In that moment, I could finally see him in full. And I recognized him.
Iknewthis man…
He worked for my father. One of my father’s… friends.
I was too young to know his name, or understand anything about who he was. All I knew was that I’d seen him before, and my father called himel marfil…
The Ivory.
Blanco…
He cocked his head, the movement of a curious animal.
To my childish mind, he was ten feet tall, towering over me. Eyes like coal, pale skin and white hair. Like an old man, only he wasn’t old. He was young.
Tooyoung to be so frightening.
He stared at me for several generous seconds during which I was just shaking and sniveling. My eyes fell to my parents’ dead bodies on the floor behind him, and he made a noise. Like a sucking of his teeth that called my attention back to him.
He crouched down, putting us eye level. And I was certain he was going to bite a chunk of my neck off or swallow me whole like the monster he so clearly was.
But instead, he simply pressed a long finger to his lips. A gesture even three-year-old me knew meant Shh.
And he whispered, “Ojos abiertos, boca cerrada, pajarito.”
Eyes open, mouth shut, little bird.
He straightened as footsteps up the hall signaled his friend coming back. He closed the closet door and stalked away, joining the other man.
“You handle it?” The man asked him.
And The Ivory grunted, “Si. Let’s go.”
Then they left.
And a deafening silence surrounded me.
The smell of blood and gunpowder hung in the air… along with the desolation of everyone I’d ever loved in the world being dead, and gone. A finality I could hear, see, smell and feel.
They had my sister…
I didn’t know what they were going to do with her, but I could feel the distance between us stretching further and further.
In that moment, I was dead too.
Numb. Empty.
I sat in that closet for twelve hours until someone eventually found me.
Two days later, my aunt Cristal came to the family welfare office to pick me up, and she brought me to live with her in Bogota.
I didn’t speak a word until I was six years old…
After the fear turned to sorrow. Once the sorrow turned to rage.
And that rage prompted an inferno ofneedin me. A yearning I couldn’t overcome.
Young or not, I knew what needed to happen. It was time to wake up. To be resurrected.
