“Mommy, Aunt Elena is watching me.
Monica stiffened. Dario turned suddenly to the coffin. I closed my eyes just in time and held my breath until my lungs burned.
“Don’t talk nonsense, Nico,” she whispered.
“Yes, he’s seeing me,” the boy insisted. “He’s got it open here.”
I felt his little finger point right towards the slit.
There was such a heavy silence that even my mother stopped praying.
“Children say everything,” Darío murmured, but his voice broke.
I heard his footsteps approaching.
Each of Monica’s heels against the floor was like a hammer on my head. The wax from the candles and the sweet perfume turned my stomach. I forced myself to remain motionless, although a pang in my chest asked me to sit up suddenly and scratch them both.
The lid creaked.
A hand pushed it barely. More light came in through the crack. I kept my eyes closed, praying for the first time in years that they wouldn’t notice the trembling in my eyelashes.
“See?” Monica said, closer, breathing over me. “It’s the same.”
Equal.
As if I were already a thing.
“I told you,” Darius replied. “Calm down.”
Then he touched my neck.
He wanted to check that the chain was no longer there.
That touch ignited a fury so lively that it almost gave me away. I wanted to bite his fingers. I wanted to open my eyes and see him swallow his face as a perfect widower.
But I put up with it.
Because if they had been able to drug me, wake me alive and plan to collect my insurance, they were also able to finish the job right there.
My mom prayed again, louder, almost shouting the mysteries, and someone in the room asked for coffee. Outside a dog barked. Life went on as if nothing had happened while I learned, lying in my own coffin, that you can be killed before you are buried.
Darío lowered his voice.
“At night they take her directly to the funeral home and early tomorrow to the cemetery. Hold on for a few more hours and that’s it.
“I don’t want to go,” Monica said. “I can’t see her when they take her down.
“Well, learn,” he blurted out. “We’ve done the worst.
The worst.
I gritted my teeth so hard that I felt blood in my gum.
Nico was still there.
I knew because I smelled his strawberry popsicle.
Then, very quietly, as if he were talking to me and not to them, he said:
“Auntie, if you’re alive, blink.”
It almost broke me.
That child was the only clean thing in that entire rotten room. I wanted to do it. I wanted to open an eye and ask him for help. But before I decided, I felt another presence approach.
My mother.
Moms even recognize the strange silences.
She dragged a chair beside the coffin and sighed as if she had been tired for a thousand years. Then, in a low voice, a voice that was not that of a mourner but that of a cornered woman, said:
“Enough is enough, Darío.
My soul stopped.
“Madam, don’t start,” he replied.
“I didn’t want this.
The whole room was silent. Even Nico stopped sucking on the lollipop.
“I didn’t want this,” my mother repeated, now crying for real. “You said she was just going to sleep, that she was going to be hospitalized, that she was going to be put through a crisis, and then everything would be all right. You didn’t say that they were going to put her in a coffin.
The world turned upside down inside my head.
My mother.
My own mother knew.
Monica began to sob.
“We can’t turn anything back now,” Darius said dryly. “If you open your mouth, you fall with us.”
“She’s my daughter,” my mother whispered.
“And he also signed.
He signed.
I felt nausea, anger, a shame so brutal that it burned me more than the poison of milk. My mother, the one who had combed my hair for my graduation, the one who called me “my baby,” had signed my death as if authorizing an operation.
The chair creaked. I heard the banging of his hands against the wood of the coffin.
“Forgive me, Elena,” he said.
That was the first time I opened my eyes.
Not much.
Just enough to look, through the crack, at one of their own.
My mother recoiled with a choke.
We saw each other.
I will never forget the face he made.
It was not relief.
It wasn’t love.
It was terror.
Pure terror.
“Darío…” he gasped.
He turned.
I didn’t hold back anymore.
I put my fingers in the opening, pushed with all the force I had left, and the lid of the coffin suddenly lifted, throwing a candle on the floor. My enlarged photo fell from the table. Someone screamed. My aunt Lupita dropped the rosary as if she had seen the devil.
I sat up half-heartedly, coughing, my dress close to my body and my hair stiff with sweat.
Monica was the first to back down.
He put his hands around his neck.
My chain shone there, on his skin.
“Give it back to me,” I said, but my voice came out broken, hollow, worse than a ghost’s.
Nico began to cry.
My mother fell to her knees.
And Darío…
Darío did not move.
He just looked at me with a coldness that made me understand that the fear had run out very quickly.
“Damn,” he murmured.
Then he put his hand inside the sack.
And he brought out something that I didn’t see well.
But I did see Monica’s face disfigured when she shouted:
“No, not here!”
If you want, I’ll move on to the next part.
