile widened. Her gimlet eyes glittered. She beckoned to him with a slender hook of finger, tapering to a glinting point of ivory nail. Fernando approached her across the sparkling silt of the ancient streambed. A short distance from her he stopped, close enough so that he could smell the warm mineral

It was a snake and not a snake— A gigantic reptilian beast, which resolved itself by slow and dreadful degrees into the hybrid, chimeric image of a woman. Her skin was pale, luminescent as pearl. Her flat belly was navel-less where it met the scaled serpentine body of her lower half. But above this snake-half she

Fernando didn’t fall far—maybe three meters or so. Still he thought it a dim miracle he didn’t snap his ankle in the plunge. He sat up cringing in the moss. A shower of dirt and leaves rained down on him from above, slowly thinning. He sneezed, then shook himself off. He reached for his flashlight

Though Fernando’s judgment was far from sound, abruptly to him, it seemed, the character of the Amazonian wilderness grew wilder and more sinister. The looming trees pressed close around him, older and thicker and more ghastly in their contorted forms. The strident animal calls dampened, sounding lower and nearer, eerily menacing in their pitch. Even

Between the wrench of the rope and the heft of the animal, the noose cinched taut around its throat. Jerked to its hindlegs in the stranglehold, the goat bucked and thrashed like a grotesque puppet dancing on its strings. Fernando laughed raspily, unhinged. The rush of savage triumph demented him. As the goat exhausted itself

In retrospect, charging headlong in the dead of night into an unfamiliar wilderness full of vipers, jaguars and other known dangers had been a damn stupid thing to do. But dizzy with resentment, and perhaps even then the incipient effects of the potion, Fernando slashed his way heedless through the verdant brush and trailing vines.

In the scant illumination of the embers, Fernando fumbled for the flashlight he’d brought with him from Chico’s place. The pale beam streamed out before him. Descending the warped wooden steps, he started out across the churned, sticking mud of the yard. He circled around the hulking wreckage of the shack. The nighttime landscape distorted

Outside the forsaken chicken coop, with the bloody spiked maul glistening at his feet, Fernando stood hunched and panting. He considered, as his clarity returned to him, that a more fitting revenge would have been to smash the snake’s skull and slit open its belly to reclaim the stolen eggs. But what was done was

Fernando trudged back through the stiffening, sucking muck. Depleted, he sat down on the steps of the ruined porch. He felt useless to do anything else because there was nothing else. Nothing to salvage, nothing spared. What little the storm hadn’t leveled he would have to see leveled himself. But not today. Today there was

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