Outside the forsaken chicken coop, with the bloody spiked maul glistening at his feet, Fernando stood hunched and panting. He considered, as his clarity returned to him, that a more fitting revenge would have been to smash the snake’s skull and slit open its belly to reclaim the stolen eggs.

But what was done was done.

By now the sun had set. In the fading afterglow, Fernando knocked down a few jungle fruits too sheltered and unripe to have been snatched up by the storm winds. He rooted through the wreckage of the shack, foraging for more scraps. He found some thick-husked root vegetables dangling by their braided stems from the jut of a broken rafter, their edible centers untouched by the corrupting waters of the flood.

In a makeshift pit on the ruined porch, Fernando built a fire. Its flame glowed clean and bright, a stark counterpoint to the sooty, demoniacal smolder of the burning paddock beyond. He ate a sad dinner of charred roots and tough fruits, staring hard ahead of him at nothing at all. More than anything, he wished he had a cigarette. He stoked the fire to keep the mosquitos at bay, though they hadn’t much plagued him. Perhaps the violence of the storm had swept the brunt of them away.

Between two standing ribs of wall beams, he hung a dried hammock he’d salvaged from the carcass of the fallen house. In the stiff, scratchy arc of it, he lay sourly, swaying. Unlike his father, he had never been fond of sleeping in hammocks. He disliked the feeling of having nothing but the uncertain air beneath him. He preferred to have something more solid at his back.

But with only the water-logged wood of the porch and the wet, blighted mud of the yard surrounding him, it was either the hammock or bust. Despite his discomfort, Fernando expected he would sleep. Generally, he did, even when he was far less exhausted than he was now. To him the act of sleep was an act of self-discipline. He could will himself to sleep just about anywhere, at any time.

In the chittering dark of night, the dark of his mind was yet deeper and more disquiet. It wasn’t the nuisance of the hammock that kept him from falling into the peace of oblivion. It was the specter of his failures which haunted him. From the shadows of the wilderness, they leered, drawing strength and shape from its gloating malevolence. Crowding in on him in their dark derision. Taunting him with his miscalculations. Antagonizing him for his hubris like the vengeful spirits of his good intentions damned to hell and back.

Steeped in the blood, dirt and sweat of his vain pursuits, Fernando felt the germ of his unease fester into full-blown agitation. Knowing the cause of sleep was lost, he got out of the hammock. He paced the swollen, creaking boards of the porch. His restless mind wandered ahead of him. Desperate to escape the onslaught of his many regrets, his thoughts lighted on the image of a discovery from earlier that day—a find which he’d dismissed about as soon as he’d stumbled across it.

Now the recollection of it stood out to him in vivid relief.

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy