Bedtime Stories & Modern Mythology

She never spoke these stories while we readied for bed but she’d say them in the living room with her morning coffee, looking through the TV and the hosts of ¡Despierta América! She says a demon walked through the plaza, raspando as he walked, his testicles engorged and thrown over his shoulder, dragging on the ground behind his back. He could kill whole families, if only one of them looked at him as he passed. Devoraba a mujeres; a devourer of women, sallow and saggy. Like Saturno Devorando a su hijo, my mother was a linguistic Goya painting the gore with soft words, and, always, the dry, grinding sound of the demon’s testicles pulling behind him.

We watched novellas with cheap and tawdry names, mimicries of the same stories; facsimiles of reality, she paused one day between a heated exchange on the screen and asked if I knew about duendes; have my frustrations built up to loss? She wonders if she has enriched my nights and what’s-under-the-bed-fears with la siguanaba; her beauty, her curse, the pendulous swing of her sagging breasts. How lust makes monsters of us all.

It was a burning day at the beach and she looked at the boats on the other side of the buoy line and handed me dripping watermelon from a cooler we dragged together from the parking lot all the way here, between us, She said the day reminds her of home, and home reminds her of this, a local beach where just far enough you could make out a sunken boat beneath the clear waters; clarito el agua, how clear, like the boat was just beneath the surface if you reached down and just touched it; she was Shahrazad and Sinbad, a traveler, a weaver of images. She says, look, just beyond your reach, something you do not understand. Would you still try to take it? Intentaron, they tried, but the deeper they swam, the same distance it remained and something, whatever used human curiosity as a lure, would drown them. She sighed in the breeze; it was more humid, back there.

I stumbled upon a realization the after a day of searching for versions of my mother’s stories online; I mused under the burning water of the shower and burned my eyes with shampoo, shut them against the pain and it came, a daring epiphany of what it takes to make modern folklore, how new stories are made, how myths are borne into existence; I thought of the families in ditches, the raped and beaten women devoured whole. How myths were used to explain away phenomenon, like how simple neighbors could morph into monsters with machetes. How they dragged their balls and indiscriminately, took their culling as respect. Forged in the sun, in the humidity in the air; by words that built them into folklore. I wondered why life couldn’t be as simple as an Aesopian fable, the ones where the moral or lesson is neatly presented at the end of the story. Perhaps because life was just messy like that, it never lent itself to tidy conclusions: none of my mother’s old stories ever started with once upon a time or ended with a happily ever after