Hello, friends. Now that October is upon us I’ve decided to make things a little bit spooky around here. To that end, each Short Story Saturday up until Halloween will cover a horror story. Which, admittedly, isn’t all that different to most of my posts.

Anyway, today we’re going to take a look at “Lacrimosa” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, originally published in 2015.

“Lacrimosa” is about Ramon, a Mexican immigrant who currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia. One night, while walking home, he sees a homeless woman that he does his best to ignore. The woman then asks him where her children are, which freaks him out for reasons he can’t quite identify. It’s not until he gets home that he realizes that it’s because the homeless woman reminds him of La Llorona.

Now, I’ve written about La Llorona before, but here’s a quick recap. La Llorona, or The Weeping Woman, is a figure from Central American folklore. In essence, she’s the ghost of a woman who drowned her children and is now cursed to wander the world looking for them. Because she can’t find them, she then takes other people’s children and drowns them. Needless to say, running into her probably isn’t going to be a very good time.

Ramon reminisces a bit about his childhood, as well as a story his great uncle Camilo told him about his own encounter with her. Basically, Camilo had been driving down the street when he encountered a woman in white, bleeding from the mouth, with said blood dripping onto her dress. Ramon had always doubted this story since Camilo was frequently hammered, but his encounter with the woman in the alley still has him pretty shaken.

Some time later, he encounters the woman again, trying to stay out of the rain under a ledge. Tearfully, she asks him again where her children are, which prompts him to pick up the pace to get away from here. He encounters a homeless man who begs for change, who he regards with disgust and muses that this is why he’d left Mexico in the first place.

Later, he has a nightmare involving howling dogs, which Camilo told him meant they’d seen La Llorona.

The next week, he encounters the homeless woman again, and he’s still disgusted by her. He thinks about how the city is going right down the gutter, and how he can’t wait to retire so he can go to his own island somewhere he won’t have to deal with this. Ramon is kind of a dick. Just saying.

Anyway, while grocery shopping, Ramon starts to think about his family. He used to send postcards to his mother while he was living in the US, but was too poor to afford to send money. He also couldn’t call home unless he went to a payphone. Ramon then remembers the last conversation with his sister, Carmen, which turned into a full-blown argument over his lack of familial support. Before he hangs up, Carmen yells, “There’s some things you can’t get rid of, Ramon.”

This was the last time they’d spoken, and Ramon ponders that what Carmen said is true.

But maybe Carmen had been right. Maybe there’s some things you can’t get rid of. Certain memories, certain stories, certain fears that cling to the skin like old scars.

These things follow you.

Maybe ghosts can follow you, too.

Some time later, Ramon has a pretty bad day, so he hunkers down and tries to get home as soon as he can before anything else can go wrong. When he’s about four blocks from his place, he hears a high-pitched, shrieking noise. This turns out to be the homeless woman, waling and chanting the word “children” over and over again.

This creeps him the fuck out, so he picks up the pace. While he’s walking away, though, he looks over his shoulder only to find that the homeless woman has disappeared.

That night, he has another dream of dogs howling, though this time part of said dream is his mother comforting him. Except it turns out not to actually be his mother, but a horrifying apparition that grins at him with yellowed teeth and asks him if he’s seen her children.

He starts taking a cab to work, and remembers what his great-uncle told him: that if you see La Llorona’s face, she’ll drown you. He thinks for a moment that he’d left all that behind when he left Mexico, or at least he thought he did. He then wonders if there’s any kind of charm against the ghost, but can’t think of any besides his mother’s comfort.

Some time later Ramon decides to risk walking again. He doesn’t run into the homeless woman, but can kind of feel her presence in the air around him. When he gets home, he realizes that his ceiling has begun to leak.

Later, he can see the homeless woman standing in the alley outside of his apartment building, staring up into the window. He finds his family’s old phone number and tries to call it, but the number has been disconnected. Ramon tries to go to bed, but can hear the dogs howling and the woman scratching at the dumpster outside.

He goes out to meet her, and finds her huddled near said dumpster, crying about her children. She looks up at him and, while he expects to see a horrible nightmare face, instead he just sees an old woman who could be her mother. The story then ends with this:

The woman looks at him. Parched, forgotten, and afraid.

“I’ve lost my children,” she whispers with her voice of dead leaves.

The alley is a river. He goes to her, sinks into the muck, sinks into the silvery water. He embraces her and she strokes his hair. The sky above is black and white, like the pictures in the old TV set and the wind that howls in his ears is the demon wind of his childhood.

As for what the story’s about, I think it’s basically about what Carmen tells Ramon: that some things you can’t run from. Ramon is trying to run from his past and culture, which he seems to hold contempt for, but it catches up to him anyway. Seeing the old woman who reminds him so strongly of stories he heard as a child that he starts to think about his family again, and decides to try and reconnect with them towards the end. However, by that point it’s too late, as their number has been disconnected and he no longer knows what happened to them.

So, that was a delightfully spooky little yarn. I like how it builds from a mild sense of foreboding up to outright dread. I also like the sense of ambiguity around the old homeless woman. The story doesn’t really make it clear that the woman is really La Llorona, or if Ramon is having some kind of psychotic break.

And really, I think that kind of ambiguity is what makes horror, well, horror.