Free Celestial Inventories by Steve Rasnic Tem Page B

suddenly stopped, and he sat up in bed, trying to control his breathing. A rustling came from the dining room, and he immediately thought of rats though he’d never seen one in their house. He crawled out of bed and walked slowly down the dark hall, clouds of flies separating on either side of his face like a lively and murmurous beaded curtain. He clamped his mouth shut. Flies don’t enter a shut mouth.
    His father sat slumped over the ruins of the table (Alejandro had to remind himself that it was the feast in decay, and not the beautiful table itself). His father stared off into the distance, as if waiting. The ragged shadows atop the table shifted, then moved with a scrape of claw and a slide of tail, slowly trundling off into the deeper black like props being moved about between scenes of a play. Occasionally some of the odd baggage revealed itself in a sliver of moonlight from the windows high in the wall: pale and mossy things, red-encrusted pink softnesses, sharp-edged, exposed bone, congealed liquid splatters, all kinds of obscene things Alejandro thought best buried, best all forgotten.
    But to all this there was a strange quiet, a seriousness, unlike anything he’d witnessed outside a church. And then Alejandro wondered if he was in a kind of church here, watching the processional. The ushers were guiding the people to their seats. The props were being moved about. Someone hushed a talker in the back pew. Someone was weeping.
    His father jerked out a hand desperately and tried to stuff some of the moving food into his mouth, the great black backs of shiny insects drifting over his face like crude widow’s lace. Kissing the food, spreading it over his mouth and cheeks for comfort. For communion. “Felicia . . . Felicia . . .” He mouthed the name over and over, but would not release it.
    On the other side of the room someone moved in and out of shadow.
    The woman in the grey dress carrying the large splinter of dripping wood might have been his mother as she had been at a younger age. The old women said that a man sometimes saw a woman like that—not as she was but as she used to be. Certainly the woman in the grey dress was beautiful in the same way that his mother had been beautiful. This he was sure of.
    His father opened his mouth but would not speak. Alejandro wanted to ask him if he saw the same things as he, but could not bring himself to do this. His father had caused all this—the rotting feast, the woman carrying the great, bleeding splinter—just as he had caused the death of Alejandro’s beautiful mother. It was a hard thought. Once he had admitted this in his head he felt tension melting away from his face and chest, as if it were food rotting and falling into bits, even though he knew he could never say such a thing aloud. His father’s fantasies, his father’s grief, embarrassed Alejandro, and he could not make himself speak to him.
    A hand appeared out of the darkness and set a plain wooden cup of smooth, white milk on the table by Alejandro’s hand. He looked at his father’s face, the lips struggling for sound, the lips pale, dry, dead-looking.
    He needed to speak the truth, but he could not. He needed to talk to his father of his grief, but he could not. The milk sat in its cup unused, souring, until after the woman had left the room and the remains of the feast were gone.
    Still his father could not speak, and Alejandro could not bring himself to speak to his father. Alejandro would brood over this failure, he knew, the rest of his life. But he could not help himself. And he could not change things now.
    ----
    When the old people in the village had a problem they went to find a
bruja
. His father was sick, he could not speak, and he was seeing things. A
mestizo
woman who lived in an old shack a half-day’s hike outside their village was said to know of such things. Some said she was a witch and some said she just had friends who were witches. All the old men in the village