Mexican Gothic

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Her presence was a novelty and an alteration to their patterns. An organism introduced into a sterile environment.

Noemí wondered if High Place had robbed her of her illusions, or if they were meant to be shattered all along. Marriage could hardly be like the passionate romances one read about in books.

She thought Howard looked like an insect and Florence was an insectivorous plant. But Virgil Doyle, he was a carnivore, high up the food chain.

“Not this place and not us. You look back two, three generations, as far as you can. You won’t find love. We are incapable of such a thing.”

“It is important to maintain a sense of order in one’s house, in one’s life. It helps you determine your place in the world, where you belong.

“But painting is the repeated exposure to a thing. It captures the essence of the object.”

He was unlike his cousin in a thousand tiny ways, with his slim hands and his weak mouth, spindly where Virgil was solid forcefulness. He was young and wan, and infected with kindness.

He smiled, and the smile, like his voice, was genuine. Everything in High Place was gnarled and begrimed, but he’d been able to grow bright and mindful, like an odd plant that is carried onto the wrong flower bed.

The serpent does not devour its tail, it devours everything around it, voracious, its appetite never quenched.

Your presence makes me better. It’s like in those stories I used to read: it’s as if you’ve broken a spell.”

You are right to think that I was grown like an orchid. Carefully manufactured, carefully reared. I am, yes, like an orchid. Accustomed to a certain climate, a certain amount of light and heat. I’ve been fashioned for a single end. A fish can’t breathe out of water. I belong with the family.”

She’d known instinctively that this must be their destination, yet she still recoiled at the entrance and clutched Francis’s hand so hard she must have hurt him. He whispered in her ear. “We’re together,” he said.

She was a dreamer, eternally bound to a nightmare, eyes closed even when her eyes had turned to dust.

What did people do after witnessing the horrors they had seen? Was it possible to slip back into normality, to play pretend and go on?

To know a place, you must look at the land.

But it’s also a story about those other ghosts: the ones that were left like a scar on the land.