Mayra

A Novel

About the Book

An eerie, hypnotic debut about friendship, desire, and memory set against the sultry backdrop of Florida’s swamplands.

“A mesmerizing, hallucinatory adrenaline rush of a novel.”—Claire Luchette, author of Agatha of Little Neon

It’s been years since Ingrid has heard from her childhood best friend, Mayra, a fearless rebel who fled their hometown of Hialeah, a Cuban neighborhood just west of Miami, for college in the Northeast. But when Mayra calls out of the blue to invite Ingrid to a weekend getaway at a house in the Everglades, she impulsively accepts.

From the moment Ingrid sets out, danger looms: The directions are difficult, she’s out of reach of cell service, and as she drives deeper into the Everglades, the wet maw of the swamp threatens to swallow her whole. But once Ingrid arrives, Mayra is, in many ways, just as she remembers—with her sharp tongue and effortless, seductive beauty, still thumbing her nose at the world.

Before they can fully settle into the familiar intimacy of each other’s company, their reunion is spoiled by the reemergence of past disagreements and the unexpected presence of Mayra’s new boyfriend, Benji. The trio spend their hours eating lavish meals and exploring the labyrinthine house, which holds as much mystery as the swamp itself. Indoors and on the grounds, time itself seems to expand, and Ingrid begins to lose a sense of the outside world, and herself.

Against this disquieting setting, where lizards dart in and out of porches and alligators peek from dark waters, Gonzalez weaves a surreal, unforgettable story about the dizzying power of early friendship and the lengths we’ll go to earn love and acceptance—even at the risk of losing ourselves entirely.
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Praise for Mayra

“Ingrid and her charismatic childhood friend Mayra—described as ‘a kind of wild animal’—are planning a reunion. . . . Settle in for swamp flora that encroaches claustrophobically, ‘intestinal’ green snakes, and plenty of long-simmering antagonism between the two leads.”—Vulture

“I ate this greedily; I swallowed it whole. Beguiling and moody and strange, Mayra shimmers with supernatural eeriness and the mercuriality of memory. Nicky Gonzalez unspools all the disorienting, lonely-making work of getting unstuck and finding home and bliss—then, she terrifies you. This is a mesmerizing, hallucinatory adrenaline rush of a novel.”—Claire Luchette, author of Agatha of Little Neon

“Nicky Gonzalez channels Shirley Jackson (something I do not say lightly) in this disquieting, mesmerizing twenty-first-century Southern Gothic. In Mayra, the hazy borders of friendship and identity are blurred, made uncanny and dangerous, and I was hooked from paragraph one.”—Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts

“In prose as luscious as the ribs at our beloved Flanigan’s, the story that unfolds between Mayra and Ingrid lovingly embodies the vibrant beauty of Hialeah and the Florida Everglades. Mayra is a haunting testament to the literal terror of being consumed by the very thing you’re trying to escape.”—Jennine Capó Crucet, author of Say Hello to My Little Friend

“Eerie, haunting, and gorgeously written, Mayra is a powerful story of memory, home, and the friendships that make us. I was entranced by its luscious dreamworld of secret doors, traps, wonders, and the uncanny. Gonzalez is a master of tension, tenuous lines, and complicated love.”—Ananda Lima, author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil

“Gorgeous and hypnotic, surreal and unsettling, Mayra is part coming-of-age story, part Twilight Zone episode, part thoughtful meditation on all of the ways that memory is itself a haunted house. I loved this book.”—Karen Thompson Walker, New York Times bestselling author of The Strange Case of Jane O.

“This debut examines the ways people can either find or lose themselves in intense friendships . . . this slow-burn novel will have readers on the edge of their seats by the end. Recommend to fans of Stephen King’s Duma Key, David Mitchell’s Slade House, or Bunny by Mona Awad.”Booklist

“A ghost from her past brings a woman to a peculiar, isolated Everglades mansion—and to the brink of delirium—in this ominous and compulsively readable gothic debut. . . . A brilliantly rendered fever dream from which readers won’t want to wake . . . this mesmerizing and luscious trip is perfect for fans of Rachel Harrison and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.”Library Journal
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Excerpt

Mayra

1

Mayra would do this thing with her mouth. As girls we’d sit on opposite ends of a three-cushion couch with our legs tangled beneath a blanket, the watercolor glow of the TV painting our faces. She’d hook her lower teeth to her upper lip and work her jaw until flakes of dead skin chipped away and disappeared down her throat. Chewing like that, with her jaw stuck out in an underbite, glowing in an otherwise dark room, she reminded me of an anglerfish. I couldn’t help but stare. Until then, all the beautiful women I’d met acted as though they were being watched at all times. My mother, for example, always left the room to blow her nose, no matter how intimate her relationship with present company. Mayra drew the eye, but she either didn’t know or didn’t care. Girls like me, though, with sandpaper complexions and tight-lipped smiles, could afford to be uncouth from time to time. Back then, nobody was looking at my small mouth, my thin legs.

When her name lit up my phone screen on a Wednesday night so many years later, an anglerfish still came to mind. My belly warmed and turned as the phone’s vibration sent ripples through the mug of stale coffee resting beside it. I tended to ignore calls from old friends and acquaintances. Too often, I’d get my hopes up, charmed by the rare friendly gesture, only to have the pretense of polite conversation ruptured five minutes in, when the caller revealed themselves to be part of a pyramid scheme. It always began friendly enough, but then the questions crept in—was I in the market for leggings with pockets? iron supplements? a cream formulated specifically for dry nostrils?—and it always ended with me feeling a great deal lonelier, thirty fewer dollars to my name.

It had been six years since I’d heard Mayra’s voice, more since I’d seen her in person, but our friendship had been the kind of telepathic bond that most people only feel once or twice in their lives. If she wanted to sell me vitamins, I’d let her. I picked up.

“Ingrid, you answered,” she said. After all this time, hearing her voice blew a hole right through me.

“Of course,” I managed.

We recited hollow how-are-yous.

“I’d like to meet up,” Mayra said, simply. I asked if she was in town, and she said, “I will be. Kind of. I’m getting in tonight.” Her voice was so clear it was eerie, and when she told me where she was headed—just southeast of Naples, the middle of the swamp—I imagined her speaking to me from a screened-in porch in an empty field, miles of sawgrass muffling the skittering of every reptile. She was done with her graduate program, she explained, and planned on taking some “me time” in a remote house, walled off from everything, to clear the muck from her mind before reentering the workforce. She wanted me to join. I pictured something advertised as a “cabin” because of its log-siding exterior, while on the inside boasting ten fully renovated bedrooms, a saltwater pool, a home theater.

“You’re still in Hialeah, right?” Mayra asked.

“I am.”

I heard pity in the way she said, “Oh.”

“It’s super nice. A one-bedroom,” I said, “all to myself. And I have a garden.”

It was a studio apartment and the garden in question was a wilting basil plant on the kitchen windowsill. If I were to draw up a listing for it at work, I’d call the floor plan “efficient.”

“A garden? How do you keep people from stealing your vegetables?”

“I don’t,” I said with some force.

“People used to steal my grandparents’ mangoes,” Mayra said.

That was not the same thing at all. A yard peppered with mangoes destined to rot in the south Florida sun begged for someone to hop the fence and do some cleaning up. It was hardly stealing. It was a public service. My blood fizzed and popped—this kind of offhand comment about our hometown reminded me why our friendship had faded. After undergrad in upstate New York, Mayra regarded Hialeah the way a gringa would: what a quaint little place, what potential. But I felt bad for people who lived anywhere else. Where else could you find a four-dollar medianoche the size of your head? Where else could you open a window and eavesdrop on three different conversations without even having to hold your ear to the screen? Where else, four beers deep, having come home after half-watching the Heat game at Flanigan’s happy hour, would you find a green anole perched on your showerhead, bobbing its head to the salsa blasting from a neighbor’s yard?

“So what do you think? You coming?” she asked.

“Naples is kind of a drive for me. Can’t you drop by? Are you flying into Miami?” I asked, knowing she’d say no. Being back home made her squirm, accustomed as she had become to northerners who talked so softly, they practically spoke in whispers. The last time we hung out, when two women on the other side of the pants aisle of Red White & Blue Thrift Store began arguing about who had seen a particular pair of canary-yellow leggings first, I watched her hands shake as she pushed hangers along the rack. If she had been in a car, she would have locked the doors. I knew she’d rather chug a pint of swamp water than ever come home, but I wanted to make her say it.

“I’m actually driving. I’m in Gainesville these days.”

“Gainesville? Since when? I thought you were up in Vermont or something.” That she’d never live near Miami again was a given, but even Gainesville, a five-hour drive north, seemed too close. I assumed the entire state of Florida, for her, had a repellent radius of at least five hundred miles.

“I’ve never lived in Vermont? But close enough, I guess. I’m at UF now. Or I was,” she said. “So what do you think? I’ll get there tonight, and you can come anytime after that. Explore with me? Catch up?”

“Maybe,” I said. There’d been a period of my life when I’d have done anything for that much alone time with Mayra.

“Come on. When was our last sleepover? Think about it.”

“I have work, though,” I said.

“Where do you work these days? Can’t you take a day off?”

I could. I had sick days and personal days now: a blessing, a miracle even, after five years of processing returns at the same Kohl’s Mayra and I used to steal from.

“I work in real estate,” I said.

“You’re an agent?”

“Mhmm,” I answered. I was an assistant, but I didn’t want to demote myself in Mayra’s mind.

“That means you, like, sell houses that’ll be underwater in twenty years?”

So there was still no winning with her.

“I guess, bro,” I said, “but it’s just a job. A lot of these assholes are so rich they buy these places and barely even live there, anyway.”

“You have any tours scheduled tomorrow?”

“No.”

“Okay, so, tomorrow? Spend the weekend,” Mayra pressed.

“I have a date tomorrow.” That was true.

“A date! With who?” Her voice became low, conspiratorial. The tell me everything tone. Except there was nothing to tell. A middling man I’d matched with asked me on a first date, and I said yes, hoping he’d surprise me.

“His name is Brian,” I said. “He’s amazing. I think it’s going really well. We’re still kind of in the honeymoon phase, so I’ve really been looking forward to tomorrow night.” My text chemistry with Brian over the past couple of weeks had ranged from mild to medium. He enjoyed watching Westerns and going to the gym. Two beige flags.

“And after the date?” she asked. “Can’t you come on Friday?”

I said I’d think about it.

“How about you let me give you directions now in case you do decide to come. I don’t know how good service will be out there, so you should write this down. In case you can’t reach me.” Mayra recited the directions haltingly, as though she was reading them for the first time herself. My phone would only get me so far, she said, and after that I’d have to follow the instructions I was jotting on a sticky note: left at a fork, five-mile stretch of swamp, left again at a marsh, and twenty-odd miles later a right onto a gravel road that was easy to miss.

“See you soon, I hope,” she said.

I looked her up as soon as the call ended. She used to be easier to stalk, back before she became one of those social media minimalists who posts once per century. Once upon a time, every hot chocolate, every study session, every jaunt off campus had its place on her feed. Which was how I’d found out, well into her junior year, that she was visiting Hialeah. It was a selfie. A preset filter failed to offset the flat, cold lighting of the room she was in, and as a result her skin looked grayish green, a corpse color. Even so, I could see why she’d posted it. She had a puffy, fresh-out-of-bed look. Casual and cuteiful. I may have even liked it except that, off in a corner, I saw one of La Carreta’s branded paper placemats. I waited days for her to reach out, but she never did. A whole visit home and she hadn’t even tried to link up. I took it for what it was: a nail in the coffin, a big fat “f*** you.”

About the Author

Nicky Gonzalez
Nicky Gonzalez is a writer from Hialeah, Florida. Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, BOMB, The Kenyon Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, and other publications. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Granum Foundation, Millay Arts, Lighthouse Works, and the Hambidge Center. She lives in Massachusetts. More by Nicky Gonzalez
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