Stuck in the dark purgatory of his ruminations, Fernando waited with Chico for the doctor to return. He didn’t want to think anymore about that hellacious storm and the fallout from it. He didn’t want to think anymore about anything. He hated how he couldn’t just stop thinking—even for one single goddamn second. He felt like

Pushing two child’s cots together, Emmanuella made them up with fresh linens from the nicked flower bureau. The faded knit of the sheets was feather-soft with age. Fernando settled his delirious grandmother onto the bed. He averted his eyes as Emmanuella stripped off the damp scratchy poncho and clothed the little old woman in a

Fernando woke the next morning naked and alone. He sat up stiffly from the rock. He pulled on his clothes and shoes which were mostly dry. His grandmother’s nightdress and warstaff were still laying there on the ground nearby him, but the woolen poncho was not. Outside on the bluff, the rain and wind had

Bitterly, Fernando turned away from the fallen shack, in pursuit of his grandmother. The flashlight’s wavering beam proved next to useless, scattering wanly in the turbulence of the downpour. Attempting to follow his grandmother’s tracks proved vain from the outset. Whatever shallow depressions her doe feet had left in the mud had been swept away

Fernando woke with a start. His heart hammered wildly. He was damp with sweat, feverishly hot. Horribly and painfully aroused. Furiously ashamed. His hand stung, sliced open by an icon fallen from the shelf above his cot. The walls groaned, creaking. Shaking perilously under the strain of remaining upright against the stormwinds that assailed them.

In this dream of himself as a child, Fernando’s mother lifted one coffee-colored leg. She braced her foot on the edge of the vanity to paint her toes. Her dressing robe tented as she did this—a makeshift fort which no little boy could resist. He crawled under her chair, under her pitched-up skirt. She was naked

The skies grew dark well before dusk. Fell winds gusted, breathy and portentous. Hushed whispers of warning that skimmed the ear. The dense, damp air stirred like a broth. Grey-black thunderheads thickened as they rolled in above the lashing trees. Murky clouds churned slow and viscous overhead, like a cauldron of conjured night. The old

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.

Fernando lost track of the days in his convalescence. In the gloom of the hut day and night seemed to meld together, shadow for eclipsing shadow. Eventually, Chico and the others came to visit him. Whether they had spent the intervening time mustering up the nerve to cross the witch’s threshold, or bracing themselves for

IV Fernando watched the shadows play over the clapboard walls, chinked with cracked clay, packed with moss and palm floss. In the flicker of the oil lamp, the shadows bent and twisted, undulating salacious and sinister over the racks of dried herbs, the grubby tallow candles, the rough-hewn shelves of bones and beads and carved