Our Share of Night

by Mariana Enriquez

That was his medium’s mark, the physical metamorphosis that distinguished and condemned him. The god of the golden claws.

Gaspar had lived with those sudden mood changes for a while now, and he no longer tried to find a reason for them: quite simply, if his dad wanted to have some fun now, he had to make the most of it, that’s just how it was.

Maybe Adela is even right about her father. Parents should not exist, we should all be orphans, grow up alone, let someone teach us how to cook and bathe when we’re little and that’s that.

Like in alchemy, I told her: they seem like regular walks, but they’re a process. The meaning lies in the time spent on that process, not in the result: the discipline of repetition.

The question is not whether it’s impossible to understand it. The question is whether it’s talking to us or just speaking inside its abyss, whether what speaks is merely hunger in the void.

There is no greater disappointment than to believe oneself the chosen one and to not be chosen.

I don’t want to choke to death in a village hotel with my lungs full of fluid and my body half-paralyzed. I don’t know how to work. I can’t find my way with a map. It’s easy to talk about getting away, leaving, dying, changing, when leaving it all behind means nothing. But to feel the power in my whole body, to claw and mark people, to have a role as the companion of the god of night—it means something. It’s mine. I’m yours too, I told him in a low voice. You’re mine too, he replied.

The Darkness had guided me by the hand every step of the way. I was the real priestess. Not those three crones.

I was a little annoyed by his bad mood, but I knew him well enough to recognize his way of showing affection—behaving like the world was a porcupine and he couldn’t find anywhere to sit.

The victims’ fathers tend to be silent companions. Many have died during these years spent in the background, accompanying their wives. They’re killed by impotence and love; they’re unprepared. Women know how to manage these emotions better.

‘When we call upon the devil with the required ceremonies, the devil comes and we see him. In order not to die, struck down by this vision, in order not to become cataleptic or insane, one must already be crazy.’

he was the one you paid.

She hung up, then slowly walked to the nurses’ station. She needed to lie down, rest her head that was spinning dizzily, and cry in peace around women, without having to explain something she couldn’t even think about, just telling them, Girls, you can’t imagine what a mess, what a disaster, what a nightmare.

they could beat their heads against the wall until they broke their heads and the wall, and he would be right behind them, arms crossed, saying, Well then, shall we start by fixing your skull, your anger, or the bricks? You choose.