The woman said nothing. She stared at Emilia as the stain now covered everything, dripped from the bottom edge of the tunic down onto the dirt.
“But it wasn’t my fault,” Emilia cried, her hands on her face. “It was Julio. He did this. I couldn’t stop him!”
I knew then who she was.
La mujer de La Palmita.
The first person that Julio had killed.
Emilia backed into me. “Make her go away,” she said, grappling for my hand, squeezing it tight.
“Just ignore her!” I said, and I tried to get Emilia to come with me, to get out of this place, but she wouldn’t budge.
“I can’t,” she said. “What if I could have helped her? Why didn’t I stand up to him before?”
“You’re being unfair to yourself,” I said. “Trust me. I know. He did this, not you. He was the one who killed all those people in La Palmita!”
The woman held her hands beneath her stomach, and then she screamed as her entrails fell forth, and then she was pushing her insides back into the gaping hole, and red blood oozed through her fingers.
It rained down on Emilia: black ash from the sky. La mujer de La Palmita growled, and her mouth opened, impossibly wide, and she pulled a blade out of that chasm, and it was covered in her own blood.
But Emilia became rage, became rejection. She roared and Emilia shoved through the woman, who now spat ash at Emilia, and then the shadow was gone and Emilia was scowling, saying something over and over—
“¡No soy mi papi!”
And he sprang up behind her, stretching terribly from her shadow, and his long arms grasped her from behind, and he was cackling.
“Did you think you could escape me?” he roared. “I can find you just as well as los sabuesos, mija!”
She thrashed about, and I dived for her, but my hands went through Julio’s arms, right to Emilia’s skin.
“Eres una asesina,” he cooed into her ear, and his teeth grew, longer and longer and he sank them into the flesh of her shoulder and tore at it, sinews and blood dripping from his mouth. “¡Una asesina como yo!”
She cried out.
She fell back.
Tears streamed down her face, but she wrenched herself upward and began to pummel him with her fists, her voice raw, vicious. “I am nothing like you!” she shrieked, and each fist pushed him back, until her hands began to sink into his flesh, began to reshape his form, and then his head tipped to the side, plummeted to the earth.
She crushed it.
“I am nothing like you,” she wheezed out again, and Julio’s ashes burst up into the air. “I will never be that.”
Someone screamed behind Emilia. “No, leave us alone!”
Another shadow had grown.
There was a man, tall, his arms thick with muscle, on his knees in front of Rosalinda, his hands up, pleading with her. “Mi amor, take me back,” he begged, and he looked so real now, no longer a shadow given form.
Una pesadilla. Made whole.
“I miss you. I miss our son. Felipe.”
“Mami, stop him.” Felipe backed away from the man, right into me, and he latched on to my arm as he did so. “Xochitl, how is he here? Is he going to take us back?”
“No!” shouted Rosalinda at him, furious and righteous. “We left you behind. We are never going back!”
He sprang up from the dirt, from the bones of this dead city, and his body grew, twisted, stretched in unimaginable directions, until he towered over the whole group, and he unhinged his jaw, letting forth a bellow that vibrated through all of us. “You’re worthless! I never loved you! I’ll just see Adelina again, and she’ll give me what I want!”
Felipe howled as the apparition continued to berate his mother. “Why did I ever marry you? Why did I ever have a son?”
Rosalinda did not flinch. She did not cower before that manifestation. She stretched her body taller, and when she screamed, spit flew from her mouth, her eyes flared with fury. “I will never let you hurt us again.”
“But you waited so long to leave,” he teased, his words both slimy and sharp. “You couldn’t do it. You wanted him to suffer with you, so that you didn’t have to experience me alone.”
“Stop talking,” she said, and she threw her hands over her ears.
“Mami?” Felipe’s voice sounded so small, so terrified.
“It’s true, Felipe,” crooned his father. “She’s worthless. She didn’t get you out soon enough.”
“No!” she shrieked, and she shoved at the man so hard that he stumbled. “I didn’t know how to leave! I never would have married you if I knew what you’d turn out to be.”
“So you’d give up our son for your own peace?”
Rosalinda smiled, and it left me awestruck, fearful.
“I would choose Felipe over you every time.”
His face twisted up in anger, and at first, I thought he was going to turn on her. But then Felipe balled up his fists and started shaking next to his mother. “This is your fault!” he said. “Why were you always so mean to Mami? Why couldn’t you love her?”
And then he stood in front of Rosalinda, who watched on with the rest of us.
“I love her, Papi. You have to get through me to get her.”
He put up his fists.
And Rosalinda spat on her husband.
The shadow shrank, crumbled before Felipe y Rosalinda, and then it was so small—barely larger than a stone. La pesadilla raised its tiny hands, but that was not enough to stop the stone that crushed it, that Rosalinda had hefted up and dropped on that shadowy form.
No sooner had that terrible image left us than a howling began. It was low at first, then higher in pitch. Was it the dead?
No.
I saw them.
They were motionless.
Watching.
Silent witnesses to the truth.
“Mi amor, mi amor…” He sang it to her, and there she was.
Gracia.
Flowing, drifting, in a long white robe.
And she was so beautiful, Solís, as Eliazar had said.
He was on his
