Bad Valentines by Steve Vernon

Author:Steve Vernon [Steve Vernon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2012-02-03T13:00:00+00:00

Potboiler, Told in a Spanish Key

This is an old story, best told slowly over guttering red coals. A story of love made badly and the hot gutting knife of vengeance. It is a story of a man and a woman and you should tell it as slowly as cooking stew, adding the proper bits and pieces, watching as the pot begins to boil.

The woman's name was Conchita. Her heart had been broken like an overly ripe casaba melon. She had painted the floor of her room with bitter tears and dreamed a song of long and slow revenge.

Most dreams are smoke.

They touch the brick of the chimney and vanish – but some dreams are brick. They stay and they gather strength, soaking heat and flame, well-seasoned, like a stew.

Conchita's dreams were dark as the shadow that hides behind a dead man's eyes. She dreamed of jaguar bones and the hollow drip of blood. Her tongue tasted of heart-meat torn from the pain-arced chests of angels burning in ancient swamps. Conchita came from a hard hating bloodline. She was the granddaughter of a brujo, a maker of magic and darker things. She knew some secrets and could guess at others.

A guess is a dangerous movement of the spirit, a knife swung blindly in the dark. You can never tell where it might cut.

This night Conchita made a dark secret pact, stronger than forgotten smoke.

She sat in her adobe room in Mexico City, with an empty white envelope tucked between her knees. She licked her lips and tasted the chalk of tomb dust, church bells, and steel shrieked into flesh. She whispered old names that would not lay down in books. Voices and words whispered about her ears like the buzzing of meat flies at the slaughterhouse. In the streets the beggars heard her pain, and danced sorrow jigs for the ignorant tourists who snapped their photographs and laughed.

Conchita sang a soft and croonless tune. She barked and croaked and hacked words that bent and cut at her soft, wet tongue. She had to be careful, but she wasn't.

There are doors, once opened, that can never be closed. There are paths that memorize the taste of heedless footsteps. Conchita leaned back, letting the weight of her hair gallow down until it coiled upon the ancient adobe.

The adobe of Mexico City is old and tainted with the dried out memories of death and dust and sorrow. You can smell centuries of Aztec blood mixed with this adobe. Men's sweat, women's tears, the piss of the ancients soaked into soft white walls.

Conchita whispered to the darkness. To Huitzilopochtl, Tlalocs, Quetzalcoatl, the gods of rain and fire and the ever hungry sun god, the smaller gods of amaranth and maize and pulque, and the god of screams.

It was to this last god that she prayed the hardest. This was the lurker, the creeper, the god of rot and mold and everything diseased. This was the god of the rock and the knife and the arrow. This was the god of screams.

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