Nadir Shadow

From the cliff edge El Jefe scans his muscular town below, its sinewy roads, strapping houses, windows glinting like Ray-Bans and in the harbour, boardwalk gums and the pearly teeth of gleaming white yachts. A cove, like a shy smile, a barely opened mouth, smuggled away from the ocean’s humours by discouraging cliffs.

“Once this place was a mere X on map.” El Jefe says. Even to him, his voice sounds reedy though the walk from the car wasn’t far. “Not bad eh?” El Jefe adds, though his question is more rhetorical. He only expects agreement. Admiration.

El Niño takes his time, drifting his eyes. It takes cojones to act bored or disinterested, and his lip curls, El Jefe hears Niño’s throaty tick – a glottal stop of disapproval, air compressed in the back of his mouth.

El Niño points with his chin to the signs of complacency. Muscle turning to fat, cavities ruining teeth, lines that should be defined, becoming slack. Then he shrugs like it’s no matter to him.

A muscle twitches in El Jefe’s cheek. El Niño doesn’t miss much. Notices perhaps more than he should and in noticing, there’s denigration. El Jefe had hoped he’d found his chosen one, an heir to fill the void where there should have been a son, but El Niño has forgotten the art of subtlety. Of deference. He’s crossed a line, pointed a finger. He’s challenged El Jefe, however slyly, but it can’t be ignored. It’s a disappointment and now an example needs to be made.

Drop a man from here, he’d be swallowed by the town’s throat into the stinking gore of its belly. A quick way to join its corruption. A mundane way to die.

Disgusted El Jefe wants to spit at the sea’s invitation, but his mouth is dry. Besides, he’s a classical man—he prefers the intimacy of knives, and this situation requires something extra…a spectacle.

Hanging? Exposure to carrion birds’ keen hunger? Crucifixion. A cross more meaningful than the vain medallions sweating on his men’s exposed chests, weighing their necks. A cross with a new significance. A reminder. He’s his father’s son.

But however extravagant El Jefe makes this display there’ll always be need for more, for worse. For depravity.

He turns away from El Niño, puts his back to the sea, sniffs and studies the wind blasted hills. Sea salt, sage, fennel and broom and he can detect the ripe melon scent of treachery. His nose is still good but juices running dry in the mouth, a waning appetite and now his shadow shrinking behind him in the late morning sun, tells him, he’s also a tired man.

El Niño’s shove is so casual. It’s like a quick finger snap to catch a waiter’s attention, an unconscious flick of the hand to shoo an irritating fly.

El Jefe is stunned as he loses his footing. Outraged and winded by such an easy dismissal. Open-mouthed but unable to make a sound, he nurses the insult all the way down until he smacks against the unforgiving sea.

BIO: Emily Macdonald has stories published in anthologies and online journals. She is a Pushcart and Best Micro Fiction nominee. She has been shortlisted for the Katherine Mansfield At The Bay Short Story Prize in 2025 and the Cambridge Short Story prize 2025 and twice for the Bath Short Story award. Her collection of driving related stories, Wheel Spin and Traction, was published in November 2023.

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