Monstrilio

by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

Her son was alive and now he isn’t. No thunder, no angels weeping, no cloaked Death, no grace; just his silent body, unbreathing, and the blunt realization that this is it.

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.

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

He asked me to cry with him, but his sadness was his and I couldn’t steal it.