En el Patio de la Casa del Callejón
The house at the end of the street has an abandoned fountain on the ground floor patio. It is littered with leaves and bruised flowers, fifty-year-old dust and dirt clogging metal poles that sustain a Statue, lanced through its granite limbs: two arms, a tail and spine.
(It breathes in through stone gills;
behind two sets of eyelids
it flutters its eyes and
breathes out.)
There was, once upon a time, a tree that fed the fountain with oranges and limes. It suckled from infancy the sweet-sour nectars and grew, limbs stretched out like bougainvillaea branches.
There is a man that lives in this house, decayed. Misery and decrepit bones alongside sixty-year-old flaws and fears clog the arteries, that sustain that rickety denture; that creeping heart.
This man hates the Statue; he thrills in its decay and revels in its abandonment. And so the granite fades under the sun and rain, the pipes rust, flaking off reddish strips as water makes sluggish attempts to circulate.
And the Statue knows it.
It has laid silent for so long, generation after generation. This house is an inheritance, stolen from his sister. Unceremoniously waiting for time to aid his theft, entrenching himself in the bowels of this house: its winding staircase and spacious patio, its wilting garden and decaying Statue.
The dried ink on dotted lines wakes it.
(it breathes in
draws itself upwards,
slinking out of the sea of
leaves
and neglect that has
become its home.)
Behind, it drags its tail; with hands, it claws across the stone, and the yellowed grass, desperate for a taste of clear, cool water. The long metal spikes hold its head, its limbs entrapped. It wails, high pitched and rage-filled.
The Statue loves only women. It remembers this: once upon a time a woman swept the patio—she prayed daily, left flowers and honey, peeled oranges and lit candles. When the grass was green and the trees hung heavy with the fruit of that faded memory, the woman’s hair spilled like ink at the edge of the fountain. Her eyes grew marble black and empty as they looked up at the Statue in supplication. She'd always been told that for love to grow it must be cultivated, methodical; this love is not, it is a relentless storm of summer that turns a desert into an ocean.
The Statue remembers the woman with the sweet smile that swept the patio every morning until her brother threw her out and stole everything.
(it drags its tail along the red tiles
of the parlour floor,
past the eyes of other dented statues
that hold the sun and moon.
Up the steps made grey with dust;
Up along urine stained carpets.
Up until the velvet red curtain starts—
where it makes its way into the bed
claws curled in the tapestry
claws curled into what lay behind them.)
The man’s shock robs him of his voice before the statue collects: his life for all those he ruined. You’re dead, he says, with no regret and endless resentment, splayed out on the carpet. His head caved in, the sight of the beams in the ceiling fading to black. There is a sound of moving stone, like an avalanche before his world ends.
His last thoughts are of himself, and the bone-deep terror of knowing that the house is no longer his to have. The narrow hallways and secret dining room will belong to his sisters once more.
†
There is a house where a nameless, miserly man no longer lives. Where flowers bloom in season and the sea-salt air permeates through its untamed vine covered gates. The entrance is littered with orange peels, outlining a path to its patio where a fountain sleeps.
At the end of El Callejon de la Sirena lies a house thought decayed. A house owned by a statue with a voice of the deep.
© 2022 Tania Chen
About the Author
Tania Chen is a Chinese-Mexican queer writer. Their work has been published in Unfettered Hexes by Neon Hemlock. They are also a first reader for Strange Horizons and Nightmare Magazine and a graduate of the Clarion West Novella Bootcamp workshop of January/Feb 2021. Their work is upcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Strange Horizon and Baffling.