saddlebag dispatches
was, and I had room for everything—minus la Muerte, the skeleton effigy. I refused to offer her sanctuary because of my fear of what she represented. I was ashamed though and relieved she was shrouded in a black cloth. I did not need to see her physically to picture her in my mind, so familiar was she after so many years of my being around her. Under the material, I knew her skeleton face peered out of the black shawl one of the Verónicas had placed around her head and shoulders. She perched on a stand, her dark dress reaching almost to the floor and covering her misshapen bony feet and the thin sticks that were her legs. The hollow black holes where her eyes should be were so dark they stretched into her skull like endless tunnels. The first and last time I had looked into them scared me so with their empty darkness that I was filled with a hopelessness I hadn’t felt before. I was five. The realization that she represented the end of life for all living beings hit me full force and began the decades-long fear of her that I harbored. Would any sane parent want to bring the personification of death into the house? With two small children who feared my first walking doll— still residing in my closet—I could not ask them to accept that Death would be joining us. Of course, now that she and I are good friends and she no longer frightens me, I regret not offering her a safe haven. Oone of the elder Verónicas took her in, and her daughter cares for her still. I fought tears the day I saw her last because I also bade the last of los Hermanos and Verónicas goodbye. We were never all together again.
TWO HORSEHAIR SCOURGES AND ONE OF BRAIDED LEATHER WITH KNOTS AT THE ENDS LIKE A CAT-O-NINE TAILS. THEY ARE KNOWN AS LAS DISCIPLINAS AND WERE DISCOVERED IN THE TRUNK THEY ARE RESTING ON.
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