You Are Expected
- a short story about ancient forces, fleeting glimpses, and ungrasped meaning
You Are Expected
-by S. Francis Burns
The bus from Mexico City coughed and stopped at the edge of town. I stepped down into the heat. Cobblestones shifted under my shoes.
I had the envelope in my pocket. Cream paper, creased, my name written in a hand I didn’t know. No sender. Only an address, and a line: You are expected.
The market pressed close. Papaya stacked high, guava split open on the table. Smoke from a grill. A cleaver striking bone. Voices arguing price. A speaker rattled with music no one seemed to hear. Incense drifted above it all.
I kept to the street, Avenida Revolución de 1910. The name itself like a warning. Dogs slept in the shade of awnings. A woman fanned herself with cardboard. Children ran, their sandals slapping stone.
I stopped to catch my breath. Above the roofs the mountains rose sharp and dark, almost blue. And there, balanced high on the cliff, the pyramid. Tepozteco.
An old man by a fruit stand saw me looking. His hands trembled as he lifted a bag of mangoes onto the scale.
“You’ll climb it,” he said.
“Maybe,” I answered.
“Everyone climbs it. Sooner or later.”
I walked on. The farther I went, the quieter it became. Stalls gave way to walls, painted once, now faded. A jaguar leapt across one mural. A Virgin looked out from another. Spray-painted slogans overlapped them both. Dogs barked from behind gates. The air smelled of earth.
At the bend in the road I saw the wall. Twelve feet high, built of stone black as if wet. No windows. No cracks. A gate of wood reinforced with iron.
A man sat on a stool in the shade. His chin on his chest, hat tilted down. A rifle leaned against the wall.
I slowed. The gate looked not just closed, but sealed. The envelope sweated in my pocket. I cleared my throat.
The guard didn’t move.
I waited. Flies gathered and lifted again. The mountains watched from above. At last he stirred, raised his head, looked at me. His eyes were small, unreadable.
I held out the envelope. He didn’t take it. He stood, turned, and pushed the gate. The hinges groaned.
Cool air met me on the other side. Quieter, too, though I could hear birds somewhere high in the trees.
I looked back once before the gate shut. The guard had already lowered his hat again, as if nothing had passed between us.
The gate closed behind me.
Stone walls ran the length of the grounds, enclosing everything. The path led through manicured grass toward the house, a long shape of dark stone and glass. Windows high and wide, though no curtains moved.
To the right, at some distance, a swimming pool lay under the sun. Its water hardly stirred. At the far end a figure towered above it, a bronze angel, wearing a pointed mask, wings spread, taller than any man. The face was blank, mouth sealed. The pool caught its reflection, broken by a faint ripple.
Closer to the path, other figures stood in the grass. Cloaked shapes, faceless. Lifesized sculptures of women holding children, as if running though fixed in place. A man bent over a pond, hands pulling up a fish that would never break free.
The walls pressed high, close. I couldn’t tell if they were built to keep something out, or in.
I reached the house. The door stood open.
Inside, stone hallways stretched long in both directions. Light fell through the windows, pale and sharp, cutting the dust. Paintings hung but I didn’t stop to see them. My footsteps echoed.
A room opened on my left. High ceiling, dark beams, a wide stone fireplace. Above the mantle, a guitar hung in a frame. The wood was worn, the body scarred. Across its face a name scrawled in black ink: El Tri. I had heard of them once. Someone had called their band leader the Neil Young of Mexico.
The room smelled faintly of smoke, though the hearth was cold.
I kept walking. Doors opened to other rooms: a dining room with a table long enough for twenty, a kitchen tiled in blue, a sitting room where dust lay thick on the furniture. Somewhere deeper in the house, voices drifted, low, indistinct.
I followed them and came to a courtyard.
Four people stood together under the lantern light, their clothes pale against the heat. Their voices carried, laughter rising, breaking, settling again. For a moment that lingered, none of them noticed me.
Then a woman turned. Her eyes locked on mine. Brown, deep, steady. The kind of gaze that felt older than recognition, as if she had known me long before this place.
The moment broke. She smiled lightly at something said, folded herself back into the circle, her laugh as soft as the breeze. Soon after, she left them. Passing close, she brushed my arm, cool against the heat, though she didn’t look at me again.
I wanted to ask who they were, who had invited us, but the words stuck. No one asked me either.
A man in a white shirt approached from a distant casita I hadn’t previously noticed on the property. One of the staff. He bowed slightly.
“The master of the house is delayed,” he said. “He hopes to explain everything soon, when he arrives.”
He left me with that.
In the courtyard’s center stood a fountain, dry, its basin cracked. The shadow of the bronze angel fell across it in the late light, stretched long and thin.
I went upstairs. The stone steps were worn smooth in the middle. On the landing, a narrow window framed the mountains. The pyramid caught the last of the sun. I thought again of the man in the market, “Everyone climbs it.”
In the late afternoon, the bell in town began to ring. Slow, steady, but wrong. The hour had passed. The sound was not keeping time but warning, or calling. Each strike hung in the air too long.
When I came down again, the courtyard was empty.
I stepped onto the lawn. The air was cooler now. The sculptures stood where they had, shadows stretched longer across the grass. The pool reflected the sky, pale and dim. The angel’s face seemed turned toward me as if it had shifted.
The light was starting to fade when I left the house. At the gate, the guard sat again in his chair. Chin sunk, hat low. The rifle leaned in reach. He didn’t look up as I passed. But his mouth, just barely, seemed to bend into a smile.
I followed the slope toward town. Shadows growing longer across the cobblestones. To one side a wall rose, its iron gate half-open. I stepped through.
The Panteón Municipal cemetery.
Early evening held the place close. The air was dry, touched with wax and flowers left too long. Graves crowded each other, crowded and stacked so tight there was no ground between them. Above-ground tombs painted pink, blue, or left to crumble gray. Names scratched, dates half-worn.
I turned down a narrow way. It closed fast behind me. Another turn, and another. The paths bent back on themselves, pulling me deeper in. The stones leaned together, shoulder to shoulder. Some tall as houses, others no more than a box.
On one wall an old mural spread across the grave: two men on horseback, rifles raised, their faces dark with resolve. Defensores de Tepoztlán. Beneath it, the name: Coronel Ignacio Rojas González. The colors cracked but fierce.
I stood before it as the light dimmed. The horses seemed to fix their gaze on me, or past me, toward some enemy no one had warned me about.
The bell rang from town again. Not the hour. Too late, too slow, each strike lagging. Its sound drifted into the graves like fog and stayed there, as if the stones absorbed it.
I turned, tried another path. It ended in shadow, the air thick, close. I doubled back, but the way was not the same. I moved faster. The light was thinning, the sky turning violet through the trees. I thought I saw the mural again, though I had turned away from it.
I stopped under a tree whose roots had broken through the tombs. They pushed the stone aside, curling into cracks, prying open lids.
I thought of the thousand who must lie here, pressed close beneath the earth. Children, farmers, soldiers, all reduced to what the roots could use. Bones giving way to soil, soil feeding the tree.
The mural came back to me, men on horseback, rifles raised, their faces carved in paint. Defenders. I wondered what they had defended, and for how long. Time had taken them too. The horses no longer carried them. The rifles lay rusted somewhere, if they had not already been buried as well.
The stone would crumble. The paint would fade. The roots would keep moving down, patient, without pause.
For a moment, I thought I could hear them working below, splitting rock, prying bone loose from earth.
I sat on the low wall of a grave and tried to steady my breath. Above me, branches creaked, though the air was still.
When I rose, I wasn’t sure which way I had come.
I turned left. Then right. At last I saw the gate. I stepped back into the street.
Behind me the cemetery seemed to close, its walls taller now, its paths sealed.
Far above, the pyramid caught the last of the light.
At first light on the next day, the house stirred. Doors opened, footsteps in the hall. Someone knocked once on mine and told me to join the others outside.
We walked in a line down the path, the guard watching us from his stool, the rifle at his side. The walls opened to the road, and we began to climb. All would be revealed soon it said.
The mountains rose ahead, jagged and dark. Mist clung low to the trees. The air cooled as we gained height. No one spoke.
An hour passed. We left the road for a trail that wound through scrub and stone. Birds flashed between branches, vanished. At a clearing the path widened. A cave opened to one side, black and wet. Beside it stood a low dome of stone. The temazcal.
The others waited by the entrance. An old man crouched near the fire, feeding stones into its belly. He nodded once, then motioned for us to crawl inside.
I bent low and entered.
The heat met me first, then the dark. The dome closed around us. We sat in a circle on the stone floor, knees drawn in. The door shut and the world disappeared.
Steam rose as water struck the stones. It filled the air, thick, blinding. My breath came ragged. A chant began, low, steady, pulsing against the walls. Another voice joined, then another. The sound closed in until it was all I could hear.
I closed my eyes. The heat pressed against me, pushed into my chest. My skin slick, my head swimming.
Something moved. Slow, heavy.
At first I thought it was one of us shifting on the floor. But the sound circled, padded steps, deliberate, pressing into the steam.
I opened my eyes. Shapes wavered in the dark, bodies hunched, hands on knees. But in the blur something larger passed, close enough I could feel its heat.
A breath, deep and low, filled the dome.
The chanting did not falter.
The steps came again, heavier this time. A shape brushing my shoulder and gone before I turned. My pulse quickened.
A growl rose, soft, guttural, close to the floor.
I could not tell if it came from the chanters, or from the thing moving among us. The sound thickened the steam, made the dark vibrate.
Another pass. This time I smelled it, musky, sharp, animal.
The heat pressed harder. My chest strained. The chant grew louder, rose to a pitch, fell again.
Then silence. Only breath. Mine ragged, others steady.
The door opened. Light knifed in.
Steam poured out, lifting into the sky. I stumbled forward on hands and knees. Outside the air was cool, sharp. My body shone with sweat.
The old man watched from the fire, expression blank. He gave no sign of what had happened, or if anything had.
I turned back once. The others filed out, faces unreadable. None spoke.
The cave behind us gaped dark.
We started back down the path, single file. The stones still burned in my skin, the growl still in my ear.
By afternoon, we were back behind the walls. The guard let us through without a word. His chin still sunk, hat low.
The others drifted apart, silent as they had been on the climb. Some vanished into the long corridors. One sat in the courtyard and poured water from a jug, drinking slow, head tilted back. The woman with the brown eyes was nowhere, but I could feel her nearby.
I found my way to the great room. The guitar hung above the fireplace, its strings dulled, its signed face catching the light. The air smelled faintly of dust and old smoke. A sculpture of an enormous bronze dove looked through the window at me, half in the shadows of the trees surrounding it.
I lay on the stone floor and let the cool seep into me. My body still burned from the temazcal, skin salt-crusted, lungs raw. In the quiet I could still hear the chant, rising and falling, as if it had sunk into the stone itself.
Outside, the sun fell slow. Long shadows from the cloaked figures stretched across the grass. The angel by the pool turned bronze in the last of the light.
Somewhere in the house a door slammed. Another opened. Footsteps faded down a hall.
The bell rang again from the town, out of time, each strike hanging longer than it should. No longer sure why I was here.
I closed my eyes as the room began to spin. For a moment I felt the same heat, the same heavy breath close to me. The growl deep in the steam. I opened them again. The room was still. The guitar hung silent.
Night pressed at the windows. The walls held. “The master will be here soon” the same servant said.
It began with a wind. A shutter banged against stone. The courtyard lantern swung hard, throwing light across the walls.
Then the rain came. Not steady, but sudden, as if a river had tipped over the house. Sheets of water hammered the roof, poured from gutters, ran in torrents across the grass.
The cloaked figures on the lawn glistened dark, their outlines blurred. The angel by the pool shone wet, its mask catching the flashes of lightning. For a moment it seemed to lean closer to the water.
Doors opened and slammed. Voices rose, scattered. Footsteps hurried down halls. Someone called out but the words were drowned. The house, which had held so much silence, now shook with noise.
I went to the window. The pool churned with rain. The bronze dove stood among the trees, wings streaked, watching. Lightning cut the sky, white, jagged, showing the mountains for an instant before they fell back into black.
The bell rang again, but not from the town. This time the sound came from inside the walls. Deep, metallic, struck too hard. Each toll carried through stone, shook the air.
I left the room and stepped into the hall. Water ran under the door, pooling on the floor. A figure passed me in the dark, brushing my shoulder, and was gone before I could turn.
The storm broke the walls. Rain poured down the paths, turning stone to streams. Water rose around my ankles, pulling at me.
I reached the gate. The rifle leaned against the wall, slick with rain. The guard was gone. The chair remembered him.
I stepped out.
The road had become a river. The storm carried branches, leaves, bits of paper torn from somewhere. A dog ran past, soaked, eyes wide. Shouting carried up from the town.
I followed the noise.
The power cut. Lights in windows blinked, then died. Doors slammed, voices rose. Families rushed into the street, carrying blankets, plastic bags, children wrapped tight. A man shouted names into the rain. A woman dragged a chair from her house, then let it go and ran.
Lightning cut the sky white. For a moment I saw the whole village, roofs shining, water coursing down the slope, people scattered like figures in a play. Then the dark closed again.
I kept walking. No one looked at me. They passed, faces turned away, eyes wide on something else. The shouting swelled, broke, rose again.
The bell struck. Not from the church but close, inside the village, struck hard and off-time, as if someone was sounding an alarm no one answered.
The storm pressed harder. Water surged at my knees. My body ached from the temazcal, lungs raw, skin burning even in the cold. I stumbled, caught myself, moved on.
Another flash, lightning over the mountain. The pyramid appeared for an instant, huge against the cliff, then gone.
The shouting thinned. Houses gave way to fields. My legs carried me forward though I no longer knew the way. The night pressed in. Water roared.
Then nothing.
I woke in silence.
The rain had passed. My body lay damp against earth. A canopy of black branches arched above me, twisted, tangled, shutting out the sky. Light filtered green through the leaves.
The air was sharp, alive. Every sound clear, the drip of water from branches, the call of a bird, the rustle of something moving in the undergrowth.
I sat up. My clothes clung heavy. My hands shook as I lifted them. Sunlight broke through in shards, bright against the dark wood.
I rose and walked. The ground was soft, scattered with roots that coiled like veins. My feet slid in mud.
The grove pulsed. Trees bent in ways that seemed impossible, branches braided and knotted above, their bark slick black. The air shimmered as if the world itself breathed.
I sat back. My chest eased. The chaos of the night, the shouting, the storm, the flight, felt far, though the water still dripped from my clothes.
For a moment the world sharpened beyond what I knew. The trees alive with color deeper than green. The air trembling, electric. The earth under me not dead ground but pulsing, vast, uncountable. Alive in ways I could not comprehend.
I closed my eyes. Opened them again. The grove was still.
But it felt as if it had claimed me.
The grove thinned, and I found myself on a trail cut between stone. The ground rose beneath me, wet earth giving way to rock.
Ahead, the sound of rushing water grew louder.
I stepped out into an opening where two massive boulders leaned toward one another, almost touching at the top. Their bases spread wide, a narrow stream running fast between them. The water shone white in the morning light.
The air here felt charged, heavier than the grove. I crouched at the edge of the stream and lowered my hands. Cold water filled them, clear, bright. I raised a double handful, gently as I could. It would not be held. Always slipping away.
Somewhere behind me, a laugh like wind. Then a bark cut the air.
The dog stood on the bank, coat dark with rain, eyes fixed on me. He did not move closer, only waited, tail still.
I looked up. A feather drifted down from the space between the rocks, spinning, catching light, and came to rest against the wet stone.
On the cliff face above, a shadow coiled, long, sinuous, rising and falling across the rock. Feathered, scaled, stormlight made flesh. For a moment it seemed to breathe.
I stood still. The dog did not move. The water rushed on.
High above, the pyramid shone in the sun, close yet unreachable.
The sun broke through, pale against the wet stone. Mist lifted from the stream, rising into the air.
I sat on the bank. The dog lay down a little distance away, head on its paws, watching the water.
The feather clung to the rock until the current loosened it and carried it downstream.
The shadow faded from the cliff. The mountain stood bare again, the pyramid fixed high above.
I waited for meaning to form, for the night and storm and house to gather into something I could hold. Nothing came.
Only the mountains and stream breathing.
Only the silence after rain.