Free The House of Impossible Loves by Cristina López Barrio

chirping crickets surged. Suddenly, a speeding cart ran right over her. A client found her on his way home after an amorous session and a serving of Bernarda’s stew. He lifted the old woman into the back of his cart, laying her down with his hoe, scythe, and shovel. The woman’s teeth were bloodstained, a trickle of pink spit running down her neck toward her heart. Her good eye was closed; her blind eye shone like a marble. Her crushed hands gripped her treasured sack. The cart was filled with wheat, millet, and flour.
    “Let go of the sack,” the man said.
    The old witch shook her head and sucked her lips. She tried to speak.
    “Don’t say a word. I’ll go get your daughter.” The man returned to Scarlet Manor.
    “Back for more?” Tomasa asked when he opened the door.
    “Tell the owner, tell Clara. Her mother’s in my cart, half-dead.”
    Tomasa found her mistress in the kitchen, eating a meal of potatoes and rabbit, recovering after a long night of revenge.
    “I think they’ve killed your mother,” Tomasa said.
    Clara ran a hand over her lips, wiping away a bit of gravy.
    “A bad weed never dies,” she murmured.
    Clara met the man in the clay-tiled entryway and followed him out to his cart. She was wearing a long satin dressing gown and a pair of Moorish pants. The wee hours were fresh, with crickets still chirping.
    “Madre?”
    The old woman’s head was resting on a bag of flour.
    “Church, church,” she croaked.
    “But what happened to her?”
    “Looks like she was hit by a cart,” the man replied.
    “Church,” the Laguna witch insisted.
    “I’ll take you.”
    Clara climbed into the cart and ripped the sack of bones from her mother’s hands.
    “Up and down these roads with this filthy cat! I knew it would kill you.”
    “No,” the old woman protested.
    The cart clattered over the stones that early morning.
    “Why does she want to go to the church? Shouldn’t we take her to the doctor or the apothecary?” the client asked.
    Wiping the spit from her lips with a broken hand, the witch muttered the word
cursed
followed by the word
death
.
    “Cursed women only go to church when they’re about to die.”
    Her mother nodded as bloody vomit filled her mouth behind her teeth.
    “Hurry!”
    The man snapped the reins. Flour inside the man’s cart puffed up into a pale cloud. The town’s cobblestone streets shined brilliantly with dew, and the sound of hooves echoed against the mildewed stone façades. The town square opened up before them, free of fog. The cart came to a halt in front of the church. Clara climbed out and banged away on the big wooden doors. She cried for Padre Imperio, cold splinters shredding her knuckles.
    The priest woke in his spartan room next to the sacristy. He was dreaming about Clara Laguna, salvation in her golden eyes, when he heard the voice in his dream, and banging on the door. Wearing the same gray pajamas he wore in his seminary days, he shuffled along in slippers one of his parishioners had given him, his hair disheveled, his sleep-filled eyes unfocused, his cassock hanging open in place of a robe, and his red scar vivid across his throat, and opened one door. The first rays of light shot in like a lance, followed by Clara in her harem clothes, and the man carrying the Laguna witch’s battered body.
    “She’s dying, Father, she’s dying!” Clara clapped her hands on the priest’s chest, the first time she had ever touched him. She snatched them back and formed two fists.
    Padre Imperio blushed.
    “Lay her on a pew, by the altar.”
    Spring air slipped through cracks in the windows. You could hear the Castilian caballeros rolling over in their graves.
    “What happened?”
    “I think she was hit by a cart. I found her on the side of the road as I was leaving . . .” The man stared down at the floor. “Forgive me, Father.”
    “No time for that now. Has she seen the doctor?”
    “No. She asked me to bring her here,” Clara replied.
    Padre Imperio