Cain’s Feast

“Cain’s Feast” reads simultaneously like a biblical tale of love and infidelity and a chronicle of a murder. A devastated lover’s past and present collide as he invokes both heaven and hell upon his beloved in the same breath. A tone of ominous prophecy roves through the text; the writing follows pace, and heedlessly disrupts temporal and spatial narrative conventions. Published first in Giramondo Publishing’s HEAT magazine and written by the Mexican writer Aniela Rodríguez, “Cain’s Feast” is an anachronistic story of doomed lovers, in a translation dense with the rhythm of another language and place.

– Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

In memoriam
To my beloved Nacho, since this feast
is more yours than mine

he shot Jocinto delivered him that day was enough for the priest to realize that heaven is a shitty invention: the futile drivel of the missals and leaflets matrons dispense when proclaiming the blessedness of Our Lord. First light was enough for us to find ourselves leaving church singing hallelujahs and giving thanks to God, for the sky to blacken and the organ to be struck dumb due to some fault in its moving parts or an anomaly in the hearts of men. Jacinto went rigid at the door. He wasn’t going to try anything, by God he didn’t want to shoot him. He had backed out of it to start with. To forget, he stepped inside the cantina, where he tossed back the bottle of whisky that was set down in front of him; it didn’t obliterate his shame,