Monstrilio

by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

for things to become real, I must be able to name them in Spanish.

I believed that flower was my son reincarnated. One believes the stupidest things in grief. I spoke to the flower and called it my son. And then I laughed because how ridiculous—how cruel, really—it would have been if my son was reincarnated as something so ephemeral, frail, and beautiful. I killed that first bloom with one swoop of my hand. Dead again, my son could become something else: the shell of a tortoise, strong and ancient, or a hideous fanged creature deep in the sea where he’d see wonders even he could’ve never imagined.

We didn’t so much exist as much as we haunted, and with no one else to haunt, we haunted each other.

what it would sound like without his shuffling steps and his sudden rants, his “Did you know that …,” as if Joseph and I had been born at the same time as he and, like him, were just discovering the world.

“A lump of flesh. It’s no one. Just meat.”

Monstrilio is wild. If you loved him, you wouldn’t want to change him.”