The Kitchen of Good Fortune

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--and that boils down to a blessed and abundant life, which reduces further to the essence of personal happiness--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 the narrow twist of Serpent Moon Street. The shops, owned by the Flores sisters, are connected via two wide sets of heavy pocket doors. For the past two years, 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, but everyone remembers how the argument began, and this is how it happened.

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 la cocina de la buena fortuna. Sara walked to the café 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 missed 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.

____________________

“En nombre de todas las diosas,” 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 can 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 is a killer. 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 admit it. It had been such a cathartic act that she had repeated it eight times before she was through, and then she had changed her shirt, dropped the blade into her handbag, and made straight for la cocina de la buena fortuna.

“Sí, she killed him, that perro canequero,” 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 brashly 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 love him with all my heart. I know he’s never done anything like this before. It’s just a midlife crisis kind of thing. We have a good life together, and I just want to keep him.”

Fateful words, indeed, though neither woman at the time thought of the darker possibilities they held. 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 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 Randolph. Now her lips twisted into a tiny 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, who 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 two warring parties of a love triangle. It was her policy to work only with one of them–-the first to call upon her received her help. It was a fair and impartial rule for clients, but it was a metaphysical law for Alia the spellmaker. Breaking it might unleash all manner of chaos, and never had she broken it. Never had she been faced with having to turn away a friend in pain.

“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, mi amiga, 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, lime, orange, parrot green–-and the hissing copper kettles on the broad stovetop, the flame shimmying beneath them like tickling fingers. A generous rack of wines winked at her from between the tall windows overlooking the perfection of the brick-floored patio garden. The sills of the windows rested on the floor, and she could step through either of them as though they were doors. 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 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 part of the spell.”

____________________

John Allan Randolph lay in the lake of his blood, grown cold and inert. The blood had grown black and thick, sipped by the marble tiles beneath his body so that they held Randolph’s imprint, a macabre reflection. Randolph 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 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.

Randolph, 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 Randolph’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 Randolph’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 weak grout lines. A cracking, rending sound arose as the stone was broken to rubble, and then to dust, creating a trough that served as both grave and planter bed.

____________________

Mouth-watering fragrances steamed, day after day and late into the evenings, from the open windows of la cocina de la buena fortuna. Dish after dish, Lila taught Sara the magic of sensuality. Pescado frito colombiano, crisped and perfect as though gilded, swam on a colorful platter with green plantains and coconut rice, carrying with it the wild joy of the sea. Sliced avocado, rich and glossy, its luscious creaminess brightened with a squeeze of lime; arroz caldoso de camarones like a warm hug, the shrimp curled in succulent knuckles in the tomato-rich rice; huevos pericos like a sunrise carnival of savory enthusiasm; 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, sliced and 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 and touching the tempting ingredients. She danced and felt the sun on her body that was hers alone. 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. What she thought of as her 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 new humidity. Sara had turned off the icy air-conditioning and allowed the doors to remain open to the summer nights. The furtive scrabbling of small animals sometimes came from the garden. Tiny dark eyes sometimes peered from the foliage. Birds had ventured inside and sang and rustled 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.

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September arrived hot and golden, but the still-balmy nights carried a thread of coolness, a promise of autumn. Sara came to the café less often, preferring now to cook in her own kitchen, a vortex of earthy energy. La cocina de la buena fortuna 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, in all these 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 to her rival.”

Alia grew more still than a stone. “How do you know this?”

“Two weeks ago, when you had gone to the book market, a woman came to the café, banging on my door until I opened it. 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 in over a week. I told her when you would return, and she left. When she was gone, Sara, who was in the kitchen during the conversation, 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 two years.

“I saved Sara. She 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 is shift the payment 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. Sara remembered how, when she had found out John’s infidelity, she had not been shocked to learn Daniella was the one. With all that had transpired, she felt that a reckoning had still to be attained, and she had finally seen a way.

She perched on a high stool at her kitchen island and folded two bright orange linen napkins. Beside her, a fat pot of fragrant black tea steamed. An unadorned ponqué, made from Lila’s recipe, cooled on the simply set table waiting to be sauced.

The table stood beside the jungle-like garden, perfumed by exotic blooms. Sara was no botanist, and she had been able to identify only a few of the plants at first. Now, though, she knew all their names in Latin. She knew whether their fruits and blossoms were edible or toxic. For instance, the stunted little tree at the edge of the garden, the one that had grown to fruiting within the last three days, had an interesting name. It was called manzanilla de la muerte, the little apple of death. It had erupted from the garden just as the answer to her questions about a reckoning had burst like a firework in her mind. With infinite care, she had accepted one of its fruits and stewed it in a pot she would discard. It had simmered down into a lovely, lethal sauce that she kept warm on the back of her stove.

When she had called Daniella, she had found she had to work as hard as any actress to bring the tears into her voice.

“Please, don’t hang up. Is John with you? I don’t want to talk to him; I just need to know he’s okay.”

The younger woman, astonished and suspicious, had to try twice to find her own voice. The nearness of her lover’s wife, sobbing in her ear, was a shock—as though Sara had touched her. It startled the truth from her.

“I haven’t seen him in more than a month. I thought…” Here, Daniella choked on her confession. Confusion, hurt, and anger at her perceived loss of the spoils of war rose in her throat, gagging her. She had been so sure that John had returned to his wife. “Why are you calling? What do you want?”

“You haven’t seen him? Truly?” Sara invested the questions with breathless incredulity, pressing her hand over her mouth to stifle the laughter that bubbled inside her. “Then where is he, Daniella?”

Silence met the query. Sara could almost hear the other woman’s thoughts colliding. When Daniella answered, her voice was less wary.

“If he isn’t with you, I don’t know where he is, Sara. He was upset the last time I saw him. We…quarreled. Have you called his family? His friends?”

John had not had friends. He had not been the chummy sort. Sara lied, “I spoke with his brother. None of his family have seen him. I’m worried.” She pinched herself hard to bring the tears, letting her voice rise on a little thermal of hysteria. “Daniella, whatever has happened doesn’t matter now. I just want to find John.”

“Well…what do you want me to do? I don’t know where he is.”

“Will you come over? We’ll have tea. Between us, maybe we can come up with some idea of where to look.”

Daniella’s breath whistled over the phone. “We should call the police. Jesus, Sara, it’s been weeks.”

The hysteria had caught like a spark in dry brush. Sara smiled and fanned the flame. “Come for tea. Please. We’ll call them together. I’m afraid.”

When rivalry turns, uneasy alliances may form. Ill-conjured magic, like a ricocheting bullet, will find its mark. All that Daniella had yearned for when she visited Alia Flores was a means with which to be always with her lover. Now, she felt a rush of relief that John had not, after all, abandoned her. He had not chosen Sara; he was somewhere wishing for Daniella’s company. Love burst open in her heart once more, and with it, fear for her missing lover’s safety.

“I’ll come right over,” she said to Sara, and reached for her keys.

____________________

Sara placed the folded napkins on the table. The manzanilla tree was already fading. An ephemeral offering of the garden, it would not linger. Sara knelt and scooped up a handful of the rich soil. She squeezed it and let it trickle through her fingers, breathing in the heavy, humid scent of it. It had fed on death and magic and had produced this new life. It was a fair exchange, and one she was ready to repeat. When the doorbell rang, she dusted off her hands and went to answer it with a light heart. She knew what made