The Black Garden

The Black Garden By Juan Sauceda

I awoke when the screams started. I peeked through the crack in my wall and watched my father throw a woman confined by barbed wire inside a freshly dug pit in the center of the yard. Their faces muddy, and my father's hands were strewn with blood as God cried at the sight of his fallen angel.

"Why! Why would you do this to me?! I'm sorry, okay! Please don't punish me; I'm begging you, please stop! Why would you kill me? I'll do anything, anything, please stop..." What came next was a resounding scream. If someone were miles away, they would assume a banshee was bounding through the woods. My father began to throw portions of the dirt mound over the hole. Even as my father shoveled the last of the dirt, the shrieks did not stop.

"Shut! The fuck! Uppppp!" My father screamed as God's tears rushed. Blood covered his face and hands like a scavenger snacking on a corpse.

He stepped out of view toward the house. I threw the covers over my head. The wood grew tense as he walked into a house that was no longer a home. Soon the screams from the yard joined a snore from my father's room that made my hands tremble. I could not sleep for three nights; my father never acknowledged the noise coming just outside my room. Every morning he would sip his coffee and read his paper pretending the shrieks of despair were not his doing. For forty days and forty-one nights, the cries pierced my eardrums.

I dreamt of jesters with no bones and limitless lungs dancing and shouting as they looked down on me. Then on the forty-first night, the jesters stopped crying, their bodies came to a halt, and as they smiled at me, their bodies melted like hot wax.

I awoke to my father's cries.

"Come here!" He yelled from the front yard.

I jumped out of bed and ran to see what startled him.

"Look at this." I was positioned where my father had been when he threw the woman in the pit, "There's strawberries, chiles, cucumbers, and squash."

"Why is it all black?" The produce that lay over the dead woman's tomb looked like it was splashed with black paint. The fruits and vegetables were stout. My father took his knife from his pocket and cut the stem of an incredibly plump squash then, cut the squash in half. How peculiar these fruits were, their innards reflected the blackest black as if it were prepared in a cauldron of devils blood.

"Take a bite."

"No, I don't wanna eat that."

"Eat it, now!"

I looked at the squash, then at my father. I was not one to eat squash nor squash that looked to be made in the depths of hell. It was cold to the touch and smelt of charcoal. I looked at my father once more, his brow lowering as he grew impatient.

"Eat it, now!" He repeated. I couldn't look at the man who was egging me to poison my abdomen. His hand, fraught with dry blood, grabbed at the back of my neck and shoved it toward the squash in my grasp. I peeked up at him, then back to the squash; he squeezed my neck tighter. I resisted the force guiding me toward the damned vegetable, and as my eyes welled with tears, a cry escaped my lips.

"No."

His eyes narrowed, teeth clenched his grip grew tighter, I was escorted to the cellar doors that held the spiders and rats scared to shelter in the house. My father thrust the doors open, I was shoved into the cold cement that held the ghost of a happy family. I yelled for quite some time. The rage coursed through my body as I dreamed of the pain I could inflict on the man I called father. My shrieks were heard by no one except father, who could ignore a weeping heart. There I screamed and screamed and screamed until my throat could no longer take the fluctuations that came from my derangement. The rats were frightened by the devil in my genes while I thrashed about in a fit of unpleasantry. The light that leaked from the cellar doors was gone by the time my shrieks turned to lament as I mourned the death of my faith.