She Who Has Dominion Over Serpents

She Who Has Dominion Over Serpents: A Tragedy

By

Matt McGuire

You came to me in shadows. We met in darkness, timorous then bolder, me closing the deal with a few promises for a future rendezvous, dinner at my expense, all flowery words and fronted courtesy. You’d lost your virginity and had a child by a Chicano who couldn’t give a damn, some slick orphan or low-grade dirt-slinging hood. You’d never been with a man who spoke to your heart instead of your inhibitions, and you nursed secret hopes for a life beyond the confines of single motherhood. You wept at the feet of Guadalupe for a savior, a man of steel and roses who would slay your chimeras and play your enula campana. All I offered was repose from a tenement and a slave routine.

We sat in pause mode for a few moments, you smoking fervently between trembles and me examining your body, your lips, your ebony hair. I leaned in to breathe your cheaply perfumed locks and hinted that you smelled of gardenias and cinnamon. You confided in whispers that, “I have relatives in Spain." The tired tale of the noble descent of the disenfranchised--ties to royalty, William Wallace, Charles Stuart, the Duke of Alba, whatever. No one ever told you that your lineage was full of small pox, murder, and cheap real estate. Just a pipe dream of red crested shields and chivalry—chaste maids and white stallioned conquistadores. I indulged your whim, played your knight-errant and quoted Cervantes—something of the shepherdess Marcela and you shifted closer to me. I draped my arm around you and kissed you deeply, nibbling your lips lightly and dancing my tongue over your teeth slowly, deliberately, and with grazia. I moved down to your brown breast now disrobed and sucked lightly at the source, seeing it grow firm, feeling you convulse with every flicker of the flames against my walls. I grasped your hand and led you from the couch to the bedroom where it was cold as a November stream in Biarritz. I left you within the hour, hot, gasping and wet, eyes glued to the ceiling in paroxysm and intoning prayers to La Chingada while I washed and stoked the embers. You left shortly thereafter and I returned to my copy of The Economist and a commitment free existence.

Strophe: Rebeccah, will you water my horses when I come calling? Will you be a mother to my nations and bear my curse a little longer? Will you sell my birthright for some porridge and a lamb’s skin?

Antistrophe: She appeared in white, garbed in white, standing white, pure white. – Bernardino de Sahagún