Monstrilio

by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

I went up to Santiago’s room. Sat on his bed. Sunlight seeped at the edges of his closed curtains. The room smelled of fabric softener. I sniffed his cartoon-dinosaur bedspread. Maybe Magos would hate me for having erased Santiago’s smell from his room. Time would have erased it anyway. On his desk there were mugs and mason jars filled with rainbows of colored pencils, markers, and pens. I noticed a notebook with “Santiago Jansen de la Mora” on the cover. On the first page, he had written, “Hello, today is Tuesday,” and drawn a sort of fox with a tail three times the size of its body. The next page read, “Hello, today is Wednesday,” and showed a drawing of a pink creature. Its shape most resembled a giraffe’s, but with two large fangs protruding from its mouth. On one of the last filled pages (“Hello, today is Saturday”), he drew a creature that looked just like Monstrilio, same ball-body, same arm-tail sticking out awkwardly from its side, same row of fangs across half of its body. A few pages later, he wrote, “Hello, today is Monday.” Then, instead of a creature, he wrote, “The End.” There were a bunch of blank pages remaining in the notebook. I closed the book and set it down the way he’d left it. I opened his curtains and the window. I sat back on his bed hoping for a breeze to waft in and cool my face and for the sunlight to lift the shadows that clung to me.

He monstrosity or he Santiago. A blending of identities. Even Lina isn’t sure, either. Ominous “the end”