Monstrilio

by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

One believes the stupidest things in grief.

I wanted him to snap, to finally and absolutely lose it. To break. He was withering. To wither is not the same as to break; to break is to have pieces to put back together, and to wither is to dry up, to wilt, to lose bone, to die, and death is the most boring.

Santiago’s death didn’t fit my life though I had known it was inevitable. It stopped my life as I’d built it. We had been a unit of three, Joseph, Santiago, and I, and without my son our unit ceased to exist. I was back by myself. Not back. I had never really been by myself.

I was tempted to pray for her, but God is a scumbag; he wouldn’t answer any prayers of mine. I wished instead, like one wishes on a birthday candle or a star.

Colleagues trained themselves to achieve this kind of focus. It came easily to me, this compartmentalizing. So easy I sometimes worried that I was a type of psychopath as yet undiscovered, and then I remembered that if I were a true psychopath, I wouldn’t fear being one.

The parents of those dead kids would think it a bad prank when they received the news because it is other children who die, never your own.

They’d form a support group but soon grow to hate one another because what they needed wasn’t acknowledgment or empathy or closure; it was escape.

We drank whisky and beer. Lena got us shots and we forgot we were all in our forties, pretending to be the twenty-year-olds