Monstrilio


 Contents
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Copyright
 Dedication
 Begin Reading
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Copyright
 Dedication
 Begin Reading
 Acknowledgments
 Start to Contents
 
 
 
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 Monstrilio
 GERARDO SÁMANOCÓRDOVA
 zando
 NEW YORK
 
 
 
 
 The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
 Copyright © 2023 by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
 Zando supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, uploading, or distributing this book or any part of it without permission. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for brief quotations embodied in reviews), please contact [email protected].
 Zando
 zandoprojects.com
 First Edition: March 2023
 Text design by Aubrey Khan, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.
 Cover design by Alex Merto
 Cover image: detail from The nightmare by Nicolas Abraham Abildgaard (1743–1809) | Photo © Photo Josse / Bridgeman Images
 The publisher does not have control over and is not responsible for author or other third-party websites (or their content).
 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945255
 978-1-63893-036-5 (Hardcover)
 978-1-63893-037-2 (ebook)
 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Manufactured in the United States of America
 
 
 A Papi, Mami y Pol,
 You’ve been with me from the very beginning
 and, for that, I am the luckiest.
 
 
 Her son dies in a child-sized bed, big enough for him but barely enough to hold her and her husband who cling to the edges, folding themselves small so they fit one on each side of him. She savors the constant shifting and squirming needed to keep her in place.
 Her son was alive and now he isn’t. No thunder, no angels weeping, no cloaked Death, no grace; just his silent body, unbreathing, and the blunt realization that this is it.
 How dull, she thinks. She could scream, get on her knees, pull out her hair, curse God. Take me, she could plead while beating her chest with her fist. She won’t. She can’t rally the drama she once imagined.
 In her fantasies—is it too morbid to call them fantasies? She doesn’t think so. In her fantasies, her son died in a shopping mall, one of the big ones in Mexico City, because in a mall there is an audience, and she wanted an audience but thought dying in the street was too sordid. At the mall, her son collapsed, and as she held his little body in her lap, mall-goers surrounded her in hushed awe of her sorrow, unimaginable to all, while she became a Pietà, marble and gorgeous. Tears, fat and clean, slid from her cheeks and pooled on her chin. When she imagined this, she cried along with her kneeling self.
 And now, nothing. This is the moment—Death!—and not a tear. Perhaps she needs an audience, and her only audience in this room, this bright room, is her whimpering husband, and one whimpering man is no audience.
 Her husband nuzzles their son in the space the boy’s squat neck allows, as if her husband were the fawn and her son the doe. Her husband squeezes their son with his whole body: arms, legs, head, and chest. He grunts as he squeezes. His breaths are loud against their son’s neck, smelling him hard. She squeezes their son too, tries what her husband tries because he seems to know how to grieve, and she doesn’t. Her husband grabs her upper arm and pulls her toward the middle of the bed, toward their son. It seems her husband figures that if they push themselves hard enough, they might be able to bear him again. I bore him, she thinks. I won’t bear him again. Her husband’s blond hair falls on her son’s face. She sweeps it away with the