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If I didn’t have need for you, I’d kill you, June signed, the anger making her gestures formal and stiff, the air rippling with each silvery movement.
Rafa closed the distance between them, his fingers grasping at the edges of her shawl, drawing her limbs together like marbles in a bag. He was close enough to differentiate between the dark of her pupil and the black of iris in the light of the full moon.
“The feeling is mutual, linda,” he hissed, his senses alert to everything. In the dark - it was always dark - with the howl of the wolves that caused blood to curdle like limes added to milk. The chill stole across the ground, making it stud like icy diamonds in its wake. She shrugged out of his grasp, her hands yanking at the darkness of her cloak as it fell over them and -
Crushed in the tight space as if crushed in the old fashioned birdcage elevators back in the last century. It was transparent enough to see through and be chilled by the outside world: cacti seemingly carved out of ice and crystal at a bride’s whim. The volcanoes in the distance seething at coming to life, the sky in broad, cruel streaks of a painter’s brush, the reds and oranges violent against the light.
His skin studded with goosebumps as the irregular shape of a goat, with its narrow, triangular face limed by the illumination from its eyes glowing like coals in an oven as it looked at and past him. Its breath unfurled into a midst of smoke and mist as it dipped its head, its horns skyscraper tall with a slight curve to them like the profile of an elegant lady’s nail.
Rafa’s shoulder sang from the sharp points of pain of June’s fingers clamping into his forearm. He opened his mouth as if to scream but couldn’t -
His gun –
A thought so abstract, he didn’t recognise it as his. His vision was obscured by the grain of fabric that was her cloak and their protection.
He should have said no when he had the chance to.
Right now, Rafa could have been cultivating the next best thing.
The unidentified animal briefly pressed against the protective barrier, and rocked it before hissing and running off. The sensation was akin to bobbing in a small boat on Lake Texcoco.
Madre Dios the words on his tongue but he dare not whisper. Didn’t breathe until it disappeared in the distance.
For the first time in a long while, he thought about his mother and her fear that he’d be captured by a bruja and forced to do her will.
As June relaxed against him, her soft expulsion of breath hinting that this was a close one, he turned to look at her. “This cannot be my fault. I do not accept.”
June didn’t say a word - her kind didn’t. According to lore, they gave up their voices for magic. But her eyes said everything that her tongue couldn’t.
It is.
Two weeks ago
At times, people trespassed well beyond their assigned places in business and life.
Sometimes, it didn’t pay to be easy going, with a winning smile and bright eyes, because people sought to exploit your good nature.
Case in point, Knight and Fogg. Two gringos with serviceable Spanish marked by their accents - English- and a name that sounded like an expatriate law firm in the old part of the city. Knight loomed in the corner, a hulking humanoid of metal, with the ridges and silhouette of a Conquistadorian knight, his skin a low sheen by the muted light in his study, and Fogg - nothing but plumes of smoke and rain held together by a light trench coat, its belt tightening in the middle.
“I make product, I don’t deliver. I can do what she wants, but my services end there.”
Lazily, Rafa stuck his finger in the trigger loop, his Smith & Wesson sliding across the slick glass topped table, its nuzzle waving to and fro like the point of a compass orienting itself. Not a flinch between Knight and Fogg as they eyed the weapon with an amused interest.
All three knew that when it came down to it, it wouldn’t harm either of them.
Fogg stepped forward, his form drifting and shifting like clouds in a clear sky. Like the ones that existed before- before. You couldn’t stare at him long without blinking hard, his features blurring like white noise and changeable with every minute breath.
“Señorita Gibbons is of the opinion that you do and that you will.”
Rafa shook his head as he waved his hand towards the window that framed the wildness of outside. Trees in the distance throwing back their canopy of leaves, the air filled with the faint rustle of laughter. The sky was still that brushed velvet of black, with entities slipping in and out, babies crawling with peasants riding donkeys on their backs.
“Tsh,” the hiss of amusement escaped him. He looked at his wrists, wreathed with heavy gold bracelets,idly toyed at his chains with the tips of his fingers, each hefty cuban link a nod to his cunning, agility and skill. He’d traversed the distance from being a street runner into one who made decisions and product. Yet he was expected to answer to some slip of a girl who lived with her sister on the outskirts of the city wanted him to–
“Mate.” Knight‘s voice now, as harsh as metal scrapings, cut through the room. He was huge, having to bow under the door frame and turning sideways to come in earlier. “We’d rather not quibble. You know your role.”
“Your… Doña asks for much,” Rafa leaned forward, resting his forearms on the sleek, cold surface of the table. “She wants me to create a counter to my own… product and then requests me to tag along with her on some adventure, as if I’m some schoolboy.”
Knight shrugged what passed as his shoulders, the motion emitting a scrape of metal on metal.
“Be nice, now. Just because we’re talking casually doesn’t mean that you have the excuse to be so… familiar.”
“I’m not,” Rafa drummed his fingers on the desk. “I’m not seeing why this is a matter for me.”
Knight retreated a step, allowing Fogg to creep in front of him. He was a cold one, his powers being to dissipate like smoke in the wind, slip into his victims’ throats before increasing in density with his victims passing away from strangulation.
Rafa grinned with the confidence of a man who knew he’d live past tonight.
“You see, luv,” the vacant spaces which were Fogg‘s eyes narrowed as much as his features allowed, the endearment as scathing as any expletive. “You created this in the first place.”
One week earlier
All the world as we knew it, inhaled and blacked out the sun with a puff.
Twilight drew across the skies, stealing across the sun, dulling it into the soft, remote face of the moon. The edges of the world smeared like rain on glass. No straight lines, everything rocking like a boat on rough seas. That was unforeseen, them having to burn lights and heat around their marijuana crop night and day. To increase irrigation for crops and increase patrols.
It had been inconvenient, but doable.
Especially with his product being snapped up faster than they could grow and harvest, cold extract and cure.
“What did you put in this?” Pedro shook his head in Rafa’s lab. “Cocaine?”
Rafa cut into the soft loaf of paste with a butter knife and raised the blade to eye level, the paste spread like a thin lemon curd under the glare of the HID lamps. He titled the knife this way and that.
This was the culmination of a life’s work.
Sorting through one hundred and forty strains of sativa. Narrowing all of them down to smell, turps, taste, cross breeding until he yielded the one that pleased him. Aimed for smoothness and uniqueness like one would do when distilling a fine spirit.
The resin was soft and glazed like a delicate egg washed pastry due to the intensity of the terpenes in the product. The aroma was something he’d been proud of: the feedback from users ecstatic about the spicy and citrus notes that permeated once it had been unwrapped. It was pure, unabashed hash, strong enough to open the door to any reality that you imagined.
It was the best thing he’d ever done, after years of doing.
Cocaine. Hmmph.
“No,” Rafa lowered the knife, wanting to laugh at his companion’s ill concealed discomfort, half thinking that he’d split him open with the dull blade of the knife. As if he’d waste such good resin. “Not cocaine, but something – more.”
Only for the world to hiccough and everyone bounced onto the other side.
The sun still had yet to return. Twilight deepened into night, the tweeting of song birds giving way to the hooting of owls. The smoke cleared, leaving the sky an unsettling flat, unrelenting black, with no tears for the universe to peek through.
Just the dullness of the moon with no sun to reflect off of it, according to the radio.
“It’s as if we’re in Xibala,” Dr Carolina Hernandez Sanchez, an astronomer from the National Autonomous University of Mexico observed while giving an interview on TV before being thrown over a skeleton’s bony shoulder blade, her voice fading as she was carried off in the distance. “And the sun has stopped existing.”
That was the least of everyone’s problems.
“I’m nothing but a humble farmer and chemist,” Rafa raised his hands to shoulder height. “None of this is of my making.”
Outside the window, a head of a woman popped up in the window, her eyes wide and unblinking under a striking unibrow. Atop her head a wreath of flowers so lush and verdant, its eerie perfume stole into their room, unfurled like the smoke of incense and stayed there.
She peered in through the window bars with her swan-like neck, her mouth in a grim red line. Her eyes scanned them, sharp and shrewd before she withdrew her head and ambled off. her torso and legs in the form of a deer with arrows protruding from its sides.
The trio observed the figure in silence until she faded away, before they faced each other once more.
Fogg’s smile was unnerving, like a skull made from smoke, the grin twisting and rippling even though the air in the room was still.
“That’s not what she says.”
“She can tell me directly.”
“That’s not how it goes.”
No, it wasn’t. Initial contact never came from Las Flacas. The custom was that they sent emissaries in their stead, and business done as a go between.
People never laid eyes on them directly, not with Fogg and Knight running errands on their behalf from the time that this part of the city had been aware of their existence. They lived on its outskirts, never showing their faces. No one knew what they did, just that they were tucked away.
Another thing was, no one said no to a request. No one. To say yes invited luck and favour. To say no was to court reprisal.
But.
Rafa thought about the new orders coming in for his hash, the supply a drop in the face of the demand. The intensitive proprietary process of extraction and freeze dried curing that only he could do. Placed his hand on the handle of the gun, more for show than anything, but they understood.
Never mind that he was courting death either by choking or being diced into chunks by the duo, but he had product to move.
“I have what she wants,” he said.
Only to come downstairs and open his lab, watching in bemusement the leaves of his crop transmogrified into butterflies and swarmed past him.
Swearing and grabbing for his gun as he punched numbers to the heavy door of his safe where the resin would be, wrapped in tiny bricks of cellophane in the best of temperatures.
Now empty save one shoe tin of the stuff.
La maldita cabróna.
It was her skin that struck him first.
The deep, soil dark richness of it, with a rich sheen as if she walked around with her own sun. She was slender, her head and shoulders covered by a shawl, the fabric high in quality, but frayed by handling and age. Her limbs were almost sketch-like in their slenderness as she folded herself into the chair opposite him.
She was bold, stealing into the restaurant that he liked to frequent when daylight existed - once upon a time. Now with everything at night, their surroundings were as dramatic as chiaroscuro; light at source, dissipating quickly into the oncoming dark. Even with the lights everywhere, it was never bright enough, with the darkness smothering the ragged edges of it.
The air was alive with tension, weapons raised and pointed in her direction, but even then no one wanted to shoot. To make noise was to invite - no - they didn’t know. In the distance, three female figures practiced in the phases of asanas, their movements overlapping each other, their breathing heavy and laboured as the towering impassive statues of ancient Toltec warriors watched floating from above.
In front of him was the real mystery, her face as triangular as a cat’s, with wide set eyes and a small mouth that twitched as if she had secrets to tell to anyone who’d dare to ask.
“Nena Flaca,” Rafa greeted, raising his shot glass in her direction. Her face was impassive as she removed an earring from her ear, placed it on the table. She started to sign, her fingers slender and her hands and arms graceful as she drew pictures with words. Her voice in his head was like a hum in his ear. “You owe me.”
You said no
“I’m busy.”
You have time now.
“You’ve made me even… busier.”
Not for this
Rafa reached for his cigarette and took a drag. Allowed the smoke to fill his lungs.
”Why should I help?“
Her lips half opened, her tongue behind her teeth, the howls of wolves distant yet piercing and too close.
Because you can’t sell your product to a destroyed world.
Now, as the Huay Chivo slinked away, its horns tall enough to score the thick pastel oil of a sky, leaving scratches of light behind, June exhaled, her eyes scanning the distance for a pinpoint of power. Her vision obscured behind her cloak in a cross-hatch of lines. Her magic was waning, and she sank her fingers into the flesh of his forearm.
She felt the surge of power there - not magic- but of ambition and dark will - which was its own sorcery. June sipped at it, the warmth of his skin, the bulk of his forearm. Inhaled the scent of smoke laced with the citrus bitter sweet notes and resin underscored by him and steadied herself.
When he turned to her, his hair ruffled, his eyes wide with what he’d seen, shaking his head in denial about his hand in this.
“This is not my fault.”
For the first time since forever, she opened her mouth with the intention to speak, and was caught anew by her frustration in nothing tripping out.
The ropes that connected the pulleys of her brain to her mouth were still cut. She glared, unable to sign because her efforts were focused on maintaining The Spell of The Obscure. They were both wrapped in darkness by her magic, and it was fading.
On his forearm, she drew a sigil and with a wink, they disappeared.
Tumbled out into the mountains above the city. It sprawled below them, its lights weak and smeared as if one were viewing them through thick cataracts. Normally, the lights in the metropolis below would have pierced the shadows and kept them at bay. The city would be spread, glowing with the bustle of people, with spirits slipping in and out of dances with people in the many city squares.
Now, the lights flickered like a candle flame guttering in a strong wind.
June stood up first, gathering her cloak around her, clasping its edges with her fingers. They had the luck to stumble into an empty room of a five star hotel. Previously, it would have been alive with guests and those who served them. Everything gleaming and bright as if in a dream.
According to La Jornada, two weeks ago, the Foreign guests had been chased away by the previous MesoAmerican inhabitants who rose from the dead and proceeded to sit with them; their curiosity overcoming any other emotion. The hotel guests had not reciprocated, as they screamed rushing to the exits. The now animated indigenous people broke bread and muttered to themselves – whatever they would have muttered to themselves.
The local workers served them food and built an altar in the formal dining room.
“Good choice,” and she stared over her shoulder, frowning at Rafa spread eagled in the middle of the queen sized bed, his socked feet crossed at the ankles, his fingers threaded across his chest.
June turned around fully, sidling along the edge of the bed, wishing she could cross her arms under her breasts, but she needed them free to fry him with a hex or —in this case - to sign. She snapped her fingers, the lights flickering before they surged to life. Her signage was swift, from having both palms up in a questioning manner, to pointing at him with her index fingers and having her palms facing each other and moving in a circular direction.
What are you doing?
“Resting,” he responded through half lidded eyes. “It’s been two weeks, and we’re no nearer to what you want me to do. You have me moving product -” he tapped his fingers against his bare chest, his shirt half way undone, his cluster of necklaces glowing in the flicker of light. Him sliding his hands into his pocket, and holding out the last sample of hash in one of those old fashioned shoe polish tins. “And I’m not moving until you tell me why.”
June worried at her bottom lip with her teeth.
Wondered the best way to go about this, looked at him and shrugged, as she climbed onto the bed, her cloak slipping from her shoulders, the bed dipping with her added weight. His eyes lit up with interest, and she shook her head, pressing her index finger to her lips.
He sobered up quick enough, his eyes scanning her face, his lips tight with tension. June felt the hardness and outline of his gun tucked in between the waistband of his trousers and skin. Noted the shift in him from relaxed to a subtle tension.
Despite herself, the corner of her mouth kicked up with a wry amusement, You’d shoot me?
“Yes.”
I see she gestured as she raised her hand to his face. Hovered her fingers over his forehead as she rested her index finger and middle finger against his temples. Wished she could tell him what would come next as –
It was as if she’d been yanked underwater so fast, she couldn’t even catch her breath. Sensed, rather than felt Rafa as he arched underneath her touch, his mouth stretched wide in a noiseless scream as images flooded his brain.
The world’s ending started with an unfurling of the most concentrated resin known to man.
Eager fingers stripping its wax and cellophane coverings like a child waiting on a much loved present.
Should you- and that was June, seated at the foot of Ororo’s bed. Whenever they were together, she didn’t need to sign, they just knew. What they had to say to each other was warmly transmitted in feelings and images, not words.
“I- I - I just for reality to be soft for a while,” she lifted her misty blue eyes to June’s. “I’ve heard great things about this.”
Ororo.
“Just once, I don’t want to be brave, not after –” her voice broke, her arms clutching her abdomen. “Let me do this just once, and I can try to go back to what things were.”
June looked at her sister’s hands, the warm, smooth darkness of her arms. The soft, white clouds of her afro framing her face and shoulders tinged with the gloom of grey, her eyes dull with grief. Saw the empty cot at the side of the bed and looked away.
Just once, June agreed, as she got to her feet, her cloak skimming from thigh to calf, enveloping her in a hug. I’ll leave you to it, then.
Closed the door with a click, and leaned against it, staring at the sky trying to ignore the broken sobbing on the other side of the door.
Woke up the next morning, and she was gone, gone.
Shuri’s eyes fluttered open as she pushed herself from sleeping to sitting position, reality torquing sideways. Through the window, tears dripped from the face of the sun and perforated the stones at the foot of the garden. Shuri scrambled to her feet, watching in dawning horror as the sun cried itself into a frenzy, running from the sky into the sea and leaving the moon behind.
No, she pulled herself from her bed, running towards the bedroom, wrenched the door open. Everything empty except for mists of fog that drifted and bumped against the sides of the room. June raised her hands, already knowing Ororo wasn’t there, her heart lurching when she saw the heaps of discarded cellophane wrappers with the logo she’d come to know.
Ororo, June’s legs gave way, as she leaned heavily against the door jam.
What have you done?
She came to, blinking her eyes open, surprised that they were dry.
Realised that under her palm his skin was warm, his chest rising and falling with breath. He would awaken shortly, and she waited. Tried to speak again, but found herself coughing hoarsely.
His body jolted underneath hers, and she craned her neck to look at him. His brows drawn together, his consternation punctuated by a vertical line in the middle.
“Your sister caused all this?”
She glared at him and he scoffed. “Wait - your sister was my best customer?”
At June’s silence, he half laughed, half huffed. “Well, damn. My best customer was one of Las Flacas. Think of what that would mean for busin–”
She slapped him, the room echoing with the noise of it. Found herself on her back, her wrists pinned to the bed, his face inches from hers. His legs on either side of her torso, pinning her to the bed.
“I’m not one to hit women,” he hissed. “But you’re pushing it.”
June glared, grimly satisfied at his yell as she pinned him against the ceiling of the hotel with nothing but thought. Half missing the heat and press of him, and half annoyed at his liberty taking.
He angled his head, and glared at her. Rafa was feral even when helpless against her, his limbs immobile as he squirmed against invisble restraints. With everything going on, she shouldn’t have the time and attention to take pleasure in whatever this was.
With control, she lowered him until his feet touched the ground. Only for him to fall onto his hands and knees, his hair falling across his face.
“I hope your plan works, skinny girl.”
It worked too well.
Every bit of resin was soaked up by her sister to the point of withdrawal. Except for the portion on Rafa’s person.
Rafa was surprisingly co-operative, and had enough of a manic nature to see the twisted amusement of it all.
“Great advertisement for the product, eh? Enough to warp reality.”
June angled her head in his direction, her mouthed really? enough to make him sheepish. For one second.
“There aren’t many things that I’m good at,” he smiled sharklike, but strangely, almost sweet. “But at this - I’m a master.”
June looked around his lab, now bare of all plants. Rafa at the table, with the hashish on his person. His hair ruffled because he’d only been able to comb it with his fingers when they were on the run.
I’m going to have to unmask you now, she signed, before brushing the ends of her cloak along his forearms. Once this was done, he would be in the crosshairs of her sister. A sacrifice for the world to be right again, as she laid a hand against his chest, focusing on the task at hand.
Magic wasn’t necessarily harder to do when one was mute - it just called for greater application of other senses. Better hand work, for one, and focused on intention until the inky taste of it flooded your tongue, two.
But you still needed the motion of words on your tongue, not just the weight of them.
She mouthed the End of Spell and made to move her hand. Only for it to be anchored under his larger one as he leaned in, his lips brushing against hers. Before she could react, he stepped back, shrugging his shoulders in lieu of an explanation.
June shook her head, and held out her hand.
“My legacy,” Rafa shrugged as he placed the tin of hash in her palm. “Five years of graft. Of experiment and countless failures before success. To think, this is the last of it.”
If June could speak-
If her brain had the working ropes and pulleys to open her mouth and have noise and words and sounds that were recognisable she’d – tell him to find another profession.
She could not, and turned her attention to the things that she could do.
“You – betrayed me.”
No, Juno signed, that’s not true, Ororo.
“You hid him from me,” Ororo raged, her power pulsing around her like an aura. It pressed and ripped against the confines of the room. Paint and plaster peeled back from the walls like the skin of an orange to the grey of concrete bricks. June’s skin sizzled from the sparks of lightning that was a part of her sister’s power.
It was as wild as a hurricane touching on land. The gales stung and dragged against her skin as if she were caught in a wind tunnel. Her voice deepened and ragged with her rage, and June clenched her fist as she built up her will.
“You destroyed everything - even from source.”
You said it would just be one time, she leapt back, narrowly escaping a bolt of balled lighting that Ororo flung in her direction. It’s not a fiesta if it happens every night. It’s - June threw her hands up, deflecting the stream of Ororo’s power.
“What?”
Not now June mouthed, her cloak raising and whipping around her shoulders and torso as she extended her locus of protection to include him.
“He can join me,” Ororo’s voice was imperious with cold fury. The world warping and wavering as if seized by heat. “Be my apothecary , supplying me with what I need.”
What you need - June sketched a mousetrap out of magic, causing it to clap around Ororo’s middle, the crunch of ribs loud enough to shock everything into silence.
Ororo’s eyes flew open, wide enough for the whites of them to be seen, before they rolled in the back of her head, falling heavily to the ground with a thud.
Before she changed her mind, Juno formed a smooth, tight seamless ball of scales reminiscent of an armadillo. Her resolve laced with intent as hard as vibranium.
I didn’t want to do this, she raised her hand bringing her fingers together until the ball shrank smaller and smaller into nothingness with one hand. Ripping a portal in the sky with the other.
Thought about Ororo, her drowned baby and the start of her unravelling.
Threw the ball about the size of a marble into the portal and zipped it shut.
June fell to her knees, dry eyed because she’d done all her crying months ago.
Watched as the skies retreat from twilight, to azure. The moon fading into the background as the sun awakened to existence. The world warmed under her palms, the dark retreating from the strength of the sun into a scream.
The world righted itself with fitful convalesce .
People adjusted, mostly. The first few weeks of the sun wrapped up in the cloak of night made a few jittery. But after a few cycles, the minds adjusted. The Toltec statues retreated to where they originally came, with the female figures doing asanas for their pleasure faded into mist and lore.
Once there had been two Flacas there was now one. Juno still lived in the old, shambling house on the outskirts. People’s perception of her back to what it had been before; a skinny, dark skinned young woman who created tinctures and good luck to whomever sought her out in that part of the city. She was someone still to be left alone otherwise.
June pressed the door open, not surprised to see Rafa seated in the slightly too small high backed chair for adults in the parlour, she at the business end of his gun. The passageway of the house had always pleased her; with its curved arch, dun coloured walls, its surroundings suffused by light both direct and indirect from windows in the other rooms and the light from the doorway.
The spots of colour brought to one by tinted tiles and spots of art that hung on the walls. Mirrors on the walls reflected each other, portals left uncovered because Ororo would come back to her eventually - and she would be ready.
But for now –
Rafa hadn’t changed, his hair as wild as storms, his eyes obsidian dark and flinty. His mouth curled with the arrogance that she’d come to know.
“Tell me, pequeña, why I shouldn’t kill you right now."
I’m surprised that you showed up here alone. Juno signed, as she closed the door behind her with a click, hanging up her light cloak on the hook, and her bags.
“You still have Fogg and Knight,” he waved the gun lazily in her direction. “Your associates’ reputation precedes them. And then –” June found herself raked by his stare. In her simple dress and sandals, she looked like a college coed going about her day. “There’s you.”
And yet, June signed thoughtfully, you aren’t frightened.
“You owe me a fuck ton of money, why should I be?”
June waved a hand in his direction. Because you’re holding a bouquet of flowers.
He was faster than she remembered.
The bouquet of flowers, now slackened by his lack of hold as the bouquet broke into stems of flowers on striking the ground, scattering across the floor as if thrown across a meadow. Their scents unfurled in the air, as heady and thick as incense. Her back against the wall as he crowded her there, his arms caging her in.
She could hex him, turn him into an Alebrije worthy of a Linares López creation: half donkey, with the lower half of a tricycle, and at the end of a horn on his head, a bell.
“Clever,” he murmured, his palm half covering her face, his thumb dragging on her lower lip. His breath was humid against the seal of her lips. Ah, and he was a danger, the kind that undid Ororo when it all fell apart. She allowed herself to open to this kind of magic, his palm moving from neck to her chest. The kick of her heart going into high gear.
June opened her mouth, the ropes and pulleys of her brain and tongue clicked together in motion.
Surprised them both when she said, “How did you learn sign?”
The light in his eyes dimmed a little at this, his smile still unfaltering.
“You learn some things because you have to. I’ll tell you one day.”
One day, which meant that this - would be more than today. For the second time in just a few minutes, she opened her mouth, charmed at the magic of her own words coming out as she wanted them to.
“Kiss me,” she said.
As they embraced, the third mirror in the passage flashed. A pair of misty blue eyes widened - and narrowed - with confusion. They blinked once and disappeared, the mirror reflecting the trampled flowers on the floor.
Fin