La Llorona

by Joseph Grant

Eighty years ago, there lived a young factory worker named Pablo who fell in love from afar with the most beautiful Lucinda, youngest daughter of one of the wealthiest land owners in all of Sonora. Each day, Pablo would see her in the dusty and crowded marketplace on his way home for siesta and after a few weeks, he finally worked up the courage to speak to this raven-haired beauty with lovely and mysterious brown eyes that seemed to beckon him from a distance and then look right through him. At first, they met in secret by the lake, their rendezvous unbeknownst to her strict and steely father who upon learning of the young couple's trysts, forbade his daughter to see the young man ever again, so when Lucinda became pregnant by this nearly-indigent journeyman, her enraged father disowned her for bringing shame onto their house and as a result, threw her and his unborn bastard grandchild out on the street. Pablo and Lucinda lived on love and barely anything else and for a long time were very happy in the knowledge of two so in love, but when a second child was born, the two struggled to make ends meet with longer hours for him at the factory and her taking care of two young children and it left little in the way of time for the couple to be in the same room, let alone the same conversation, unless it was to exchange heated words of a couple growing quickly and coldly apart. With Pablo's new hours came many welcome diversions and one of them was a shapely 19 year-old named Marquetta who turned her womanly attentions towards the much-older 23 year-old and made him feel wanted again and when he started to work sometimes until the morning hours, Lucinda wasn't as naive as Pablo had hoped for and figured it out and as a tempestuous result, Pablo left her for a slightly younger woman, if only by a few months. The newspapers of the day would label it a 'crime of passion' when La Llarona, as they now called her, drowned her children and herself in the lake where she and Pablo once used to meet but for those who knew the couple, it was anything but, as the passion between the two had been worked to the bone for a long time and it was more of a crime of revenge they would say; so if sometime you're walking by the lake at midnight in Sonora and you think you see and hear the ghostly visage of beautiful young woman weeping, doomed to wander eternity in search of her lost children, maybe it's just the moonlight playing tricks on you and only the wind howling as the locals like to say so as not to disrupt tourism, but then again maybe, just maybe...it is what it is.

6S

Joseph Grant is one of 6S's favorite sons, and the hits just keep on coming.