P1: The Red Dress.

MADRID, NM: 22:39 hrs.

 

The body is ordered quietly alongside the miry vein of the dirt road, surreptitious, unnerving in the forlorn look of it for seeming uncannily etched there or precisely carved and pale-painted, right into the southwestern landscape; it is grotesquely exquisite.

The body has ceremoniously rested here a long while, awaiting discovery with a mute patience, and in its dreamless death it doth rest eternal; some elsewhere realm they say the ancestors embrace her troubled ghost. Here the body she left behind lies with spatters of old, dried blood being wetted and carried red and away by baptismal raindrops soldiering over her. The young hands are draped aesthetically on bruised ribs, and she seems coldly to glow in the defunct amnion of night. A girl too soon returned to earth with filth caught beneath the fingernails; a hint at an earlier struggle evidently not won. The face and the head are covered with what they’ll eventually come to know as her own red dress, and the unclothed hips take the voyeurs eyes downward to naked, outstretched legs the warm color of cozy adobe homes, posed rigidly straight together down to the ankles underneath the telling shine of a shy half-moon. A shock of dark pubic hair blots the onlookers eyes.

No reveler drunk in their nightly rapture of dancing in the packed mineshaft tavern takes note of the dead, for they’ve yet to fan their merry-making out of the moist wooden doors, and into the pouring streets.

Here the crowd come now, with a cojunto accordion at their backs wafting out, ecstatic and oblivious.

 

to be continued … 

 

 

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[‘Girls That Vanish At Night: New Mexico, 1986′ is the continuation of a short horror series told episodically by Samantha Lucero. To catch up on series 1, go here.]