Where There Was Fire by John Manuel Arias EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: John Manuel Arias
- Language: English
- Genre: Literary Sagas
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
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.
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