I was not borne of this world. Through no fault of their own my parents were unable to have children, and for days to weeks to months and years they suffered for it. Until one day, when my mother prayed so hard that the stars themselves took pity on her (or grew tired of her constant wailing, she likes to muse) and delivered unto her a child crafted from the dust in space, blessed with the light of the stars in my eyes and the heat of the universe in my chest. She was charged with loving me, keeping me safe until I grew to fulfill some destiny they never felt the need to elaborate on. That can’t have been easy, I suppose, star-child that I was, but it’s been well worth it. Or so she swears.
That’s the story my mother told me as a child, and tells me still. Ask any of our family friends and they’ll tell you my parents met after college, fell in love, and found out they were pregnant with me when my father was finishing his Bachelor’s and my mother was a Master’s degree recipient. They both came from traditional families, and so after a few weeks of harassment from both sides, they got married. They exchanged their vows six months before I was born, on a warm June night like any other. From what my godmother tells me of my mother’s pregnancy with me, it was long and arduous and she all but scarred my father’s arm during the delivery.
I told you my family is hardcore traditional, and to some extent they are. We worship the old gods of the stars, from when constellations walked the earth, when the world was vibrant and rich with mythos come to life. I never understood the continuity of it, especially since my father was born in Denmark and my mother in Mexico. He was raised in a loosely practicing Evangelical Lutheran home, so the astral worship comes from her side.
My mother’s lineage can be traced way back to the Coca natives of Mexico, who resided in what we know today to be Guadalajara. Old legends of warriors who took other shapes as easily as changing clothes, who spoke with tongues of silver and weaved words into gold, who could speak with the wind, or run as fast - that was who we came from, my mother promised me. These abilities appealed to me, especially when I was in middle school. I was painfully conscious of my crooked nose and downturned mouth, inherited from my father and mother respectively. I was not the swiftest runner, and as much as I talked, I was no honey-dripping wordsmith. I cried about it to my father one day, and he reassured me that I was not wholly incapable of any of it. These things were earned, he told me, when I had the strength of character and self-awareness to wield them.
I would have dismissed it all as bullshit right then and there, but I’ve learned since then that our family’s truth is stranger than fiction.
I’d just turned fifteen when I had my own personal brush with the supernatural. Fifteen was a big deal for my mom, both because of the elaborate quinceañera she’d nearly killed herself planning, and because this was the year I would see my first vision, as had my mother before me, and my grandmother before her. I remember it mostly for the man my mother killed in front of me.
I’d been strutting around the ranch a few days before, telling everyone who would listen about how excited I was to finally be fifteen. Fifteen is a good number. The one in fifteen is sharp. The one knows what it wants, and it takes it pointedly. The five is round and heavy, swollen with possibilities. My tíos and tías endured my posturing in good humor, but my cousins were only too eager to knock me down a few pegs and remind me of the pecking order. My eldest cousin, Che, took to the responsibility like a duck to water.
There was a tradition to be upheld, he told me. A night spent out under the open sky, alone and awake from the onset of inky blackness to the first splashes of dawn. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, and if I asked any of the adults, they would have been struck down on the spot if they admitted knowledge of it. This was something everyone had to go through on their own merit. It was also complete bullshit.
I remember the disbelief in my voice and the barely-hidden smiles on my cousins’ faces.
“I just have to stay awake? And outside?”
“You can talk to the stars,” another cousin offered gleefully, before being shushed by Che. He turned back to me, studying me before smiling gently.
“Valentina knows not to bother them unless she really, really, really needs it,” he reminded us. “Don’t you, Val?”
I nodded grimly, aware as we all were that the stars would only answer a few times in a lifetime if you were lucky, once or not at all if you weren’t. I wasn’t wasting any of my free passes on a slumber party.
Getting the supplies together was the easy part. The hard part was convincing my mother I shouldn’t be sleeping in my own bed. Uncharacteristically solemn, she told me to quit looking for trouble before it bit me in the ass. Where the hell else would I be spending the night if not in my room? We’d just finished safeguarding it, and she knew I’d been looking forward to sleeping under the glow in the dark stars we’d just pasted all across the ceiling.
I told her I wanted to spend the night with the horses, which was a plausible lie. One of our mares, Canela, had had a difficult birth, pushing out a foal born far later than her spring-birthed peers. My parents had allowed my brother and I to take turns sleeping in the barn with them. We believed our presence alone had some fantastical healing effect on the mare, and she and the foal were made safer because we were with them. The anxiety was mostly because of hushed whispers of a horse killer in the area, some animal that had evolved from killing chickens, to killing goats and cows and finally settling on horses. No one thought there was any mythological element to it, just some mangey coyote that had contracted rabies and gone on a killing spree. Never mind that rabid, parasite-ridden coyotes don’t normally escape detection for so long, let alone kill several horses.
It was my bad luck that the undefined predator had set its sights on our ranch.
The night before my birthday, my mother tucked me into the hay, leaving me some marzipan to snack on and a flashlight, in case I got scared. The implication offended me, and I remember I refused her good night kiss. She ruffled my hair, hesitated, and then offered me her lucky knife. It was a simple thing, barely as long as my hand and empty of any decoration. Not much to scare off a horse-killer, but I took it all the same. I’m glad I did.
I never knew what time it was when I woke up, still in the barn. I blinked awake, half-conscious of where I was, before my gut dropped and I realized I’d already spoiled the night by falling asleep and staying in the stall. I was so preoccupied with the worry that I’d let my ancestors down that I missed what had woken me up in the first place.
The horses were stomping unhappily, tails swishing anxiously and breath coming in ragged spurts of discomfort. I got up from the hay to soothe a few, shushing them and moving down the stalls slowly. The flashlight was gripped tightly, and my fingers were stiff from clenching it in my hand. As I passed the horses, a few let out quiet neighs, though none dared to make any noise above what would be socially acceptable in a library. The thought of Canela and her unnamed foal studying in a library soothed me out of my nerves. I circled back to my nest of hay and sat there, returning to my thoughts of failure. At least until Canela keened, high and shrill and full of terror. I jumped, the flashlight tumbling out of my hands and onto the barn floor.
It was as if Canela had broken a spell, and all the horses were suddenly free to scream. And scream they did, kicking at the walls and doors of their stalls. I fumbled for my flashlight, wondering why no one was coming out to the barn, forgetting in my terror that we were a good three quarters of a mile from the main house and if help was coming, it was not coming quickly enough.
I don’t remember what else I was thinking about, standing there, frozen in the blackness. What I do remember is that I was bowled over by a mass of writhing fur and flesh, hearing the click of teeth snapping together an inch from my ear. It was my turn to scream, a noise wrenched from the marrow of my bones and delivered into the face of my attacker. The face was vaguely canine, the fangs as long and thick as my middle finger, and it could well have been a mangey coyote, if it weren’t for the eyes. The eyes were human, wide and rolling in fear and some hunger, and behind it, a deeper anger that I had not died in the first assault.
It wasn’t that much bigger than me, and though I had trouble pinning the shape of it, my hysteria lent me urgency and I slithered out of its arms and ran past it. Where I was going, I don’t know. But my flight was blocked by another shape, bigger than the one that had attacked me. This one had the same bright yellow eyes, but in them burned a hatred far more ferocious than my attacker had. I knew instinctively that if this monster attacked me, it would not fail. This was the seasoned horse-killer, and the other its spawn.
Somehow I found the presence of mind to hold my knife out in what I hoped was a threatening stance. The horse-killer was unaffected, and dropped into a crouch. I shut my eyes tightly before realizing my death had not yet occurred. I opened one eye fearfully, only to see a man standing before me, his black hair thickening at the neck and swallowing his shoulders and most of his arms.
“Who—what are you?” I asked, the words cracking in my mouth like oblea wafers.
“You know what I am,” he said in amusement. “And I know your family, little one. I have waited for the chance to kill one of their own for a very long time.”
“You can’t kill me,” I said, more out of hope than any particular certainty. “The stars are watching over me.” I brandished my knife. “And I’m not little,” I added hastily. He let out a low laugh.
“They can watch all they want. They can’t stop me from—”
What he planned for me, I never heard. I could only watch in open shock as his shoulder exploded, a blast from my mother’s shotgun tearing it into wet chunks of useless meat. The horse-killer screamed, his form collapsing in on itself, and when he turned to face my mother it was as a beast again, maw open in fury.
I dropped to the ground, trying to make myself as small a target as possible, and between the blasts of gunpowder and the horse-killer’s roar, I heard another, shriller scream of fear. I thought it was my own, but when I dared look at where the smaller horse-killer had been, I saw it turn tail and flee into the dark of the ranch.
When I next opened my eyes it was to find my mother, gathering me up in her arms and carrying me to our wheezy red truck. She was muttering a string of curses, English and Spanish alike, although the Spanish curses held more venom. Back at the main house, she told my brother and I that under no circumstances were we ever to spend the night outside again. I’d been attacked by a chupacabra. Not a natural monster, but in this case a man who had run afoul of some entity or other and been cursed with the condition. He was a local who disappeared decades before my birth, and his remaining family in the area had not spoken of him out of shame. I found out later that they had been unable to find the second chupacabra, and my mother feared its vengeful return. The first chupacabra had likely infected a youth from the town, and been raising it as its own, for what reason no one could ascertain. This was the first time we’d been faced with a chupacabra in sixty years.
My quince came and went without much drama. My mother’s one complaint is that the photographer could not fully erase the bags under our eyes, too heavy and stark for photoshop to realistically cover. And no wonder, with the night we’d had.
I thank Canela and the unnamed foal still for saving me that night, especially because when my brother and I ventured to ask what had happened to them, we were told they were slaughtered in their stall, the foal first and Canela second. She died standing up, her throat torn out and her knees locked over the foal’s prone corpse. My abuela crossed herself and swore it was a bad omen, that it marked the beginning of an evil year. The rest of us were inclined to agree, and those in the family who had not fully committed to our family calling found their faith renewed.
I don’t live on the ranch anymore. Sometime around graduating high school I decided to get as far away from home as I could. I told myself it was because I could hunt the things outside the ranch, where my family’s influence didn’t extend. I think I can admit now that I was scared of the memories, of the things that still stalked past the cattle guards and wallow in our ponds, and scared that I haven’t fully escaped whatever fate the ranch has bound me to. I’m still terrified. But sitting here in my apartment, Quetzal curled up and purring in my lap, it doesn’t seem as scary.
My fifteenth birthday was marked with death. It only made sense for me to learn to start killing, my mother reasoned, and in the years since she and my father have dedicated themselves to teaching me what they knew. I started keeping records of some things we’ve faced. It wasn’t a spur of the moment decision. I didn’t wake up one day and go, “I really miss the teen vogue feeling of writing down how every single detail of my day made me feel. I should do that again!” It was more of a nagging feeling that these things need to be transcribed. Kept alive somehow. So here I am.
Che complains that the way I begin this entry with the stars is misleading, since this isn’t a sci-fi story. It’s barely a space story, in the logical and scientific sense. I once likened it to a ghost story, and the label resonates with me still, so I suppose that’s what this is. A ghost story about humanity’s love affair with the heavens and those of us caught in the crossfire.
*Edited to fix a few words. Che has graciously reminded me that it was a flashlight my mother gave me, not a lantern. I blame the espresso he made me just before posting.