La llaga

A sun-bleached wound gapes open in the Mexican sierra; into this scorched scar stumbles a taciturn farmer, dragging his fractured lineage like a rusted plough. His wife’s ghost already walks the cracked adobe, her absence louder than the cicadas, while a barefoot daughter—eyes older than the mesquite—counts vultures as bedtime sheep. When a predatory loan-shark brandishes a contract inked with drought and desperation, the land itself seems to sigh, surrendering its last marrow. From this parched pact blossoms a slow hemorrhage of dignity: corn refuses to rise, the communal well vomits mud, and the farmer’s clasp-knife becomes a confessor. Night after night, candle-fat dripping onto saint cards, he carves tally marks into the kitchen beam—each groove a failed prayer—until the beam weeps sap like a weeping virgin. A travelling carnival arrives, all sequined rot and brassy tubas, offering oblivion in the guise of a Ferris wheel; the daughter boards, clutching a rag doll stuffed with sorghum seeds, ascending into a heaven that smells of kerosene and burnt sugar. Below, her father bargains away the final furrow of earth, his thumbprint a blood-red comma on the deed. The carnival leaves before dawn, carrying the girl’s laughter in its battered music box. Left behind, the man plants the sorghum seeds in the shape of a cross, waters them with moonshine, and waits for a resurrection that never breaks soil. When the first green blade finally pierces the crust, he mistakes it for a miracle, kneels, and swallows the field whole—mouthful of thorns, of dust, of her name.