aaduna in exile - Winter 2021-2022 - Mario Duarte
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| Mario Duarte (photo provided) |
Cassandra and Las Brujas
¡Pinche pendejo! Las bujas, nasty witches, old busybodies, who police the streets with their morality, hit me on the head knocking me out, and then stripped and gagged me, and tied my hands and feet to the bedposts. Next, they took a long string, tied a knot around my pene (my stupid dick), and tied the other end to a doorknob, and left the door ajar. I feel groggy, barely able to move, terrified of the slightest breeze from the open window. Fuck me if one of those crazy brujas returns and slams the goddamn door!
Why did this happen you ask? Over nothing, just a piece of cola, you know what I mean, some tail. I’m an hombre, right, and a man has to do what he’s gottta do. I know one thing, I’m sure not to blame, no, Cassandra is. Blame it on her beauty. I couldn’t help myself. There she was one day crossing the street, her short red dress fluttering over her long legs, hips swaying, long dark hair cascading down her milky shoulders.
I followed her into Rips tavern. She was seated alone at the counter. I smiled at her with my eyes. She smiled back. I swear that I felt as if we had met before, that somehow we were destined to meet again. I ordered us drinks. Ah, what a wonderful deep throaty laugh Cassandra has after a few drinks.
“I can tell the future,” she told me. A little drunk, I laughed and nearly slid off the barstool. She didn’t laugh or smile, though. Her face grew taut—she was serious.
“What’s the future hold? For you, or for me? What the hell, for the world?” I asked waving a hand across the empty air. My body pulsed with excitement, my mind intrigued, and both exhilarated by the chase.
She touched her brooch, a gold snake with ruby eyes, pinned over her left breast. Her head moved aside as if she heard a voice. “The future is always in flux. It can change from moment to moment. It depends on how we act, or react to things, events and to each other, but for you I see a woman, no a group of women, angry, and I see devastating pain.”
I ordered a whiskey. “I can tell the future too, Casandra. I see a man kissing a beautiful woman. I see them entwined together, like the coils of your snake.”
She bit her lip. Her eyes sad. “Yes, I see this too, but I also see me alone, sitting on a porch swing, listening to the cicadas, gazing up at the tear-stained stars, wishing you were sitting next to me.”
“Maybe if you listen hard enough you just might hear my boot steps coming down your street some evening, a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a bouquet of roses, red, pink or yellow, whatever color you like best, in the other.”
“Our time together will be brief,” she said her face turned down, “but passionate.” Her pale cheeks flushed. When I touch her high cheekbones, my body flared into flames.
The next thing I remember was holding her in my arms, after making love, in her brass bed, feeling content, satisfied. The phone began ringing in the living room downstairs and for the first time that night I thought about my wife, a good woman who deserved better. I thought she must be worried about me, how my supper, probably beans in a black iron skillet and tortillas wrapped with a hand towel in a basket had gone cold. I felt beads of cold sweat on my forehead and temples and my eyes ached. It felt like there was something horrible in my mouth, something bitter and gritty that I needed to spit out but had to swallow.
Cassandra twisted and pulled on the ends of her hair and then said, “After what has happened between us, I see it now just as plainly as I see you. I know what’s to become of us, of everyone. The city, no, the world will burn when the sun suddenly flares out and there is nothing you or I or anyone can do to stop it.”
I started to laugh but caught myself. “I think the future is what we make of it. Cassandra, didn’t you said so yourself that the future is in flux?” I squeezed her hands. They felt soft, but sweaty. I looked into her eyes until she looked at me. She let the twisted ends of hair drop over her breasts. “Maybe it’s not too late to change things, Cassandra? There has to be more time.”
“Is there?” she said. ”What if there is no tomorrow?”
Cassandra kissed me, and I never felt more alive, when all of the sudden mi esposa, my wife Adelita, who I realized I no longer love, and a coven of las brujas stormed into the room. Most of them carried brooms or mops, some baseball bats. They beat us without mercy but Cassandra never screamed. The look on her face was one of defiance and something else—acceptance. I felt a hard blow on my head and the all the light of the world slanted into half-darkness, followed by a plunge into nothingness.
When I opened my eyes everyone was gone. No wife or brujas. I can imagine what las brujas did to Cassandra, what they do to all women they call fallen, wayward. No doubt, they bound her hands, gagged her, shaved her head, dressed her in a nun’s habit, and paraded her around the town square with a plaque around her neck, with one word: Puta, whore, in red letters.
I ached all over, even my eyelids were sore. My head hurts worse than ever and I have never felt more confused, or more scared. I didn’t know where I was at first or how I got here. I just wanted to go home. Slowly, oh so slowly I remembered. I remembered Cassandra—her lips, her breasts, her sky-blue eyes.
Now you’ve heard my story, our story. It ends with me unable to avoid seeing myself in the ceiling mirror. I am such a stupid cabrón! All I can do is lie here, staring at myself, my pito swelling, holding my breath, waiting for a sudden gust to blow the door shut and rip me up. I can’t make the slightest twitch. What’s that I hear?
Snakes are hissing, somewhere out of sight on the floor, and I am wondering if I will ever see Cassandra again, and if Adelita will finally divorce me. Then, this funny feeling comes back, that this has all happened before and will happen again. I shout for help but the gag muffles my voice. I feel Casandra’s prophecy is coming true. There’s a taste of ash in my mouth, and my body is surrounded by orange flames with rising blue hearts rolling through a big hole in the ceiling into a smoky gray sky with unbearable heat, searing everything away, all thought, all feeling, all memory, except for Cassandra, only her behind my eyes.
About the Author
Mario Duarte is a Mexican-American writer born, raised and living in the Midwest. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of New Hampshire. His poems and short stories have appeared in 2River Review, Abstract Elephant, American Writers Review, Bilingual/Borderless, Digging Through the Fat, Lunch Ticket, Pank, Rigorous, Sky Island Journal, Plainsongs, Write Launch, Typishly, and previously in aaduna. New work is forthcoming.
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