The moment has arrived!

“I Sit in Silence Next to the Angel of Death”

A short story.

I sit in silence next to the Angel of Death while they lower my aunt Lola down to the hole in the ground. The little angel sits next to me, white plaster, mostly smooth, except where the rains and the heat have taken chunks off him. He plays a guitar, but no one hears. The relatives around my aunt cry and wail lifting their arms up to the sky and lowering their heads toward the descending coffin, in a blur of red, black, white, and flowery yellow and purple. They have to be the biggest liars. Haven’t I heard them countless times talk about how horrible Aunt Lola was? I even heard her oldest son, Rogelio, once say she deserved to die. Well, there you have it! She is as dead as Captain Bill, the man whose bones turn into dust underneath my feet. Father decided to build a two-room house right over Captain Bill’s tomb, one room for my brother Julio and me, and another for Mother and him. We cook outside on a metal sheet with coals underneath, and we make our necessities in a deep hole Father dug behind those trees over there. Julio and I play around the tombs when we come back from school, running around, and hiding among a couple of hundred monuments, being careful we do not destroy what other families have built. That is what you do when you live in a cemetery. Our teacher says the city is overpopulated and that the poor people have no other place to go.

            The cemetery stretches far into the distance. There must be hundreds of families living here. A neighbor takes a bunch of us kids to the school in town in his horse cart, down the road where they brought Aunt Lola, the one they use for the important dead. Aunt Lola was lucky because the woman she cleaned for, the one that lives in the mansion on the hill gave her a plot where we can bury her. She did not care Aunt Lola had done it with her husband and had children with him. She really was a good woman. I pray my mother is not so good with my father, if she ever finds him, like I did, in their own bed with another woman. I peeked behind the curtain and saw my father’s hips rise and fall, slowly, on this unknown woman, while Mother was out selling her tortillas. Miserable creep! He is a liar too. I ask my Angel of Death why all these people behave so. His silence tells me much.

            His silence teaches me to wait, to be patient, to be different, to know nothing around me is real, that everything one day will disappear: the people, the town, the huts in the cemetery, the cemetery itself, the lies, the gossip, the hate. His silence tells me what my grandmother told me many times: You are not stupid, you are special. Keep dreaming; keep your wild side; keep staring at the clouds. And when you have lived a while, and you have plump breasts and curved hips, forget everything we have taught you and be a child again. That is what she told me many times before we lowered her to the ground. Maybe grandma lives inside the angel.

            My brother asks me why I call this little plaster baby, the Angel of Death. What else could I call him? We live in this cemetery, and this is where I met him, so soft to the touch, so white, so quiet. Do you not see he plays for all the dead, and since the people started coming here to build their huts, running from the law and who knows what else, he, my Angel of Death, plays for the living too? The Angel of Death tells me, in his silence among the tombs that one day my little brother and I are going to leave the cemetery, and that the world is not going to trap us in its lies. He says we are going to be free to be who we truly are. He tells me we are going to be truly alive, like the dead under our feet.

            When all the people are gone, my brother and I remain by the freshly piled dirt, where Aunt Lola lies. We should forgive Aunt Lola, and Father, and everyone else, isn’t that right, little Angel of Death? Yes, we should, just in case no one else will.

[There is always that moment; that decisive moment when you have to choose a path. Mine has arrived, and I take it with a mix of courage and trepidation. I think we all do.]

J. G. Herrera, Copyright 2023.