"hybridae" -- A Short Story By Cesar Torres

Hybridae Cesar Torres

HYBRIDAE CESAR TORRES

August, 1899 The train came to a full stop. The station sign beyond the window read “Ciudad de Mexico.” Harvey De Castille picked up his two suitcases and slung his camera equipment over his shoulder. He made his way to the exit of the car, where several families and a handful of lone male travelers filed out of the steam locomotive. The people — the hundreds and hundreds of people — struck his eyes and ears. There were so many of them, radiating in their own skin like glowing bronze statues come to life. Most were a deep tan that gleamed under the white sunlight, but there were others too, who were shaded in red, perhaps yellow like the Chinamen he had once seen in San Francisco, but one fact remained: None of these people was anything at all like him. Many men opted for the modern fashion of the day, with long, fitted waistcoats, narrow britches and the high collars of the privileged. The wax in their mustaches shone glossy and dark like otter fur, yet it was redundant on these men, because their natural luster needed no pomades. The women’s corsets and petticoats, and their square-heeled shoes might have been the same that walked the streets of his own native Philadelphia, perhaps even Paris, but the soft golden skin and deep brown eyes on parade before him were of a different and exotic hue. Ah — there — a man with a beautiful and compact ebony toothpick case. And the toothpick itself — what a marvel to behold, like a needle of pure gold. Yes, Harvey wanted to believe this was just like Paris, or New York, or maybe Berlin. Except it was not. It never would be. Only men with shallow pockets came to a dank corner of the world such as this one.

His nose absorbed the thousand smells of poverty, disorder, and the unknown. He smelled the earth, the clay and the horse dung, as well as the grit of coal, which workers dressed in plain white shirts and pants carried in wheelbarrows down the street. He could smell food too, and his stomach grumbled, though with doubt. The thick and sweet scent of corn wove itself into his nose, but foreign smells came with it — pig blood, innards, and herb scents cloaked in mystery. Faces glanced at him for brief moments, taking in his black wool suit, his thick cravat, his youthful face, and then, as if they had never seen him, as if he had never existed, they turned away. He walked toward the city center in hopes of renting an inexpensive room. As he turned the corner and walked down a street that housed churches, the jewelry makers, the watch repairmen, the cobblers and the cabinet makers, he brushed his shoulders against the bulk of a much taller man, who stopped Harvey in his tracks with one raspy word. “Alto,” the man said, behind a thick warbling voice and the red-faced mask of alcohol. He teetered as if suspended by marionette strings. His sway was graceful, yet in an queer way, mechanical. The man’s toothy grin was out of proportion, filled with even white teeth that somehow shouldn’t have been. The thick chest hair that sprouted his filthy white shirt revolted Harvey. Before he had a chance to regret his encounter with the knave, Harvey unbuckled his shoulder bag, deftly handling the black steel and glass equipment of his camera inside. His first chance at a shot; He did not want to miss it. The drunkard rolled his eyes toward the sky, laughing to himself, curling his ragged hair with his fingertips like a child, oblivious to the world spread before him. Harvey De Castille snapped a photograph.

From the Journal Modern Latin American Photography, Year 3 Vol. 2, 1909. Photograph, Mexico City Untitled, Gelatin Print

Untitled is one of the least known examples of De Castille’s photography, but it proves to be most indicative of the directions the artist would take on in later years. Close friends and other scholars generally dismiss this singular piece as banal and somewhat amateurish, but a closer look reveals more complexity than can be expected of a young man of twenty three years of age with only self-taught skills with a camera. Official records show De Castille entered Mexico just two days earlier via railroad, but his ability to capture the essence of a subject, within mere hours after his arrival in a new city, is unprecedented. The subject, a derelict, hands and eyes lifted toward the sky, posed naturally against a street corner amid the foot traffic of the metropolis synthesizes the Mexican sensibility of the ordinary and the divine, as he takes on a pose most often seen in the religious icons of Catholic saints in the thousands of churches and chapels throughout the country. The whitewashed wall behind the subject stands in direct contrast to the ornate blue and white tiles and classic architecture of the city, and the shadows that permeate the facial features of the subject are nothing if not saturated with a deep shade of black, achievable under only optimal lighting (or dark room) conditions. Despite the remarkable intensity of the shadows, Untitled lacks finesse in its composition, but de Castille cannot be faulted. He is a young artist, exploring his own limitations and possibilities at this stage in his life. The Argentine art critic Miguelangelo Cezanne commented in his critical 1902 essay “Dimensions in Sides” that Untitled cannot escape its fate as the prime example of the mediocre touch of an artist who cannot yet be called an artist. Besides, Untitled lacks De Castille’s phantoms. Without them, the work is negligible.”

De Castille is best known for phantoms, but they don’t appear until September of that same year.

September 1899 Every time he walked down to the city centre, El Zócalo, its main square, the monstrosity of El Palacio Nacional, the National Palace, wanted to swallow Harvey whole. Like a swarm of yellowjackets, the multitudes of vendors, city officials, beggars and families grew denser, thickening around him, as the shadows from the east shortened in the midday sun. The Emperor Maximillian had named it the Imperial Palace just three decades ago, but the rule of the Díaz presidency had reclaimed the name National Palace. The vast fortress of granite, marble and wood housed the Mexican government elite, including the president, and the throngs of people in the Zócalo radiated from it as if the country knew only how to look towards its own center. There had to be hundreds, maybe thousands of men and women filling the square this morning. How could a city center such as this fill with so many people, every single day, without

succumbing to chaos? Its other sides were also fenced in by the imposing heft of the other colonial buildings, including the titanic cathedral that overlooked the main square. The sun was gone, and a thick wash of slate blue and dense gray obscured the mountains in the distance. He had arrived just four weeks earlier, but he was settling into routines. Every day he walked with his camera tucked under one arm and a short tripod under the other. Doing this repetitive task was what he was probably most good at. It certainly wasn’t being a doctor. He’d let his brothers fill that role. Every day, a new letter arrived from the United States, calling for his return to a life whose possibilities he knew were slipping past him like a wind draft. He had yet to correspond with his parents, much less his siblings. Ahead of him, standing with his hands clasped behind his narrow back, stood a familiar figure. At first Harvey wasn’t sure it might be the same person, but as he walked around and saw the unmistakable profile, the flat brow and unusually white teeth, he realized the man he had seen on his first day in Mexico City, was standing before him again. The overripe smell of pulque, the milky fermented drink made from the maguey cactus, rolled off the scarecrow’s tongue. It reeked of decay, as far as Harvey was concerned. The whole country reeked. “The light is strange here,” Harvey said, in his heavily accented Spanish, which had improved dramatically in a mere month. “The light has always been strange. But not uniformly so. If you were to walk toward the northeastern corner of El Zócalo, you’d see the light is as yellow and warm as God made it. But if you were to walk in the opposite direction, you’d find spots sprinkled throughout this square where the light is simply…incorrect. How does your device work?” “Well, I let light into this box, as so, and then the image from the outside is imprinted onto a plate, here,” Harvey said, pointing to the corresponding parts of his camera. “Then I use a chemical process to reveal the image, in a room without light. To protect the image on the plate, of course.” “And you think you can capture Mexico in a box, as such?” said the drunkard.

“Well, yes, of course. It’s a scientific process.” The man adjusted the crusty collar, as if he might be about to give a rousing speech. “Not so long ago, I was faculty at the National University, but also a politician housed just a few offices down from the President’s, right in there.” He pointed a filthy black nail toward the national palace. “I was the head of the ministry of education. And then one day, no longer. That’s a story for another day. But in my time in the National Palace, I knew that this square is unlike others.” “Is that so?” Harvey said. “It’s all down here,” the drunkard said, and he pointed his crooked finger toward the ground. “The world, the invisible world, it lives down there like a hungry worm. It’s a black and silver world, with sharp edges and angles and shapes that are beyond comprehension. It is the world of the infinite cosmos, the cosmos that preceded the Aztec, and before them the Teotihuacans, and the Toltecs. If you look from the right angle, you can also see the invisible world, and the beings that live there. Sometimes they come to the surface. Over there, friend.” Harvey looked at the spot on the southeastern edge where the drunkard pointed to. The sidewalk, as well as the ground where the carriages trod over the earth, remained ordinary as ever. At least until Harvey noticed the pool of liquid smoke. Under the shoe of one of the businessmen who was about to cross the street, a thin, liquid shadow drifted out of the ground, as if a cloud of black steam were solidifying, forming itself into a solid. Harvey turned toward the drunkard, who smiled a grin wide enough to put two fists inside. The grimy man laughed in his sandpaper baritone. “The rituals of the Aztec and others before them were the bridge between this valley and the things— the deities — they called by names like Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli. Beings so powerful they could only be seen through symbol. Our own naked eyes might burn to cinders if we could look directly into the nature of the gods. But the invisible world is older, and far older than the empire of the Aztecs. All the Aztecs could do was ascribe god-like qualities to them. But I have seen the silver beings myself, friend. And

ever since I gazed into their unknowable faces, well, I no longer walk among the men of society.” Through the viewfinder, his eye swallowed the washes of muddy clouds and the thick opacity of the human crowds before him. The soft notes of “La Golondrina,” a folk song that was quickly burning itself into his permanent memory, danced through the air from an organ, and children chased each other through the square, spilling pepitas from their paper sacks, the boys brushing the ribbons in the girls’ hair while their black leather shoes clicked on the grid of stones that comprised the square. In the foreground, an Indian woman no older than twenty years old, swaddled in the bright red purple flows of her shawl, bent down to the ground to pick an object. Perhaps it was a coin. Harvey could not see from where he stood. Though no longer in the frame, the policemen, students, housewives, elders and teachers of the metropolis gathered in a dark patch toward the lip of the square, where the horse carriages and cars circled the plaza. Through a narrow crevasse amid the rows of buildings, Harvey could see a black tram inch its way across the city. And then he shuddered in fear, washed away by his own sense of isolation at the sight before him. At the southwest corner, where the edge of the National Palace provided shade to the pedestrians, he could see the liquid shadow rise and grow bigger, thicker, rising out of the corner of the square, now the size of a mule, taking a shape, extending its form into limbs. Harvey’s stomach knotted, and he felt himself go cold. No one else but Harvey could see the thing. He readied his camera to take a shot.

From the Journal Modern Latin American Photography, Year 3 Vol. 2, 1909. Photograph, Mexico City Title: The Essence of el Zócalo, Gelatin Print Date: September 1899

De Castille's unusual techniques are more firmly set in place by the time he begins his millennial series, so dubbed by the critics and other artists posthumously. Yet we know for certain De Castille never considered the photographs of the Zócalo a series, and certainly much less a series he might label. Until his death, De Castille rejected classification and the roving eye of art movements. According to an interview he gave to the newspaper “El Sol” during his years of reclusion in 1945, the millennial series was nothing more than “an accident, a jar of spilled ink over a tablecloth.” The shapes the critic Cezanne named the “phantoms” appear for the first time in Essence of El Zócalo. These phantoms were also named the “chimeras,” by ardent collector President Porfirio Díaz, and named the “shadow nymphs” by De Castille’s friend Carl Wilhelm Kahlo, father of painter Frida Kahlo. These chimera, as this journal will opt to call these darkroom wonders, show up clearly for the first time in this first of the series. Imposed over the composition — as if made of black, translucent smoke — a shape identifiable as some sort of animal on three, or possibly four legs, lumbers through the center of el Zócalo, towering above the famous figure of the stooped “Isabelita,” the young peasant woman in a rebozo or shawl. The “chimera” can be seen stepping behind the woman and in front of the groups of playing children. The Essence of El Zócalo is the first photograph by the expatriate American that shows his darkroom technique in fulll. It transgresses against the naturalism of photographers of the time through the use of his unconventional dark room methods. There are no

sources of information on how De Castille manipulated the chemicals or the plates to create the unusual shapes of the chimera. Even in his last few interviews, he refused to reveal the inspiration for the creature in the photograph, though countless stories of dubious credibility relate an anecdote of a drunk De Castille at a New Year’s party celebration in 1937, where after countless questions, he conceded that the shape in The Essence of El Zócalo had not only the head of a snake, but talon legs of a predatory bird, and perhaps even multiple appendages (like hands) over its thick torso. “Like my mother in law,” he is supposed to have said. However, close inspection of the print offers no real details. The shape, though clear enough to identify as a silhouette, does not offer shading or even smaller details to the eye. It is believed De Castille might have in effect etched directly onto the plate with a metal brush, or some sort of fiber, working under meager light in order to sketch and render his chimera over the image while preserving the integrity of the plate. His estate, to this day, remains the sole owner of what remains of his dark room, so the secrets of his technique are buried with De Castille through posterity.

August 1900 He could see them now, coming at him, from every direction, the way flies swarm to a piece of dead flesh. He sweated, even on a winter day like this one, when even at midday, collars were buttoned and overcoats were draped over shoulders at El Zócalo. So strange, he thought, I am in one of the sunniest cities I have ever been to, yet every time I return to its center, the sun fades behind the gauze of the sky, and the light dims ever so. An old woman, hunched like a dry salamander, wrapped in bright pink swatches of fabric and carrying a vast basket of pepitas, chili peanuts and pecans, shuffled towards him. Her shoes, thin as eggshells and scuffed so badly they resembled the patchy skin on her legs, dragged along the street. Her brown eyes lay flat on her face like opaque crescents. He unfolded his camera case and began to set up a shot. "It's funny," he said. "I've been here close to a year, and this place, this monstrous city…. I don't understand the customs, much less your food, with hundreds - no -thousands of flavors dancing simultaneously on the palate...This place, your city, this square. Deplorable." He had been coming here to el Zócalo, almost everyday, and he snapped at least one or two shots (sometimes a dozen) every single time. The developing process revealed to him the smoky silvery beings that appeared only in the photos. Though obscured by shadow, these shapes contained animal limb, head or body, and they appeared of their own accord across his silver and gelatin prints. That morning, he had developed two more photos he

had taken of the creatures, the shapes he had come to call the "Hybridae," in honor of the naming conventions for myriad species he had read about in Charles’ Darwin’s work. He kept their name secret. He told no one about the Hybridae. And if he kept their name sealed behind his lips, locked in his mind, no one would ask any questions. Though he could never predict how they would surface on his compositions, the Hybridae only appeared in photographs he took here, in el Zócalo. Their shapes were in the air, and in the ground like mist. And he was sure they were beings, though only his only alibi was his camera. He feared sleep sometimes, because he sometimes dreamt of their multiple limbs, and of their thick black shapes, outlined as if by a soft sheen of light, like silver dust.

From the Journal Modern Latin American Photography, Year 3 Vol. 2, 1909. Photograph, Mexico City Title: Fuga, Gelatin Print Year: 1900

Fuga or Fugue, is the first photo in the millennial series that De Castille titled in Spanish. This piece kicks off his most prolific period, and his idiosyncrasies begin to meld with his interest in the city and the nature of the national identity of this newly adopted home. It is at this time that he met Maria Elena López, the daughter of a railroad entrepreneur and his future wife, though we know he continued working mostly in solitude this time; he did not marry her until 20 years later, when he was already in his mid-forties. The photo at first seems poorly composed, because it is shot an angle that seems to cut off most of its subjects in foreground and background. The woman selling nuts is halved by

the edge of the photo, slicing her from head to toe; the edge of a tree (at the time the landscaping included trees; they are since gone), is nothing more than a severed image. Even the horse-drawn cart in the distance is seen halved. Careful inspection reveals an image that not only contains objects cut in half, it revels in the dual nature of these halves. Everything in the composition is severed as if the artist were dissecting, or vivisecting El Zócalo, searching for meaning, or answers. Fuga also shows the largest and clearest addition of a chimera thus far in the photographer’s body of work. A dog-like shape with a long tail ending in a human hand saunters near the edge of the pavement, also bifurcated by the architectural girth of El Palacio Nacional. The animal’s countenance is ferocious and savage, and it is almost possible to see smoking silver eyes in its face. The chimera’s unusual shape corresponds to the mythical folk creature Ahuizotl, which was said to have lived in the valley of Mexico, right in the heart of El Zócalo, drowning men in the waters of the lake that once used to exist here. It should be noted that we do not know whether De Castille was aware of this legend, which also tells us that just the mere sight of the Gorgonic beast was enough to kill its beholder. Perverse critics mark this photograph as the first time De Castille begins to comment on the nature of photography itself, to address the viewer directly. The effect is quite literal. The viewer is immersed in this halved environment of the composition, and the dog faces forward, on its haunches, as if looking to strike. If the Ahuizotl is so fearsome to behold, what better place to put it than looking straight at the camera, at the viewer?

August, 1904

While he rode a train, Harvey De Castille reflected on the years that had passed. In his travels he had seen things no other man from his country had seen. He had seen giant sinkholes in the Yucatan big enough to swallow a city block, filled with crystalline water more beautiful than Niagara. He had seen the Quetzal bird, bathed in glowing shades of blue and indigo, flying through the jungles of Mérida. He had witnessed the awesome sight of a whole forest covering several square miles where orange butterflies came to mate. He had tasted the earthy flavors of something called mole, which he discovered was the turnkey to his palate. He had passed out drunk in a saloon on a vile drink named tequila, and the following night he had gone back to the saloon to punch the barman in the face for poisoning him, and to ask for several bottles to take back with him to Mexico City. He had fallen in love too, with Maria Elena, but he still remained shy, unsure of the right protocol or social norms on how to ask her father for her hand. He had no father to ask for this advice. In his five years of traveling, he kept looking for the Hybridae. He looked under his hotel room beds, as if he might find them scurrying like ants. He looked in the dark corners of the churches and chapels in the smaller towns, where the crucifixes were still adorned with gilded gold melted down from Aztec treasure from ages ago. He had visited Chichen Itzá, home to the Maya, but he had only received stings from strange red mosquitoes. He had visited Toluca, home to giant pillar statues of titans, or gods, or men. When he had come close to them, his camera had captured only the drifting specs of flower pollen flowing in the wind. Every print outside of El Zócalo came back clean. It seemed the

center of the country was the only place he could get glimpses of the monsters of smoke he dreamt so much about. His gaze drifted as the railroad car moved south along the mountains of Chihuahua, closing off five years of travel. He must return to Mexico City. He was about to drift off into a hazy nap, when he saw a shape near the mountains in the distance, exactly where Mexico City awaited in its deep valley. His eyes grew wide, and he felt fear slip into his heart and lungs like icy water. He gasped and sat up. Sitting at the edge of the car, by the window, he took out his portable camera, and he propped the thing on his lap, hoping the jostling wouldn’t disturb his shot. He had but a split second to take the photo.

From the Journal Modern Latin American Photography, Year 3 Vol. 2, 1909. Photograph, Mexico City Title: Horizons Year: 1904

Horizons remains a wonder. It was taken with amazing skill on a moving train, as it headed toward Mexico City, punctuating the first of De Castille’s many in-depth travels through the country. The effects and consequences of the Industrial Revolution are now evident. Though Mexico City is not visible in the frame, the valley where it rests shows its future legacy — a vast cloud rising from it like a spewing volcano. This cloud is composed of soot and the smoke from its new factories, and it fills the sky with ominous, thick presence. It is difficult to know for sure if the shape is pollution or one of De Castille’s darkroom “chimeras.” The cloud forms itself into a gigantic bird whose talons are replaced by serpents with mouths agape. Tendrils of black matter spread out like a

nimbus, or thick hairs. By the scale of the photograph, the beast might easily measure two miles across and a mile high, towering in a terrifying pose over the city of millions. Though the milennium series continues for several years after, De Castille’s answers to questions about the nature of his compositions continued to be vague, elusive. As the years went on, he withdrew from the public eye even further, even during his marriage, though his prolific output continued at a steady rate. The depth of interviews he gave magazines and newspapers from this point forward, were at best, superficial.

Mexico City, 1947

Time withered Harvey De Castille’s face and hair, but not his hands. Their skin remained elastic and unlined, just like it had looked when he was a young man and he had barely perceived the Hybridae. If he was careful not to exert himself, he could walk with his cane along the length of El Zócalo without the burning pain of his arthritic joints. The square looked wider, especially now that the trees had been cleared away. Above, the sky dampened his skin with its icy light. He knew he was close to the Hybridae now, much

closer than he had in more than four decades. His wife Maria Elena had been dead for two years, so what else was an old man to do? While they were married, he kept his ideas and black, secret wishes about the Hybridae to himself, but now he was alone, left to his own devices. There was nothing left to do but to look for the Hybridae. He had explored every corner of this country — my country, he thought — and he had never even come as close to the Hybridae as he had in the very center of this land. In its very heart, like a nest of parasites — or angels, yes angels — he could see the multiple faces of God, or the Gods, or the very essence of what lay behind and inside the sky and the air. He could see the mysteries of the universe, but only through the silver titans of smoke his camera captured. His lungs breathed with effort, but before he knew it, he could see it. Just how he had spotted the sharp edge of the Palacio Nacional in his camera decades ago, that southeastern corner of the Zócalo, --yes, the one ethereal, inescapable corner where his mortal eye could glimpse something of the beyond – was within his grasp on this ordinary day. That edge of the building for him remained banal, yet significant, and opportune. How didn’t he see it before? How? He gazed for a moment at the edge of the fortress. He gasped. He realized the very cornerstone he was gazing at, ground to a perfect right angle, rigid, man made, would be the very object that led to the place that held the impossible shapes of own feather and jaguar teeth, dragonfly wings and dog tails. It took his limping legs fifteen minutes to cross the square, but he reached the place he was looking for. He chipped away at the stone with a short knife, his camera at his side, but the camera was useless to him now. He didn’t need a camera. Now that his photos had captured the occasional Hybridae moving through the square as its rightful owners, now that he himself was on the verge of another shift in existence, or the end of it altogether, he thought, why not see the Hybridae himself, without the camera? The art world had seen them, but they got cast aside as mere trickeries. Better that way, so they could remain his, and his forever. As he chipped at the stone, he felt the shadow shapes loom around him, rearing up as if guarding the entrance to a roomful of treasure. He was sure he could hear the Hybridae and their glassy song (in his heart he knew they sang crystalline songs into the outer reach of infinity). He could feel them in his very skin, and he knew they were true as rain.

He chipped away at the stone, making a dent the size of a hand. No one seemed to notice the kneeling old man chipping at the ground. “They always said I had a secret technique,” he said to the stone, and around him beasts that fused the features of a spider and a dove filled the sky like a cascade of needles, ”but I never did. None. I developed my photographs just as anyone else would. In fact, I was careful to leave the image as pristine and natural as could be. There never were any darkroom tricks.” The light remained grey that afternoon, and he was unsure if the sun was setting, because he worked for what seemed like hours, determined to chip away at the ground, to find the door that led to the realm of the Hybridae, beneath the ground, like intuition told him it would be. He hunched over and picked at the stone, and the flecks flew away from his hands as the night-black Hybridae glided through el Zócalo. There was a tiny hole in the ground now, and he knew that this spot was the entry point to the invisible world. It just simply had to be. He took a short break from his work, and he took out his camera, for a brief second unsure of what to do. He prepared the shot and took a photograph.

From the Nueva Luz: Fotografia Moderna, Year 3 Vol. 2, 1959. Photograph, Mexico City Title: Mundo Gris Year: 1947

Mundo Gris, or Grey World, is the closing note to De Castille’s body of work. Shortly after he took his final shot, De Castille experienced a heart attack, and he was rushed to the hospital, where he died the following day. The single photograph he took at El Zócalo closes out the last of the 200 photographs that are part of the millennial series, and it captures the best of the Zócalo: A long ancient history of more than a dozen cultures and peoples melded into a single place, living in organized chaos. Though the lighting conditions were unnaturally low, his composition captures the joy and life of his adoptive country, and its people. His estate developed the photograph, though it is not known exactly if he gave any instructions on how to develop the print. He was dead long before developing, and no one knows exactly how someone else — an assistant, a secretary , perhaps an unnamed colleague— could have reproduced his trademark black creatures, dubbed the “chimera” by the Journal of Latin American Photography in 1909, into the print. For this reason many collectors eschew Mundo Gris and call it a forgery, though at the time of press, this journal considers the photograph to be legitimate. Its hallucinatory shapes in the background are most striking, perhaps the most memorable of the millennial series. Hybrid dove and spider creatures float in the sky above Mexico City’s square as if in formation to strike— as if at war, and several hulking shapes, easily thirty feet tall, move toward De Castille, with their humanoid and animal limbs extended, as if to claim him, or perhaps to claim the other people present in el Zócalo that day. There are at least four hundred chimera present in the photo, though the way they burst forth from a stone in the corner of the square suggests there may be thousands of them that simply have not emerged from the ground yet. De Castille’s legacy of love for his adopted

country is juxtaposed one last time, in this final tableau that hints at the magnitude of his unusual artistic vision and ability to express himself through symbol (or perhaps, for symbol to express itself through him).

Author’s Note I hope you have enjoyed “Hybridae,” which I wrote in 2008 and was first published in the now defunct Steampunk literary magazine The Willows. I wanted to make it more widely available and with new art. If you enjoy this work, I encourage you to contact me with your thoughts and feedback. I thank you, Gentle Reader, for spending your hard earned money on this small piece of fiction. If you like what you read here, do let others know that you enjoyed it through word of mouth or online. “Hybridae” is dedicated to my father, who shares my passion for Mexico City, or as we call it, “El De Efe.” About the Author Cesar Torres is a Chicago-based fiction writer, specializing in speculative and literary fiction. He studied print journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and he has worked in the fields of online journalism, information architecture, and theater. He writes the Urraca Blog to chronicle his writing process at http://cesartorres.net .You can also follow him on Twitter at @urraca. For more information, email him at [email protected].