I’d been right. The police had found my parents. Their remains had been left in a small clearing. Their skin had been removed from their bodies in pieces and stitched together like a patchwork. Everything else—bones, organs, hair, and teeth—had been piled inside the cloth made of their skin, and then sewn up into a bulging, wet parcel. It was suspended about fifteen feet above the ground. Yards of red thread looped around it and held it in place, tying it to the surrounding trees. Disassembled and sewn back together like that, they no longer looked like my father and my mother.
