I pulled a strip of cloth over her wound, both to help it heal and so I wouldn’t see it. I wanted to dampen the smell of iron, sweet as rain-made rust. “Why did you fall?” I asked.
A wry laugh stuck in the back of her throat. “Why do you think?”
“You wanted something.”
“Yes.”
“What?”
Two shallow breaths wavered in the back of her throat, one, then the other, before she grabbed me and kissed me, her desert-warm mouth searing my lips.
“Soft.” She buried her nose in my hair and dug the heels of her hands into my back. “You’re so soft.” Then she dropped her hands and pulled away. “I’m sorry.”
I stopped myself from grabbing her back. “I don’t understand.” I straightened my posture. “You fell because you wanted someone?”
“No.” She dropped her head, letting her hair shadow her face. “That’s the worst part. There was no one. I didn’t fall in love. I just wanted.”
I crawled on top of her, slowly pinning her down, and kissed her. She startled, but then gave her mouth to mine. I let my mouth wander down her neck toward her breasts, but it strayed, and her blood stained my lower lip. She arched her back to press her body into mine, but her blood heated my mouth, like hot sugar on its way to caramel, and I scrambled off her so quickly I fell from the bed. She grabbed my waist and pulled me back.
I licked my lip, blushing and guilty.
“You are hungry,” she said.
“I shouldn’t be,” I said. “I eat all the time. My sister says if I don’t stop, I’ll get so chubby, I’ll look like a little girl forever.”
She pushed a piece of hair out of my face. “You don’t look like a little girl.”
I watched her mouth, her lips parted.
She turned her shoulder toward me. “And you’re hungry for this, aren’t you?”
I looked away. I didn’t want to see the jeweled red again.
She cupped my face in her hands. “Could you live off me?”
I raised my eyes to hers. “What?”
“Could you live off me?”
I tried to wrench away from her. “I couldn’t do that.”
“Because it’s not possible?”
“Because I couldn’t do that to you.”
“Yes, you could,” she said. “I’m no good for anything else.”
“You’d be weak whenever I had some of you.”
“I don’t care.”
I snuck a look at the streak of garnet on her shoulder. “Would you let me give you something?”
She narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“What you wanted.”
“I couldn’t ask you for that,” she said. “I’m fallen. I’m dirty.”
I slid my hands under the sheet and onto her hands. “And I’m a nagual.”
She moved my hands back on top of the blanket. “If I could be your nourishment, maybe I’d be something good again.”
I got up from the bed.
“Where are you going?” She asked, baring the red jasper of her shoulder.
“I need a cookie.” I paced in front of the door. “Do you want a cookie?”
“No. I don’t want a cookie.”
I put a hand on the doorknob. “Well, I need a cookie.”
“Why?”
Because I still thought the food of my former life would fill me. “Because when I get upset, I want cookies.”
She laughed a soft laugh. That made me madder, and I left.
I hadn’t even closed my bedroom door behind me when the barrel of my grandmother’s pearl-handled pistol was in my face.
“Good,” said Salazar, his drunken breath pressing me against the wall. “The littlest puta. Come on.” He gestured with the gun, and I followed the gleam of the handle toward the living room.
Carmen always kept my grandmother’s pistol in the armoire in her room. I didn’t understand how Salazar could have it until I saw my sisters lined up against the mantel, Carmen with a gash across her right temple. Their bedroom doors were open, and they were in their nightclothes.
“All four putas.” Salazar shoved me toward them.
“Leave her alone,” said Lucia, in a louder voice than anyone but her sisters had ever heard her use.
Salazar pointed the gun toward her. “The Virgin Lucia has something to say?” He twirled the barrel through her curls.
Adriana lunged at him, but Salazar jammed the hilt of the gun into the side of her head, and she reeled back toward the mantel.
Lucia stayed silent, glaring at him.
“Any of you whores have anything to say?” he asked.
Blood from Carmen’s wound glistened on her eyelashes, heating her stare. Adriana held the side of her head, but glowered through the hair in her face.
“That’s what I thought.” He lowered the gun, but held it tight. “I want to hear what you did to him. I want to hear where you hid my brother’s body.”
La caída’s face appeared in the hallway mirror out of the darkness, the steps of her bare feet quiet on the floor. She lifted a terra-cotta vase from the side table.
Salazar turned at the slight sound of dried clay against wood, but la caída had already lifted the vase over her head, and brought it down on Salazar’s.
The gun went off, shattering the mirror in the hallway. Lucia screamed. Salazar fell to the floor, hitting his head on the ceramic tile.
I searched the dark for la caída’s face. She was nowhere.
I stepped over the glass shards. “Caída?”
I heard her soft moan and followed the sound. She was on the floor, her wound spattered with blood. I knelt to look at her. I hadn’t remembered the wound as that big, that open.
It was on the wrong shoulder.
“He shot her,” I said, feeling her forehead and brushing her hair out of her face. “He shot her.”
Lucia grabbed her shawl. “I’ll go wake Marcus.”
“She’s going for the doctor,” I whispered to la caída.
“No,” said la caída. “Please.”
Adriana turned on every light in the hallway. “Get her away from the glass.”
Lucia cleared a path with the broom and I pulled la caída away from the broken mirror.
La caída tilted her head, sweat dotting her forehead with glass beads. “Take what you need.”
“No.” I kissed her forehead. “No.”
Carmen found the bloody bullet among the glass shards. “It’s not in her.” She held it up. “It grazed her.” She crouched near us, taking in the black and orange wings on la caída’s back with a slow nod.
Adriana began boiling water on the stove. Lucia crossed herself and whispered a prayer I couldn’t make out.
Carmen held la caída’s arm by her elbow, not rough, but no more gentle than she had to be. “It’s not deep. But you should see the doctor anyway.”
“What will he do to me?”
“Nothing I don’t tell him to,” she said. “He’s my brother.” She looked at me. “Where did you find her?”
“Outside,” I said.
She set her elbow back down and nodded at Lucia. “Marcus will come here.”
“Aren’t they going to come take me?” La caída asked, pulling her limbs into her chest.
“Who?”
“I killed him,” said la caída.
“No one will know.” Carmen tossed her hands toward Salazar’s body. “Who’s hungry?”
I couldn’t lift la caída’s body anymore. She was heavy as a real woman. Adriana helped me get her back into my bed, where our brother checked her wound, pressing his lips together and nodding at my bandaging. “Not bad, hermanita.” He gave la caída something for the pain, and she slept. “She saved all my sisters, huh?” he asked when he saw the lines of her monarch’s wings. “Should be enough to get her back into heaven when she dies.”
“What, now you’re a priest?” said Carmen, shooing him out of the room when he was done. “Get back to your wife.”
As my sisters took their meal in the fields outside town, I lay in bed next to la caída, tracing my finger along the thin cut where a shard of glass had sliced along the edge of her hip. Marcus had missed it because he was worried about the wound on her arm.
La caída moaned awake.
I pulled my hand away.
“No,” she said, almost humming. “It feels good.” She reached up, her eyes still half-closed, and rubbed a lock of my hair between her fingers like it was silk ribbon. “You’re still hungry.” She pulled the sheet back to expose the cut on her hip.
I flushed. “I can’t. You’re hurt.”
“Will you take care of me?” She gave me a lopsided smile in the dark.
“Yes.” I curled her hand into a loose fist and kissed her thumb. “Yes.”
“Then take what I want to give you.” She pressed her palm into her hip to thicken the little thread of blood. “Take what you need.” She cradled the back of my neck in her hand and gently guided my mouth toward the cut.
Part of me wanted to drain her; I’d silenced my hunger for the months since my eighteenth birthday. But she was so warm, all salt and no sweetness, that I wanted to savor her like the wine of black Tempranillo grapes or the darkest bittersweet chocolate. I drank slowly, and before she was too weak I stopped and slid my mouth across her thigh to the triangle of soft hair between her legs. I sucked on her labia, one at a time. I touched her as I kissed her, and she shuddered when I felt her wetness, and again when my curious fingers made her wetter. I drank her wetness and tasted the same perfect salt I found in her blood. She pulled me on top of her and traced her hands under my dress. Her palms painted my shape so I no longer felt young and hungry, rounded with baby fat. Her hands and her salt were shaping me into something nourished and womanly. Soft.
Her fingers found me, and she touched me in the way I’d tried to touch myself every night for years. She covered my mouth with hers to keep me from waking my sisters. We mapped each other’s bodies with our mouths, and when her touch made me as weak as she was, we slept.
When la caída was well enough, she and I joined my sisters on their walks, Carmen and Lucia with the lovers that followed them from town to town, Adriana with her woman of the week. As we passed the town cemetery, a headstone caught my eye. It was too new, too free of weeds and dry lichen, and carved with only the letter S and the current year. The grass covering the grave looked new and tenuous.
La caída stopped with me, but couldn’t tell what I was looking at. She hadn’t passed the cemetery a hundred times.
“Mother told you we would never defile good men’s graves,” Carmen whispered as she passed. “Instead, we make new ones.”
La caída watched Carmen, and her eyes narrowed as she listened. She didn’t yet understand the ways our family, how the undertakers and stonecutters, the doctors and butchers, all worked together to shield the desires of the women. She didn’t yet understand how we worked, humans or naguales. She didn’t yet know the million little sins we committed to turn our hunger for salt into the best thing it could be.
Carmen took my hand and la caída’s and put mine in hers. “Welcome to Earth, ángel caída. You have a lot to learn.”
THE HORSE AND HOUNDS
Rachel Charman
They come from miles to be here, I think as I feel the car’s tires scrunch on the gravel drive. Peering through the rain-washed windscreen I remember what you told me. You sat in my kitchen, a ray of sunlight on your hair and mouth, being an island of fun in this silent, open, empty place. You smirked at me, knowing you were twisting my heart with every filthy word as you told me when and where to show up. I hadn’t known if you were teasing me or not. Now I am here, jittery at the thought of finding it all true, and I want to phone you in your new home with him and tell you that I have gone after all, to see if it hurts you.
The place is the usual English country pub, too far out from anywhere for a former city-dweller like me to walk to. It is square, brick and thatch, with a chipped wooden sign swinging and squeaking over the door: THE HORSE AND HOUNDS. It could be any pub anywhere in the country, but you—my lovely, teasing, unobtainable you—told me this place was special.
“They’re coming from all over the county to this place, for a little, you know…” you said, looking at me from the corner of your cat’s eyes. I do know. I had seen that look on your face before, as your head rested on my pillow. It was a look that denoted pleasure; private, individual pleasure. Holding a coffee cup as you lay in my bed, one eye on the clock, because you knew your husband would be home for dinner within the hour, you told me about what happened that time at the pub, and that it was going to happen again. A week or so later you were gone, and I suddenly understood why you had told me to go there: to ease the pain of your departure.
When I walk into the place, holding a newspaper over my head to catch the rain, I am hit by two things: the hot, dog-like smell of pubs now that smoking is banned, and secondly, how inconspicuous the women are. I scold myself for my silliness. Had I expected them to be sitting beneath a banner? You would have laughed at that, in your high, sighing, skipping laugh that made your throat work beautifully.
I make my way to the bar, flapping my wet paper and tugging my coat open. I order a bitter shandy from the barmaid, who is a squarish, middle-aged woman dripping in bangles and earrings, and survey the women for a moment.
At a table in the farthest corner, partially hidden in a nook in the wall, is a group of six women. The age difference between them all strikes me, as I savor the first glug of warm, earthy beer. There is a woman headed straight for sixty if she is a day, but another who can’t be older than twenty-two. I mentally shake myself again for making assumptions. Did I expect them to all look just like me?
In a way, though, they do all look like me. I can see, as I walk past the fireplace across the red, sticky carpet, the brand of loneliness in their faces. It’s the kind of loneliness that hangs from the features of a woman’s face, like moss or cobwebs; the kind of loneliness that builds up over time in this desolate place the rain never leaves alone. It is the kind of loneliness a chat at the post office, or the hand of a husband, or the glow of the TV can’t wipe away; the loneliness of a woman with love all around her but who can’t love, and who feels her heart is beating loudly and alone in all these wide open spaces; not thrumming in time with the world or someone else. My face looks like theirs now, since you left my heartbeat to slow alone.
I get to the table and the woman who is in charge, Justine, looks up and smiles. We had a stilted conversation on the phone a day or two ago to confirm times. She is around forty, with dark hair, and a fashionable wax jacket on her thin frame. I can tell from her accent and the slightly patronizing way she looks at her little group that she is a former urbanite like me, and wealthy to boot.
We exchange hellos. I hadn’t really thought about what to say next but fortunately someone is pulling a chair over and someone else is shuffling along to make space and there, I’m seated among them with the least fuss possible. They don’t want to draw attention to themselves. I feel as though I’ve just sat down with a new book group.
The conversation too feels like that of a book group. It is the nervous, extra-polite talk of women keen to make a good impression. I take them all in. Justine used to be something flash in the city before she and her husband upped sticks to the country to start a family. It is clear from her manner she is used to exercising authority. Kim, the young one, is plump and mousey with a baby at home with her farm-laborer husband. She’s a local girl who has barely left the county. There is Marge, a weather-beaten woman in her late fifties, whose partner, who died last year, is alluded to regularly in non-gender-specific terms. There are two thirtysomething friends, Sam and Lisa, with identical glossy haircuts and trendy Ugg boots. It is painfully obvious, to me at least, that they are lovers and think it is a secret. Then there is a wiry, clear-skinned woman of indeterminate age, dressed boyishly in denim and a checked shirt, her bl
onde hair cropped close to her head and her hands writhing for want of a cigarette.
Into this I throw my story. Yes, I’m new to the next village, having moved in just a year ago. No, nobody back at the cottage I bought petulantly, believing I was too old to need city distractions anymore. What do I do? Well, I’m a writer. I don’t mention how I have barely written a word since I saw you over the garden fence, tucking a strand of hair from the corner of your apple-red mouth behind your ear. I leave out how I had hated the place instantly but stayed because after living next door for six weeks, you appeared in my kitchen and then in my bed, and then came over every day at 12:00 to drink coffee and make love while your husband worked without thinking of you. I forget to mention that when he took the new job you refused to make any plans to see me again, as if plans lent some sort of calculation to our affair, whereas slipping in my back door every day you seemed to be able to write off as a series of one-off slips of judgment. Then off you went, leaving flowers on the kitchen table as the removal van belched and shuddered away.
He’d been trying to make you pregnant and you didn’t want him to. You said the feel of my skin on yours made you feel like a woman and not a reproductive machine made of fluids and membranes. Then you left me in this countryside hell, and I ache.
Keeping all this to myself I observe for a while. The conversation steers toward neutral topics like the weather, the TV, and the last good fair of the summer. It is not stimulating but my guts are fluttering with nervous excitement. You had told me about this little gang, and now that I can’t have you I want to live in the little story you left behind.
You can’t quite remember how it happened last time, you said, leaning on one elbow in bed, your hair soft and straggled by my hands. You whispered, running a finger from my chin to my breastbone, it actually was a book group to start with. Justine brought together this group of strangers and you went along for something to do. Perhaps it was because they were all lonely at the right time, or perhaps it was because the right amount of chardonnay was drunk. Several factors led to an occurrence, you said. Things were done, privately, you said. They hardly mentioned it afterward, you smirked as you kissed me, but then months later Justine sent out an email to say the “book group” was meeting again. “You should try it,” you had said, and looked sad, although I didn’t know why at the time.
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