Author: long

PART 1 The silence in Jalisco’s main parish was so thick it was suffocating. “I can’t accept it,” Leonardo’s voice echoed in front of the altar carved in gold. Alma, enveloped in a white lace dress that took her six months to hand-embroider, felt the mosaic floor disappear beneath her feet. “I won’t marry a…

The morning began with a strange smell of expensive perfume… a smell that wasn’t for me. My husband stood in front of the bedroom mirror, straightening his shirt as if he were going on an important date. Too much cologne, too much enthusiasm… too much of everything for someone who was supposedly just going to…

Three weeks later, that very old cat was dragging a filthy stuffed mouse down the hallway like it was a trophy. And then we understood why “he didn’t get up”. When the municipal shelter called us, they didn’t embellish anything. They just said: —He’s older. He needs someone to lovingly care for him. My wife…

Diego did not sit down immediately. She stood there, her back rigid, staring at the folder as if she could guess its contents just by seeing it closed. The smell of hot food still lingered in the kitchen, but it no longer whetted the appetite. Now it was heavy. Like everything that hadn’t been said…

A deaf farmer marries an obese girl as part of a bet; what she pulled out of her ear left everyone stunned. The morning Clara Valdés got married, the snow fell on the mountains of Chihuahua with a sad patience, as if the sky itself knew that it was not a day of celebration, but…

I felt the coldness of the ground pressed against my cheek, a damp and cruel hardness that made me feel clinging to the present while everything else slowly began to drift away. The smell of burnt grease that kept coming from the hot pan mingled with the iron smell of blood and with fear, filling…

The phone hit the floor with a sharp sound that pierced my chest. I didn’t scream. I didn’t run. I did nothing. Because at that moment… everything inside me understood something that my mind still couldn’t accept. The smell. He didn’t come out of bed. It came from the truth. I crouched down slowly, as…

I didn’t sleep that night. It wasn’t because of the children. After crying and exhaustion, they collapsed, as always. It was silence. That silence that remains when something breaks… but you still don’t know what. The house felt bigger. Colder. As if Miguel had taken something invisible with him when he crossed that door. I…

The metal was cold. Not because of the room. Because of what it meant. Mateo didn’t pull it out abruptly. He didn’t make any sudden movements. His fingers, still trembling from the weight of everything he had just lost, slid with a precision that didn’t belong to that moment. As if his body were remembering…

The Villaverde industrial park never slept, but at that hour of the early morning, it breathed differently, like a large, weary beast that had learned to hide its fangs in the fog. Steam rose from the sewers in white, spectral plumes; in the distance, the warehouses continued to hum with a constant, indifferent, metallic hum,…