When customers to the café ask for love spells, Lila tells them, “It’s my sister you want.” She sends them around the corner to Alia’s bookstore in Serpent Moon Street. La cocina de la buena fortuna, Lila maintains, is for finding one’s luck - and while that might include love, it encompasses much more. Finding luck, in the truest sense, takes patience and persistence. It takes work, too. The seeker must be committed to the search. If it’s luck you want, you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and plunge your hands into the ingredients. You’ve got to create something.
The seekers of love spells, Lila knows, are notoriously impatient. They want immediate results with no labor involved. They have bled from their hearts, been driven mad with wanting, and now they have come to the final hurdle – they are willing to force the issue, to have their desire at any price. Mostly, they are women. Young and foolish or older and angry, it is the same. Help me. Give me. Make him … Lila knows something else about those who ask for love spells. They do not understand the dark side of their desires, nor perceive the bloody fangs of love hidden among the roses.
La cocina de la buena fortuna sits on the corner of Spider Moon Street and January Avenue, with its sister shop, Moonflower Books, at its back on Serpent Moon Street. The shops, owned by the Flores sisters, are connected via two wide sets of heavy pocket doors. For the past month, the doors have been closed, making it necessary for patrons to walk around the corner to visit either shop. The whole neighborhood knows it is because Lila and Alia have had a disagreement, and they no longer speak or share their joined space the way they used to do. There is no way to tell when the feud might end or in whose favor, for each of the Flores sisters is blessed with infinite patience. This is how the argument began.
In the hot glare of an August afternoon, with the shadows of the buildings falling to the pavement as linear and solid as toppled stage flats, a woman named Sara Randolph entered the café. She walked to the counter where she had ordered her morning coffee and pastry every day for six years. She placed her handbag on the counter, pushed her sunglasses up onto her head, and waited.
“Sara! You’re late for your breakfast,” Lila chuckled as she bustled out from the kitchen.
The café was empty, an unusual thing, and Lila had just been remarking on the circumstance to the lazy ginger cat in the window. Now, as she looked at Sara standing pale and silent at the counter, she realized the lull was a cosmic gap, a pause freighted with significance in the normal rush and whirl of the universe. There are places where such a gap can be recognized and used, for good or ill, to alter the trajectory of a life, and the kitchen of Lila Flores is one. She peered at Sara with shrewd eyes, noting the vacant gaze and the misbuttoned blouse.
“Tell me what’s happened,” she said.
In reply, Sara opened her handbag and drew out a large chef’s knife of impeccable heft and balance, the razor glint of its blade obscured by sticky scarlet all the way to the grip. She laid the knife before Lila as though it were a gift.
“I had been making lunch,” she said, and her face cramped with tears.
Lila moved with speed and grace to the café door where she turned the lock and flipped the sign. For the next several weeks, La cocina was CLOSED.
“In the name of all the goddesses,” Alia rasped, spitting the shells of the sunflower seeds she chewed into the ashtray beside her smoldering cigarillo. She shuffled the cards for their weekly game of Chinchón.
“Leave her to her fate, sister. She knew the dangers when she begged me for the spell, and she was happy to risk them. You are interfering with the balance of things … again.”
Lila sighed and sipped her rum. This was an old grumble of Alia’s, and one Lila typically ignored with a jovial wave of her hand. Today, though, she felt an uneasy tickle of apprehension and a suspicion that for once Alia might be correct in her assessment.
“She is a friend. I must help her.”
Alia reached for the cigarillo and puffed at it, sending a cloud of fragrant smoke toward the ceiling. Her eyes narrowed as she watched it ascend, and she shrugged one sharp shoulder.
“I know you will try. But this is not some silly young chica with hot pants and fluff for brains. Sara has darkness enough in her to kill. You should let the snake eat its tail in peace.”
Well, there was no denying that Sara had killed her husband. She had taken her very expensive chef’s knife away from the task of carving a breast of roasted chicken and had plunged it into the belly of the man who had betrayed her and was fool enough to then demand a divorce. It had been such a cathartic act that she had repeated it seven times before she was through, and then she had changed her shirt, dropped the blade into her handbag, and made straight for the café.
“Sí, she killed him, that perro,” Lila said, arching a brow. “You must be slipping, sister. Your love spell surely did not work this time.”
A shadow crossed Alia’s face, so swift that Lila was not sure she’d seen it. Her sister dealt the cards and pushed forward her empty glass.
“Give me some rum, Lila, and look at your cards.” Alia squinted at her own hand. “We all make our mistakes. Pray that you are not about to find that out.”
Alia had a secret. It was not like the sisters to keep anything from one another, but this time Alia, who was the elder and therefore had a certain position of sisterly authority to maintain, had done something unconscionable. She knew it, had spent a few moments regretting it, and was now content to move on from it and accept the consequences of her deed. It was her nature to encourage both free choice and ultimate responsibility, to let the chips fall where they may and to spend no time weeping over a poor outcome. Still, she felt no good could come of advertising her misdeed, and certainly Lila would view it with disapproval.
When Sara had come to Alia, wringing her hands and wailing that her beloved husband was seeing another woman, Alia had felt smugly confident in her ability to return the wayward man to his wife.
“You are sure you want to keep him, eh?” she had asked. “He is worth this effort?”
Sara, on the cusp of committing magic, had gulped down her tears and sat up straight. “Oh, yes. I’ve loved him since high school. He’s never done anything like this before. It’s just a stupid midlife crisis kind of thing. We have a good life together.”
The tears began again, rolling down Sara’s face without accompanying sobs, as though she were bleeding. Alia supposed she was, in a way. Bleeding love and pain, shock and outrage. Like every woman who had ever sat across from her at the scarred table in the back room of Moonflower Books, Sara could think of nothing but her heart. She could feel nothing but fierce desire.
“I do not know your husband. Give me his name.” Alia pushed a slip of paper and a pen across the table.
Sara scribbled the name on the paper and folded it, then dug in her handbag for a small jeweler’s box. She set the box on the paper and sent it back across the table. The ritual had begun.
“What is it?” Alia tapped the little cardboard box with a long red nail. She made no move yet to read the name inscribed on the paper.
“Hair,” Sara said. Her eyes were feverish now with hope. “I took it from his brush. Will it be enough?”
Alia opened the box. A tuft of dark hair sprang up, and she stirred it about with her long nail. Already, she did not like Sara’s faithless husband. The spirit that hovered about the stolen hair made her like him even less. A chilly feeling climbed over her hand and clamped her wrist. It painted for her a picture of a shallow, selfish man who cared only for his own amusement. She knew that Sara was wrong about her husband; he had betrayed her many times. She opened the folded slip of paper and looked at his name: John Allan Sanders. Now her lips twisted into a tiny, bitter smile. She knew him, after all.
She looked at her friend, sitting in the same chair in which this man’s other woman had sat, with the same look of desperate want on her face. Sara, the wife, had come too late to the battle for a worthless lover. It was not the first time in her long career that Alia had been called upon by both warring parties of a love triangle. It was her policy to work only with the first to call upon her, and in this way, she preserved the precarious balance her magic demanded. Yet, never had she been faced with having to turn away a friend. She gazed at Sara, knowing that to help would open the door to chaos.
“Yes,” she said, plucking the hair from the box. “This is quite enough for our purposes.”
Just like that, the die was cast.
In the kitchen of Lila Flores, even murder can be diced, simmered, and transformed into an inviting and palatable dish. There, amid the green abundance of flowering vines and fragrant, potted herbs, Sara got her knife back. It had been scrubbed and boiled and sharpened to such a gleaming edge that the sunlight running along the blade fell to either side of it like sliced paper.
“I am giving this to you, my friend, so that you may make of it an instrument of creation,” Lila said. “Death has ridden it, but that is in another lifetime now. I will teach you a way to invite your luck, and you will have much difficult work to do. ¡Presta atención!”
Sara took the knife in a tentative hand. It drooped in her grip as the tears ran again.
“I can’t use this, Lila. Not after … what I did.”
“Tcha! Lift it up, chica, and stop your blubbering. Already, you have more luck than you deserve. Now, we will begin.”
She reached across the teak butcher block counter, worn and oiled to smooth warmth, and drew forward a basket of vegetables. Pointing at it with the boning knife in her own hand, Lila leveled a stern gaze at Sara.
“This is the beginning. Chop!” She tipped the basket. “And as you prepare these vegetables, think of all that has gone before and how you would have your life proceed.”
Sara turned to the tomatoes, onions, and peppers rolling on the satiny wood. She looked around the sunny kitchen at the bright, figured tiles – blue, orange, parrot green – and the hissing copper kettles on the broad stovetop, the flame shimmying beneath them like tickling fingers. A rack of wines winked at her from between tall windows opening onto the perfection of a brick-floored patio garden. The ginger cat lounged in a sunbeam on the bricks, gazing at her with green eyes narrowed to slits. Lila’s kitchen was calm, yet lively. Beautiful, yet comfortable. Power radiated from it, a soft, joyful womanly power that held iron will at its core. Sara considered the illusion of her marriage. She had thought she was happy within its boundaries, that it was the proper channel in which her life should run. Yet, never had her own kitchen, in the big country house, felt like this one. She had been a ghost in her own castle. A spasm of desire cramped her heart, stronger than anything she’d ever felt for John, shocking her with its clear passion. I want this. I want a garden grown from my own power. Her hand tightened on the grip of the knife.
Lila put a hand on Sara’s shoulder. “Now you see. Chop, Sara. Sudado de pollo is the first recipe of the spell.”
John Allan Sanders lay in the lake of his blood, cold and inert. The blood had grown black and thick, sipped by the raw marble tiles beneath his body so that they held Sanders’s imprint, a macabre reflection. Sanders had been still for more than two days, stiffening and relaxing again, and now, except for the blood, he gave the appearance of a man taking his leisure. His eyes stared at the pressed tin tiles and wormy chestnut beams of the ceiling. Sunlight caressed him playfully, skipping through the open French doors to drape him with its lemon veils. Earlier, hundreds of shimmering black beetles had followed the sun through the doors and traversed the congealed soup of his blood to climb over him. Each one, in its razor-edged jaws, bore aloft a seed, for which it made a tiny space in the dead man’s flesh. The beetles planted the seeds with the tender care of master gardeners before scurrying away on other errands.
Sanders, lying in his shroud of sunlight near the open doors, submitted with languid grace. His jaw had fallen open, and the first infinitesimal movement began in the dark of his throat. A subtle rustling of burrowing roots issued from his gaping mouth like a whisper, followed by the emergence of a green sprout, delicate yet vigorous. The plantlet stretched up into the light, past Sanders’s teeth, plunging more roots into the soft soil of his tongue. Like a general marshalling troops, it beckoned with its unfurling leaves in the clean air. In a rapid wave, shoots erupted from Sanders’s body until he was little more than a man-sized shape beneath a green carpet of new life. Roots dug through him, shot out hungrily over the nourishing glaze of his blood, thrust implacable fingers into the marble, prying at the tiles. A cracking, rending sound arose as the stone was broken into rubble, and then into dust, creating a trough that served as both grave and garden bed.
Mouth-watering fragrances steamed, day after day and late into the evenings, from the open windows of the café. Dish after dish, Lila taught Sara the magic of sensuality. Pescado frito colombiano, crisped and perfect, swimming on a colorful platter with green plantains and coconut rice; avocado, rich and glossy, brightened with a squeeze of lime; arroz caldoso de camarones, the shrimp curled in succulent knuckles in the tomato-rich rice; huevos pericos like a savory sunrise; and flan de coco, as sweet and melting on the tongue as first love.
Sara cooked, and Lila instructed her. Taste this. Smell this. Feel this texture. Roll this on your tongue. Lila broke open crusty breads, shaved cheeses, and poured wines. She tuned the radio to cumbia bands and swung her hips, clapping. Sara, at first bewildered and shy, grew confident enough to join her, filling her glass with the heady wine, nibbling the tempting ingredients. She danced and felt the sun on her body. Day by day, she opened to the world of her senses and felt both her joy in it and her power over it. Each night, she returned to her house in the country and the bursting, blossoming corpse of her husband.
Her kitchen there, expensively decorated and soulless, was changing. Her new garden had consumed the corner near the French doors, eating the marble tiles and spreading outward in lush green exuberance. Bird of paradise, verdant palms, and an eight-foot-tall coffee tree exploded from the dark well of her crime. Orchids clung to the costly reclaimed chestnut beams, their vulvar faces glistening in the humidity. Sara had turned off the icy air conditioning and thrown open the doors to the summer nights. The furtive scrabbling of small animals came from the garden. Tiny dark eyes peered from the foliage. Birds ventured inside to sing and rustle in the trees.
Sara, standing barefoot in her thin slip at the edge of this miniature forest, looked in vain for any remnant of her husband. He had been consumed, transformed. In this way, she mused, he gave her more pleasure than he ever had as a living man. Fireflies winked in the dusk, the kitchen was alive as it had never been, and so was Sara.
September arrived hot and golden, but the still-balmy nights carried a thread of coolness, a promise of autumn. The café reopened its doors to the public, and patrons stampeded eagerly to it as though they had starved in the weeks since its closure. Food and wine, coffee and pastries, bread and cheese, tumbled from the kitchen in riotous bounty. Customers groaned in sated ecstasy and waddled home to enjoy naps rich with sweet dreams.
After one such busy day, Lila sat with Alia in the cool twilight of her patio garden, a glass of rum in her hand.
“I have not seen much of you, sister, these last weeks. I hope you are not angry with me for helping Sara.”
Alia shook her head and smoked. “I am not angry. But there will be a reckoning yet. It is the way of things, Lila, you know it.”
“I know another thing,” Lila said, sipping her rum and gazing into the gathering dark. “I know that you gave the same love spell to Sara and her rival.”
Alia grew more still than a stone. “How do you know this?”
“Last week, when you had gone to the book market, a woman came to the café. Her name was Daniella, and she wanted to speak with you about a love spell. One that had not worked, she said. I told her that was very unlikely, for I know your ability, Alia. But she told me that her lover had not answered her calls or visited her for weeks. I told her when you would return, and she left. When she was gone, I found Sara weeping and trembling in the kitchen. She had heard the conversation and she told me that Daniella was the woman who had stolen away her husband. And so, we both understood how your magic had failed. You made a serious mistake, sister.”
Alia set her cigarillo on the edge of the little iron patio table and folded her hands. She was silent for long minutes, struggling with an unaccustomed feeling of chagrin that sparked her ire. She would not deny her stumble. Likewise, she would not be lectured by her younger sister who had compounded the error by shielding Sara from the consequences of her murder.
“We have both erred, Lila,” she said at last.
Lila stood in some passion.
“I have erred?” she cried. “I helped a friend who completed an act that you set in motion, Alia. Why would you do such a thing? And then to keep it from me, like a guilty schoolgirl!”
Alia left her chair and walked across the patio, through the open window and the gorgeous chaos of the kitchen. She would not argue with Lila, nor justify her actions by saying that she, too, had tried to help their friend. That it had been wrong was painfully evident. There was no gentle slap on the wrist when one broke such rules, but neither was the balancing to be considered a punishment or a curse. It was simply the way of things.
“Alia! Do not walk away.” Lila followed.
When her sister reached the connecting doors between their shops, Lila spoke the words that would sever them for the next month.
“I saved our friend. Sara is strong and capable now, and why should she be thrown away because of your mistake?”
Alia, who had regained the dim comfort of her own shop, whirled and faced Lila. They stood glaring at one another from opposite sides of the pocket doors.
“It is yet to be seen, what becomes of Sara,” Alia hissed. “And if she has avoided the consequences of her crime, then we shall surely pay in her place. Someone must. All you have done, little fool, is shift the reckoning onto other shoulders.”
With that, she pulled shut the doors with a bang and shot the bolt. Stung and trembling, Lila ran to the second set of doors and did the same.
A reckoning. The subject had been much on Sara’s mind since the day she had seen Daniella at the café. They were not strangers, though they had never been friends. The younger woman had a brash sort of confidence that was anathema to Sara, always flaunting herself, always snatching greedily at what she wanted with no regard for decency or the claims of others. John had not been the first husband to fall prey to Daniella’s appetites for worship and offerings. Sara remembered how, when she had recovered from the first shock of John’s infidelity, she had not been surprised to learn Daniella was the one. Now, despite the lively enchantment that Lila had plucked from the aromatic air of her kitchen and presented to her like a magician’s scarf, Sara felt the hungry panther of her outrage still prowling the chambers of her heart.
At the café, Sara embraced the days filled with the sensual spells of spices, music, and wine. But in recent nights, alone in her big house, she had lost her sense of peace and purpose. At night, John’s cell phone had begun chiming with frequent insistence, and each time she saw that the caller was Daniella. Tormented, Sara roamed the rooms until, inevitably, she came to stand before the garden that had sprung from her wicked deed.
There, she knelt and whispered into the lush, rustling foliage. “John? Can you hear me? Are you there? I’m sorry.”
And yet, she knew in the secret depths of her heart where the panther prowled, she was not sorry. Nor did she wish to have John with her again, and she was glad when there was no answer to her whispers, but only the flutter of moths among the orchids. What she wanted was not a return, but a decisive move forward and past this unfortunate time in her life. A reckoning had still to be attained, the prowling beast sated. She clutched a handful of the garden’s rich soil. There was only one impediment.
“What about Daniella?” she hissed.
Above her, the foliage rustled more purposefully. New tendrils sprouted and crept along the orchid laden boughs, deep red like oxygenated blood. Sara stood and watched as garnet nodes swelled and burst at intervals along the slender vine, each one birthing a firework of fine, white, recurved petals. Long, trembling stamens probed the air, and at the end of each, an anther exuded a drop of bloody nectar. A strong scent of cherries smothered her. Immediately, the moths that flirted among the orchids were drawn to the blossoms. A deadly ballet ensued, beautiful in its cold efficiency. One after another, the fluttering dancers dropped at Sara’s feet, dead from a single sip. Her eyes grew wide. As John’s phone trilled yet again, Sara began to smile.
“Lila, can you show me how to make chocolate truffles? I want to send some to my niece for her sixteenth birthday.” Sara blinked at Lila, noting that the other woman looked less radiant than usual, a bit worn and tired.
Things had been subdued at La cocina de la buena fortuna. The kitchen held less sunlight than before. Perhaps it was only the changing days of autumn, but Sara thought the separation between the sisters was to blame. Some days, Lila closed the café early and sat with the ginger cat in the little patio garden, staring into the air. She had even taken to smoking the brand of cigarillos that her sister, Alia, favored. The smoke perfumed the garden, but it did not lure Alia from her darkened bookstore. Moonflower Books had been silent behind its Closed for Business sign for weeks, and if Alia resided within her tiny apartment at the rear of the store, she made no more stir than a mouse.
Now, Lila ceased her stirring of the soup pot and looked over at Sara, chopping fresh herbs from the pots on the windowsills.
“Truffles? They are simple enough. I will show you.”
Sara concentrated on mincing the rosemary before her. “She loves chocolate covered cherries. I thought perhaps I could make a cherry liqueur for the filling.”
“Cherries, of course.”
Lila, distracted by thoughts of her childhood, turned back to her soup. When they were young girls, she and Alia had an uncle who brought them enormous boxes of fancy chocolates when he and his wife visited. The boxes had been beautiful enough to keep after the candies had been enjoyed, holding the sisters’ stationery and silk-ribbon bookmarks, scenting everything with luscious aromas of chocolate, vanilla, mint, and yes, cherries. She recalled her mother and her aunt laughing together as they sampled the chocolates with their coffee. Mama, who had learned French at school, had called the candies la petite mort, and the two women had giggled like schoolgirls. Later, Alia had explained why the words had so amused the ladies, and Lila had blushed and giggled, too. What a strange memory to resurrect, Lila mused, but her thoughts were really on Alia and how tiresome it was to be at odds with her sister.
And so, Sara and Lila embarked on the creation of the creamiest, richest chocolate truffles, stuffed with bourbon cherry filling. Lila, her memories bright and happy in her mind, set a dozen aside as a peace offering for her sister. It was time to end their feud, and as no harm had come of her teaching Sara the magic of her kitchen, Alia would have to admit her doomy musings had been born of her own feelings of guilt. Already, the vivacious spirit of the café could be felt reviving. Soon the warm light would spill again from the bookstore, and the two shops would open to one another. Lila turned on the radio in preparation.
Sara took her dozen truffles home with her in a pink heart-shaped candy box. As she drove through the countryside, she opened the box and ate one of the candies. The cherry sweetness glossed her lips, and she licked the chocolate from her fingers with satisfaction. She glanced at the empty cell in the box, and a gentle smile curled her lips. It would not stay empty for long. The previous evening, she had harvested the fat ruby droplets of nectar from the strange white flowers in her garden. The heavy cherry scent had a soporific effect, and she struggled to remain alert enough to gather the nectar with care into the little glass dish of dried cherries and bourbon. Tap, tap, tap, with a chopstick, one blossom after another offered a meager dash of the fragrant poison that was quickly absorbed into the fruit. She moved with slow deliberation, taking shallow sips of air, until she had visited each flower along the slip of vine. She had no idea how much nectar was lethal and put her trust in the garden which had supplied exactly eight blossoms. The following morning, the flowers had gone, and the thin red vine had shriveled like a dry umbilicus.
In her kitchen, Sara crafted one more truffle. She fancied it was her most perfect one yet and chuckled. When the candy, placed with care on a square of parchment paper, sat chilling in her refrigerator, she stripped off her surgical gloves and disposed of them. While the chocolate hardened, she amused herself by snipping a length of satin ribbon for the candy box and experimenting with various expressions of love for the card. In the end, she settled for a simple All My Love, John. She cast an amused glance at the garden.
“You always were economical with words, dear,” she said.
When her package was ready, she carried it to her car. She would leave the chocolates on the door mat of the townhouse her husband had leased for his mistress. Sara had driven by the townhouse several times, observing Daniella’s comings and goings in her sleek little sports car, another of John’s extravagant gifts. It had seemed, all those weeks ago, that fortune had favored Daniella. Lila had taught Sara how luck was truly cultivated. One had to create it from the deep well of one’s own pain. It had been hard work to learn, but now she understood.
In the park across the street from Daniella’s home, Sara sat in shaded comfort and watched until she saw the girl carry the package inside. She settled into the curve of the bench and sipped her own chocolate, served hot and sweet from a cart at the corner. The October evening was pleasant. Sara could see the warm glow of Daniella’s lighted window through the long shadows. She enjoyed imagining Daniella reading the note on the candy box with relief and triumph, selecting a chocolate, and carrying it to her lips. Would it bring death or pleasure? It was an interesting lottery, and she wondered which of them would be luckier upon that first, delicious bite.
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