My Favorite Scar by Nicolás Ferraro

Author:Nicolás Ferraro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press

15.

We land at night.

We land.

Because there are some nights you tumble into, like a deep, dark well.

And this is one of them.

There’s a light in the distance, so far away it looks like a star. The lamp marks the wooden shack, with a door in the middle and a DirecTV antenna. If there are windows, I can’t see them, or they’re boarded up.

I know there are trees. I can smell them, but I can’t see them. I can’t even see my feet on the ground. The only thing that’s real is the shotgun in my hands and Dad, up there ahead of me somewhere, more a noise than something I can see.

The sound of a butterfly’s wings could split the night in two. I wonder if I’ll ever cast a shadow again. But more than anything else, I wonder why the hell I said, I’ll go.

I said I’ll go and after that, everything is foggy.

I put on a huge button-down shirt and sweatpants to hide that I’m a girl, so they don’t think you’re weak. I don’t know who handed me the shirt or who said that. It could have been either of them.

Dad gave me the shotgun, my shotgun, the same one as always, the one I shot at cardboard boxes and old cars, but never at a person, and he said again, as if I didn’t carry his words with me like a birthmark, when people see a shotgun, their assholes tighten up, but their tongues loosen, and I think that Dad’s voice is a birthmark that can take any shape. Anything he needs. Just like me.

Dad explains the plan, once, twice, three times, like it’s complicated, and in the background Gula’s nose keeps snorting coke. Got it? And I think I said yes, or I nodded. And then the plan again, and the snorting.

He handed me the yellow shells with salt in them, so I won’t have to carry a death on my conscience. I don’t know if that’s how he said it, I don’t think so, but that’s how I decide to remember it. You’ll still mess them up pretty good with these. When he’s not looking, I change them out for my own, the regular red ones, because if push comes to shove, I prefer to mess up my conscience but stay alive.

Then there was my condition: I put on the jaguar mask, hoping that something inside it would protect me, make me feel safe.

And now that we’re landing, at night, I know it won’t.

We go a little farther in, until the light rescues us from the darkness, gives birth to my shadow, and there’s something in that I find calming. Then the lamp brings Dad to the surface, glinting first off the double-barrel in his right hand and then the .38 in his left. He turns, and I start giggling when I see him in the caiman mask.

“Shh,” Dad hisses.

The shack is about the size of a shipping container. I can hear voices, but I can’t make out what they’re saying.

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