Excerpt from Where There Was Fire by John Manuel Arias, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Teresa, Barrio Ávila, 1968

Some still talk about how hot that night was. Old women whisper it over coffee, their just-as-old husbands debating over checkers outside. Even a tow truck driver named Luis, born that night, has been told about the malignancy of the heat. Its teeth. He says if his mother hadn't known any better, she would have sworn she'd just given birth to the Antichrist.

That Friday was good until it wasn't. Crucifixion reenactors drank clandestinely in bars, pyretic palmers unlocked their knees to scuttle home. Time wasn't tallied, because the priests who normally manned the belfries lay naked inside the darkness of their churches, praying for the heat to pass. No singing bells to interrupt the hours. At dusk, it felt as if a second sun had risen—a sugar-white impostor with no warmth to its light. The full moon climbed center-sky, its body no longer a mirror but a magnifying glass focusing its beams on San José's valley. It cast long shadows, boiled away stagnant pools of water. And when its glow leaked through the stained glass of the dark churches, the sweating priests, draped like towels over pews, couldn't ignore the inkling that somehow the burning they felt was closer to that of the gnawing sensation of ice.

It all began on a banana plantation owned by the American Fruit Company. From its cantina emerged a man as drunk as the father he was named after. He stumbled out into a mud-dirt road and swayed in the imaginary breeze only drunken men feel. He gripped something invisible—a bottle … a machete?—and lumbered along La Guaria Railroad. The rails glittered in the moonlight, hypnotizing him. Over his slurred thoughts, a cool, rum-sweet voice persuaded him along. Past wilting hibiscus bushes. Past muggers, and mongrels, and Mothers Superior. Past shrieking ghosts tied tightly to the track like damsels in distress. This voice beckoned the man back to his home—a fragile little affluent neighborhood by the name of Barrio Ávila. There, his family and neighbors were still stuck in dreams, oblivious to his pilgrimage.

* * *

THE MOON WAS highest in the sky when Teresa startled from sleep, her face wet. Outside, Barrio Ávila slept peacefully. La Guaria Railroad sprawled out like a fat, tired snake, dividing Teresa's lonely house from the rest. The newly installed streetlamps stood sentinel, their heads swarmed by lazy gnats and tiny things that touched the lights and fell to the track below. Trees gossiped in the hush. Two hounds lapped up each other's urine. A cane toad's croaking haunted streets and shadowed corners.

Teresa rubbed her eyes of sleep and picked her ears of echoes. The humidity trapped in the bedroom lay atop her, thick as caramel. In a tender reflex, she felt gently for her grandmother's arm, but the sheets beside her were dry and undisturbed. A reflex she couldn't shake, even though it had been many years since her grandmother died.

Saints are just devils who cut off their tails, her grandmother's voice said in the darkness. She'd been a famous soothsayer and sage, an encyclopedia of proverbs and sayings. Again, the echo of those saints and devils. It had been her grandmother's greatest wisdom; she spoke of those who sanctified themselves by ridding their lives of vices and wickedness. But eventually she decided on a plain, simple addendum to her own adage: Men are the devils, and women the saints. And every woman is born with a sharp machete inside her heart. She must learn to wield it, to cut off men's tails.

Women far and wide subscribed to her grandmother's gospel, and she even advised Teresa to keep the tail locked away from the things she loved. If you were to open my drawer, the tails would scramble and jump out like vipers, her grandmother confessed. They would slither away and try to reattach themselves.

Copyright © 2023 by John Manuel Arias