Welcome to Tiny Worlds!
We’re shifting our focus to explore Mexico's eastern coast with twelve-year-old George Perez in the serialized novel: ISLA.
For longer fiction visit Stories, and for flash fiction go to Sketchbook.
Nicte and George were spat onto a polished granite surface.
George hit the ground so fast his hands didn’t have time to brace himself. Stone debris from the chamber scattered around them.
The space was tight. George couldn’t sit up fully as his head bumped into a smooth wooden surface. But the sides where the wood stopped were close and mostly open except for… legs?
Around them were intricate leggings and footwear. Some had robes or cloth that fell neatly to each side or to the floor behind them. George started to count them, nine on one side, five on the other, with an empty space in the middle where there were no legs.
A table?
Nicte seemed to be wondering the same as they crawled toward the open space. Quietly they crept, around feet and legs outstretched and past a sleeping dog. Its nose snuffled, freezing their movement, as they waited to see its eyes stay shut.
Nicte was the first to emerge from behind an intricate weave of material that lay draped over the edge. There she stopped moving, George pausing behind her.
“Guardian?” George heard a voice say from somewhere beyond his vision, “Good of you to join us.”
Nicte moved slowly, pulling herself out, then rising beyond the drape of cloth.
“Did you bring someone with you?” Another voice asked. “Come out, boy.”
George peeked out just enough to see the man seated there, resplendent in shape and form—his hair bound tight with woven bands, his eyes dark and steady. Jade glinted at his ears, a collar of carved shells resting on his chest. He looked down, smiling at George emerging from under the table.
“You must be Story,” the man said, holding a palm out, welcoming George into the room.
The hall gleamed as George stood, looking around. The granite shone as though polished daily, the wooden table they had been underneath stretched without a seam. Light from candelabras of hammered gold shimmered from above.
“This is Xibalba?” George wondered under his breath.
It was so unlike any story of the underworld that George blinked, half-expecting his head to still be ringing from the fall.
Then the figures stirred.
One by one, directed by the two men who sat at the center of the table, they each gave Nicte and George a slight nod or touched their beards, watching the two closely.
When they had finished, one of the men at the center spoke. His eyes were impossibly clear and steady, his face smooth, as though no beard had ever grown there.
“Please, dine with us,” he said.
The other, more handsome than the first but with a faint scar above his eye, opened his hand to the space without chairs.
A pair of hairy wild boar behind Nicte and George lowered their heads and quickly shoved two large chairs toward the table. They slowed enough in the last few paces for both to sit as the chairs slid into place.
With a wave, from the corners of the room owls and monkeys swept in with a whisk and a whoosh, setting down platters that gleamed with fruit, maize, fish, and steaming meat. The table filled in a blink, dazzling and sudden. George felt awe catch in his throat, watching the animals move, and how swiftly it all appeared.
As the last dish settled, George caught it—just a flicker. A metal goblet filled with wine, yet in its reflection inside the polished surface the liquid was black as pitch. He blinked, and all was perfect again. Nicte was looking at something in the reflection of her silverware, her eyes widening.
The smooth-faced man leaned back, his companion forward, eyes bright, voice smooth as wet stone.
“Please eat… you must be hungry,” he said with a slippery smile.
George felt like a knight at the roundtable, surrounded by so much pageantry—and food.
Er, no. These men weren’t Lancelot or Galahad but they did have some similar flourishes. And, of course, the table was a rectangle.
Still, his stomach grumbled at the sight of the steaming platters, then groaned. Pushing aside the plate of corn—too much of that already, and it hadn’t gone well—George reached for a slice of meat, juices running off the plate and onto the wood. His fingers closed around it, and he lifted it halfway to his mouth before Nicte’s hand shot out. Her silverware tumbled to the floor along with the meat.
In a flash, behind them came the sound of chewing. George turned quickly to see a jaguar cub wrestling the piece of meat, flinging it side to side. Juice from the meat slopped onto the floor. He peered closer—the cub’s reflection was different: horribly matted, with skin missing from around its jaw, its gnarled, broken teeth visible beneath. And writhing in the liquid from the meat: worms, fat and slippery.
At once George lost his appetite. Beside him, the air seemed to shift—charged.
Nicte stood, her chair scraping the floor. Even before it stopped she was already speaking, her voice hard as stone. To George it sounded like an incantation—until he caught names in the torrent. She was calling out each of them in her own tongue: Xiquiripat. Cuchumaquic. Ahalpuh. Each seemed to strike like a blow, and with every name the recipient’s once-pleasant face turned cold.
Light from the candelabras flickered, throwing grotesque shadows on faces. Animals—on the ground and above, still attentively waiting—flinched.
And when Nicte’s naming came to the two men in the center, her mouth turned up, a slight smile as she said, “Vucub-Camé… Hun-Ca–”
Then her voice went silent.
She grabbed at her throat, her tongue still moving as if talking—the sounds just never came out. Her other hand clenched tight against the table, the burn on her hand flickering—pulsing. George stared at it. It glowed like the beat of a second hand, faster than before.
“Guardian…” the scarred one muttered with a tisk, “far too many words.”
A roar of mirth spread, rippling from the center to the outer edges of the group.
Nicte reached for the goblet at her setting and, with a deliberate twist, tipped it over. The black liquid spread across the polished table, pooling in unnatural shapes.
The smooth-faced one turned to George. His eyes, still clear but now with a touch of malice, narrowed as he said, “We understand that you, boy, are Story. If you will not eat, tell us one.”
All eyes turned to George. He could hear their clothes shift as everyone pivoted. Waiting.
George’s mouth fell open, dry. He looked at Nicte as she sat, her hand continuing to pulse. Her eyes showed she was holding back a scream of pain.
“A story?” George said quietly.
“Stand, boy,” one of the men said.
The room erupted in laughter.
George pushed his chair back with some effort. The Rolodex in his head spun, cards slipping, stacking, scattering. Nothing fit.
These men watched him, waiting for him to fail.
He could tell the story of Scylla and Charybdis, but it wasn’t one he knew well. Or borrow from his father’s style, riff on The Phantom Tollbooth—maybe about the princesses Rhyme and Reason. But to do that he’d have to be someone else.
His whole life he had wondered about that power that flowered so deeply in his father’s chest—if the seeds of it would ever grow in his own. The soil was fertile, but the fruit—his voice—still unripe. That’s what this felt like: too soon.
The jeering pressed in. The flames dipped low.
In that flicker he thought he caught two shadows leaning together at the edge of the room, behind a hanging tapestry. When he looked again, then they were gone.
George swallowed and blurted the first thing that came.
“There’s a little black spot on the sun today. The same thing as yesterday.”
The hall stirred, approving.
“And after flame?” a Lord asked.
George flipped the Rolodex, grabbing at anything that might fit.
“Generals gathered in their masses. Sorcerers of death’s construction. Fields, um, with bodies burning.”
A rumble of satisfaction circled the table. Their questions came faster, sharper, like arrows.
“And after blood?”
“A skeleton choking on a crust of bread. And a king… kings… with their eyes torn out. Kings of pain.”
The lords smiled.
“And after sorrow?”
The words—and whatever thread he’d been trying to weave—left him. George stumbled, grabbing at anything his mind could remember.
“You may ask yourself… how did I get here? This is not my beautiful house… not my beautiful—” His voice cracked. The thread unspooling.
Mocking voices thundered off the polished stone.
“Story without a story,” one spat.
“Nothing but fragments,” another chided.
George’s face burned. He wanted to sink beneath the table.
But through the taunting came something else: silence. Not in the room, but in his head, as the volume of everything turned down.
In a flash he saw his father’s classroom, students hushed, eyes waiting. His father stood like a conductor in the pause before the first note, arms raised in silence to snatch thoughts from the air. He saw him behind the glass in the radio station, head tilted to the sky, quiet, while chaos raged outside.
That pause—it was something he’d seen his father do, even mid-speech. George only ever saw it as forgetfulness, thinking, waiting for the words to form on his tongue.
But, as a light wind blew on George’s face he considered something else: was his father waiting for words to arrive on wind, ones only he could hear? Eye-to-eye or to an invisible audience over radio waves, his father never took words lightly. They were sacred. Each one… a breath.
George lifted his head.
“I am not a great storyteller. That was my father.”
His voice carried differently now—his father’s rhythm beneath it, but something new rising through.
“He said stories breathe through us. They move through our bones, through the living parts of us. If we bury them, they don’t die—they seep into the ground. They are not just words—they are life itself, moving from one chest to another, like air. That is why we pass them on. We have to, or else we don’t live.”
He paused, letting the thought settle. “That’s why I’m here. Because of stories—the ones he breathed into me.”
The laughter thinned.
Nicte shifted in her chair, glancing upward. The owl was there—silent, wings unfurling and folding again. Then it looked down. She turned to see what had caught its eyes. In the shimmer of shadow near the far wall, two small figures stood side by side. Boys. Grinning. The sight chilled her—help or harm, she couldn’t tell.
George touched the polished wood of the table, eyes tracing the grain.
He pictured his father in the record store—head tilted, looking off. The words had come to him there too. He was pausing time. To hear them he had to quiet the world and make room for them, if only for an instant. That silence wasn’t aloofness. It was listening for a truth, arriving only in pieces over time.
Then, a question surfaced to George as he spoke: “And what are stories too large for one voice to hold?”
The words seemed to hang there for a moment.
“Gods” George said–the answer to his own question laid out.
From the corner of his eye he could see Nicte watching him, shifting with pain.
“Gods are stories too heavy for one person to hold. We call them gods because they’re memories too big to stay inside us. They made us to share that weight—to talk with them, so they wouldn’t be alone. And when the world grew dangerous, they disappeared and waited for us to remember how to listen.”
George’s voice broke off. For a moment all sound thinned, and he felt the air gather in his chest, listening with him.
“Unless—they didn’t disappear.”
The candelabras guttered. Shadows twisted the hosts’ faces, rot bleeding through before smoothing again. He watched them change, meeting their eyes.
Like a Polaroid developing grainy and out of focus, George glimpsed the puzzle his father had been solving—the idea that had brought him to the island, that had made him restless.
“You hid them,” George said, his voice hardening. “You put them out of reach because you couldn’t destroy them.”
He glanced at Nicte—her hand still flashing, a small smile beginning to bloom across his face.
“You… don’t have that kind of power.”
The men at the table twitched. Some looked away, pretending to be distracted. The two at the center—leaned forward as if to challenge him.
“Because you can’t cage a breath. Even in our chest, the air flows into the blood. And you can’t silence memory, not really. Trap a story and it twists, echoes, shakes the ground until it’s heard.”
He stepped closer to the table, a sudden rush. He could feel it—he was onto something.
“And when you lock away gods, it’s no different. They break the earth to make room. Not because they are beyond us—but because they are us. They are memory. They are breath.”
For an instant, George thought of the journal—heavy in his hand, filled with the words that had led him here—and of the unpublished book, the strange and beautiful bedtime stories. Pieces, but never whole until now, as if his father had left the rest for him to find.
George leaned forward. “You are not keepers. You are jailors. You smothered the archive, tried to silence the voices, because you feared what they remembered. But memory doesn’t die in the dark. It waits for someone to speak it aloud.”
The air tightened. The owl stirred above, wings flexing.
“And stories, like gods,” George said, his voice ringing now, “don’t belong to you. They belong to everyone.”
Nicte’s eyes widened, flicking from George to the owl… as it dove.
Down.
Down.
Its wings blasted over the candelabras, snuffing every flame in an instant. Darkness dropped like a curtain.
A thunderclap split the silence, followed by the groan of wood tearing itself apart.
Then—light.
But not candlelight.
A crack tore open the ceiling above them, spilling white fire across the hall. Through it, the sky yawned—dark and endless—and across that gulf the comet burned, arcing toward the horizon. Its tail dragged ribbons of silver that trembled like breath.
Nicte cried out, “Xux ek’!” Her voice rose in awe and warning both.
George followed her voice. The wound on her hand glowed, the light deepening red, pulsing in rhythm with the comet’s fire.
She turned to him, breathless, and pointed upward, then toward the far end of the hall—an unmistakable command.
He hesitated only a second. “It’s almost gone,” he said under his breath and moved toward her.
Laughing, the Twins came out of the shadows and leapt onto the table, sparks spitting from their hands as they pointed the same way Nicte had.
“In k’áat!” Nicte shouted—Come!—grabbing George’s arm.
The Twins cleared a path, their sparks swirling into shapes of stars and serpents as the comet’s light widened the breach above.
Together, George and Nicte ran the length of the table, plates and rotted food crunching underfoot. The Lords howled behind them, their feast collapsing into ruin.
Laughter from the Twins cut through the chaos—bright, merciless. In a shower of sparks, a mirror erupted along the split center of the table. It stretched from one end to the other, a narrow river of light reflecting the Lords seated on both sides.
The Lords froze. Their own faces stared back at them—bloated, rotting, skin peeling, jaws unhinged. Then the images began to shift. They saw themselves stumble, falter, collapse. Feasts shriveled into ash, proud thrones buckled beneath them, and always the laughter of boys cut through it all.
In their seats the Lords writhed but could not look away. The mirror held them, bound not by chains but by the weight of their own shame.
The walls trembled as Nicte and George fled the hall, their footsteps fading into the passageway and the waiting dark beyond..
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Music
King Of Pain - The Police
War Pigs - Black Sabbath
Once In A Lifetime - The Talking Heads
These fragments I have shored against my ruin
So good!!