As the boy knelt to lay down the flowers he’d brought to the gravestone—lilies, they were—he felt suddenly struck by something. Not grief, which usually visited him at this place, but a very strange thought.
It occurred to the boy that the dead man in the ground under him had once been young. In fact he had lived a whole life. He had done all the things men do. He had owned shirts and ironed them, had made eggs in the morning and driven to work and dealt with coworkers and hated his boss. He had held a stethoscope against people’s chests to listen to their hearts. He had spilled his coffee. He had married a woman. Together, they had bought a house. They had had children; he had rocked them to sleep. He had petted their dog. Had grown a mustache. He had dutifully voted in elections and lived through two coups d’etat. He had swum in the ocean once a year on their trips to the beach. And in their backyard pool he had done laps until his body was spent and then he had dried himself and gone back inside and paced around that echoey house until he had felt weary with life. He had felt trapped, actually. He’d gotten angry. He’d given the boy’s mom ugly bruises, and then he had left. He had not gone far but he had left. He had bought a lonely apartment uptown with a great view of the mountains and white walls he had scarcely known how to decorate and it was a long time before he did this again after that but he had also taken his kids out for ice cream. He had sent money on Christmas Eve.
Sometimes, he and the boy had eaten at restaurants, just the two of them. He had been bitterly apprehensive before the boy was born, it was said, because he had felt too old to have another kid. But then he had loved the boy. He had worked very hard for years. He had cut behind people’s ears with a scalpel to help them hear again. He had lost count of how many implants he’d done. And then he had aged. He had seemed to age early at first, for his hair had grayed while he was still a young man, and then, later, he had aged for real, forever. He had fallen ill with a terrible illness that made his hands wither until he couldn’t sign his name on a piece of paper or button his shirt. He had asked for things to be passed to him very often close to the end, had pointed with a shriveled finger at a piece of bread, a blanket, the TV remote. He had said I love you more often, had reached out with his arms, like a baby flapping a pair of awkward limbs, asking for a hug. He had been a child once, too, hadn’t he, with eager brown eyes and a wide-open smile.
And none of these things were news to the boy kneeling there in the warm afternoon, holding his lilies. But also, all of it was.
— Matías Guevara Ruales
Illustration by Ariel Kim