Photo: Carlos de Paz from A Coruña, España, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
He had crossed A Quintana dos Mortos for the same place and at the same time for years, and yet he had never seen that woman before: dressed in white light she was sensually laid down on the magnificent stone floor. Almost levitating, her feminine figure created an absorbing and mesmerizing visual. Those huge and primeval slabs covered the plaza generously from the nunnery to the back side of the cathedral, creating the most enchanting atmosphere, a mesmerizing realm. La Berenguela, the watch tower, oversees it knowingly. Her bells had just struck midday, composing a supernatural echo that liquefied the surface of the sturdy old pavement just for an instant.
She was so alluring in her pearly dress that he couldn’t feel but smitten. A bright magnetic field originated from her, and he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, avoid its embrace. He descended the stairs with stars in his eyes, and approached her in a direct and candid manner. “My name is Jonathan. And yours?” She welcomed him as if he were her sweetheart. She pronounced a distorted sound, and by the power of the stones her utterance was turned into a name he had always loved, Mina. Had his name been Tristan, he would have heard Isolde. And if Dante, Beatrice. Whatever this eerie creature kept on saying, it was transformed into exactly what he expected to hear. They talked all the afternoon, and in the evening they saw together how the blue moon, the one that occurred on August 22nd 2021, rose above the cathedral escorted by Saturn and Jupiter. He was so enchanted he couldn’t see himself away from her soft feather-like presence, carefully caressed by the sparkles she naturally emanated.
Minutes before midnight, the memory of all the chores he had failed to do that day fell on him like a bucket of cold water. He felt overwhelmed but charmed, not at all bad for being so obviously absent minded. Rushing up, he asked her for a way to reach her in the morning, and she promptly wrote a number on the palm of his hand. Pressing the figures close to his heart he ascended the stairs with intimate joy, not realizing she had just jotted down his own phone number.
As soon as he turned the corner of Via Sacra, the watch tower imposed the witchy hour throughout the entire city and valley. Like tears of white sap she slowly melted down through the pores of the monstrous carcass, thinking of how much she liked doing it: ascending to the surface every blue moon to conquer a human. Of all the hobbies a ghost could entertained, infatuating was no doubt her favourite. She took up scaring for a while, but she quit because others were more gifted and would cause deeper frights, persistent like lethal wounds. Her snowy eyelids lovingly held images of Jonathan until the contours of our visible world became blurry and non-existent. She descended more and more into the lands belonging to the dead. There she remains all gathered and dreamy like a precious moonstone looking forward to the next blue on August 30th 2023.
Rosemary Thorne is a Spanish bilingual writer living in Madrid, Spain, who has been her entire life producing fiction in her mother tongue, with not much local professional encouragement. That’s why in 2019 she became a HWA member and began to think Horror in English terms. It’s worth mentioning that she was born in 1968, year of shocking revolutions, beautiful women and great red wine, and that’s why she doesn’t give up: she has published her first novel in Spain in December 2021, and her goal for 2022 is to have it translated into several languages and to populate the world with her monsters. Find out more about her: https://linktr.ee/Rosemary_thorne