7. The Return of La Muelona #3
I flinched, every nerve screaming to turn away. Her words scraped against the truth I carried like a bruise.
The fields. Papá’s deal. The men. Their hands. My silence. And in the center of it, the shame I could never name.
I wanted to deny it. Wanted to run. But something in me had already cracked opened.
Maybe that’s why I had come.
Her voice dropped to a low murmur, almost drowned by the humming around us, but I heard her still.
“I will help you,” she offered. “But you have a choice to make. You can let the land seize you, drag you down like all the others, blood spilled and drained, lose yourself in its depth. Or you can rise, become part of it, lead it.”
“Lead it?” I whispered, my throat raw.
She nodded once. “You already belong to it. The land heard what you couldn’t say. All you have to do is accept it.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound came.
A rush of cold surged through me, sharp as glass. Like fingers threading through my marrow, searching for the part of me I’d tried to forget.
Isabel closed the space between us without a sound. Her presence pressed in, vast and quiet and unbearable.
Suddenly, the thought struck: becoming like her—ancient, unknowable—should’ve filled me with terror. And maybe it did. But there was something else, too. An ache. A pull.
Was this what freedom felt like? Not the kind I had once imagined, all open skies and running. A freedom that didn’t mean forgetting but becoming the thing they feared.
The world changed when I stepped outside, the night growing still and watchful around me.
I left Isabel’s house, and as I moved through the streets, my steps mindless, I felt the weight of her power forcing me onward.
People didn’t notice me, didn’t look at me with the same curiosity they once had.
I was no longer the mayor’s daughter. I was different now, and I could feel their fear from a distance.
They didn’t know what I had become, but they sensed the gloom lurking within me.
It didn’t take long for me to stumble upon Papá at the town square. The midday sun burning above us against a canvas of clear skies. As if today was another regular day. But this was far from regular.
“What happened?” I asked, my voice quiet but certain. “Everything seems… out of place.”
My father’s face, once carved from stone, cracked with disbelief—no anger, no hate, just cold, empty fear.
“Something is wrong,” he muttered, trying to shove the thought away like a bad smell.
His eyes darted past me, toward the dusky jungle swallowing the road out of town—the place where freedom waited, just out of reach.
I saw through him. Saw him for the coward that he was.
I wasn’t his. Not anymore.
A wildfire roared within my ribs, born from every scar he pretended not to see.
I hated him with a fierceness that felt holy.
And now, I was something else entirely: dangerous, unyielding, alive.
“The land, it’s come to take everything back,” I said, my words slightly dissonant, almost like they’d slipped from somewhere beyond me. “All this will be gone.”
The hum swelled, low at first, then denser, thicker, those black wings vibrating through the air like a warning. Not loud. Just steady. Certain.
Papá recoiled slightly, but it was enough. I caught the flicker in his eyes, the far-off stare, like he was watching something ancient unearth itself, something he’d long pretended to forget.
And within me, I felt a pressure. Power. Something waiting. Isabel’s presence.
“Let them see. Let them feel it.”
It wasn’t a whisper. It moved through me like smoke—slow, clinging, impossible to hold or escape. I tried to resist, to keep myself separate from her. From it. But hadn’t I, for once, made a choice of my own?
Still, the more I pulled away, the louder it became. A call I couldn’t quiet. A tug I no longer knew how to refuse.
I turned to my father, voice steadier than I felt.
“Tell the people to leave. The land will take them all, one by one, until it’s satisfied. Until it gets what it’s owed.”
Days had passed, and a lingering haze curled around me like a living fog. Murmurs rippled through the people of Santa Elenita, their eyes wide with unease, but no one dared to move. They were trapped in a silent fear.
I left them behind, drawn to the edge of town, the clearing near Isabel’s house. Dusk folded into darkness, swallowing the last light. Near the jungle, Isabel stood motionless; her eyes caught the fading glow, cold and unreadable.
“You feel it now, don’t you?” she asked, her voice calm but full of something deeper and harsher than the wind that blew through the trees. “The hunger. The power.”
I couldn’t find the words. They caught like stones in my throat, heavy and cold. A bitter taste lingered on my tongue. Deep down, I knew Isabel spoke the truth.
“You’ve chosen,” Isabel repeated, a smile playing at the corner of her lips. “Now it is time to fulfill your purpose.”
I nodded slowly, the finality of it sinking into me.
Isabel raised her hand, and as she did, I felt a shift once again. It was as if the land itself were moving with us, responding to our call. The chill deepened, shapes flickering unnaturally around us, and then in the distance, I saw them.
The workers. Their families. The natives. Centuries-old victims, players in the war for the land.
They were emerging from the grasp of the jungle, their bodies stiff, their eyes empty. They were dead, but they moved like they were alive, their limbs jerking awkwardly, their faces contorted in agony.
“They have risen,” Isabel whispered. “The land has claimed them.”
The dead were coming, slipping from the earth’s cracks, their hollow eyes burning with a hunger that would not be sated, drawn to drag down those who dared hide their sins below the graves of the forgotten.
“They will follow us,” Isabel said, her voice rising with the growing sound of the flies. “You will lead them, just as I have led them here.”
The dead began to move, slowly at first, but then gaining pace—an unstoppable tide swarming through the town, heading straight for the heart of Santa Elenita, where the rich men lived, where the plantation owners sat in their mansions, their wealth built on the backs of those they had enslaved.
The time for the reckoning had come.
Santa Elenita shifted uneasily as the dead advanced. Blinds fluttered, doors creaked, small signs of growing dread. The throng’s noise deepened as pale faces appeared at windows, watching the procession snake through the streets.