![]() They’d serve it next day, together with the rabbit. A large one,” Hector said when he saw her. She walked into the house just as her cousins came in carrying a few rabbits and laughing, chattering the dogs wagged their tails and sniffed around their feet. ![]() Probably not a snake, though there were plenty up the hill, in the little cemetery. In the brush, she thought she saw something moving, a shadow disappearing. She read about the silly heroine, who suspected the castle was haunted by the ghost of her husband’s previous wife, until the sun started going down and the rumble of a truck made her lift her eyes. She’d looked it up in an encyclopedia, in the days when taxonomy and animals had fascinated her. Neither is the alicante, moving through the maize field, hiding in the furrows. The heroine had fallen into a pit of poisonous pythons. She read about the Gothic heroine, who had married a rich man and now lived in his accursed castle, riddled with dozens of secret passages. She went back to the house but stayed outside, sitting under the shade of a pirul. Laura placed the money on the counter and felt the accusing eyes of the woman as she left the store. “Only this,” Laura said, placing the book upon the counter and when the shopkeeper opened her mouth to speak, Laura cut her off. The woman behind it was very pregnant, her belly straining against the confines of her blouse, sweat dripping down her brow. The romance novel was an old Gothic story, with the heroine standing, wide-eyed, in front of an ominous castle. The owner had tossed some used comic books, two pulp novels and a romance novel into the stack. Laura went in and rummaged at the magazine rack - pictures of pop and soap opera stars in garish colors on the cover. At dusk, the children gathered outside of it, to drink soda and chew bubble gum. It sold everything from batteries to canned goods. Laura slid away from the house, away from the quiet stares of her aunts. Like the snakes, which flee when you burn chilis at night to keep them at bay, far from the low, warm bedrolls where the country folk sleep. The women started roasting chilis and the smell tickled Laura’s nostrils, making her cough. City girl with no mettle, no strength in her hollow bones. The rest of them, the cousins and the aunts and uncles, they looked at her kindly, but she knew what they thought of her, they thought she had gone weak in the city. She’d hunted with him when they were kids, using a two-pronged stick to catch the snakes afterwards, they’d splash in the watering hole. He was hunting with some of her other cousins, off to find deer and snakes. This day there was no talk of snakes that steal milk. The women were making tortillas, palming the dough into shape. Outside, there were only the trees and the dark. Silly stories and superstitions she’d heard as a child.īut she had no baby. ![]() Sometimes, if the baby of the family woke up, the snake placed the tip of its tail in the infant’s mouth, pacifying it so it would not stir the mother. It crept over stones and grass and into the bedroom, and it sucked the mother’s milk. She shouldn’t have listened to the stories her aunts were telling about the alicante, how it would come in the middle of the night, into the homes where nursing women slept. Laura opened the window and stood still, listening. The serpent screams like that as it waits in the thickets. ![]() Moreno-Garcia is deft at ratcheting up the dread-filled tension, but the author is also aware that the key to really great horror lies in grounding it in human emotion: the terror of one's body betraying itself, of not being believed by the people around you.Ī child wailed in the dark, in the scrubland. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play
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