Uncanny Magazine - JanFeb2017 Page 16

  © 2017 by Angel Cruz

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  Angel Cruz is a writer and boy band scholar living in Toronto. She is a staff writer at Women Write About Comics and Book Riot , and a 2017 Contributing Writer at The Learned Fangirl , with additional bylines at the Chicago Review of Books and Brooklyn Magazine . Find more of her work at angelcruzwrites.contently.com , or follow her on Twitter @angelcwrites .

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  In Lieu of the Stories My Santera Abuela Should Have Told Me Herself, This Poem

  Carlos Hernandez | 1675 words

  Part I: I Am Blank Verse

  Abuela of the Headless Saints: hello.

  It’s Carlos, Emma and Osmundo’s son,

  tu nieto. You’ve been dead ten years. Your ghost

  is cheesecloth thin now, prone to holes,

  and if I held your soul up to the sun

  I could count the threads of your integrity.

  Ten years: no hauntings, geases, duende pranks,

  secrets, curses, visions or possessions.

  Not one. ¡That’s not the way your afterlife

  was meant to work, Abuela! ¿Dónde estás?

  You should have come as a silver trick of light

  to me some night before the sun was born

  when I, my eyes still blurred by dreams, throat parched,

  had sought a drink of water from the sink

  and turned to see you hovering behind me,

  your face a rictus paralyzed mid–howl.

  You wouldn’t say a thing. I wouldn’t fear you.

  The dead can’t help the way that devils carve them,

  and neither can the living. I would sit

  my bare ass on the chilly tile floor

  and I would tell you stories of your life:

  those you forgot, and others total lies.

  ¿Remember when you buried rotten eggs

  in Mami’s garden, hoping to destroy

  her chance to have more children? “¡Four is enough!”

  you offered as your sole defense, then asked,

  “¿Is Emma human, or a bitch? She breeds

  like she has eight tits hanging from her chest.”

  (I paraphrase. I got this second–hand.

  I wasn’t even three when this occurred.)

  ¿Do you recall how Papi, so incensed,

  took all the saints you owned and ¡bámbata!

  stomped off their heads against the backyard steps?

  “¡Basta con tu mierda Santería!”

  he yelled, and decollated every statue

  beneath his avenging heel.

  You kept those saints

  throughout my childhood: they, your pantheon

  of hollow plaster martyrs, listened well

  to every prayer you whispered in their neck–holes—

  so long as you remembered to provide

  the candies and the rum orishas like,

  the oranges and herbs, the spicy rise

  of incense, waving like an endless flag.

  ¡What twisted pleasure you enjoyed, to hear

  your prayers resounding, amplified, inside

  Elegua, Yemayá, Oshún, Changó!

  What a thumbscrew victory, to make a shrine

  of Papi’s rage and Mami’s breathless dread,

  one we saw every Sunday, when we came

  to take you with us to our Catholic church.

  Black magic. Witchcraft. Mami called you “bruja,”

  and you did not deny it. You would brag

  how you could sicken nietos malcriados

  with your evil eye (my sisters to this day

  wear talismans to counter mal de ojo).

  With your Cartas Españolas you would pay

  out fortunes for your friends, and you taught me

  a game of taking tricks I still enjoy.

  With a mother lion’s patience for her cub

  (who learns his way to murder via play)

  you let me pinch the papery backs of your hands,

  make sails of your loose, thin, piebald skin.

  I loved to press your river–branching veins

  and, playing doctor, feel for a pulse.

  I said I couldn’t find one; you replied,

  “I guess that means I’m dead.” That made me laugh.

  You liked the way I didn’t think to fear you.

  Abuela. Oh. I knew you as a child,

  and children have not struggled against time

  enough to know the future’s fish–hook pull

  will drag us from the water, gasping, shocked.

  In college I discovered Santería

  is not black magic, but, Yoruba–based,

  an African–Caribbean religion

  as legitimate as any gang of gods

  a people have depended on to make

  some sense of self–awareness in a world

  of unpersonifyable dolór.

  If I could haunt my younger self, appear

  to Carlos, nine years old, he’d know

  before I alphaed out to nothingness

  our Abuela’s not a bruja, nor a saint,

  but a sharp–eyed woman utterly displaced

  from every scheme for understanding life

  she’d spent her life developing. Instead,

  the un–Cuban landscapes of America

  deprived her of the comforting surround

  of the trees and shops and roads and homes of home.

  She always thanked the United States, when asked,

  for rescuing her family from Castro,

  but she had a marble, Michelangelo silence

  when sitting in her Laz–E–Boy, that spoke

  with all the dignity of Rhodes’ Colossus

  about how quickly life erases victory

  and leaves just sun–bleached ruins of our past

  through which we sail daily. She had health,

  a house, complete with mutt and mango tree,

  her marriage to Abuelo,

  (never easy;

  you knew him only as a laughing man,

  but he, nine–year–old Carlos, was so violent

  he’d leave machista Cuban men astonished

  at his cruelty, his Goliath–killing fist,

  the one he used to blind a mule’s right eye

  when it refused to plow one time too many:

  and evermore, head tilted toward the ground

  so it could use the one eye it had left

  to mind its footfalls, that blinkered mule

  carefully obeyed Abuelo’s orders),

  and the smattering of family that lived

  north of the Florida Straits: my aunt and us.

  (And we were almost nothing, visiting

  on Sundays, holidays, and… yeah, that’s it.)

  I’m tired of how people misuse “evil”

  when all they really mean is “counterculture.”

  ¿When a lonely, exiled woman, all but trapped,

  without community, facility

  with English, money of her own, and hope

  of ever going home, decides to claim

  she has communion with the spirit world,

  can snuff the fire of life with her winking eye,

  can reroute fate away or straight toward ruin

  depending on the way she’s treated, why

  should we deny her anything? Her ebós

  were thwarted dreams that ritual amended.

  The offerings she left for saints bespoke

  the fruit and fragrance of the life she lost.

  So Carlos, nine years old, here’s what I ask:

  a story we have heard throughout our life—

  of how Abuela sent a mighty chicken

  (¿ensorcelled, quest–bound, mounted by Changó?)

  to teach Abuelo something of respect—

  I never heard from her. Those Cuban friends

  who came to visit us throughout the years

  inevitably told us how Abuelo

&
nbsp; left–hooked the eye from out his mule’s fool head

  and how Abuela, scarier than he,

  compelled a barnyard rooster to retrieve

  Abuelo from the bar he frequented

  instead of tending to his matrimony.

  It must have been eleven separate Cubans

  who sat in the Hernandez living room

  espresso–charged and eager to recount

  the marvels of my pedigree to me. ¿But she?

  She’d never said a thing about her past

  unless I asked. So ask. And then tell me.

  Part II. My Abuela Is a Canción

  I’ve always been a bruja.

  My parley with the devil,

  however, I am sad to say, is minimal.

  I practice the occult

  not as some grand revolt

  against what every human thinks is goodness.

  ¡If people would respect me I would do less!

  But women of my era

  have power that they scare up

  or else they live a barnyard–horse existence.

  I’ve always been too lazy

  and too much of a lady

  to work so hard to make another’s supper.

  But everybody knows that when a bruja

  has made a wondrous meal

  you push back from the table

  or else you might end up a goat–rat–cow thing.

  Mi esposo made our dinner every evening.

  ¿Our marriage? Somewhat equal.

  Leopoldo wasn’t meek or

  a man who’d tolerate a sleight of honor.

  But he thought his reputation

  for violence would fate him

  to heirless loneliness and bachelorhood.

  ¡He needed someone guapa he could woo!

  He courted me, ignoring

  the rumors he was hearing,

  since brujas have no fear. He thought me pretty

  in the way adventurers are drawn to mystery.

  ¡I said yes to his madness,

  for it was housed inside the handsomest

  body you could find in all of Cárdenas!

  ¿Our love? Not made in heaven

  but at least the fight was even:

  our love resembled more an armistice.

  But peace achieved by any means is peace.

  Peace lasted for a while.

  Our love was bright and animal,

  ¿and fighting? For the most part, aphrodisiacal.

  It’s funny, though, how quickly

  amor becomes monotony

  once we have seen our lover’s naked body.

  Exposed enough, we grow immune to beauty.

  But part of maturation

  is valuing the ration

  of food and joy and quiet we are given.

  We had a farm, and plenty

  of work and friends and money:

  that should have been enough to leave us grateful.

  ¿What made Leopoldo jaded, bored, and spiteful

  not one year after marriage?

  He’d ride into the village

  for drinks and dominoes most every evening.

  He’d leave me home. Alone. Indignant. Scheming.

  Consulting with my cartas,

  I only drew espadas,

  ¡and if the cards say “¡Swords!” then draw your sword!

  I grabbed my sharpest knife and

  went searching for a victim

  to stand for Leopoldo (or I’d kill him).

  At first I thought I’d sacrifice a chicken.

  But when I saw our rooster—

  ¡who only lived for honor!—

  a different plan occurred to me. I said,

  “Gallito amoroso

  go bring back my esposo,”

  and he replied, “¡Mi doña, por supuesto!”

  ¡He took off at a trot, that caballero!

  The kisses that I blew him,

  as each one landed, grew him,

  until that haughty, knee–high, gallant rooster

  became the size of horse, then bull, then monster.

  I watched the road past midnight

  by amber–violet moonlight

  for signs of either gallo or my husband.

  ¡Then, running up so fast

  his soles kicked his own ass,

  Leopoldo fled my champion cock, my chicken

  who did his best to murder him with pecking!

  Leopoldo ran inside

  as fast as legs allowed

  and slammed the door so hard the windows clattered.

  I turned then to my hero,

  that bloodied, wounded rooster,

  who’d lost the better part of his black feathers

  no doubt to Leopoldo in their battle.

  I took a breath. He shrank.

  Inhaled again. He sang,

  and by the third breath he was poultry–sized.

  I thanked him one more time. He merely gazed,

  a chicken once again:

  no magic left in him.

  (No magic to begin with, some would venture:

  they’d say I’d killed a fowl

  and brought it into town

  and used the corpse to beat my husband red

  until he ran back home, awash in blood.

  The rumored Santería

  and wicked brujeria

  would come much later, unbelievers offered.

  Most people find it handy

  to blame the otherworldly

  when, driven to extremes by grief or rancor,

  we act in ways unthinkably deplorable.

  How shame would fill my face

  if I had sacrificed

  my gallo just to seek revenge, sin duda.

  It’s lucky that I really am a bruja.)

  The moral of the story:

  we once again were happy,

  in our resigned, appreciative awareness,

  that life had worse indignities in store for us.

  For the moment, I had youth,

  and a husband I could trust,

  for now we’d reached a proper understanding:

  if he took me for granted, I’d remind him

  there’re threats much worse than chickens I could send him.

  ( Editors’ Note: “In Lieu of the Stories My Santera Abuela Should Have Told Me Herself, This Poem” is read by Amal El–Mohtar on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 14A.)

  © 2017 by Carlos Hernandez

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  Carlos Hernandez is the author of The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria (Rosarium 2016). By day, Carlos is a CUNY Associate Professor of English, with appointments at BMCC and the CUNY Graduate Center. Besides his dedication to writing, Carlos is a game writer and designer: he served as Literary Consultant for the forthcoming iPhone game Losswords and continues work as a designer and lead writer on Meriwether , which goes live on Steam Greenlight on December 9.

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  Jean–Luc, Future Ghost

  Nin Harris | 270 words

  She was going to be named Jean–Luc but she was not going to join the fleet.

  Instead, she’d build the first starship to take us out of this galaxy;

  we’d test this simulation with cardboard boxes in the yard

  —the adventures would end with peanut cookies, lepat pisang,

  and steamed chive dumplings as a reward for saving humanity

  from the impact of imploding planets.

  I would adjust your pigtails and your hand–embroidered dungarees,

  Jean–Luc with sharp, inquisitive eyes and bandaged knees,

  a tomboy like your mother occasionally was in her

  vacillations between states of ontic presentation.

  Like her, you contain the dreams of frontiers unfolding from frontiers

  a fractal loop of infinite discoveries.

  You were conceived only in my mind on the day I was frozen with fright

  (a routine and precautionary medical exam
ination

  to root out hereditary demons within my blood)

  my entire form petrified in confusion and despair

  at possibilities I had not wanted to consider,

  and decisions I was not ready to make.

  “Do you want to have children?”—my doctor asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” I murmured, barely understanding.

  This mourning too was an apparition of the mother I would never be,

  a role I would never play, an emotion I had no vocabulary to confine

  nor encompass.

  I denied your presence with the full weight of my steeled recalcitrance

  —a sword of tears nestled within the sinew of my will.

  Emotions too are ghosts.

  © 2017 by Nin Harris

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  Nin Harris is an author, poet, and Gothic scholar who exists in a perpetual state of unheimlich. Nin writes Gothic fiction, cyberpunk, nerdcore post–apocalyptic fiction, planetary romances, and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin’s publishing credits include: Clarkesworld , Strange Horizons , and Lightspeed . Nin is currently working on Watermyth , the first novel of the Watermaidens Trilogy .

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  Except Thou Bless Me

  Nicasio Andres Reed | 286 words

  I will press myself to you until I am red as an ancient riverbank

  Red as a drunken flush red as my tongue swollen in my mouth for you

  Red like my life pressing out from itself. You impose your body’s shape

  On the fabric of the universe; I impose my body’s shape onto you. Red

  As an emergency red as the face of a sated lion, as an unplucked orchard

  Red like certain youthful lips are red before they have been used for love

  Red as the deepest ripeness of a persimmon as if you invite me to

  Pierce you with the firm prick of my thumb. Mars, Mars, Mars

  You are red and I am a bull, my mouth slack and frothing for you.

  I will have you. Do you doubt me? I will have you until I am overcome

  My ocean loosed across the plane of you, I will flood you blue. Burst

  Hot across you the way a thousand years of cold science could not

  Leave the divots and depressions of you blue, blue as if I have bruised