What He Told Them, by C. Adán Cabrera
for A.D.C.
According to Abuela Carmen, her brother Miguel vanished for two days after encountering the monster. He was fifteen then: sufficiently mature to join his father and the other men at the coffee plantation but still young enough to complain about having to get up at dawn and work in the first place. Yet Monday through Saturday, after their morning prayers, Miguel and his father would hike the three kilometers through the thick mango groves to the cafetal, carrying with them their machetes and water jugs and the day’s provisions. On the morning, he saw the monster, though Abuela Carmen—who at the time was eight—had come down with a fever and couldn’t fetch the family’s water like she usually did. So, at his mother’s request, Miguel set off for the river instead, a bucket in either hand, saying he would join the men later that morning.
When an hour had passed, and he still hadn’t returned, Miguel’s mother paced around the limits of the mesón, shouting his name into the trees, cursing the disobedient child under her breath. She didn’t start worrying until her husband, who thought Miguel had shirked his responsibilities, came home alone. Miguel’s parents looked at each other and then at the darkening woods. Did he step on a rattlesnake? Was he stung by a scorpion, like the one that killed the Gutierrez daughter? Did he fall down a ravine? Or was it something worse?
Things in rural El Salvador were different back then. This was in the thirties before the telephone lines were installed, and streetlights illuminated the tree line with their jaundiced glow before Abuela Carmen’s family had running water and a permanent stove on which to cook. Back when the supernatural—child-stealing owls, goblins with backward feet, whispering butterflies—was not mocked but respected. And, sometimes, feared. But a boy could still be tasked with traversing the dense forest that he knew better than his town’s dirt streets. His parents knew Miguel hadn’t gotten lost––they were afraid of what else might have happened to him.
Two nights passed before Miguel finally stumbled home, one hand gripping the handle of his dented machete, his clothes streaked with blood and mud and smelling faintly of dried urine. His arms and back were latticed with deep scratches. Miguel’s parents rushed out the moment he stepped over the wooden fence separating the mesón from the dark forest and immediately demanded to know where he’d been. But no matter how much they shook him or how many buckets of cold river water they dumped on his head, Miguel would not speak. He just stood there, mouth a tight slit, his bare feet sinking deeper into the newly-formed mud.
When he finally opened his mouth later that evening, it was to scream: a soul-piercing howl, the dark wail of a dying animal. His father raced over and shook, then slapped the boy. Abuela Carmen, whose fever had broken earlier, pressed her little hands to her ears. But the shrieking continued, Miguel’s gaze still blank and unmoving, saliva running down a corner of his mouth.
The screams stopped when Miguel’s mother lit a candle with an image of the Sagrado Corazón. Or, it was after his father fell to his knees, begging God for mercy. Or, Miguel stopped after four black spiders, each bigger and hairier than the last, crawled out of his open mouth. Abuela Carmen told the story differently each time.
Either way, after he stopped screaming, Miguel looked around the room, his gaze anxious and searching every dark corner. His mother tentatively laid a hand on his shoulder, and when he began to weep, she embraced him. His father and Abuela Carmen watched on the other side of the room, waiting for him to speak.
___
This is what he told them.
Miguel was filling the last bucket when he saw her sitting on a fallen log, not ten yards from where he stood. She hummed a melody he did not recognize as water beaded and dripped on her caramel-colored arms. She had her back turned to him, and despite the weak light of dawn, behind her long strands of wet black hair, he recognized the faint outlines of her naked flesh. The edge of a shoulder blade, the long cleft of her back, the tempting curve of her breasts, the suggestion of a full backside. Miguel thought of the only woman he’d ever been with, one of the women twice his age who sold pupusas at the plantation and would sometimes also take a man’s hand and lead him into the forest. What was she doing here? he wondered. He felt his manhood shift in his pants when he imagined smoothing the water from the smooth dark thigh.
Miguel called out to her, a faint hello.
The speed with which the head snapped in his direction was enough to let him know it was not her. A now-pale hand with black nails parted her dark hair from her face, revealing what looked like a horse's skull. He’d seen plenty of dead animals rotting in the countryside and felt his heart hammering in his chest when he recognized the same sun-bleached bones framed by human-looking hair, except that this creature had sharp teeth lining her lipless jaw. She bit the empty air once, twice: the sound of stones grinding together. Miguel froze in place as she stood on top of the fallen log to face him. Gone were the long, caramel-colored legs, the sinewy back, the delicate-looking toes. Instead, the monster stood on two limbs that resembled those of a chicken—legs red as coffee berries, scaly, thin as tree branches, tipped with three sharp ivory-colored talons. Her wrinkled breasts hung long and heavy, stretching well past her knees. They dipped into the river water in front of her as she stepped down from the log and made her way toward him.
“Fuck me, Miguel,” she said. Her voice was maniacal, almost teasing. Her talons wrapped around the river rocks as she stepped toward him. She bent forward as if she was about to pounce. Biting the air, she growled and rubbed the place where her sex would be.
The monster repeated her command, and when Miguel remained immobile, fixed in terror, she grabbed her breasts and started beating them against a boulder. Water splashed up as she slammed them against the stone, shattering it into shards that rained over him.
That was enough for him to snap out of his stupor. Miguel took the machete out of his hand. He faintly remembered someone saying you were supposed to bite down on the blade to repel the Siguanaba if you encountered her. But terrified as he was at the ghastly sight, he instead ran uphill toward the mesón. The mango trees shook with the monster’s bellows, and as he fled, he heard the snap of twigs and crunch of leaves and her terrible, wet steps.
Miguel hacked blindly at the foliage as he ran, afraid to look behind him. He felt the sting of the branches and sharp-edged stones that grazed him, and right when the mesón’s wooden fence and the promise of safety came into view, he slipped on a fallen mango. Warmth trickled down his leg when he heard the monster getting closer. He quickly got to his feet and pushed toward the hilltop. He was almost home.
But Miguel turned one last time. That’s when he saw her growling in the shadows. She opened her jowls as if she were going to swallow him whole from where she stood. A black, sulfurous mist rushed out of her mouth, and though he batted it away, he had the sudden sensation that he was falling into a deep, lightless abyss.
The next thing Miguel knew, he woke to a sharp, disembodied moan that was somehow emanating from his own throat.
___
Abuela Carmen always ended the story the same way: we blessed the house y ya está. Time went on, the family got older, and life kept going. No one ever mentioned the monster again.
She met my grandfather when she was seventeen and immigrated to Los Angeles. Miguel stayed in El Salvador with their parents in the countryside, in a house near the forest where they had grown up. He had never married and never had any children, preferring, he said, to instead care for their parents until they passed away.
I only met him once, during a family trip to El Salvador after the cancer had taken Abuela Carmen. While everyone else napped, we talked in the living room, and I asked him about the Siguanaba. Miguel smiled and shook his head. Your Abuela Carmen had quite an imagination. Those things don’t exist. But when something—a mango, perhaps, or a stone—fell on the tin roof, sending a rattle through the house, he tensed up at the sharp, piercing sound, nearly spilling his hot, black coffee.
C. Adán Cabrera is a Salvadoran-American writer and translator based in Barcelona. Among other publication credits, his writing has appeared in Carve Magazine, Kweli, The Acentos Review, and Digging Through the Fat. His work has also received support from Tin House, the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Lambda Literary Foundation. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Carlos is hard at work on his first collection of short stories. Visit him online at www.cadancabrera.net