r/Hell
“Harpies” by Rollin Jewett
Before time began, very long ago, Hernan Ortiguera booked the tickets on impulse through Groupon. He did not have a Reddit account beforehand, although he later made one to ask for help with the refunding process, at which point he saw all the vicious, betrayed cries of Scam! Scam! splashed across the top of r/groupon, and by then it was far too late and he was down $750, which really could have been far worse, as he told his wife Ariel and her lemon-puckered lips and narrowed rutile eyes. And that was true, two tickets from O’Hare to Ninoy Aquino could have robbed them of their rent for the month, or their daughter’s spring tuition, or the balikbayan box they were to send to her sister next month, but nevertheless Ariel shuttered like a turbine vent and there was very little Hernan could say to make her see the sparkle glinting off the meniscus of their half-full glass.
Ariel often said that she had married him under the impression that he was just an idealist, but quite soon after the veil and the cord and the coins and the vows she discovered that he was something even more difficult to work with—a stargazer. She said this to her coworkers while in line for the bank’s single-use bathroom and to her church friends at the Easter potlucks and to her sister when they managed to both make it to their biweekly international Skype call, which tended to be about once every three months if nothing truly urgent came up, and it always did. Someone back home was always dying. Ariel’s coworkers and friends and her sister Até all hummed or clucked or nodded sagely even though none of their husbands were stargazers like Hernan, and it seemed they could not commiserate the way Ariel wanted them to because she kept bringing it up.
Once, before the Groupon tickets, she and Hernan were walking around North Pond and he had stopped to quest for the freshly migrated night-herons while she continued her brisk circuit, and on the far end of the pond a muskrat emerged from the sedges onto the asphalt path and she very nearly kicked it. She stumbled back, began to apologize, and instead found herself berating the muskrat for its carelessness. The muskrat took offense.
“Lady, I built this mudball, I can walk where I damn well please,” it said. Pond water pearled off its ragged fur, and the drops vanished before they could darken the ground. She asked where it got the nerve.
“Up yours,” the muskrat said, already moving on.
And Ariel watched it patter to the other side of the trail, shellac-tipped fists trembling at her hips, failing to do much more than grind her teeth down. She stood there until Hernan caught up with her, beaming and prattling on about the birds he’d seen (terns, gulls, wrens, finches, no herons today but surely next time, ‘tis the season after all), and she let him talk until they reached the penultimate block from their home, and then the whole story exploded out of her like tin foil in the microwave. He patted her shoulder placatingly while she spoke, but as they stacked their shoes next to the coatrack, he came to the muskrat’s defense.
After all, he told her as he washed the rice for dinner, around these parts, it did make the earth. And he went on to describe the muskrats pulling up the ocean floor for the Great Spirit to fashion into land, as if she didn’t know, as if they hadn’t both lived by the Lakes their whole lives and bumped into and maneuvered around Midwest gods for just as long. She thumbed along her rosary, felt the pearls click and spin. He said it was lucky she hadn’t stepped on the horned serpent of the pond instead, gotten herself eaten, and she left him there chopping broccoli to go smoke on the fire escape. It did not calm her down per se, but it did guarantee a brief respite from her asthmatic husband, which was close enough. She flicked the ashes off the railing and watched the wind dance them away. Back in the motherland Ariel had never seen, great tree spirits shook fireflies from the ends of their cigars to fill the steaming jungles. This had dubious effects on local bat populations, according to Até’s outdoorsy friends. Scales of need. And now Hernan had fumbled $750 on a voyage they would never see, across the seas and the stars, a dart piercing through time and space to a universe where the two of them really were from there.
During the hungry month that followed, while her husband worked overtime at Seafood City, Ariel Ortiguera booted up their ponderous desktop and unearthed the timeshare she had bought for them years ago. They had always traded it in to spend every-other-Christmas with Hernan’s brother in California, the brother with the many sons and the generous dinner table and the no guest rooms, but the original share was for a small resort in Grand Cayman—another claim they had never witnessed in full. She had bought it in the wake of a hurricane, when the whole thing looked like it might stay under the waves. Ariel scrolled through the forum’s gushing posts about sand and sun and relaxation, checked that Hernan had not made an early trade this year, began looking into tickets, paused to make her own Reddit account, and through an aggressive ping pong match between airline websites and subreddits, found herself in the possession of two economy tickets for the holidays. O’Hare to Owen Roberts, $375. She used the bank’s Xerox to print the confirmation emails and copy the Britannica entry on the Grand Cayman Bullfinch and she tucked them all away until the time was right to spring her trap.
***
I thought he’d appreciate the romance, the spontaneity, especially since he tried to do the same thing but he just did it wrong, Ariel told the woman behind them in the customs line, apparently believing it, apparently not noticing the woman’s disinterest. Hernan was shuffling through their papers and pointedly not listening in. Ariel adjusted the chunky Chanel-rip-off sunglasses she had bought at a kiosk back in O’Hare, which sat now at the crown of her head in anticipation of the blazing December sun they had squinted their way through in the deboarding process. The short sunlit walk across the tarmac from plane to port had broken Hernan out of his funk for a short while, drawing a smile until they were back in the air-conditioning and he returned to huffing and twisting his lips.
Once the customs agent waved them through, Hernan led the brisk charge out to the pickup zone where the taxi Ariel had arranged was waiting, and despite the old tennis injury flaring up in her knee she did not slow or stumble.
A rooster strutted past the rows of white taxis, bokboking softly as it placed its feet with delicate intention, and Hernan pulled out his birders for a closer look. It was less than twenty feet away from him. Ariel shoved her sunglasses over her eyes and pulled both their suitcases over to the taxi van and struck up a conversation with the driver about Anancy and whether or not they should avoid squashing spiders while they’re here. She placed herself so that the driver’s eyes were kept firmly away from Hernan’s creeper stance, but it meant she herself had a perfect view of her stargazer husband, binoculars embedded in his face, staring down a bird as it pecked at his shoelace. The rooster soon grew dissatisfied with the taste and left to find a cricket; Ariel did not much appreciate the reprieve. Hernan watched it go for a good long while. When he reached the van, he sat in the back with their bags and Ariel neatly folded herself into shotgun.
Despite the stubborn ice shelf crackling away between the couple, she was the type of woman who could be trusted to make the best of things, and she began asking the driver—a good pinoy boy twenty years their junior, because she’d heard from someone on the forums that Cayman was riddled with Filipinos and had hunted through the taxi company listings until she found one—how he’d found himself on the other side of the planet. If you dropped a penny in the dirt outside the Mall of Asia and it missed the dirt, just kept falling right through the crust and core and everything, straight on to the other side, it might pop up in Hell, Grand Cayman, Ariel told the driver in her sly inside-joke tone, and he laughed politely. Work visa, he explained, and the Caymans were very strict about how many non-locals they imported so he was shipping back to Quezon City come spring. Hernan traced a circle in the dusty window and slashed through it with a fingernail. Point A to Point B.
A spider wove its web inside the hollow of the van’s rearview mirror, and thought about tessellations, and the pathways between things, and flies.
“Tourists,” it singsonged to itself.
***
She had bought a new swimsuit for this trip, blue and white with ruffles at the shoulders, but he maintained that his age-old cargo shorts would serve just fine, and this may have been true if they were visiting the pebbled shores of Washington Island, but here on the pristine white beaches his many utility pockets filled with sand and the khaki canvas stiffened with salt. Ariel opposed the thin layer of grit he kept tracking into their hotel room, so Hernan shook them out on the balcony overlooking the courtyard, rubbing his fingers into the fabric and holding them to his tongue, lapping at the ocean.
There used to be a beach behind their (charming, quaint, cozy, 4.1-stars on Yelp) hotel, and it still featured in some of the pictures, but the sand had been swallowed up by the hurricane all those years ago along with millions of dollars in real estate value and a few of the locals, and the British crown, still respected here as god-ordained monarchs although by which god was harder to say, hadn’t bothered to dip its toes into the thriving black market sand trade to rob Jamaica blind and restore this side of the island, so now there was nothing past the parking lot and chipped-paint safety railing except rocks, water, and the slightest slime-covered ledge below the railing which one person at a time could shuffle across and carefully lower themselves down to submerge the tops of their feet in the sunset.
Hernan had found the ledge on the first night, Wednesday, because he wanted to see the sun sink into that perfect green-blue water, and as he watched the world turn purple and golden Ariel stayed back where the parking lot fell into the surf, one hand wrapped around the corroded paint, drier than her husband but still squinting against the spray. She said she didn’t trust her knees to keep her out of danger, and this was true, but as she watched the quotidian miracle burnishing the skies, and her husband’s face turning open and galactic and holy, her fingers tightened and she perched one sandaled foot on the corner of the ledge. Just testing the weight.
The sun hit the cloudbank a fist’s width above the horizon and swelled enormously, pregnant with its own death, melting, bleeding, then spilling into the sea, metal and crucible as one, splintering like a doorway to heaven. And it was not, not here, but Hernan would not have believed you in that moment, his revelation. He told Ariel he’d like to stay until the stars came out, and even though they had a reservation at the barbeque place down the road, she hummed agreement, and they remained there, sat or propped against the salt-encrusted concrete until the last drop of ichor faded from view and he could paint ancient wonders across the twilit sky. He had left his binoculars in the room but found he could make do quite well without them. Ariel traced out the Big Dipper, Orion, that one that looked like a W or something. She raised one hand and tried to place the spot of darkness that was her index finger over the North Star and smiled when she snuffed it out. It was actually Venus, but she had no way of knowing that.
***
The island was a shallow fishhook gently hugging its green sounds in an embrace of mangrove roots and masticated quartz, with a main road on either side of the curve, a central luxury shopping district, and a collection of attractions and conservation facilities at the very point of the hook. Owing to Ariel’s spotty knees and Hernan’s spottier lungs, they allowed themselves a maximum of two activities per day, with the rest of their tropical hours allocated to the next beach over, or the pool, or the poolside loungers. Hernan’s birders were polarized against glare, and as his search for the island’s only endemic bird drew on, he began keeping a log of the shorebirds and seabirds that flitted across his viewfinder, and a separate log just to tally all the chickens; Ariel was reading a book about burnout, the avoidance thereof, five easy steps.
Saturday, three days before Christmas, they took their rental car up to the turtle place at the northmost point of the island. Hernan told her on the drive that despite the name, caimans were not always the most populous reptile in the isles, it used to be the turtle, las tortugas, kind of like that pirate movie, and Ariel did not believe that turtles were reptiles but could not name an alternative categorization when pressed, though she knew they had some kind of exoskeleton and stuck to her guns as firmly as her foot stuck to the pedal all the way up the hook. They were still trading cross-examinations in the ticket line, somewhere between teasing and cutthroat, hobbling hand in hand through the lobby and the double doors out into the plein air enclosure, which stopped them dead.
Dios mío, Ariel said, and Hernan could not even muster the humor to ask which one she meant. When they called it a turtle farm, he started, and could not continue. It was like a beehive. It was like water polo. It was like several hundred sea turtles sharing a T-shaped pool that couldn’t be called Olympic by half. The Ortigueras stood near the signposts and watched the sore-ridden reptiles tumble over each other, always a dozen breaching for air at any given moment so that the whole zoo was filled with low moaning and nasally gasps. Dozens of sun-reddened tourists meandered past to the other aquatic and land animal exhibits, laughter and interest uninhibited by the two stock-still figures in matching polo shirts and visors leaning stiffly against the guardrail.
Hernan asked his wife if Cayman turtles were gods or spirits or tricksters, if they could speak, answer questions, lobby the government, bite back. After a long moment filled by the congested susurrus, Ariel said: I think they’re just meat.
There was an aviary (ibises, doves, flycatchers, parrots) down the way, but Hernan said he was okay, actually, and they trailed out of the gift shop without buying any turtle necklaces or turtle keychains or turtle snow globes.
Ariel tried to Skype her sister that evening in the hotel’s business center. She watched the little profile picture pulsate for a minute, hung up, called again, hung up, then pulled up WhatsApp to ask if her sister’s outdoorsy friends knew anything about sea turtles, or knew any sea turtles, and spent twenty minutes typing and retyping the message before the horror of asking Até for help set in and she backspaced the whole thing away. Hernan was watching roosters and gulls from the balcony again, and she joined him for a cigarette. The steadily pleasant breeze kept the smoke from his face, or close enough.
Not even the rats would put up with that back home, she told him, it’s because no one was from here before the Europeans took over. He didn’t answer, but his binoculars trailed upward to the translucent net of stars fading into view and stayed there long after her cigarette had crumbled to nothing.
***
Even vacation Sundays were for church. In the pew, sweating through a bleached-white button-up and khaki shorts with fewer pockets, Hernan fanned himself with a collection envelope and covetously side-eyed the woman next to them who had brought a proper hand fan. The farthest south he’d ever been before this was San Bruno, which still felt some semblance of winter (the light jacket kind), and this tropical madness was something entirely foreign to his acute midwestern senses.
The woman wore fishnets under her neat church dress, which struck Hernan as odd, but odder still was the scarf artfully draped around her long dark neck despite the heat: it hissed. He got Ariel’s attention and twisted his lips towards their pewmate, watched his wife’s eyes narrow and then flicker with recognition, she of the now well-used Reddit account and devotion to NPR, and amidst a thundering stretch of hellfire preaching, she leaned over Hernan to ask the goddess of the waters why she was attending a service for a Catholic god.
“Can’t a girl scope out the competition?” Mama Dlo demurred. She smiled like gold, or the promise of it. Hernan returned the grin. Ariel suggested she was a few hundred years late for that, and the smile turned tinny.
“It’s a small island, huh? A little care goes a long way,” she said. “Your gods may frequent these parts but they put no stock in bad manners.”
Ariel was affronted at the assertion, Hernan confused; the three of them sat in silence until the final good word made its way through the phlegm and fire to stick, globular, to the pulpit. When communion began, the spirit was gone as if she’d never been, and they would not see Mama Dlo again, not on the island, not ever.
***
The world was made a thousand different ways. Mud, songs, sacrifices. Hernan dreamt about birds that night, the creation stories from a land that was not his—one weary bird inciting a battle between sea and sky until the islands scarred over and he had a place to rest, another bird, titanic and proud, swallowing the sun whole, yet another bird prizing open the bamboo womb that held the first man and woman—and when he awoke with the hotel sheets tangled around his knees and the hem of Ariel’s nightgown clamped between his knuckles, there was the distant roll of a woman’s laughter on the breeze, or it may have been thunder. He pressed a kiss to his wife’s shoulder and could not fall back asleep.
***
On their final day, they went to Hell.
It was mostly a wide square patch of grass, full of chickens as everything was here, boxed in by a gift shop and a post office so as to facilitate epistolary humor: See You In Hell, It’s Hot Down Here, I Went To Hell And All I Got Was Addicted To Sulfur, and so on, etcetera. There was a cat among the gift shop keychains that Ariel set about befriending while Hernan broke into the triple digits in his fowl tally outside.
The store owner was twenty years her senior, Indian, and as sedate as the breeze in nature, so Ariel spent nearly half an hour drawing out the details of her arrival in Cayman, her family back in Kolkata, the last hurricane, the local gods, the cat’s name and preferred scratching spot, the last time a Grand Cayman Bullfinch had been spotted around these parts. Most of the answers disheartened her, but Letty the cat was friendly enough, and so Ariel tucked away her new ornithological information and met her husband out by the tour bus that had just pulled into the gravel lot. He was at 65 chickens and 40-odd gulls, after their Sunday afternoon beach crawl, and Ariel congratulated him as she slipped one hand in the crook of his elbow and led the pair of them towards the boardwalk to Hell.
The original geological site for which the town was named cropped up from a thin gray disc of water in an expanse of jagged biomorphic towers, gothic limestone spires no higher than two meters creating a complex network of miniature ponds and channels, and it was here the wetland birds fed. The rotten egg smell wrinkled their noses, but did not keep Hernan and his binoculars from pressing as close as he could to the wooden railing to call out his discoveries—yellowlegs, gallinules, egrets, whistling ducks, and yes, herons, although green ones—to Ariel, scribing away in her neatest hand. He said he was quite confident he’d spot the bullfinch before their flight home, and this was not the ideal environment, but there was always a chance, and he may as well look for it. He pulled a granola bar out of a utility pocket and crunched it down, spilling oats into the water, which the birds didn’t seem to mind, but Ariel began to compose her next opening line to her sister. Ah, Até, you would not believe… You enjoying the mineral bath, the spa treatment, she asked a duck paddling under the boardwalk nearby, and it did not reply, although its manner seemed to suggest a positive answer.
The skies were tinging green overhead, and sulfur burned at her nostrils. Hernan would want to stay until the sun went down, she knew, despite the hour-long drive back to the hotel, despite this being the wrong habitat entirely, despite her bad knee. She hadn’t yet decided if she would let him.
***
At 2 pm on Christmas Eve it was dark as night outside, the perfect green waters peaking like cream at the edge of sight, the perfect palm trees bent double, the perfect white sands cleaving away from their beaches in thick ribbons, and the Ortigueras watched it all through the thin, rattling glass of the airport window. Ariel said, unprompted, that she had checked the radar religiously in the weeks leading up to this trip, and researched typical Caymanian weather patterns, and over-extended her welcome in the forums asking questions about what to expect, because she wanted to be prepared, you see, she knew Hernan wasn’t one for details and planning but she wanted this to go well, to be relaxing, which is what the roomy itinerary was for, and all the multiple choice activities, and her goddamn patience with the birds, always the birds, and does he even appreciate the planning, the research, because he doesn’t seem to, and does he know it was all for him, for them, for their family? She was folded into the plastic seat as gracefully as she could manage, so not very, and wringing her hands around her suitcase handle. Hernan’s head was perpendicular to the rest of him, slumped back against the chair, wide eyes fixed towards the ceiling. He didn’t seem to hear her. There was a sound like air leaking from a tire, its source unknowable. Fuck, she said, petulant, and now we’re just going to die here, I guess.
“Seems likely,” said the muskrat on the seat facing Ariel. This made her swear again, and drop her sunglasses on the linoleum. She wasn’t sure why it was so far from its northern shores.
“Principle of the thing,” it said, “you brought me here.”
She protested.
“Right, cause you know all about deity transmission, sorry to fuckin’ presume. Everyone here was brought, genius.”
I guess, she said, dubious and furtively glancing out at the storm. Someone bring that too?
“You and yours,” it said, munching on a cattail, “that cab driver of yours, the waiters at the barbecue place, the bankers and their offshore investments, whatever. It’s hard to say. I didn’t mold this pot, least not yet.”
The glass was groaning now, the departure boards red, the rain parallel to the face of the earth. She asked if that was Mama Dlo at work.
“Not her style. She’s a dream-walker, dealmaker type.”
She asked if they were going to die here, stuck at Point C, other end of the whole gods-damned planet, no cell signal to tell her sister or her daughter one last time, no bullfinches, no stars, no refund. Hernan mumbled as if asleep, his eyes like saucers pinned upward. The birds were soaring back to the start of everything.
“That’s up to the sea dragon out there, ain’t it. It’s a storm right now, but he might as well make a full hurricane at this point.” The muskrat continued its meal unbothered as Ariel lurched to her feet, awkward as her knee locked, and pressed her face to the rattling glass. Yes, there, beyond the tarmac and the thin strip of beleaguered flora, twisting and leaping among the breakers: a flash of silver scales and the churning of powerful muscles. Ariel didn’t know what god it could possibly have been, and she said as much to the muskrat.
“Shame,” it said, and nothing more. Out there in the water was the same dragon, Bakunawa, who swallowed the moons and churned the seafloor of the archipelago that Ariel was not from, was born of, had never seen, the same dragon who broke Ilongot spears and sank Visayan shores, but she had no way of knowing that.
Waves were peaking well above the airport roof now, black and jagged and full of divine teeth bared wide, and Ariel thought, for a moment, that she could walk out into the sound and place one hand on the creature’s horned head, not to calm it but to tell it to pick its lane and stick to it, to mind the oceans it belongs to, crawled out of, came from. She felt the cartilage creaking where her nose was smashed to the window. She heard Hernan’s stuttering breath and the soft crunching of cattails. She saw the silver glint of cobwebs refracting between panes of glass.
She sat back in the molded plastic seat and held her husband’s limp hand. His fingers fluttered weakly against hers. Ariel followed Hernan’s gaze up and tried to imagine the stars.
“It’s not fair,” she said, to whoever was listening. And they were.
About the Author
Gabriella Paz Hoggatt is a Filipino-American writer from Milwaukee. They are currently an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in BarBar, Midwest Weird, Peatsmoke Journal, and elsewhere.
about the artist
Rollin Jewett is an award-winning actor, playwright, screenwriter, singer/songwriter, poet, photographer, and author. His feature film credits include Laws of Deception, American Vampire, and the upcoming Daylight to Dark (2025). Mr. Jewett’s poetry has recently been seen in Coffin Bell, Night Picnic, and Door is a Jar Magazine. His short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies, including Aphotic Realm, Ghost Stories, Fell Beasts and Fair, and Bloodlet. Mr. Jewett’s plays have been produced off-Broadway and all over the world. His photography has graced the covers and pages of numerous magazines and journals.