LIT ANGELS #36: New Beginnings at The End of The Year

with first chapters by Jen Backman, Kate Marra, Ciana Wilson, Don Widmer and art by Don Widmer, Ciana Wilson and Jen Backman. Edited by Francesca Lia Block

Table of Contents

An Excerpt from the novel El Veneno del Amor by Don Widmer

An Excerpt from the novel Knee Deep by Kate Marra

An Excerpt from the novel The Mirror by Ciana Wilson

An Excerpt from the novel Tito and Miel Fight Fate by Jen Backman

Art by Don Widmer, Ciana Wilson and Jen Backman

Editor: Francesca Lia Block

These are some of my favorite works by some of my favorite students. In the new year I am hoping to create Lit Angels Press. Stay tuned and enjoy the opening chapters and art below!

Love,

flb

Machaca by Don Widmer

An Excerpt from the novel El Veneno del Amor

by Don Widmer

La viuda negra. Black widow.

Belly full of flies. And still ravenous.

She crept from her nest in the steeple, gazed down on the altar of God, dangled from a dusty ledge, and spied something wriggling below. Something redolent of sweat and blood. Something flavored like sour milk. She dropped like an acrobat, unraveling on her silky thread.

Down she tumbled.

Her long black legs like knitting needles, weaving.

Cascading.

The baby in the cradle laughed. Looked up to the stained glass window. He reached for the dazzling lights, blind to the poisonous speck descending like an acid raindrop.

The sunbeams twirled like salsa dancers above his fancy cradle. They danced the guaracha costumed in archangel blue.

The greedy spider increased her pace, all eight of her legs jerking now, teasing thread from an invisible spindle. She smelled the cradle. Her poison gurgled, yearning for blood.

“La la la” sang the naked baby, flirting with the colored light.

“Shhh,” hissed the priest, black as the spider. He stood beside the cradle, an impatient sentinel.

The baby laughed and his la-las grew louder.

His mother, in the first row of pews, fanned her face with both hands. The air stifled her. She rose to approach her son, but the priest admonished by wagging a deformed finger. He grimaced at his watch.

The spider quit her weaving. She hung two meters above the wriggling, laughing thing in its satin basket. She readied to strike her blow. She trembled with anticipation. She bared her pincers.

A woman, glancing up from her rosary, spied the black spot suspended on a scintillating string. She gurgled, “malvado,” but her throat constricted from fear.

The spider vibrated with electricity, unleased her threads, and plunged.

From a passageway echoed a slamming door.

A blast of wind caught the spider and blew her off course. She floated over the veiny head of the priest, landed on the back of his neck, and scampered down his robes, disappearing in a mangrove swamp. The priest shivered, emitting an involuntary groan. The baby, not to be outdone, la-la-ed even louder.

An odor of flowers filled the air like a bouquet of roses picked a day too soon, a slow decay.

“Tia Rosa!” whispered the congregation, “The eldest sister!”

From a side passage emerged a figure, crowned with thorns and armed with a poison more deadly than la viuda negra.

Wrapped in a crimson shawl despite the heat, Tia Rosa plodded, like a mourner, to the baby’s cradle. The braids in her hair formed prickly knots intertwined with thorny roses, which she twisted as she walked. The priest asked, “What name do you confer?”

Tia Rosa spoke, “I christen this child Adan, son of the red earth,” giving the child his first name. Then she glanced down and was amazed. The smiling boy squirmed on his cushion of white satin and his eyes enraptured Tia Rosa. Those eyes, dreamy and seductive, were a mirror of the boy’s father. She nearly snatched the child and fled the church, but then she remembered her gift. From a satchel at her hip she pulled a jar of ointment made from the poison of the false-eyed machaca, that mysterious insect with its sin-inducing bite. She dipped her thorn-scarred finger into the venom and painted an eye on the baby’s chest, over his heart.

The child gasped.

“For love, mi sobrino,” said Tia Rosa, untangling herself from the baby’s spell.

Maria, the baby’s mother, rose from her lonely pew and approached Tia Rosa, to embrace her. Tia Rosa raised her arms, as if to welcome her sister, but then dismissed her with a wave, like she was shooing a fly. As she descended with halting deliberation into the moldering north passage, she pounded her chest and fingered her thorny braids. She repeated the word pícaro like she was praying the rosary.

Something sinister crossed the sun.

“Can you hear a funeral?” a woman asked her husband. “I hear the beat of a hollow drum.”

The sunbeams from the stained-glass window dissipated. The baby’s eyes searched for the dancing lights. He waved his fists to beckon them back.

A rumbling rocked his cradle.

From the high south passage came a crash like thunder, awakening even the Saint’s incorrupt bones. Silence ensued. Then came the tapping. Clickety clickety clack clack like rain unleashed all at once. A figure emerged from shadows, tapping her dagger heels on the cold stone floor.

“Tia Sombra!” whispered a woman.

“The wealthy sister,” hissed her husband.

Arrayed in a gown of strapless, starless ebony spun from the silk of a China black worm, Tia Sombra swept in like a dangerous wave. No one could decipher where she ended and her shadow began. She cast it ahead of her like a fishing lure or dragged it in her wake like a trawling net. Whatever it caught thrashed for air. But by some charm the baby in his cradle evaded the shadow and Tia Sombra clickety clacked past, without even a sideways glance at the naked boy and his seductive eyes.

Five steps beyond the cradle she hesitated, and her shadow slid around her like a slippery lagoon. For precisely five seconds she considered whether her nephew deserved her gaze. But the impatient shadow nudged her forward; she had princes to see and envoys to charm.

The priest, finding his voice, asked, “What name do you confer?”

“I christen this child Isra, he who journeys by night,” declaimed Tia Sombra, in a voice used to silencing roomfuls of revelers. Thus, she gave the baby his second name.

She slipped a silver ring off her imperious finger. It was the simplest ring on a hand weighted with precious metals and priceless gems. With a coloratura’s flourish she tossed the ring into the air. It landed at the baby’s kicking feet. “For wealth, mi sobrino,” she intoned, with the finality of tragic opera.

Maria coughed to prove she existed. She rose to acknowledge the diva and her shadow.

“Ah,” sighed Tia Sombra. “Sister.” They exchanged empty kisses and Sombra whispered to her, “I see you sit alone in the family pew. Mamá and papá feel shame, perhaps? Tell me, does the child’s father exist?”

Maria stumbled backward to her seat.

Again, the rain clickety clacked. The shadow swept its mistress forward like a fast-moving stream toward the gulping north passage. Into its whirlpool they plunged like the midnight waters of La Cueva del Esplendor.

A creak, like the opening of a coffin, came from the opposite passage. It echoed down, down, down, but no person emerged. Just a presence, a menacing chill. The parishioners wondered at the change of weather. An icy breeze made them shiver. An usher rose to tend to the matter - a door had blown open, somehow, on this day without wind - but the priest bade him to sit, knowing what the chill foretold, who it anticipated. So did a blind woman, kneeling on a cushion of straw. She prophesized, “It’s Tia Blanca, the baby sister.”

One second was airy nothing, the next second she appeared, hovering next to the cradle. Like a hazy mirage, an image coming into focus, Tia Blanca emanated from light and shade. She resembled vapor and presented herself wrapped in white from her sandaled toes to her bulbous turban fastened by a large, moon-infused crystal. She chanted a mantra and gazed in the direction she imagined the planet Saturn spun on its crystal axis.

She wore an eternal smile, even under the direst circumstances. She bent her face toward the baby and he saw white teeth approach, consuming his field of vision. The smile became a strange, eyeless beast. He reached up to touch it, like it was one of his dancing sunbeams, but it sang no soothing melody, made no graceful motion. This smile hovered, pulsing large and small, with its own icy, meditative breath.

“What name do you confer?” whispered the priest.

The smile recoiled, its tantric meditation disrupted.

“I christen you Casimiro, destroyer of peace,” Tia Blanca exhaled, long and slow, giving the baby his third name. Then she plucked something withered and twisted from a fold in her turban, a dead seed from the tipu tree, the tree which oozed blood. The seed, with its single helicopter wing, zigzagged into the baby’s crib and he laughed to see it spin. It landed limp, somewhere above his head.

“For life, mi sobrino,” chanted Tia Blanca, extending the “o” into an “ohmmm.”

Maria rose to greet her, but Tia Blanca was already gone. Her skeleton smile seemed to hover near the cradle, for one terrible moment. Then the teeth were swallowed by the dark mouth passage.

All the aunts had come and gone. All the names conferred.

The priest quivered. Something pricked his inner thigh and scuttled down his leg. His lips formed a curse. Damn this child and its litany of names. “Let’s be done with it,” he prayed. He bent to clutch the babe and wind it in a web of gauze.

A flash of light made him falter.

It came from the upward passage, a glare of green where no light should be. Yet an emerald luminescence grew, and the sound of jangling metal, as if a dragon descended from her nest of treasure. This dragon, when she appeared, wore a neon mohawk, waxed sleek as the plume of a basilisk lizard. Her armful of bracelets clanked and sparkled. This dazzle would have been less discordant in a discoteca than a church, yet here she was.

“Tia Tia!” choked a woman who wore her crucifix too tight. “The devil!”

A hurl of insults followed.

“What hair! What pluck! What boots!”

“Such a racket. Who dared invite her?”

Tia Tia turned to face the mob. She pointed with her rhinestoned finger at everyone and no one in particular.

“You think Tia Tia needs an invitation? I come and go as I please.”

A man engaged Tia Tia with a stare, but she parried. “Speak up, cousin. Have you swallowed your tongue?”

A woman with a narrowing eye called her illegal. Tia Tia countered, “Sideshows require passports? Where I plant my feet I claim my stage.” She flicked her wrist and released a flame, a conjurer’s trick.

The priest hid behind his tabernacle. Everyone in town, even the mayor in his gilded pew, cowered before Tia Tia.

All but one. The baby’s mother rose to face the dragon.

“This is a church, not Tia Tia’s House of Illusions. Today you don’t perform your fireworks. Honor your nephew even if you don’t respect this holy place.”

Tia Tia ignited. “My darling sister. You speak of respect? Holding the baby’s name day when you thought I’d be in Rio mesmerizing crowds, turning my lava into gold? Have you grown so ashamed of me? Your twin in the mirror. We shared the same crib.”

Maria blushed but stood in place.

Tia Tia said, “This baby has four aunties, not three. He’ll receive four names. Now make way.”

She clamored to the cradle. To a chorus of gasps, she scooped the baby in her muscular arms and hugged him to her chest. The baby’s mother protested, but Tia Tia shot her a glance like bullets. That glance turned to gumdrops when she looked upon her nephew and began to sing, “Los pollitos dicen pio pio pio.” The baby reached to touch his aunt’s face and Tia Tia whispered something in his ear.

She returned him to his pillow and told her sister, like they were alone sipping coffee, “This final name is too powerful to speak aloud. I gave him its essence in a whisper. He’ll remember it, perhaps, when he outgrows the others. But I leave him this gift.” The fin on top of her head unfolded like a pair of dragon wings. She reached between the plumes and withdrew a book covered in marbled green paper. It formed a pattern of insect eyes, or silver rings, or whorled seedlings. The pattern changed with the shifting light. “For transformation, mi sobrino.”

She tucked the book safely beneath the baby’s pillow and then kissed his forehead. She told him, “I’ll see you soon enough, love.” As she walked toward the dimness of the north transept, in the footsteps of her three sisters, she cast a backward glance at the baby’s mother.

“Tell them you’ve been living with me, sister, sharing the bed of a devil, the one you ran to when our parents cast you out.”

She turned to face the spiteful throng, taking a fighting stance in her alligator boots. “Yes, you heard right, we share a bed with a pillow between us, raising this chick like two mother hens. Lovely Maria and her wayward twin Tia Tia. Who will rise and call me wicked to my face?” She challenged the congregants, one by one, with her viper stare. “Or do you prefer to catcall behind my back?”

When Tia Tia ducked into that twisting downward passage, her brilliance transformed the wet dungeon into an emerald grotto. The tambourine rhythm of her bracelets caused even the sternest congregants to tap their feet. They covered their ears and, forgetting how to pray, chanted “shame, shame, shame.”

The priest, desperate to scratch his blistering thigh, forewent the ritual of wrapping the infant. He presented a naked and singing Adan Isra Casimiro as newly christened. The baby’s mother, Maria, tugged him from the priest and bundled him in cotton. She shoved the gifts into her pockets. While the congregation gossiped in the shadow of the crucifix, Maria escaped by the front entrance. Outside the church, she spit the names into the dust, each one more horrible than the one before.

“Adan, what a name! Food for the worms.”

“Isra, don’t make me laugh! I spit you under a stone.”

“Casimiro, like poison on my tongue! Strangle the grass, not my son.”

“And what name did Tia Tia whisper in your ear? One day I’ll learn all your secrets.”

Maria held the baby away from her chest. “You give off such heat, like the sun itself!” She remembered another boy who burned like sunrise, a young man, a lover. In the morning, waking next to him, she’d be covered in sweat and rashes. Lately her nights beside her cold-blooded sister were sleepless and lonely.

“His name was Diego,” she told her son. “You’re my little Diego now. Mine alone. My bundle of sunshine. I’ll bear your heat until we find the house of our dreams… or run out of gas.” She straddled a motorcycle lent by her cousin. “Sorry, cousin, now it’s mine.” Maybe she’d send him money next month. Maybe not.

She strapped the baby to her chest and pulled on the helmet, large and wobbly. If she held it steady with one hand she could still see through the tinted visor. Then Maria and Diego, with a stolen motorcycle and a pocketful of strange gifts, sped beneath a noonday sun, leaving their city of birth, in search of something untethered and unpredictable.

Don Widmer is a papermaker, bookbinder, and writer living in Chicago. He creates pulp paintings, a papermaking technique using numerous layers of colored pulp to create imagery within sheets of handmade paper. Examples of his art can be seen in Radical Paper: Art and Design with Colored Pulp, the first scholarly book on the subject. His artist books feature traditional and contemporary binding structures such as tunnel books and flag books. His writing and art have been featured in past issues of Lit Angels. He has a MFA in Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago.