The poetic geometry of her stories is illustrated in these words from Silvina: “I think the short story is music.”

Carmen Boullosa

Skylight

The elevator gate had gold chalices with flowers and spirals of black iron foliage that would catch your eye when you were sad, watching, hypnotized by those huge snakes, the uncoiling elevator cables. It was my oldest aunt’s house, where I was taken on Saturdays to visit. Above the hall in that house with a skylight was another mysterious home, and through the glass you could see a family of feet surrounded by haloes, like saints, and the shadows of the rest of the bodies to which those feet belonged, shadows flattened like hands seen through bathwater. There were two tiny feet and three pairs of big feet, two with spiked high heels that took short steps. Trunks moved across the floor with the noise of a thunderstorm, but the family never seemed to travel. They always sat in the same bare room, unfolding newspapers while melodies flowed incessantly from the player piano, which was always stuck on the same tune. From time to time, voices bounced like balls against the floor or fell quietly onto the rug.

One winter night, a towering wooden clock that grew like a tree at bedtime struck nine; icy gusts whipped through cracks in the windows, heavy with curtains that smelled perpetually of mothballs, and shook the tropical shadow of a plant shaped like a palm tree. The street was filled with the calls of fruit and newspaper vendors, melancholy, like farewells in the night. The home above was empty, except for the soft crying of a little girl (who had just received a goodnight kiss but didn’t want to go to sleep) and the shadow of a hoop skirt, like a black devil in a perverse schoolmistress’s ankle boots. A voice that was all furrowed brows and wiry hair shouted “Celestina! Celestina!,” making a very dark abyss of that name. And, after the cry grew smaller and fainter, the two tiny feet appeared, jumping rope, and a laugh and then another laugh fell from the bare feet of Celestina, who was in her nightgown with a candy in her mouth. Her nightgown was the shape of a cloud against the square panes of green glass. The voice from the bootie-clad feet was getting louder: “Celestina, Celestina!” The laughs that answered her grew sharper, louder. The bare feet jumped the dancing oval of the rope while a music box with a doll on top played.

You could hear the crazed footsteps of those black ankle boots tied with laces that, upon coming undone, provoked deadly attacks of anger. The hoop skirt with demon wings fluttered once again against the glass. The bare feet stopped jumping. Both sets of feet ran in circles without reaching each other; the hoop skirt chased after the tiny bare feet, with talons outstretched, until a lock of hair hung, suspended in the air, caught by the black skirt’s hands, and screams erupted.