Our Share of Night

by Mariana Enriquez

All fortunes are built on the suffering of others, and ours, though it has unique and astonishing characteristics, is no exception.

Darkness is a god with claws that sniffs you out, the Darkness catches up with you, the Darkness will let you play, the way a cat lets go of its prey just to see how far it can get.

I thought then that she was unstable. But when she left and I was alone in the silence broken only by the splashing of animals in the lake, I felt an irrational dread of the jungle and all that beautiful and hostile landscape, capable of harboring so much suffering and so much death.