He spoke like a prophet but his tone was flaccid. Whatever the opposite of a radio voice is, he had it. The pomp came from the way he emphasized certain letters, or maybe how he would move his hands a little – but not too much. He looked okay. His t-shirt hugged his arms more than his gut and he sat upright without looking like a popsicle. On the other hand, his hair was uninspired, like he’d been getting the same thing from his barber since he was in high school. His skin wasn’t smooth, but if I felt charitable it maybe looked rugged. The roadhouse lighting was jukebox neon on the structure of his face. It snagged on a scar or two along his jaw and I felt myself smile.

For what it’s worth, I could tell that he’d have liked me to have more meat on my bones, that he liked plump thighs wrapped around his own skinny legs. That he liked the taste of sweat under heavy tits and that maybe my nose was just a little too “bold.” He paused a lot when he spoke like he was waiting for me to laugh but his timing seemed random. His voice was nasally, I decided. Or maybe it was tinny. I didn’t count this against him. It was neutral.

I nodded, and he kept on.

“Maybe it’s the romantic in me. I can remember them all. Crystal clear.” His gaze froze over in a subtle way, and he curled his lips into a smile made of lost opportunities. I noticed the color of his eyes, a shiny brown that carried the hues of reflected surroundings with great care. His attention returned to me from the middle distance that it had wandered to. I stayed for a few more rounds.

The bar quieted around us, the noisy friend groups and pool sharks dissolving into the ripples of our cheap cocktails. I liked the way his hand felt. Callused and strong. He would touch me with precisely the pressure that he would mean to. I took him home with me.

Most of them were happy to let me clean up after them. I would take the band of the condom with my fingers in a dainty little ring and liberate their cock from the latex. They would often say “ahhh” or suck air through their teeth right as I did it. Then I would saunter off, adding a little wiggle to my hips as I left the room in the likely event their eyes were on my ass.

I would walk down the hallway, step into some slippers, then slink into a bathrobe I kept hanging on the inside of the bathroom door. I would tie the condom into a knot, loose enough that I would be able to release it when needed. Then I would wash my hands, counting to twenty mississippi and everything.

I would then get to work in the garage, wringing the condom’s contents into a little petri dish. I always put some of the semen onto a slide and checked out the sperm under the microscope before anything else. The way they would wriggle, the general count of healthy ones versus those without heads, with two tails, that swam in circles and zigzags and those that didn’t swim at all. Once my curiosity was satisfied, I grabbed a little vial and used a dropper to apply three drops of liquid onto the cum sitting restless on my desk. I would wait fifteen minutes for the solution to take effect. Then, with the microscope hooked up to a small television situated on the garage wall, I would grab a joystick and start piloting.

It was inevitable that before long the man would wander into the garage. Sometimes I would hear his voice calling for me, and I’d answer him, guiding him to me. This time was like any other, except he approached wordlessly. His steps were very light. Something tipped him off, maybe. Some vague impression.

I could feel him look around at all the vials and jars, at all of my little laboratory. I didn’t think he’d understand and he didn’t, he mumbled under his breath and took a few stunned glances at me, though fewer than you’d think. It’s never about me, I find. He started thinking in silence while I stood there, letting the script play out.

He saw me move the joystick to the left, and saw the lucky sperm cell move along with it. It turned to the right, collided with one of its siblings, then hooked left again.

I imagine his thoughts. I figure he thought about his legacy, his genes, his ancestors, whatever other nonsense. My guess was he was certain he didn’t want to raise kids. But even a guy like him starts to wonder what he’s wasted, seeing me turn his potential heirs into a game of bumper sperms. I don’t want kids, but the right prompt can get me thinking. Sometimes I see toddler-sized Converse. Sometimes I see a big dog playing really gently with children half its size. Sometimes I scroll past a children’s show with talking animals and lessons to learn. Sometimes I see the color “baby blue.” Sometimes I see an ice cream shop or an amusement park or an ad for gymnastics class. Sometimes I see a toy or a balloon or a grandparent.

He watched for a bit, then asked for a turn.

I had something else to show him once he was done.

He stood on the opposite side of the hole. The entrance had a sense of order to it, desert dirt showing the shape of shovels and work from every angle, a circular cavity with intentionality behind every impact. The sunlight reached it from a specific angle, and you could only see a few feet in before the darkness swallowed the cavernous walls. The air around us swelled with heat as the sun climbed through the sky.

“At first I helped them along. But now they produce it themselves. Being inside is enough.”

He stood there, waiting, and squinted as if he saw two black reflections peering up at him from the depths. He imagined this again and again, but no matter how he blinked or squinted, he could never be sure.

“I fed them, and guided them, but now they learn from each other. The sensations, the sounds, the smells they leave for each other.” I knelt down and gave the dirt a pat. I imagined it like a pregnant belly. It was compacted and didn’t budge beneath my palm. “They’re eating roots and worms and other things. Some of the things I’ve seen them find down there are crazy. They’ll drag them up with their hands as long as they’re able, but after enough time they prefer to hold things in their mouths. So now when I bring them something it’s like a treat.” His face looked at mine and I saw a little boy for a second, a fear that belongs to a first bicycle ride or trying a new meal. Fear, and trust.

“They belong to me, and to each other. And I belong to them.”

That was an offer, and I could tell from the way his teeth tugged on his lip that he got the message.

I wiped tears from my eyes when I saw the soles of his feet turn around a gradual corner and vanish from view. His clothes sat in a neatly folded pile by the entrance. I could hear him grunt for a few more seconds until the only trace of him was the imprint his body had made in the dry soil. I swallowed a lump and turned my head to the left, peering at the flatness of the landscape around me, dotted with little ranch houses and a few businesses dwarfed in height by their signage.

It all made perfect sense to me. Every time I saw them I would reach out and feel them nuzzle against my touch. I felt the baggy looseness of their skin, the rigidity of their whiskers. I would meet their eyes but the longer one of them was in the nest, the milkier their gaze would be, the heavier their eyelids would rest. I would do my best to tell them apart but it got pretty tricky. They never seemed to mind.

Featured image by Barton Aikman.

The post Naked Nest appeared first on Los Suelos.

If you smell like that, no offense. Everyone does sometimes. Even D, and he’s still the coolest. The other day, he told me that there’s two names for plants: a secret one and one that’s not. For instance, Solanum lycopersicum means tomato. You can tell people if you want. It’s spelled S-O-L-N-U-M L-I-C-E-C-U-M. Something like that.

Who’s D? He’s my friend. You got friends too, of course. And you probably got a family, don’t you. That’s nice. I think I must’ve had parents at some point. What do you mean, am I a minor? I’m a man. I’m a man that’s true to my word, that’s what D. says, he says even people like Rocket or Librarian who are old and have flabby arms are men, and special, too.

Anyway… the important stuff: basically, this guy must’ve snuck in somehow without any of us noticing. And the cat’s name is K-Mart, which D. says is a very expensive store somewhere where he’s from. Only very important people go there, like kings and the people who the king bosses around. I have a pair of jeans from there that D. gave me, they’re probably around $5,000 or so. So I keep them ironed and only wear them for the most special occasions, like for K-Mart’s funeral. It felt what Rocket sometimes calls “iron-ick,” which is a word for when the world acts funny and you don’t know why.

I asked D. who he thought did it, but quiet, out of respect for Keebler, who was leaking snot from her face. I felt dry all the way inside my soul seeing her that way, even though it was raining like always. Keebler’s never cried in front of me. You know how sometimes women get anger issues? Yeah, and—oh. I mean, I guess you’re right… sure, lady. So women—I mean, Keebler—will do stuff like get mad that you took some candy out of her hand and pull out a knife. Me, I think it’s funny, that’s why I keep doing it. I eat the candy, she chases me out of her house with the knife and we keep running for around an hour or so until she gets tired and says, “Let’s go home, Budweiser. I’m so tired my legs are worms.”

But this day, the day when Keebler looked like a knife was cutting up her insides and K-Mart couldn’t be found nowhere, not behind her legs or underneath Mr. Librarian’s tree, she couldn’t even threaten me like usual. Everyone in town was gathered and her friend Shortbread was holding her, telling her everything would be okay. D. whispered back to me, “I don’t know, but whoever he is, we’ll find him. And we’ll make sure he doesn’t get away.” I agreed. It just wouldn’t do to have a crazy man running around among us, and if I weren’t so cowardiced I would’ve thought of finding him myself.

Later on, I was heading back to my place. That’s right, my place. I live by myself. I was walking back to my place, and the river ran past me, faster than I ever could. I made sure to step real careful around puddles so I didn’t get my nice pants dirty. And then I saw something weird, like hair coming out of the ground. I rubbed my eyes and I rubbed them again, but the hair was still there, poking out like white grass. So I touched it and—here’s the real crazy part—the white grass had a face! It was K-Mart. I bet you didn’t see that coming.

So now I’m getting excited. I have K-Mart and he looks kind of bad, covered in mud and really peeved (like I wasn’t the one saving his life, jeez). But I’ll get him back to everyone and then Keebler will be happy and trying to kill me again, and everyone will throw me a party for being a hero.

I pulled K-Mart up and held him in my arms tight so that he couldn’t escape, even though he clawed me up good. I ran fast to Keebler’s house and felt happy.

The end.

What do you mean, is that all? I said “The end”, which means the story is done… Yes, I’m still here. Why? I guess I just feel confused. About some things that happened afterward.

But you heard what I said, and so anything I say from now on is just me saying stuff like a crazy person.

I finally get to Keebler’s house and I stand out there, feeling excited and shiny. The rain and the shards of glass nailed to her house are like mirrors, telling me who I am: a hero. The door’s open and I think to myself, What a good thing it is to be needed in this world.

But when I get inside, I duck back out again fast. Because there’s someone else there besides Keebler. And he sounds just like someone I know but not.

I’m cradling K-Mart, “Shh, shh, baby, it’s okay. Your mom is inside.” He’s heavy and wet and still looks mean, but all that being in a hole stuff must’ve tired him out because he gives one last tiny scream and then just breathes. I peek into the window and there’s Keebler, that’s her face with freckles and her hair is orange like Keebler’s, it must be her. So who’s the guy inside?

“Look, baby. K-Mart was sick. He was really sick. She was, baby. I told you, I was here at your house with her and she started coughing. And I hurried to get her to the doc—will you let me finish what I’m saying? I hurried to get him to the doctor but then a man came in and wrestled him to the ground. And he took him away, and you know how tired I am around 5 PM because of my leg. Why would I lie to you, Rachel, goddammit!”

And the guy slapped her across the face, hard. I’ve always thought that Keebler sort of looks like a sunflower. Celia-something, is its secret name. And so I see a sunflower that’s dying in front of me, and the guy who’s screaming at her looks like a guy with D’s face.

K-Mart, I guess, couldn’t bear the confusion either, because next thing you know he’s squirming and before I can catch him he’s gotten away and runs into the house toward Keebler.

“K-Mart!” Keebler screams, and she’s crying again but she’s happy. “K-Mart, oh baby…”

Which is when… this guy, he looks out at me. And he doesn’t look at me like I’m a man or someone he trusts to keep plants’ secret names, or someone who would help him find a murderer. He’s looking at me like he’s the hero of the story and I was never supposed to be part of it.

I ran. I ran and ran and ran all the way back to my place and then I was sick everywhere. Times like this when you’re scared and alone, I know why Keebler was so happy to have K-Mart back. So I held my arms around an imaginary K-Mart and said, “It’s alright, baby, it’s alright,” and I pretended a cat was laying on my chest and loving me until I went to sleep.

The next day, I woke up feeling just fine. And determined, I felt determined. Because I’d figured it all out: I would go tell D. how I’d found the man who was stealing everyone’s faces and wearing them as his own, who didn’t even know Keebler’s name and called her Rachel. And then everything would go back to normal.

So I pushed my creaky body that felt like it had old man’s bones inside of it up and slowly walked toward where D. lives, around five feet away from my house. He’d built my house for me when I first got here, even though everyone usually makes their own. He’d said one day I’d be strong enough to do anything by myself. He’d said one day I’d be strong enough to finally leave.

I was getting closer to D. and he had to have heard me, but he didn’t look up.

“Hey, D.”

Nothing.

I sighed and sat down, slapping my thigh. “Boy, am I glad you’re here,” I said. (Why was my voice shaking?) “The craziest thing happened yesterday. You see, I found K-Mart.”

Now I was the one who couldn’t look at him. The river surged in front of us, and I imagined myself flowing along with it, away from here. “Yep, she sure was glad to see K-Mart alright. And I’ll be going to visit her after this. Maybe she’ll make me a cake or something.”

“Who was there, Budweiser?”

I laughed. “You’re never going to believe it, D. But I found out that there’s a guy who’s stealing our faces and doing bad things with them. There was this guy and he was… well, he looked a little like you, which is so messed up, and he—” I picked up my hand and brought it against my cheek, soft. But it sounded like a gun. Maybe because he wasn’t saying anything back, maybe because everything was spinning. The rain sparked like fireworks as it landed on the water. I kept repeating myself. “Boy, am I sure glad I found you. Yeah. Boy, am I sure glad I found you.”

D. wasn’t watching the river any more. Suddenly, his face was close to mine, and he said:

“______________”

So after that, I left.

The end.

I can’t tell you what he said, ma’am. And I’ve already told you, didn’t I, that you can’t find me, so why worry yourself sick over something you won’t ever understand. I called because I wanted to have someone listen to me telling a crazy story about a man who stole my friend’s face, but you can’t shut up, so now I have to go. It’s not nice to interrupt people. I might need to figure out what happened over and over again until it makes sense, but I’m still Budweiser, even if that’s a name I gave to myself. It’s the name I chose and I’m proud of it. Oh damn, now I’m crying. K-Mart shouldn’t have died, even if he came back to life somehow, and I still have a job to do. I’ve got to save everyone, and the next time you hear about me it’ll be because I’m in the headlines.

Featured image by Klayton Harmon.

The post K-Mart appeared first on Los Suelos.

“This is Earl.” I lift the box’s lid, gingerly raising him to eye level for everyone to see. “I’ve had him for five years. My mom got him at a yard sale.” Giggles flicker in the back of the room. “He and I go everywhere together. On walks, vacations—” I hold up a few printouts my mom put together, snapshots of Earl and me at the drive-in, an amusement park, blowing bubbles on our porch. “We play fetch, too. Only, Earl is kinda the ball.” I strap Earl into his harness, stroke his gentle face, and toss him into the air. Mr. Mann winces.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, launching the stone upwards again and again, “ever since we broke the ceiling fan, I’m careful about how high I throw him.”

Mr. Mann rolls his seat away from our spectacle, eyes fixed on the airborne rock. “Any questions, class?”

Etta and Camille, best friends forever, whisper to each other and Etta raises her hand.

“Go ahead, Etta.”

“Is that the same rock your mom smashed through the church’s window?” She immediately buries her face into crossed forearms and crumbles beneath bouts of laughter.

“Out in the hall.” Mr. Mann points to the door. “Go.” Etta rolls her eyes to Camille, then stands and obeys.

Mateo shouts a question at me without raising his hand. “Does it also eat Hot Pockets every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?” Everyone cracks up—they still remember the monotony of my second-grade packed lunches.

“Sit.” Mr. Mann rises from his wheely chair and shoos me back to my desk. Hector leans over and whispers to me as I take my seat. “Really cool, wonder why no one wants to come to your house.”

I lose control of Earl’s leash and he lunges after Hector’s pug.

Earl knocks the dog hard on the head, and it yelps before falling, bleeding, to the tile floor. Hector begins to cry, and Mr. Mann yanks Earl from the floor while pulling me to the classroom door. “To the office!” I catch a final glimpse of Earl as I’m shoved into the hall and marched to the principal’s lair.

“I’m sorry, baby. They just don’t want dangerous pets like him living here.” Mom runs her fingers through my hair as I cry and stare at Earl’s empty tank. “He’ll be happier with the other rocks up in Bolt Gun Hills.”

“When can we go visit?” I whine into my forearms, all snotty and red and salty.

“Soon, baby, soon. When I get a weekend off.” She gets me ready for bed, unplugs the tank’s fluorescent light, and carries the enclosure away. It’s all dark except for the blinking streetlights outside my window.

I’m the only student in Los Suelos with in-school suspension, after-school detention, and a mom that assigns apology letters. Between sessions of schoolwork, I have to write an ‘I’m Sorry’ essay for Hector and his stupid pug. When Mom picks me up, she’s covered in the usual mix of mud and damp and dust. But she doesn’t ask me about my day and I don’t bother her about work.

We get back to our apartment, a two-bedroom in the back of a shop, and she points upstairs. “Go do your homework. I’ll let you know when dinner’s ready.” I nod, hug her, and head up to my room.

Just inside my door, I hear a strange bubbling sound. I see a light in the corner.

“Hi, little buddy!”

A small fish swims in the aquatically renovated tank. I turn to run downstairs and thank Mom, but she’s already waiting at the bottom, leaning on the banister and grinning. “Do your homework.”

I finish half of my assignments before giving up to sit and watch my new friend, tentatively named Pearl. I tap on the glass to try and make her move. She doesn’t do much. I don’t have a leash for her, but a game of catch is worth a try.

Her sliminess grosses me out and I drop her a few times as she wriggles in my fingers. “Hold still, buddy.” Cupping Pearl in both hands, I toss her up to the ceiling. I forget the spinning fan, again. Unlike Earl, Pearl doesn’t snap the blades in half—but the blades snap Pearl.

She’s thrown against a wall, bounces off, and hits the floor with a pathetic thud. She doesn’t move when I pick her up. I poke her gills but they remain motionless, orange eyes staring out at nothing.

Mom calls out from downstairs. “Dinner!”

I drop the carcass back into the tank and dash downstairs, doing my best to dry my hands on my pants and avoid the stink of guilt.

“You giv’er a name?” Mom grins as she dishes spaghetti onto my plate.

“No.” I twirl the pasta onto my fork. “Thanks for dinner.”

“Well, whatcha think? That Cabrera kid helped me pick her out, just for you.”

I shrug, and Mom deflates.

“Don’t you like her? I thought— you’re a big kid, you should have a grown-up pet.”

I don’t say a word, pushing noodles between my teeth.

“I miss Earl,” I say, wiping my mouth. “I want my rock back.”

Mom nods, sighs, and grabs another beer.

“Pets, Pets, PETS!!! don’t take returns or give refunds. That fish is what you got.”

We finish the meal in silence.

Mom finds the dead fish the next morning and drains the tank before she goes to work, flushing Pearl down the toilet and into the San Joaquin River. After our silent ride home from detention I shuffle upstairs to start my science homework.

The tank is back, full of air and easter grass.

“Earl!” I run to the glass, heart racing and face beaming. I hold him in my palms and savor the sensation of dry, cold, solid stone. It looks a lot like him, could be a twin. But it’s not Earl. I can tell. Mom has replaced him with a counterfeit.

At dinner, Mom has three beers ready and doesn’t bother asking what I think about the fake. Half-way through the meatloaf, I decide to tell her anyway.

“Mom, I’m not dumb about rocks. That isn’t the real Earl.”

Mom says she’s too busy to drive me to and from school anymore.

The next morning, I hide the Earl-fraud in my pocket and skip class to visit the Hole on the outskirts of town. I stand at the edge and throw the rock down inside, no leash attached, and wait to hear it hit the bottom—

Featured image by Ian Kappos.

The post Spinrock/Snapfish appeared first on Los Suelos.

Mom said they were “my” animals, but she just said that so I’d be the one who had to feed them every day. I didn’t mind though. Twice a day I’d walk down the dirt path from our double-wide to the barn. First I’d let the goats out of their pen to graze. There wasn’t much grass anymore, but they’d still find roots. After the goats, I’d let out the chickens. We had six chickens, but we’d started with more. One evening coyotes had gotten into the pen, even though the chicken wire was buried really deep. The chickens didn’t seem to mind their sisters dying. I always thought that was strange, but chickens were different than people in that way. Well, except for Clover.

Clover wasn’t like the other chickens, she was my favorite. She wasn’t afraid of people like the others. She always came running right up to me when I opened the coop. She was reddish brown, and even though Mom and Dad couldn’t tell her apart from the others, I always recognized Clover. We spent hours together digging for worms in Mom’s old vegetable garden. Most of the plants were dead, but the soil was deeper than other places in the yard.

I talked to Clover a lot when we spent time together. I’d ask her if chickens dreamt like people did and if she got scared in the coop at night. I wished she would answer, but she just scratched the dirt and pecked at her shadow. It was okay because she was a really good listener. Much better than Mom or Dad.

Dad watched us sometimes from the kitchen window over the sink. I’d notice him but I pretend not to. He always looked so angry and I never knew why. Then one day, he told me.

It was late in the summer and the sun was casting long shadows across the desert. When we sat down for dinner that evening the orange light made dad look dark against the window.

“It’s pathetic,” Dad mumbled through his mustache. Mom had just finished microwaving his hungry-man. He peeled the wet plastic film off the top of his Salisbury steak.

“You want me to make something else? We’ve got pork rib,” Mom said to him, doing her best to avoid another fight.

“Not this. Him.” He glared at me across the plastic floral tablecloth.

Mom glanced at me, growing irritable. She always sided with Dad, even before she knew why she should. “What did he do now?”

Dad sat up abruptly, rattling the flimsy folding table. “Every day I see him out there playing in the dirt with those god damned chickens. He’s ten years old, he’s not a fucking infant.” I hated it when he cursed. “He’s got no appreciation for how hard I work to put food on his plate.”

“It’s a tray… not a plate,” I said, tilting up the microwaveable meal.

That was the wrong thing to say. His hand lashed out, catching the back of my head hard. Hot pain sparked behind my ears. The impact jerked my head forward, so I kept it there, avoiding his eyes as tears began to drip into my corn.

“The chickens aren’t pets,” he snapped at my mother.

“I know that.” She scowled.

He glanced out the window, then back at me. “Well it’s about time he knew that also.”

His fist clasped over the back of my shirt and dragged me to my feet. I tripped over myself following him outside.

It was still light enough to see the dirt path that cut down the hill to the barn and the chicken coop beside it. The chickens had been put away for the night and were huddled together in the boxes where they laid their eggs. Their heads popped up and their feathers ruffled as we drew near. Even from a distance my dad’s anger seemed to make them nervous. Everyone always said chickens were stupid. They didn’t seem stupid right now.

Dad flung open the wire door to the chicken coop. The chickens startled, clucking like mad, their flapping kicking up feathers and dust. Somewhere in the back of my mind I understood what was happening and yet I hadn’t made a noise since we’d left the kitchen, that was, until Dad grabbed Clover.

She watched him curiously as Dad lifted her from her roost and drew her against his chest. Clover wasn’t afraid of people like the other chickens were.

“No—Dad, that’s Clover,” I said with a laugh. I knew for sure he’d made a mistake, and he just needed to be reminded of it. But he left the roost without a word, letting the wood and wire door clack behind him. I followed close on his heels.

“Dad, Dad?”

He turned sharply around the back of the barn to a stack of wood covered with a blue wrinkled tarp. He threw off the tarp, revealing a rusty axe laying on top of the pile.

“Dad, stop!”

He didn’t react. I always felt invisible, but something new had overcome my body. It was a tingling that slipped from my fingertips up the back of my neck, raising my hair and making me feel light. I felt outside myself, watching the moment like a ghost might, unable to be heard, unable to reach out. Why couldn’t I reach out? I looked down at my arms and found them pinned to my sides. Someone was holding me, it was mom. When had she gotten here? Had she been here the whole time?

Dad laid Clover on the stump he used for splitting wood, pressing her small body down against the log. She glanced about, not looking scared, just curious. She was always very curious, just like me. Dad raised the axe, gripping it in the middle with one hand. He glanced at my mother. “Shut him up!”

My mother’s hand clasped over my mouth and the world got quieter. I hadn’t realized I’d been screaming.

“You don’t want to chop wood? You don’t want to do your chores? Fine. But food isn’t free.” The axe came down and Clover shuddered, her wings jutting out like she’d just taken flight. Her head swung from her neck, not quite detached. The axe was old, after all, and very dull.

My mom laughed. “Nice one, Dan.”

How could she think this was funny?

Clover was still flapping her wings, kicking up dust in the deep orange light. The sun was gone now. But I could still see her. She was looking at me.

Dad brought down the axe again and this time it cut straight through, embedding itself in the wood stump. Clover’s head dropped to the ground, but her body jerked out from his grasp. She twisted in the dirt, flapping wildly. How was she still alive? I wondered, still feeling far away. The chicken spun and rolled until finally her body disappeared under the backside of the barn.

The soil beneath the barn had been dug out years ago by our dog Penny. Penny had been gone for a long time, but no one had ever filled in the dirt.

“Shit!” Dad shouted as Clover disappeared from view. “God damn it.”

Mom let me go and I fell to my knees. Dad kicked Clover’s head and it disappeared in a cloud of dust and dead grass. “He doesn’t come inside until he finds that chicken,” he said to Mom. “Or until he chops some god damned wood.” He yanked the axe from the log and dropped it before me. With that my parents made their way back up the hill towards our home.

Alone I started to cry. It felt like I cried for a long time.

It was dark when I ran out of tears and caught my breath. The lights from our trailer spilled out over the dirt yard and I could hear the distant sound of the M.A.S.H. theme song. I hated that song. That song meant it was my bedtime. But tonight I wasn’t in bed, I was sitting by the stump covered in feathers, staring at the dark space beneath the barn. Everything was dark, but somehow that space was even darker.

I knew Dad wanted me to get Clover’s body, but the thought was too terrible to entertain. I looked back towards the warm glow of home. If I didn’t do it Dad would be angry in the morning, but what more could he do? He’d taken everything I had.

Not everything.

I whipped around in the dark, the hairs on my arms raising. Someone had spoken from the blackness. What was more, they’d responded to something I hadn’t even said out loud.

“Hello?” I said, glancing uneasily towards the far side of the barn.

Despite being clear it had sounded like a whisper, but a wet whisper, sticky.

“Who’s there?” I asked the dark.

Who has always been there?

The voice wasn’t coming from behind the barn, it was coming from beneath it. I leaned down, trying to see into the inky black between the exposed wood beams of the foundation. There was something moving.

“I don’t know,” I said, acting braver than I felt. “Who?”

Who chases shadows by your side?

I frowned. “C—Clover?”

The small brown shape of Clover came into view under the barn, her silhouette only just lit by the dim light of the house far behind me. Her head was missing, but she was alive… she was talking.

“H-How?” I stammered.

I have always been able to speak. Now you can hear me.

My fear slipped away, replaced instead with a wave of unabashed awe. It was impossible, incredible.

“Am I dreaming?” I asked.

Do I ever speak in your dreams?

I thought about it. “No.”

Why would now be any different?

I laughed in disbelief. “This is amazing! I have to tell someone!” I got to my feet, but Clover stopped me with her wet whisper.

Do your parents ever listen to your stories?

I paused. “No,” I admitted.

Then why would now be any different?

She was right. I didn’t have anyone to tell. After a brief hesitation I sat back down.

We talked for a long time, there in the dirt by the barn. I asked Clover all the things I’d ever wanted. I asked her about her dreams and about her oldest memories.

“How did you learn to talk?” I asked as the lights from the house went dark and the television grew quiet.

She was barely visible now in the glow of a cloud-covered moon, but she still responded in the same slow whisper she’d had the whole night.

By listening.

“To me?”

To everything.

The word everything hung in my thoughts. “Before… you said Dad hadn’t taken everything from me.”

He has not.

“But what do I have left?”

Is it not obvious? Clover said. You have your curiosity. That is something we have always had in common.

I shrugged. “I guess so.”

What else are you curious about?

I thought about it for a moment, finally asking the question I’d been hesitant to ask before. “Why doesn’t Dad like me?”

Too often you ask why he does nothing for you, instead of thinking about what you can do for him.

I glanced at the wood pile, a lightness growing in my chest. “You’re right.”

Make yourself useful, Clover whispered.

Mom and Dad’s room was dark, but the yellow light from their brown plastic alarm clock was more than enough to see them lying in bed. Dad was sleeping on his back, closest to the door. That made it easier. I raised the axe high overhead and brought it down hard on the front of his neck. The axe didn’t go all the way through on the first swing. It was old, after all, and very dull. Mom woke up just before the second swing. She screamed in the same way I did when dad had cut Clover’s head off.

“It’s okay,” I said to her, smiling. I understood now why she’d laughed before. “Now Dad will finally talk to me.” I raised the axe again. “You both will.”

Featured image by Maria Pogosyan.

The post Clover appeared first on Los Suelos.

Weird fucking place, Los Suelos. Not much to it besides a slaughterhouse and a meager baseball stadium. The slaughterhouse made sense. Those tend to be in out of sight, out of mind locales. Nobody likes thinking about the violence that begets their beef. Why anybody would put a ballpark out here was beyond me though.

My office had received a torrent of phone calls about jackalope sightings in the area. Such things would usually be ignored by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, but we were collaborating with a group of graduate students at UC Berkeley who were studying Shope papilloma virus, assisting their research by collecting infected specimens on their behalf when the opportunity arose. See, SPV is one possible origin of the jackalope myth. It infects various species of Leporidae, mainly cottontails, and causes antler-like tumors to grow out of their heads. Aside from the jackalope myth itself, there’s little to no evidence of jackrabbits showing symptoms for SPV, and the reports clearly indicated these were black-tailed jackrabbits, not desert cottontails, so this was all very exciting in terms of the research. To me, taking these calls seriously seemed like a mistake. I didn’t have much say in the matter. Despite my resistance, I’d been dispatched to nowheresville.

I was to rendezvous with Carla Cooper, a local who’d called claiming to have seen jackalopes on her property. She was in her yard watering a withered garden when I arrived. As I stepped down from my truck her eyes flashed to the sidearm on my hip. “Carla?” I asked.

“And you are?” she retorted flatly.

“August Knoll. I’m here from,”

“Fish and Wildlife,” she interrupted, her face lighting up with relief. “Thanks for driving all the way here from Sacramento. I can’t tell you how much it means to me. Nobody’s been of any help at all. The sheriff damn near laughed his head off when I called him.”

“No problem, ma’am.” Carla was a portly woman with pale skin, gray hair and deep brown eyes like vats of molasses. “Well, let’s get to it,” I said. “Tell me about your experience with these, uh, jackalopes.”

“They started turning up maybe ten days ago. Whole bunch of them. They’ve practically overrun the town by now, burping all over the place.”

“Excuse me? What do you mean by that?”

“Didn’t you listen to my messages? They’ve been coming through at night and breathing some kind of putrid, reeking gas at us. Lots of folks keep their windows open at night to cool off and it comes right in through the screen.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, ma’am, but surely the smell you’re describing is coming from somewhere else. The slaughterhouse, maybe?”

“It isn’t the slaughterhouse. You’ll see. They do it every night. It’s not just the smell that gives it away. Their breath glows in the dark like a swarm of infernal fireflies. My husband inhaled it and it made him sick. He started acting strange and before long he sprouted antlers of his own.”

She was deadly serious. I wiped sweat from my brow, pissed that I’d trekked all the way out here for this cockamamie bullshit, but I couldn’t just abandon my assignment after one loony story. I still needed to at least try to trap a specimen for the study before I could go. I decided to indulge her.

“So your husband breathed in a mysterious gas and started behaving oddly. Why weren’t you affected as well?”

“Don’t know. It only seems to infect certain folks. Just got lucky, I guess.”

“This has happened to other people in town?”

“Oh yes.”

I decided to leave that alone. “What was strange about your husband’s behavior?”

“Well, at first he just couldn’t stop scratching his head. Damn near itched himself bald until—” she placed her wrists on her head, splaying her fingers out— “little nubs poked up out of his head like crocuses in spring. Before long, he had full blown antlers, just like the jackalopes. Then he couldn’t stop rambling about the voices.”

“The voices?” I tried to hide my ebbing patience.

She nodded. “He heard voices telling him to go underground. He couldn’t shut them up. He said he needed to know what was calling him from beneath the earth. One night he just left. I woke up in the morning and he was gone.”

“What about the antlers? Did you try to get him to a doctor?” I really didn’t give a shit and this story was already beyond laughable, but I sensed that if I didn’t humor her then she wouldn’t tell me what I really needed to know.

“Of course I did! He wouldn’t listen. It was just as soon as those antlers came through that he started hearing the voices, like they were antennae picking up a radio signal. If the antlers went away, so would the voices and then he’d never be able to get to the bottom of things, or at least, that’s what he said.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Oh, last night, after dark. He comes out every evening with the jackalopes. He won’t speak to me though, just looks at me with these wild eyes like he’s an animal or something.” Her voice began to break, tears welling up. “I don’t think he remembers who I am anymore. Please, will you help me?”

I couldn’t help but wonder if her husband even existed. Were these merely the ramblings of a hard boiled brain? “Could you show me where the jackalopes usually turn up? I just need to set some traps. If I see your husband I’ll try to talk some sense into him. What’s his name?”

“Joe,” she sniffled.

“Joe. Alright. If I see him tonight, I’ll see if I can’t get him to come inside.”

Carla led me up a trail into what she called the Bolt Gun Hills. In thirsty glen we came upon a thicket of creosote which camouflaged a pit five feet in diameter. I parted the branches and peered down into the hole to see where it led, but to no avail. It seemed neverending, sinking into abyssal blackness.

“That’s where they come from. Every night, without failure. Joe too.” She choked back another spate of tears. “Please, August. Bring my husband back to me and kill those fucking jackalopes.”

“I’ll do my damnedest.” I walked her back to her trailer, sat her down and consoled her a bit more before heading back to my truck. It seemed reasonable to assume that anyone else I spoke to on this matter would be equally off their rocker, so I decided not to waste my time. All I wanted was to leave this godforsaken place. I went to get some gas and food. I set traps around the pit and waited for dusk.

I’ll admit, that xeric wasteland was rather beautiful at night. The waning moon shone like a great pearl in an ebon sea. Meteors streaked against the starscape. The sweet breath of a cool breeze on my neck laved away my frustration from the day’s absurdities and allowed me to refocus on the task at hand.

I could’ve let the traps do their work overnight. Instead I posted up in my truck, guzzled some coffee and stayed awake so that I could see with my own two eyes that nothing miraculous was taking place here in Los Suelos. I needed to prove it to Carla, or maybe to myself. Eventually, creatures started stirring in the twilight. Bats, coyotes, even a kit fox emerged, but no jackrabbits.

My eyelids had begun drooping when the thicket started to rustle. One by one, a drove of hares filed out of the brush. They bore honest-to-God antlers, not papillomas. Every last one of them evaded my traps with ease, seemingly unaware of the pheromones and food that lied within. Many scampered off deeper into town, but a dozen of them formed a circle in a small clearing and stood up on their hind legs with their heads pointed skyward. As they opened their mouths, a verdant, glimmering mist poured out and coalesced to form a wheel above them. While it swirled overhead, a larger shadow rose up from the pit. The silhouette of a man loomed in the darkness and as the moonlight illuminated him I saw he was naked, caked in mud from the bank of some subterranean stream and sporting massive antlers of his own. He ambled into the circle of jackalopes, raised his hands up to the twirling wheel and began to grunt and groan.

I was stupefied. This couldn’t be happening and yet it was. Joe Cooper was standing in front of me leading a congregation of jackalopes like a demented druid. I got out of my truck. “Joe!” I hollered. Nothing. I called again. Still nothing. Racking my brain for some way, any way, to get his attention, I picked up a rock and chucked it at him. The stone caromed off his head, prompting him to slowly swivel in my direction. As I met his gaze I felt the wildness that Carla had described. He looked right through me, like he could see my very soul and wanted to shove it down his gullet.

He started to speak.

“Succumb to the will of the earth. Leave behind the profligacy and defilement of this surface world and be baptized in the cleansing clay of restoration. Below. You must go below.”

He left the circle of jackalopes and began walking toward me, lumbering at first, then in an all-out sprint, his hands outstretched, his phallus erect, his mouth frothing. Before I could think I pulled out my pistol and fired three shots, one into his forehead and two into his chest. He took a few more steps before falling dead in the dirt. His antlers disintegrated into dust and blew away.

I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I looked over to the jackalopes, suddenly transfixed by the whirling cloud above them. I stepped into the middle of the circle and let the vapor envelope me. Its aroma shifted from sulfurous to saccharine as I breathed it in and in that moment I was overcome by a primeval felicity. Antlers erupted from my skull, blood flowed down my face, but I felt no pain. I could hear whispers beckoning me, echoing up from the pit beneath the creosote.

“Descend. Descend. Descend.”

Featured image by Maria Pogosyan.

The post Jackalope appeared first on Los Suelos.

Dark all around. Downer downer colder colder. The smell at first six feet is rot. The smell of organs exposed. Like when Teddy got ran over. Orange and white Teddy—hmm. 

Deeper, the smell of sweet dirt. Earth. Up my nose and in my mouth. Touch to feel the electric pulse of the pillowy loose soil. Prickling my fingertips as I dig. Zip, zap with every touch.

Mother used to say no sweet powder for me. White, bright, like snow. On her mouth, in her nose. She zipped. She zapped. She’s dead. 

Her head rolled back every time. Her pupils gone. Gone. She’s gone.

She liked to zip.

The leader zaps.

I roll.

They roll. We dig. Dig, he says? No. Bury in love. Yes. We bury, bury ourselves in pillowy love. Love for another—love from one another. From her, he says. To us, he says. 

It is the great secret. The great unveiling. Right under our feet, he says. 

Right under her nose, I could always see. Mother’s great secret. 

I remember the progression. I remember. I—I was having dreams of lips and elbows that left me in wet underwear every morning. I was eleven and wanted to learn how to skate, but he left. He took his Spanish with him. No more mijo or por favor. 

I don’t know how long he had been gone. It was the empty carton of milk, the piling of dishes in the sink, the lack of notes on the fridge saying he was going to be late with a twenty attached. Mostly, it was the silence when I called out, “Dad!”

I wanted to believe he’d just disappeared, because his clothes still smell of Schaefer’s. 

I wished we had traded information before he fucking vanished, instead of the random small talk about the Blue Dicks and how Bulkhead has “big shoes to fill”—whatever the fuck that meant. I couldn’t feed my ass with that useless information, or take care of my mom with it.

He knew about Mom’s “habit.” I didn’t know she couldn’t live by herself, be by herself.

His absences burst open a wound I didn’t know had carved itself onto me. My eyes watched and my skin kept count of the countless times I saw my father drag my mother home. 

I—I—I remember the trees outside. It was always the two branches protruding and the stump holding it all together. But when the door would swing open, it would be my father with his two hands, carrying my high mother.

Pes-a-do. Clinging on to me. Dad’s silly Spanish. Heavy? Or careful? Cui-da-do. 

Ropes tight on hooks on me. Flashlight, no batteries. Riding up my balls. 

Lower lower tighter tighter. Gloves are optional, yell the angels. I like the dirt.

In my nails. Up my nose. On my tongue. Zip, zap.

Brought to you by Schaefers’ dead smiles and thank yous. 

In our water and on our skin—Schaefers find their way around. 

They make the best zip around! Magically nutritious. 

The leader eats a spoonful a day to keep the heavens at bay. It’s the great secret. 

It’s the basement secret. 

A little spoonful every day. Far from the earth is far from the truth, he says. Their eyes roll back.

White eyes in the basement. Angels in a cold room with uniforms for us. Holiens. 

Gloves optional. 

Oh! Finding bits of bone, such fun. Dad, is that you? Mom?  

White tip to tongue. It’s never biteable. 

At the top with everyone, we all started standing on the pillowy dirt. 

Now, only the earth holds me. Loves me. Surrounds me. 

She did leave me one parting gift. It was the start of junior year. 

By this time, she had sold most of the furniture. The only thing she was reluctant to sell was the splintering wood stool she dragged home on the first anniversary of my dad leaving.

“I can provide for us,” she said, grabbing my shoulders. Her eyes were coming out of their sockets. “I got you, kid.” Her pencil-like fingers dug into my skin. She was taller than me. Her breath smelled like the juice at the bottom of a trash can. Next to her bony body was the yellow, clunky stool. 

At that time, I believed her. I was not in charge of her. She was in charge of me. She was my mother. We had a fully furnished home still. The walls were still painted eggshell yellow. The jalapeños in the garden were fewer but still there. I was eating at school or parents were dropping off dishes and being “real sorry about my situation.” It was always the same ladies who would tell me that my father “wouldn’t have wanted it to be this way.” 

Anyways, the stool was one of the last things left inside the house that was usable. I was about to meet up with Raf to skate at the drive-in when there were three knocks. 

“I tried calling,” a voice on the other side of the front door said. The smell of sage and incense stopped me as I headed to the back. I stood in the empty room. Her voice echoed.

“Hello? Skyler?”

The walls were aged with stains. I stayed still in hopes that Paloma Plascencia would leave. 

“I can see you.”

My head whipped over to the living room window. Half of her body was visible through the curtain. Her braids angled towards the ground as she tilted her head further away from the door. All I could do was wave. She smiled in reply. 

I opened the door and pointed at the phone ripped out of the wall. The wires looked to be moving in the hole, beating. A roach scattered away.

There in front of me was my mother’s parting gift, although I didn’t know it yet. Paloma looked at my Schaefer-approved butcher boots. The version they gave to their employees ten years ago. Her eyes traveled up to my long, curly, unwashed hair.

“I just wanted to check in and make sure everything was okay with you,” Paloma said. I glanced behind me. The one-time living room was now occupied by stacks of community bulletin reports and a lamp strategically placed near the center. 

“My mom isn’t here if that’s who you’re looking for.” I looked down, to her olive cheeks, to her sandals. I kept my eyes away from hers.

“No.” She hesitated. “I actually came to see you.” 

I could feel her stare burning into my chest and my cheeks getting hot. I took a gulp of air.

“If she owes you, that’s between you and her. Sorry.” I could feel my ears getting red. “Well, if that’s all you need—”

As my palm pushed the door towards Paloma, she stuck her vibrant market bag in between us. 

“I’m not here to see Sunny. I’m here to see you,” she said in a tone only used for misbehaving children. I pulled the door back and leaned my head against the edge.

“Yeah? What’s up?” 

“Can I come in?”

I moved back so she could step in. Her head kept turning, trying to look into every empty corner. I motioned towards the wooden stool. 

Her eyes stopped searching and she looked at me. She shook her head no and motioned for me to sit on the stool. 

Our feet echoed in the empty house. I sat. She looked more comfortable. 

“I don’t know if you already knew this, but your mom was trying to get help,” Paloma said. 

“Isn’t she always?”

“She had been trying for a couple weeks.” 

Her eyes didn’t move from mine.

“Oh. Good for her.” 

“Yes. Well, she found it. She found help and she’s at a point in her healing where she thought it was best to… to find a change of scenery.” 

Paloma’s fingers were twisted in knots by the time she finished her sentence. My mother’s last words to me, well, last argument, started playing in my head.

“Right. So you mean to tell me that her last words to me were ‘give me a break, you fucker.’ Sure, Paloma.” 

The spicy chips in my stomach were trying to make their way up. Paloma’s gaze did not break. Her eyes tracked all my facial movements. Her eyebrows relaxed to the sides for a more compassionate look. 

Images of my mother crying and yelling and pointing her finger filled me. 

“So she thought you would be the best person to tell me?” My feet tapped the linoleum floor. “What is she into now? Rocks? Herbs? Jesus?”

I didn’t notice Paloma’s hand on my shoulder. I felt a warm sensation run down my lip, onto my chin. Without skipping a beat, Paloma’s thumb wiped the trickle of blood. 

“She’s trying,” she said, her voice soft like the cajeta she sold on Sundays. “She just came into my place three weeks ago. I didn’t ask her where she was headed, but her eyes and demands were clear and she wanted me to talk to you. She just doesn’t want you going down the same path.”

My teeth reached for my bottom lip again, currently bruising up from before.                                     

“She was afraid of people leading you down a hole you can’t get out of. You know.” 

I could feel Paloma’s eyes on the dirt under my fingernails. 

We start at the top with shovels and ropes, and gloves. And no hair. The ones in white call on us, tell us we need to dig.

Actually, we start at the beginning with friends and families and nails.

And when our throats have gone sore, and we are singular, digging—the leader hears us, and then he comes. He comes and spreads joy with his words and reminds us we are not alone. It echoes.

To keep digging. We are buried in love and in truth. 

It’s hard to hear in the downer downer. It’s me and the dirt and the dirt and the dirt.

It’s like a magic trick. The more you show him you can, and the lower you go, the less light you see, but you can feel the zip and zap, right? You can feel the love?

You can hear the higher-ups sing and chant. 

I chew on truth. 

That’s all you get here. Up your nose, in your mouth.

Colder colder. 

Am I climbing up or digging down. Magic, right? RIGHT?

It’s in my nose, in my mouth, in my eyes.

Downer lower.

Colder colder. 

Featured image by Allison Mick.

The post The Hand That Guides You appeared first on Los Suelos.

Her job was to maneuver that arm back and forth for eight, sometimes ten hours a day, as men in butcher hats and white aprons performed their tasks on the killing floor. It was hard to fathom how much blood came from a single cow. Once, she bought ten gallons of milk and poured them out onto the linoleum floor in the shack she shared with her husband, to demonstrate. Kiln’s crooked sneer shot despondency through her. “Disgusting.” Perhaps if the milk was red, or if it was mud, or red clay from the hills, he would get it.

The disconnect between Kiln and Cherry began in his harshness. It rose like a cliff before her. At first they were in love, then they drank and drank, then somehow a child was there. Kiln was the first to go sober when Cherry crumbled. He moved closer to town, away from the river, to live in a real house. Kiln got a new woman, while Cherry sent their son to school in mildewed polo shirts and khaki shorts as they settled the divorce. The new woman was a true believer, and she folded Kiln into the architecture of her Church, which taught something about praying beneath the dirt. Cherry thought they worshiped the grave. She had always wanted to be cremated anyway.

Across the river the Santa Gertrudis slept in the fields. Cherry walked through them toward the slaughterhouse each morning, while Hardy woke alone in the empty shack, cold eggs on the counter, dusty black sneakers by the door. She touched each bull on the backs of their necks, conferring peace. Before work this morning, she noticed one of the bulls asleep in the morning sun, laid out oddly on its side.

Orange light grazed withered blades of grass as she approached. The bull’s body was a shadowy slip instead of the familiar, oblong hunk. She turned its head over by the ears, then dropped it fast. The head hit the grass with a thud. The face was skinned perfectly around the mouth and eyes, revealing clean, cream bone. Inside its jester’s smile the tongue was missing. The steer had lost its bloat, a skeletal raft against the cool grass. Where was the blood? She was somewhere between grief and curiosity. She patted its stomach, finding it wrinkled and empty.

The official divorce proceedings took place not long after. Cherry looked out of the courthouse windows, not really listening as the judge split up their property. She saw a black dead tree against a sea of beige scrub in the small rural downtown and sat on her hands til they were numb, while the lawyers collected their papers and whispered to each other. The new woman and other members of the church sat as witnesses or whatever. The usual shit. Escaping Kiln was not what she had hoped. The freedom was supposed to be a rebirth, but the new her was only what the town saw: a divorced woman obsessed with _____. Now Keith was at the stand taking Kiln’s side, describing the jaundice in Cherry’s wide eyes when she’d come screaming into the abattoir on the morning of the mutilations. The judge let her keep custody of the boy, but wherever she looked, it was obvious who she was now. Pitiable. Pathetic. The courtroom looked like a TV set, staged and surreal, a dollhouse full of plastic people poised in their perfection. Too sober, like it was a lie. Everyone had at least one vice. She’d never visited the Church of the Belowdown, but somehow…

Downtown was thick with people, slivered eyes shielded against an angry sun. Skin cooked sweet with sweat. Seeing the crowd, she thought of blood moving through a heart, then gushing fast from the cattle’s necks. The rest of the herd was still living, and Schaefer Meat trucks came and left, bringing in new steer, carting off what was killed, but to where, she didn’t know. She really didn’t know—like she’d been thrust into the middle of a classroom, called on to answer some question she’d missed. And she was staring at herself as if from a very high distance, cheering herself on, hoping she could come up with the answer. Looking back before the divorce, there was a lot she hadn’t been present for. Where was her son?

She shook the brain from her hair and laid her head on the lacquered bar.

“Need a refresher?”

Miriam, the barkeep, was an atheist, Cherry guessed by the tattoos on her arms and hands.

“Please.”

“Of what?” Miriam nodded at the empty lowball.

“Whatever,” Cherry said, and put her head back down.

That night Cherry trudged through town, toward the shack. A young couple avoided her on the street as they smoked cigarettes. “I, too, love to judge others at a level of cleanness I can’t pass myself,” she growled. The couple returned their gaze to each other, and she eyed them, a bitter pit cracking through her stomach. She wished she still loved Kiln the way people love in new relationships, ruefully obsessed, with fullness and a blind eye to any former cruelty. Why did every notion of him being with someone new make her want to die? She hated so much about him. Her sour turned to pity as she hit the dark trail home, imagined the couple ten years from now in the place she had just left: fucking each other out of routine, the corpse-kiss of jilted vulnerability. At the end of her marriage there had been nothing beneath their flesh when they were making love. Just the cold, torpid sack of her body giving Kiln what she thought he wanted. It hadn’t worked. Long relationships just end up this way, she thought. Better to be alone. Though she wasn’t really alone; a distant drunken memory of Hardy, playing a handheld video game at the kitchen table when she got home, was lodged in her dreams. She never saw him enough. She held him while he slept, the curve of his head making a deep ache within her. He’d never comprehend her love—with every year, the purity of his need would fade.

Cherry dreamt of childhood. A board and batten farmhouse near the Bolt Guns. The inside papered in yellow roses. Her father had built it on credit, then lost it to the bank when the USGS shuffled out of town. The night he moved her and her mother into the shack she now inhabited, the farmhouse burned down. In the dream, Cherry dug through the chalky rubble until she hit dirt, looking for keepsakes of childhood. Photos, baby blankets, early drawings of people with stick legs and flat, uninterested potato faces. All ash. The memories flitted in her mind as dappled blots—then, beneath it, she uncovered the lips of a child, then unearthed cheeks, eyes, Hardy. She scratched at the compacted dirt around his face, frantically trying to free him, until he was released, rubbing and clawing at his tongue to clear his mouth caked in dust.

She screamed and woke. In bed, she checked him for marks. He coughed a little and rolled onto his back. Dirt beneath his nails, like her mother. She thought of love as a thousand tiny barbed hooks tied to nylon lines that tugged her body in one direction. At his mouth, the smallest bit of spit turned black. She pulled the covers over herself and tried to sleep, unsure if she could. Then dawn came, and she was gone again, toward the fields. That same steer still lay dead, unbothered, like time hadn’t taken anything from it.

At the carcass of the Santa Gertrudis, her muscles tightened. A sparkle rose from the steer’s body like a lens flare. She knelt and thought of Kiln and the times she’d carried things alone, knuckling around inside the ribs. So this is agony. Feeling sorry for the spear in your side for eternity, she thought. A quartz the size of her chest rolled from the steer onto the grass, with a hole as big as her fist. Inside was more lumpy rock. She gripped the rock inside, then she emerged into full bright light, her body lifting from the earth like morning fog. Ascending felt the same as falling, like a body to the rocks, with no bright gash at the end. Her mind felt flawless. She could look through it with precision, something a thousand-thousand carats large, polished and set on titanium prongs. Was duty a weakness or a strength? She knew the answer now. What was the next dream? A time when Kiln had asked her: Love or loyalty? She said love. “I would have thought you’d choose loyalty.” She explained her decision, and he didn’t respond. Maybe you will start to see how we are different, she’d thought. You won’t love me now, you’ll see the cracks in the fantasy you’ve made of me. Maybe you’ll see how this won’t work out. But in it she still wanted him, and had fantasized their family and all of it had come to fruition, even the devastating end of it. He never came to a single doctor appointment, only saw the ultrasound pictures. The years passed and she’d chosen loyalty after all.

Visions moved: she watched her son dig holes as big as bulls, coughing ash, then chunks of coal. He cried then slapped his chest, complaining of being squeezed, as though being compressed from inside. He took a rock to his face until it was no longer perceptible as human. Instead, roses, blooming deep, wrapped in ribbons. The arms kept striking anywhere that flesh remained. She let the visions play until he was just a pelvis and ribs, the lungs sclerosed. The secluded heart became hard and clear, a faceted gem.

Through its light she saw Hardy again: this time clean and older, healthy. He was in a hospital room next to a bed. Cherry thought, His wife! Their child! But in the bed was her. The crystal heart began to hum—and oh, how it hummed!—as she drew closer to this mirror. The arms were strapped to the bed with leather. Scarred petals scraped outward from her cheek and mutilated her nose on the left side. Her fingernails were removed. Only the softest skin remained, nervous at every breeze. She drew closer to it—the cure—the vibrato of the bovine heart louder with each breath—and inside her bedridden chest, too, was quartz, rutilated black and red, held open with silver speculums. She felt a lump in her throat. Her hologram hand reached down toward her. She was on the edge of something big, could feel it building in her core. The son touched her cheek, the real her, the one in bed. A tear black as blood slipped from her eye. She swallowed hard, then looked above her, somewhere far away. This next bit was meant for just her son to hear. She came to find, at every corner, everyone was cruel. She would always remember kindness.

Featured image by Kelly Harmon.

The post Rosehead appeared first on Los Suelos.

We were turning down the street towards our apartment building when Mom’s car zoomed past us. Heading towards the Drive-In. Again.

“Wanna come over?” Estrella offered. 

“Yeah, you can eat dinner with us so you’re not lonely!” Mateo always said the wrong thing. 

I’ll miss them. 

The next day Mom brought me to the Church of the Belowdown. I had to get up so early. She sped towards the Drive-In, the morning sun filling the car. Her tires made dust clouds in the dirt that floated thick on the air like smoke. I just wanted to read my book but she drives so fast that reading makes me dizzy. She thinks driving fast is cool but it’s not, it’s dangerous. She thinks going to the Drive-In in the daytime is cool but it’s not, it’s just boring and weird. There were barely any cars there when we arrived.

Carrying my book, holding my place with my finger, I followed her into the run-down building next to the Drive-In. It reminded me of the dozens of boring places she’d drag me and I’d wait for her and read. The Church of the Belowdown was like the DMV and the sales orientation and the life-coaching workshop and all the jobs she’s ever had rolled into one. I like to read. But I’d do that anywhere, even at a special celebration pancake breakfast.

With a ka-shunk she opened a pair of doors into a big empty room like the auditorium at school but without the movie theater chairs. In the corner of the room were stacks and stacks of beige folding chairs. The kind of chairs from the meetings we went to when I was Mateo’s age and Mom would talk about how Daddy got sick and went away and she would cry. Other people talked about how their daddies got sick and they’d cry too. All the crying made it hard to read.

I hoped this wasn’t like those meetings. There were so many chairs. Four stacks of twenty-four chairs equals ninety-six chairs. I hoped that many people’s daddies hadn’t gone away too. 

Mom said come on and started unfolding the chairs. She showed me where to put them. I carried chairs to her, two under each arm, with my book still tucked around my finger. The faster we got the chairs set out, the sooner I could get back to the Griffins. But she kept asking me questions and then answering them herself. 

“Do you know how special this place is? No, of course you don’t.” 

She kept telling me how happy she felt, how glad she was that I was here so I could feel her happiness myself.

“Okay,” was all I said. 

When people started arriving, she ran over to them and I found a chair in the back where I finally could sit and wait and read. Some of the people were wearing helmets and jingly metal things. Mom had some of those jingly things too and wore them as a necklace and on her belt; they made a horrible metal-y sound. But the jingly metal wasn’t so bad that day because I was reading and the Guild of Griffins were fighting a flying army of metallic serpents so I tried to pretend the noise was the crash of claws on armor.

“Hibiscus!” 

Mom was doing that thing where she greets someone way too loud, like she wants everyone to know they’re friends. 

I rolled my eyes and kept reading and trying not to think of Mateo telling me that their mom said my mom was “desperate.” When I heard that, I felt cold and wet and itchy. Inside my body and outside. It’s a cold, wet word. But that was the word that her voice reminded me of right now. She wanted these people to like her so much. It is so desperate. 

“What are you reading?”

The man that Mom was being loud and desperate at appeared behind me, which surprised me because he was wearing the most jingly metal things of anyone in the room.

“May I see your book?”

I don’t know why I handed it to him, but I did. 

“The Guild of Griffins and the School in the Sky,” he read in that tone that adults use when they’re trying to be nice to you by acting impressed when they aren’t. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t desperate but it was still cold and wet. “You know, a school in the sky sounds pretty scary to me.”

I laughed despite myself. Scary?

“Yes, scary!” He laughed, too. He had pale creases in his face and when he laughed the orange-y tan parts matched up together again. “It’s so high up.”

I was still laughing when I said, “Heights aren’t scary.”

He grabbed me and I stopped laughing. The feeling that overcame me started as a sting in my tender armpits then sizzled into indignation. He scooped me up and held me off the ground by my armpits. Up over his head. When I realized that no matter how hard I kicked and twisted I was entirely out of control and couldn’t make him put me down, the feeling running through me turned colder, wetter, more hollow. Fear and anger bloomed in my chest.

He asked me if I felt safe and entirely un-scared. I looked down into the pale rivers lining his face. 

“No.”

Then that man with his big eyes and stringy white hair threw me. Tossed me up towards the ceiling. Like a daddy would. Before. 

I screamed for him to stop. My feet hungry for the solidness of the linoleum surface. 

He gently lowered me down. “Up high can be scary sometimes. Maybe it’s better here on the ground. Maybe it gets better the further down you go.” 

He handed back the book, opened up to the page I’d left off on.

“W-well,” I countered, “it’s not scary for the Griffins because they can fly.” I’m almost ten years old. I’m not some baby to toss around and feel bad for. 

“But you can’t fly, can you?” 

I was frustrated by his words and the way he said them to me. It felt like he had just cheated at talking. 

He patted both my shoulders and walked towards Mom and some other people. Mom yelled, “Hibiscus!” again and he pulled her in close. He pushed their foreheads together. Not like a kiss. She had tears in her eyes. Maybe there is something worse than a kiss? I felt all twisted up inside. Sitting back down on the cold, tan folding chair, I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate on the words. It felt like he’d taken the Griffins away from me even though I was still holding my book. 

The thing started and he talked forever. He did the same word-cheating he did to me: saying that something is one thing and then using it another way. People jingled their metal things when he did that. Mom click-click-clicked the one she wore on a necklace. Whenever I tried to read, I couldn’t. I felt dizzy like when Mom drives too fast.

The people all stood up and I thought it meant we got to go home but instead they grouped in circles around big barrels of dirt. Mom and I did too. The Hibiscus guy said to grab a handful of dirt and whisper your fears into it. Mom did and I did too. I told the dirt that I was afraid of not being able to read again. I tried to hear Mom’s fears but she whispered so low and for so long, I couldn’t make out a word. 

After that, Mom took me to the diner. She said it was for a special celebration pancake breakfast. I remember wondering if it meant we were moving again. I even hoped a little, so we wouldn’t have to go back to that place.

She kept fidgeting with the dangly metal thing, click click click. She kept saying how happy she was and I said, “Okay” again, but she looked sad and scared. She said she’d had problems before, but she sees everything so clearly now. She said things are getting so much better for her. She said this is what we need to do. 

Our pancakes came and she stopped talking. I ate my pancakes quickly and read chapter twelve while she slowly picked at hers.

By that time next week, we lived at the Church, next to the Drive-In, with Hibiscus Bernard. 

Featured image by the author.

The post Folding Chairs appeared first on Los Suelos.

Growling along to the electric chiming of Sarah’s Ibanez hollow-body licks, Press again started to feel the sickness that didn’t want to admit it was a sickness. It seemed to disguise itself as a desire rather than sickness. He’d pretended it wasn’t the sickness, the one that made people scrabble in the ground; people who sometimes vanished completely. But he was scared, bone-scared, that the sickness might actually be just what he had. 

The rehearsal squat had cooled off quickly after the sun set, but sweat was sticky in his palm, starting to run down the battered old Shure microphone. He kept hammering out the vocals but all the time he was feeling a subtle feverishness, a little nausea—a growing energy, too. It was as if someone had dosed his beer with bad meth: energetic, in a hateful way. A weird smell was coming off the mic as he forced himself to yowl out: “A portal to a molten sun you’ll find just up 99/ Follow me, mind the pothole/ Fall into a continent way better than fuckin ours…”

And then he stopped singing. He stared at the mic. It seemed to be sweating. 

The lyrics to “The Lost Continent” had something to do with Hibiscus Bernard’s ranting invocations; but in Press’s mind, he’d written it to be satirical, to mock Bernard’s cult—but now…

“Press, dude, you’re missing the cue!” Sarah said, rolling her eyes and stopping the guitar strings’ vibration with the flat of her hand. “It’s right there at the end of the third bar—”

“Yeah, whatever,” he said. “I’m done waiting for them.”

“Marc’s always late, I don’t know about Vyv.”

“I don’t care, I’m done for today, I just…” He grabbed the warm Corona from the top of the crackling old Twin Reverb, downed the last of it, tossed it at the pile of broken glass in the corner, and rushed out the door just as the bottle crashed to pieces behind him.

“You’re a dick today!” Sarah called after him, hitting a loud dissonant chord on her guitar. The sound followed him into the grasslands.

The intrusive energy was buzzing through Press’s nervous system—it was as if he could feel his actual physical nerves as a network, every individual branch, each branching giving out a sickly humming like an offkey guitar string. He had a mental image of his nervous system alone, sans body, running across the sere, grassy flat ground at the edge of town.  

And still he ran. There was still a little light, some from the few working streetlights behind him, and he saw a lizard flicker toward its night-time den; heard coyotes ululating to one another in the Bolt Gun Hills. Felt the foreign energy prodding him, shoving him onward. He heard his panting, loud in his ears, as if through a PA system…

Where the hell am I going? he asked himself.

Press made himself stop, right there in the middle of the sandy, dusty plain, in a patch of sage. Gasping, wiping sweat and dust from his eyes with the back of his hand, he blinked around—and then forgot to breathe for about ten seconds. 

He was staring at a hole in the ground. 

His fevered mind fixated on it. Was it an entrance to the underworld paradise Bernard’s followers yammered about? 

Then Press was moving toward it—almost felt like he was puppeted to it. He knelt beside the hole, and saw it was only a depression in the ground, just a foot deep. The twilight’s shadow was pooled in the shallow sinkhole, making it seem like an enticing shaft a man could fall into, could plummet down and down so far he’d never feel it when he hit the bottom. He’d be moving too fast; instant jelly on impact.

Press crept to the middle of the depression—and then he was digging with his hands, his fingernails, tearing up handfuls of dark earth. A musky odor rose from the exposed soil. Deeper, deeper, get past the foulness to the shining realness, go deeper!

He caught himself, and straightened up. “Oh fuck,” he muttered.

It was a sickness—the sickness—it had to be. It was taking him into the digging phase.

Press stood up, and jumped from the hole; he had an irrational fear that if he stepped on the dark part it’d open up and swallow him. He went panting onward—he couldn’t have said how far—and then a light seemed to beam out to him.

Was that her house? Was it Paloma’s place?

Press staggered through the garden of mostly unrecognizable plants, past the open well, up to the front door, and yes, it was the little adobe house of Paloma Plascencia. The door was open, light poured out, but inside it seemed darker than it should be. The wall on the left was cluttered with brightly-patterned figurines, set in little niches. On the right, rows of dried plants hung from pegs. The disarray seemed to hoard shadows that made the room darker than it should be, given the glowing coals in the firepit and the two lanterns over the table where Paloma was working. She was using a pestle and mortar, pulverizing a small octagonal cactus, her long, long black hair streaming past her shoulders, past her hips, nearly to the floor. She looked up at him, her eyes pooled with shadow like the depression where he’d been digging. 

“I think I have it,” Press said, his voice a croak. “The… sickness.”

He held up his hands to show her. They were blackened with dirt. 

“You’ve been digging,” she said softly.

“I just found myself doing it. I feel so weird. It started just like yesterday… I wanted to just start running and… ended up here. You got anything to drink?”

“Mezcal,” said Paloma. “I made it from my agave patch.”

“God, fuck yes.”

She got up, and—obscured by her long black hair—swept across the room, took a mason jar from a shelf of charged jars, unscrewed its top, and handed it to him. “Drink, but not too much. You just need to mute the effects.”

He drank two full gulps. He felt a little better; the intrusive energy backed away. But he was still very afraid. “You heal people. Can you help me?”

“Can you pay—or barter?”

“I’m good for it, I just can’t do shit right now. It’s… growing in me.”

“There’s something I’ve been trying to get a hold of that might help,” she said, staring past him. 

Press heard a rustling behind him and turned to see the silhouette of a child just past the reach of the light in the garden. He heard the small shadowy figure say something—like “Pul, ma, zezz zezz zezz…” It was more an extended gutteral noise than words. Not the voice of a child; more the croaking of a dying old man.

It took one step closer, bringing only a corner of its face and a little of its body into the light. It was a sickly, wizened little thing, humanoid but not definitely human. No child. No definite age. Vyv had told him about the creatures; her little brother used to see them before he disappeared— “fluppies” had been his word. Undagens, Press heard Hibiscus say once. Himself, he’d taken to calling them grease monkeys. He’d written a lyric for Sarah to sing. The lights go out on their own/ They’ve gone and crept inside your home/ They don’t want you, don’t want me/ They just like to fuck with stuff…

“I threw some bones,” Paloma said. “They told me someone was coming. I give the weird little guys toys to play with—pieces of old radios, toilet-tank parts, a few rusted tools, the headlights from a 1987 Dodge Dart. Things like that. They do errands for me in return. They do sometimes understand what we say, even if they pretend not to.”

“You call them ‘weird little guys’?” Press was afraid to take his eyes off the creature at the doorway. Afraid it might leap on his turned back.

“Weird little guys, duendes. Whatever.” She shrugged. “There’s a place underground, but you’ll have to go quickly. Wait any longer, it’ll be too late. This one will take you. They know the Glory Udders.”

“I don’t think I should go down there,” he said. “I feel like it… wants me to.”

“Sorry, you know I need to stick around here. Take the mezcal, sip it lightly now and then. I’ll add an herb. It’ll protect you for a time. It should taste like old socks that’ve never been taken off.”

And so it was with a revolting taste embittering his mouth that Press found himself following a waddling, dim figure along the bank of the San Joaquin. He was carrying a lantern in one hand (Paloma had insisted on it, saying flashlights could be unreliable), and in the other the mason jar, a third full of herbed mezcal. There were campfire lights farther down the bank, and across the river. Someone down the bank called out a challenge to him and he ignored them. Press was going to follow this little guy wherever he went, no matter what anyone said.

But then the little guy was gone from sight.

What the fuck? Had it vanished? Then Press saw there was a cave entrance, quite small, to his right. It must have gone in there.

He felt the sickness tingling in him again. Coming back.

Press sipped his mystery cocktail, shuddered, and then went to the little hole in the rockface overlooking the river. It was barely big enough for him to fit through. He got down on his hands and knees, pushed the light in ahead of him, then the jar, and wriggled into the hole. 

Though contusing his knees and elbows on the rough stone, he kept going, finally emerging into a small chamber just big enough to stand in. He didn’t see the little guy, but ahead was a narrow tunnel with sand on the floor. In the sand Press could see small footprints.

He got to his knees, picked up the jar and the lantern, then made himself enter the stone passage. 

The cave angled downward. Now and then were animal tracks and scat—and the small humanoid footprints. He thought he heard a voice whispering to him, Dig. Come down, down, down. Break through to the shining reality beneath.

The passage went on and on: zigging, zagging, straightening. Press wondered how he’d gotten himself into this. Maybe this quest was a trap, maybe it was…

Suddenly the passage opened wide, into a low-ceilinged cavern. And fifty feet up ahead was the Glory Udder, just as Paloma had described it.

His lantern seemed superfluous because of the strong but perverse green-gold glow from the udders. The mottled udder bag, with its four black teats, emerged from the ceiling of the small cavern like a grotesque joke on stalactites. Below it, on a rough stone table, was a deposit of glutinous material: drippings built up into gelatinous formations resembling downtown Los Suelos. Deeper into the cavern, Press saw more bulbous outgrowths of Glory Udders. 

He came closer to the nearest and saw a fur of livid fungus coating the sides of the table-like stone and draping down over the rough basalt floor. The fungal coat quivered when he drew near; patterns appeared in it. Was that a face in the carpet of fungi? Were those eyes opening? 

Feeling the illness creeping up in him, Press took another drink of the Mezcal herbal solution. It gave him back some objectivity. He set the lantern down and lifted up the jar beneath the udders—they seemed to wriggle, within themselves, in anticipation. 

Paloma had told him to squeeze the thing’s milk into the jar. He hadn’t thought she’d meant something so literal as this cow’s udder seemed to be. A sound emitted from somewhere in the ceiling above the trembling udder, then—a deep bovine foghorn sound. It seemed to say, “Kill me…kill me…” He remembered stories of the Los Suelos slaughterhouse cows speaking, saying, “Thank you“–just before they were killed by the bolt gun. 

Hand trembling like the shivering of the udder, Press reached up, clasped a warm, soft teat, and massaged it the way he’d seen people do in movies—and it worked. Milk, faintly green, squirted down into the jar. He kept at it as something mooed, Kill me, till the container was about two-thirds full of a mix of herbs, Mezcal, and Glory Udder milk. The jar began to glow.

Press turned to go—but found he couldn’t move. He looked down to see that strands of the moss-like fungus had stretched out, were wound about his hips, were pulling him toward a gap that had appeared in the floor as the fungi parted… and there was a deep hole down there, a deep hole lined in more fungi that rippled as if summoning him down, down…

Press screamed and struggled to get loose. No use. He was being dragged to the giant mouth in the floor.

He looked desperately around, saw the lantern just within reach. He grabbed it with his left hand and smashed with all his strength down on the fungi. The glass fuel chamber burst, burning kerosine spattering onto the fungal carpet, and something shrieked from the hole in the floor. The grip loosened and Press pulled free, lurching away from the hole, carefully preserving the jar in his right hand.

Using the glowing jar for light now, he made his way feverishly back through the passages and out into the clean air by the river. The image of the furred fungal mouth in the floor gaping for him kept coming back, as if it were still trying to swallow him.

At Paloma’s house she added certain salts to the mixture in the jar, gave it to him to drink. He barely managed to keep it down but quickly felt better. 

“That should last you a while,” she said. “The illness may creep back, though. So someday you may have to do this again.”

“I’m never fuckin goin back there.”

Paloma smiled sadly. “If only it could be never.”

Featured image by Maria Pogosyan.

The post Glory Udder appeared first on Los Suelos.

“Remember not to call me uncle,” says the liar’s uncle as they both step off the bus, onto the dusty road leading into the drive-in.

This was supposed to be the liar’s summer job but it’s October. She is sixteen. The liar’s uncle doesn’t want to work at the drive-in and it’s only his second shift. She, on the other hand, has reasons for staying.

“Doesn’t matter in town, but I’m Eddie at work,” the uncle says near the fence surrounding the parking lot. He looks behind once, a new habit. “I’m just a family friend. As soon as the job comes through, we’re all getting out of here like your apá wanted.” Her uncle’s voice carries a lead weight he picked up when he came home a few weeks ago. Being back is starting to gray his hair.

The drive-in is on the northeast side of town. The parking lot has a slight over-clean smell, like it’s hiding more than trash bins. The only other employee is filling the ice machine. Her name is Tanya Batz and she’s chewing ice from a cup. Someone lights a candle for Tanya every night, but she doesn’t know it. The liar does. The candle is in her room.

The niece is a liar because she protects a friend.

Hibiscus, their boss, is waiting for them behind the concession table, counting money. He rolls it in rubber bands like you do when it’s not going to the bank. He sips from a bottle of soda.

“Eddie, right?” Hibiscus asks.

“That’s right,” the liar’s uncle says, smiling on his second day of work.

“You did well first shift, Eddie. I’m impressed you know all these movies. Carding customers and naming a horror flick for their birth year. I even enjoyed it. What am I again?” Hibiscus asks, motioning them over to a nook behind the popcorn machine.

“Count Dracula,” the uncle says. “1970.” He gives Hibiscus a top-to-bottom look as if confirming the choice of bloodsucker.

Hibiscus’s mouth reveals stained teeth. “No one wants to come in right now so I’m glad you’re here.” He wipes his chin with the back of his hand. “Lucy, I’m lucky you came back.”

The liar smiles and looks up at her name. “Of course.”

“I heard what happened. What do you think did it?” the liar’s uncle asks.

“I still don’t know. It took forever to clean the blood. Some of my regulars are creeped out, but I got a copy of the county sheriff’s report. Surprised they even showed up,” Hibiscus says.

“I have to tell you,” he continues, looking at her uncle, “I never imagined seeing blood flying across my lot. It even hit the popcorn machine.” Hibiscus looks at the machine, as if the blood spatter were still there. His fingers twitch as he puts the police report down. It’s only two pages but heavy with redactions, from what the liar can see.

“Lucy’s aunt says you’re a family friend. Where you from again?” Hibiscus asks.

“L.A.,” the liar’s uncle responds. He lies well, too. The liar is surrounded by mentors.

“It’s no big city here,” Hibiscus says, tapping his leg with one hand like he’s sending Morse code.

“I guessed as much.” The liar’s uncle glances at the parking lot, surveying cars as if deciding which can be trusted.

“I can’t assume what you know, or don’t, about this town,” Hibiscus says. “I want to make sure you stay longer than a few days. I have shifts to fill. Can’t be training someone new every week.”

More hours would be good, the liar thinks. More time to observe.

Hibiscus leans back, his face suggesting he’s found the backwash at the bottom of the bottle. 

The liar’s uncle takes the report and studies it. The liar knows that he is signing on for more than just a job. She watches him pay particular attention to the redacted lines.

Hibiscus waits for him to get to the second page. “They interviewed everybody. Nobody knows what the hell happened. They were hoping Lucy saw something cuz she was behind the concession table. Tanya went home early. Isn’t that right, Lucy?”

The liar’s eyes flicker to her boss. Her anxiety over being found out almost trips her, but she manages to open her lips. “That’s right. She wanted to make sure she didn’t have ‘the sickness.’”

“Probably best you didn’t see…” Hibiscus stares across the lot. “Something hit the window of my office.”

“What was it?” the uncle asks.

“Something that left a lot of blood.” Hibiscus looks at the liar as if he knows about the secret in her head and is figuring out the best way to wring it out.

The report says a call arrived at the county sheriff’s last Saturday night. Customers were in their cars watching a horror flick when blood sprayed over the fence and onto their windshields, reaching as far as the concessions. They thought it was rain, at first, but then something jumped on top of the hood of one of the cars. It hopped, car to car, until it reached the catwalk on the screen. Then, it stood on two legs. Human. It leapt over the fence. That’s when a customer started screaming and turned on their car, igniting an exodus through the too-narrow driveway. Only a few cars got out before the crash. In the aftermath, the sheriffs found a yard-wide hole in the ground behind the screen. Blood everywhere. The liar’s name is redacted, but she knows her uncle knows it’s there. He knows the liar isn’t saying something. Doesn’t matter. They’re going to get out as soon as he saves enough money. The drive-in needs to stay open.

“It says someone was reported missing.” The uncle sets the report down as carefully as he chooses his words. “But I think people will forget in a couple of weeks. You should keep your schedule.”

“I am glad we’re in agreement.” Hibiscus grins. “You can see the tops of the cars from here. That’s all.”

The liar’s back is straight. The secret is still bubbling in her head.

“Were you the only one standing here, Lucy?” her uncle asks. The liar admires how astute her uncle can be and is about to answer when Hibiscus cuts in.

“No. I stepped out for a second. Can’t be everywhere, which is why I need you. You don’t have references, but Lucy’s aunt vouched for you.” Hibiscus extends his hand to Eddie. “Welcome aboard.”

The liar’s uncle puts out his hand and slips on his public face. It’s the face he uses when he doesn’t want anyone to know what he really thinks. “You can count on me, boss.”

“Well, looks like we’re done here.” Hibiscus takes the report and saves it in his back pocket. “Hopefully, it’s a quiet night. Right, Lucy?”

“I’m sure it will be,” the liar answers.

She is glad this moment is almost over.

There’s a pop at the gate where the cars come in through. It makes the men turn, but it’s just Tanya making sure the gates are fully open. Hibiscus picks up his not-bank-bag but looks, to the liar, like he’s still searching for something. He leaves for his office. The liar is sure he’s thinking about that night, wishing he had cameras pointed at the lot.

It’s after dusk and cars fill the lot with noise and spilled candy.

As the liar and her uncle pack popcorn and help customers, they notice Tanya has finished rolling out the speakers and is going upstairs to the film booth. The night is a cool one for October.

The liar looks up and meets eye-to-eye with Tanya as Tanya climbs the stairs. She’s wearing all black and disappears like a new moon.

The liar thinks she looks like a warrior goddess out of one of her aunt’s books on the Florentine codex. 

She’s not just a pretty picture.

She’s more.

“Tanya was gone when it happened?” the liar’s uncle asks, when the line of customers is over.

“Sí tío,” the liar responds, bending the rule of not calling him uncle to distract him from the lie.

“Your aunt says neither sheriffs nor ICE like coming this way. Says they’re too scared, or uninterested, to come.”

“Most people are afraid of ‘the sickness,’” the liar answers. “But not everyone.”

It’s dark outside.

It’s often dark when frightening or amazing things happen in this town. Last Saturday night, people were working in the crop fields a mile away. The movie made a perfect container of sound. No one could hear what was happening so far away. A worker ran down the road, calling for help, and the cars couldn’t hear him. So that’s when it happened. When she appeared.

It’s happening again right now, but only the liar catches a glimpse of her.

“I’ll be back, tío,” the liar says as she takes off.

A shadow of a woman leaves the parking lot. The liar is running after her. There are too many people in the lot. Too many in the fields.

The liar finds Tanya outside the fence digging.

“Tanya,” the liar says. “Come with me. You’re gonna get hurt.” Or worse, you’re going to hurt someone else, and then somebody will turn you in. Her best friend’s brown hands are covered in red earth and her almond eyes are glistening as she pants like she’s running a fever. The liar doesn’t remember when she first noticed Tanya was sick, but this season has been the worst. The liar has stopped recognizing her during these violent fits. Last Saturday, the liar had to take a shovel to her head to drag her off the blood.

The film is loud, and people are enjoying the bootleg horror movie. The liar assumes she and Tanya are alone, but she is wrong.

“A chosen one!” a masculine voice says from behind the liar.

Hibiscus has dropped to his knees. Reverent. His pale face and hands shake like he’s watching the resurrection of White Jesus live.

The liar reluctantly accepts that Hibiscus might be able to help her keep Tanya safe.

Compromises are made. 

The liar returns to the concessions. When her uncle asks, she pretends Tanya is still upstairs.

The liar is making popcorn.

Because everyone is here for the show.

Featured image by Ian Kappos.

The post Come for the Popcorn, Stay for the Show appeared first on Los Suelos.