Adventitious, February 2026
A young girl named Clarita — full name Clara Villalba Prado — walks to the front of her elementary school classroom on hooves, wearing a century-old lace dress with bandaged fingers and goat-like yellow eyes with horizontal pupils. She unrolls a hand-embroidered family tree canvas and begins presenting the multi-generational saga of the Hacienda Villalba, a sprawling apple orchard estate in Mexico, to an increasingly bewildered audience of classmates and one very regretful teacher.
The story begins with Doña Gertrudis, Clarita’s fifth great-grandmother, a woman so convinced her children were unworthy heirs that she simply refused to die. When her body began decomposing — leaking fluids, turning grey-green, losing its heartbeat — her children scattered. Her daughter Lucrecia fled with an old lover; son Lautaro ran from a pregnancy scandal during the Revolution; and son Plutarco, who tried to bury Doña Gertrudis in a cemetery, was forced by her to bury himself alive in the backyard as punishment. He remains there still, occasionally emerging for apples.
Generations pass with equal chaos. Fidencio, Lautaro’s abandoned son, briefly inherits the estate before leaving with his mother. His son Matías arrives claiming to be the rightful heir, rebuilds the hacienda’s fortunes, but locks away his rebellious daughter Carolina — who was expelled from Catholic school for kissing girls — behind a wall so tall that trees and goats began growing on it. When Matías finally frees Carolina on her twentieth birthday, she is already pregnant. The shock kills him on the spot. Carolina later reveals the father was the devil, disguised as a goat.
The resulting son, Clarita’s grandfather Enrique, is born with horns, hooves, and goat eyes. Sent by Doña Gertrudis to hunt and kill the devil — which he does, with a machete — he returns and is married off to Milagros, the daughter of a nun who claimed immaculate conception. Their three sons carry the same goat features. The eldest, Pablo, bullied relentlessly and melancholic, dies by suicide at nineteen; his grandmother’s tears transform both of them into intertwined apple trees bearing black fruit. The middle son, Javier, avenges his brother so fiercely he accidentally kills a bully by throwing sparks and is subsequently disowned.
That leaves Clarita’s father Daniel as sole heir, eventually sent to the city to find a wife. He returns with Elena — a feminist, neopagan, queer witch who can transform into a fireball and drinks blood, and whom he courted by offering her goats. Doña Gertrudis is horrified. Elena responds by inventing nicknames for the undead matriarch so cutting that great-grandmother Carolina laughed herself to death upon hearing them.
Clarita wraps up her presentation with a smile, adjusting the ribbon between her horns. Her parents, she explains, have told her she needn’t fear Doña Gertrudis — and that she is powerful enough to reduce the ancient, rotting matriarch to ash. Her classmates sink in their seats. The teacher is dizzy. Clarita returns to her desk, grinning from ear to ear.
Aspiring author / cat lady / Mexican / ESL|EFL / aroace / she|her / BSFA awards nominee and finalist / First reader at Diabolical Plots and The Skull & Laurel