La Llorona

I'm sure you've all heard the story or seen the movie. I read this story as a child, in the late 90's. The story is written from the perspective of La Llorona and is quite a twisted and distressing tale. While you wait for my original stories, poems and artwork on Patreon to be released, I decided to share this with you.

La Llorona by Yxta Maya Murray

I could have cooked them and eaten them with some fine dark wine, a few dry crackers. Like a mad greek goddess, searching out the bones, searching her sons' blank eyes for a last song then gulping them down like that, ferociously.

Instead I fed them to the water. There is a deep, silty river by my house, it is purple black at night with strains of shaded blue like royal velvet beneath the surface. The fish live here, quietly, staring up at the light during the day with their small electric eyes, gulping in the watery air with their fishy mouths opening and shutting, their gills fluttering in the current. You can skim your hand through the force of the water, then plunge it in and eel the hard rushing push as it runs back toward the sea.

A man never knew how angry a woman could be until the very last moment, the last second when he glanced up at her and saw nothing but red, hot volcanoes. How could he love another, with his smooth skin and hard legs, his hands as strong as river rocks, and as soft? A husband is forever, he belongs to you, as do his children. They cannot leave no matter how hard they try, it will turn them into beasts, it will make you into a monster.

I have green gills now, I breathe the water as the fish do, as my children did, living down here at the bottom of the river, caressing myself and remembering.

I was once like you are. I spoke quietly, my head turned down and my mouth bending up slightly into a small smile, satisfied, I cooked warm, spicy meals with meat and rice and beans in them, milk on the table and spirits for my husband after. Putting the children to bed with stories of an Aztec king, a Mayan princess living among jaguars, and wild horses, fighting in their bloody wars. My sons would sleep like trees.

What is a woman? A woman is waiting. Waiting for the day to begin and then the lights to dim to night. A woman is praying to God. To think of the things that will happen to you, that you will let others do to you, it is madness. There is a limit to those things, but it stretches on and on, like a desert, like you are dying of thirst in the sandy ocean, seeing nothing all around but a thin, grey line at the horizon.

I have black eyes, big like a deer's. And a nose so sharp it can sniff out a beetle. My hands would have turned into claws if anyone threatened my family, I would have died for them, spread my body like a blanket, opened to any knife, just to keep them safe, to keep them mine forever. And then the lies came, and I had to protect myself. I had to do the hardest things, and sing and cry and let the heavens know that I was doing them.

My husband began turning away from me in bed. Cold sheets of air between us, between our bodies. A woman may not ask, not ever, she must keep to herself, be patient until the time when the man reaches over, when he decides that it is time for love. So I did not ask. I said nothing, only lying their surrounded by whispering air, my skin lonely, my eyes open all through the night, seeing the black walls, listening to the rats gather their food in the dark corners of our home.

And so I was the dying person in the desert, stretching myself out over the horizon, a vast sheet of skin and blood and bone, of endless hope, of patience. I would wait forever until this time passed, until he would want me again.

Once a woman like me waited until there was no more time. Then she gathered herself like the brown bear, collected all her strength and made a gold ball-gown, with find filigree and a headdress, with jewels on the sleeves and bodice, gold lace, gold petticoat, gold slip, air-spun and weightless. She sat in her small sewing room and bent over sheets of fine, burning gold, so careful not to tear it with her thin fingers, pulling the needle in and out, the thread only a gold breath, invisible, like the thoughts in her mind.

It was her finest craft. And it was so beautiful on her husband's lover, who had the same shade of hair, the same jewel-tone lips like fine rubies. The girl smiled when she saw her wedding present and offered her body to its fiery cloth, letting it burn her into ash. There were colors then, more than in any art, there was the color of vengeance, blood red and bone-white, and the stinking pull of pale skin folding over.

But I would take my creation home. I would become it. Because it is in the blood, in the soil from where we grow our food, in the black, southern dirt, with our darker skin. The woman are only their families, and their husbands and sons feel every drop of them.

He would not have me, he said. He would not have me anymore, and he hid his washed hands in his pockets. I looked over at our home with its thick wooden walls, the stone floors, my small garden with flowers and the herb plants for making teas, the quiet and beauty of the rooms, each holding us like a mother.

I will wait, I told him.

He was gone many nights, and then there was more than a cool sheet of air around me in bed, it was a tornado, and I was sinking. My children still laughed and played out by my garden, squeezing the flowers with their hands, wanting more food as they grew and widened, expanded into broader, demanding men. I saw how they would only become bigger, how they would grow dark shadows above their lips, their voices getting harder and thicker, their footfalls heavy.

I would pray to God.

The sky will not forgive stones, if you toss one up in the air it will be thrown back at you, harder and faster than before. God is like that, He is like the sky with your stones. He is like an echo, only giving back the same, spare thing, without a sign.

I burnt sage and candles and sprinkled the house with holy water, purifying myself with it, praying from my books with a low whisper. We have many devices for calling on God. There are plants to tuck into pillows and to burn in small clay pots, there is starvation, turning from food and water until the day gets clearer, until everything has a crisp, silver outline. You may kill small animals, breathing in the mist from their hot bodies in the morning, leaning over them after your knife has done its work. God may speak with you then, if you are lucky.

But He saw what was in me, what was rightly mine, and He turned away from the sight with the same cool force as my nights alone in the swallowing bed.

My sons lengthened, their legs stretching out like watered weeds.

I became a mongoose. Secret and moving at night. My skin leathered and my eyes narrowed from sifting through the darkness to see the sleeping world. I burrowed through the dirt faster than a running horse, with my ugly humped back and my spiky dirt-colored fur.

There are deceptions for the quiet ones to see, the small silent animals traveling at midnight. I wandered through my neighbors' homes, splintering their wood floors with my digging claws. I saw how other men take their lovers in different houses, the noise of their sex filling the late sky, sweeter than the simple duty at home. I saw the married women who lay like the stone in their sleeping beds. These women were not like me any more.

My husband would return some days, giving me his old smile. He would tell me lies with a slick voice. That he had fallen asleep at a bar, drinking with his friends, playing cards, discussing the new regime. He wanted me to see him there in my mind, on an old wood stool with a cognac, smoking cigars with the other good men. To believe.

But I had hardscrabbled my small, spindly animal body over the floor boards of his new woman's house. With my raw fangs I had nibbled on her linen sheets while they slept, listening to the pace of their breathing, and had seen their breath twining up in the cold night in a pale, lingering fog. His lover is the color of parchment, pale against him.

He would tell me these things, how he lost track of time with his friends, and I would stare into his flat, familiar face.

He has the look of lost people, the old bloodlines, with his flint sharp nose, and widening cheeks, his skin a weathering bronze. We are twins, I used to say, my face mirroring his with the color of an ancient pot buried under the sand. I would smile with my teeth shining out. We are the same.

But now I am dark skinned like the mongoose, like the brown bear, and not like him any longer. I am not like any woman or man, only godless, and I was digging tunnels in the dirt, and preying on grasshoppers, small mice. Practicing.

And as with the other woman who sewed night and day to make a beautiful burning gown, there came a day when I saw that all the time in the world would run out. It bled out of me, flowing and rushing out of my body like a river, the night, and the day, the dark and the light became the same, and there was only a flat, dank grey to the world. The wind ceased. I could not hear it any more, nor the birds, any laughter or music, and I wondered if I would die, quieter than dust.

Children are their mothers. They can only belong to the women. We kiss their faces and feed them, we know the fresh scents of their heads, their questions. When they will cry. Children belong to mothers, because they are of the same body. They do not become separated from us until a certain age, until they lose that gleam, the shining of their simple, pure faces. When they become like the other people around.

My sons were still only mine, there were unformed yet and simple minded. And they were the only path to my wandering husband, who was reaching past me faster and farther. I could barely see him then, only the top of his head down the road, and I knew it would be over soon, that I would fold into the earth with no more sound.

Women are weak like glass. Life will offer them only few gifts, a drawer full of trinkets. The memories of our children, of our husband and our home, the scent of a clean room, a fine meal. They will be offered for a handful of years, and then they are gone.

And so I brought my sons to the edge of the river bank, stroked their beautiful heads, their ink black hair and sturdy frames, and whispered into their ears of my love for them. They reached for me with their small hands, curved like beach shells. I saw that my own hands against their gleaming heads were starving, the meat shrunk away, only a few sticks and a layer of bark, and I remembered my husband with his clove skin, his lover's white face.

My sons did my bidding then, and swam under the river with the strength of a shark, their faces becoming its same grey color. They asked no questions, only smiling up at me until the very end, the sounds of the water rushing and their raised cheeks, letting me fold them into the murk, into the cold water like the sky in the dark night. My arms were like iron, my teeth set in a stone line while I plunged them in, and I shrieked to the sky with all the sound of the wind and roaring ocean, all the music of rain. I thought I might grow blind with the black water in my eyes, my hair wet ropes like eels, and the thick feel of silt on my face as I tried to swim too.

At the river bed there are the copper coins that the children throw in for luck, and the small sucking bottom fish and tangled feathery plants. The men and the women refuse to come near, they whisper about what I did. How my husband fell ill with the news of me, of our sons, how he cried and screamed just as a woman would, a woman with a heart in her. He would kill himself, he said, and I held my breath at this news, waiting and watching at this small shore. Then he came and took our sons away from me, he dredged up their hard bodies, their little heads with their open eyes and mouths, their few baby teeth showing. He showed no fear as he did this, but I let him feel my presence, the ice of it, as I draped my shadowy body over his and laughed into his ear.

But men live. They live without the blood running through them to keep them alive, somehow they stay on the earth to walk and work and eat and sleep just like before, only now their eyes are round and blank like eggs. My victory was small, taking life from the living, but he could not smile again with the memory of us.

There was that day when all the time poured out of me like the ocean, and now time feeds in and out of me the same as the wind, winding its way down my spine, through my fingers, it wraps its thick cloak about my body. I sit by the river and sing out loud, so that my boys might hear me, so that my husband will stop what he is doing and look up, a dazzled look on his face.

Women are weak but now I am the strong one, here in the river with the sucking fish. The townsfolk say that I hated men, that I would kill all men and boys with a cutting smile, my hands like scythes. The women cluck their tongues when they hear my singing, calling me bruja, llorona. They tell their own sons to behave, to not wander, warning them that I will kill them with my knife and tear them with my big teeth. I am the rumor now, the thing that they will whisper about, and I torture them with my songs, my voice a low violin, a grand piano, a symphony full of men in tuxedos, their heads bent over their instruments, their eyes closed.

The dirt on the river bank is green, and dust brown, it is wet with the river water, a thick muck where I sleep. I will sing the people my songs, and appear to them, dressed in green plants and old skirts, my hair these wild wet ropes around my breasts, wrapping my hips, coiling my legs like snakes. I see my old friends' frightened white-egg eyes, their open mouths and I love to hear them speak my name out loud in the living world. But there are times when I will remember and cry, seeing the grey faces of my two sons like stone, their teeth like pebbles just showing out of their open mouths, as they were with me that small while, here at the bottom of the river.

It shadows my joy, a dark bog, when I remember the time before I was a mongoose, when I could not yet become a jaguar, a muskrat, a beetle. Before I could make myself heard as thunder is and have the whole sky tremble down like weeds. I felt different then, I could let my hands linger on my husband's back, I could kiss him below his hair, my children would rush to me, like the water does. Those pictures are my ghosts now, haunting me as I will haunt all of you.

I would have a war here. If I could summon men I would bring them here with their pistols and their drums, and they would fight before me and die only for my amusement, waving their silly flags and their trumpets. I know the world works like that. But here at the marshy river my voice only carries into a few small homes, my legend travels a short distance, and the small brown fish and the spiders, the plants and the flies around me are my only family now.

They say I hate all men and the small boys, that I drowned my sons here and will walk along the bank until the sun dies, singing and crying like a hard wind. If I could have done it again, I would have been a cannibal, eating them all like lunch. If my husband had given me a daughter I would have forced her in me like that, even harder than I tucked my sons under the lapping water. I would want to breathe in the air with her same nose, her same lungs, to see the clouds with the eyes I imagine she would have had. I would want to take them all in, my husband, my sons, my daughter, one by one until they were gone.