The Hacienda

by Isabel Cañas

my world was a dark, windowless room, and he was a door.

Long grasses whispered against one another, gossiping like aunts as I crossed to the back wall of the garden.

They sounded as if they came from unreachably far away, from the unseeable side of a dream,

“I have a theory,” Andrés breathed, “about houses. I think . . . I believe that they absorb the feelings of the people who live in them. Sometimes those feelings are so strong you can feel them when you walk through the door. And when those feelings are negative . . . evil begets evil, and they grow to fill the house.

A creature of featherlight longing that bound us, though it rippled fragile as mist at sunrise.

The rush of knowing one was not alone was a heady thing, thicker than mezcal in the way it made my head spin.