By Lorette C. Luzajic

after The Guardian of the Black Egg, by Leonor Fini (Italy, b. Argentina) 1955

The house reeks of cat piss and formaldehyde. And something else, too, something rotten and old as the hills. The pine shadows sway moodily in the gloaming on the way, but inside, the night is impenetrable and blinding. 

You fumble along the walls and inside your memory for a switch. The house groans and yawns as the power flickers to life from the rafters. You make out tattered swatches of linen and tulle winding along the seams of the room. Peeling strips of wallpaper unravel from ceiling to floor. The slatted light spills to the cluttered floor through ornate bronze bars of dozens of suspended bird cages. From the silence and the stench, you understand they hold no living thing.

“You finally came.” The sound rises from heaps of rubble and jetsam. Your eyes follow her voice until you find her, perched on a pedestal of debris. She is all brittle ridges and edges, bones like blades against a sea of skirts. She nonchalantly swipes at flies. You shudder when your eyes meet. Hers are holes.

Around her neck are frayed ropes of amulets, ancient carnelian frogs, twin slate finger charms stolen from tombs. In her hands she holds what you have come for. The gleaming black egg, ancient, and birthed from the volcanos still roiling in the distance. 

It is an appointment you do not wish to keep. But the guardian has summoned you: she is getting weaker and her days on this plane are almost past. The egg must be held in hands that pulse with the bloodbeat of the Ancestor, to harbour the darkness and keep it from spilling into all the land.

“Mother,” you say. “Are you ready?” She nods. “Are you?” You stare through her, through time, and she looks through you, too, to things beyond and unknown. Without letting go of the black egg, she twists out of her garlands and places them over your lowered head. 

You shudder, but it must be done. 

Finally, she hands you the obsidian: the tecpatl, for the terrible task at hand, and the egg, for the terrible task ahead. You glide the flint through the loose soft flesh of her throat, watch red rivulets stream down until she crumbles. Then you climb into the nest and take her place on the throne.  

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Lorette C. Luzajic reads, writes, edits, publishes, and teaches flash fiction. She has placed twice in Best Small Fictions. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw.