The lord of the sun had just removed the cloak of day when Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle heard the first howl. Over the buzz of cicadas, a growl rumbled into a series of barks almost like a dog’s, almost like a monkey’s. Leaves shuddered somewhere high above in the dark, crowded trees. Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle’s stomach spoke to him louder than the rustle of the greenery, but he was a man who had been graced with craft and cunning, who had earned his wisdom from the solitude of his later life. So, having given the greatest portions of his offerings to the lords of the sky, having left the veneer of his life behind him, and having completed his pilgrimage, he laid a trap, placed the last of his fruit within it, unrolled the rough cloth of his hamaca, and hoped that for once, his seeds had been planted in fertile soil.

And then he waited.

And as the goddess Po took on the face of the moon to witness the event that was meant to come, Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle watched a creature almost in the shape of a man crawl down from the treetops and thrust its hand into the traphole filled with fruit. Having readied his hamaca, he threw the cloth over the creature and lassoed it beneath his muscle.

As he raised his machete to strike it down and thus gain power over its dominion, he heard the creature cry, “Wait!”

Being a good Catholic and a god-fearing man, Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle froze like Abraham over Isaac, his machete gleaming in Po’s relentless light. When the creature began to struggle again, he struck it and struck it with the butt of his machete until even its long black tail quivered into stillness.

“Who are you?” asked the creature. “And why have you contrived to capture Batz?"

“I am Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle,” said he, raising his arm to strike again if need be, “and you will submit to me.”

“Batz will submit to no man,” said the creature, its voice like the snap of footsteps in the jungle, “but Batz will make a bargain if a bargain is there to be made.”

“They say you are the brujo. The storyteller,” said Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle, his arm a tightening coil. “You will write my life into a new story.”

The creature ceased to move. “Batz will concede to you if you accept these terms: that if you release them, they shall grant you any boon that you wish, but you must surrender to them one thing of equal value.”

“And who is to determine the value of my wish?” Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle asked the creature.

“The gods, who have weighed the depth of your desires,” said Batz, who was no brujo. “They have seen that seed which has fallen upon the wayside and here they have nurtured that which has fallen upon good soil. They have seen a man discontented with his lot and have led you to their altars. Do you think that Batz could have been captured without the consent of the gods? Do you think that Batz does not know that which you seek, and why?”

And Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle, who had measured himself as a man and had found himself lacking, who had lain with many a woman but had never sired a child, who had for so long convinced himself that loneliness was to be his most loyal of companions, who had wrestled with his desires as Jacob had wrestled with God, almost wept with joy at the fertility of his endeavor.

“You swear this?” asked Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle.

“Batz swears this,” said the creature.

So Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle thrust his machete into the earth and released the creature from the canvas of the hamaca. Its body was slim and compact, almost graceful, something shrunken and twisted into a seraphim of limbs. It sprang into a tree and coiled its tail around a branch just beyond the reach of Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle’s machete. A dark mane haloed its face, its eyes looked death at him, and its wrinkled head rotated clockwise and counterclockwise, baring a mouthful of canines stained yellow and brown.

“Batz can make you become anything that they want. What story would you like for Batz to tell?”

Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle was a large man, comely and well-made, and when he slumped his shoulders and rested his face in his hands it was like the mountain beneath him began to crumble.

“I want a story in which I have children,” wished Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle. He looked towards the radiance of the moon, then bowed his great grave head. “I want children, and I want always for my children to have children, and I want a story that they will tell until the end of my line.”

The creature’s eyes were an eclipse. “Batz can do all this, and Batz can do more.”

So Batz opened its mouth and howled:

Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle was not a man any more than he was a myth. He was, quite simply, a crossroads, an intersection of new and old worlds who had made a trade one night near the blessed temples of Copán on the long road from Ciudad Guatemala to San Pedro Sula. Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle was not a man any more than he was a woman, and a woman was not a woman any more than she was a story, and Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle summoned a howl from the mouths of the oldest of the gods that one night near Copán, on the long road from Ciudad Guatemala to San Pedro Sula.

But Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle did not hear this. Instead he heard the gnashing of teeth and crying and tearing, and the muscles of his chest pulled and swiftly parted, and the hair of his face was steam and smoke. The fork of his legs burned like a knife, and upon undressing to find the source of his agony, Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle whimpered as he watched the dark shaft of his penis writhe until, with a pop, it disappeared into the ever-widening shift of his pelvis. Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle felt a hole opening up in the wriggling hell of his belly, sinking deeper than a fist to the tender flesh of his testes. His second birth misplaced his eyes in the pressure of his skull, and when the moment was over, he was no longer.

And as Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle ceased to be, Hun-Batz, who was ever more than a brujo, howled its laughter, mirthful and bright beneath the gaze of the goddess, Po. And she, who had borne witness to them that fateful night, who had been most appeased by offerings made on her altar, extended her long arm and kissed this man with the pale tip of her littlest finger.

The next morning, a well-rested woman awoke in her hamaca, swaddled and suspended like a child in the womb. As she stretched into wakefulness, she found two handfuls of round breasts and a soft, hairless belly, smooth where she had once been full and full where she had been flat. And the woman, fearful and astonished to find herself such, considered the words of the brujo, considered the trade she had made and weighed the value of her wish and found this: that her words had bound her to the justice of this transformation.

So she gathered her hamaca and the fruit still unsullied in its trap, and continued the journey that she had begun so many nights before, reaping the bounty she had sown for so long, rapturous in her fertility and in the blessing of the gods. No tongue alive could name the joy that had been begotten upon the woman that night.

And on that long road from Ciudad Guatemala to San Pedro Sula, she learned this:

Better to be the story of a woman with child than to be the man who was Victor Alejandro Martinez del Valle.

J. L. Bermúdez is a queer Nicaraguan-American from sunny South Florida. She received her BFA from Emerson College and is an MFA student at Florida Atlantic University. She currently serves as the Editor in Chief of the Swamp Ape Review. Her short fiction is forthcoming in Quarter After Eight and has been longlisted in the Smokelong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. Her poetry has been published in tiny wren lit. When she isn’t writing, she loves going to the beach and playing fetch with her Boston Terrier, Odysseus.