Mariana Enríquez

I also used to play with worms, cutting them up into tiny pieces. It wasn’t that I enjoyed watching the mutilated bodies writhe around before going on their way. I thought that if I really cut up the worm, sliced it like an onion, ring by ring, it wouldn’t be able to regenerate

Her grandmother denied telling her any stories, and she wasn’t lying. Josefina had no clue where she’d gotten those ideas, she just felt like she knew, the same way she knew she couldn’t put her hand to a hot stove without burning herself, or that in the fall she needed to wear a jacket over her shirt because it got cool in the evenings.

She’d read the story of Anahí and the ceibo flower, and in her dreams a woman had appeared wrapped in flames; she’d read about the potoo bird, and now before she fell asleep she would hear its call, which was really the voice of a dead girl crying near her window. She couldn’t go to La Boca because it seemed to her that the river’s black surface hid submerged bodies that would surely try to rise up as soon as she got near its edge. She never slept with a leg uncovered, because she just knew she would feel a cold hand touching it.