Resurrection

It was a long drive that got them here. Here, to this old house with a reputation for being haunted by many ghosts. There is a huge cavernous sala leading to the master bedroom. Two light bulbs glowing from the high ceiling seem hardly bright enough to drive away the darkness. Shadows fly everywhere. In the bedroom, a large wooden bed.

It creeks too much for them to sleep there. And so they lay their mats on the floor next to the vintanillas. It takes in the cool gentle breeze.

It will be a noisy evening. The room overlooks the national highway. The house shakes with every passing bus, every anonymous cargo truck. Motorcycles race by at all hours, marking their passing with a scream of exhaust pipes custom-made to be noisy more than anything else.

It is the vanity of humans which move them to behave this way: with great thunder signifying absolutely nothing. They must keep away the spirits.

They will grow used to it as they always do. They come here to help prepare the family carosas, the San Pedro and the Nazareno. They always join the processions from as long as they can remember. It is a matter of family honor. They are here in defense of all that. But perhaps all that is also just some form of vanity.

It is roughing it out which excites them; camping, as it were, inside the dusty cavernous hollow of this dusty and ancient wooden house. They might as well be in some mountaintop somewhere braving the elements under the moon and stars. It feels that way, though the elements here would be purely spirit, if by “spirit” you mean those things detected only by a feeling inside you or inside your dreams.

His two male children feel a slight fear of this place. He will have to scratch their backs to lull them to sleep. The girl-child accepts no fear at all. Still, she will need to be talked to until she grows bored and sleep overcomes her. He knows they are sleeping only by the sound of their breathing.

Tonight, it takes them a while though they have tired themselves after a whole evening of singing and strumming the guitar and countless hands of a local card game called piyat-piyat.

He does not remember falling into sleep. But there was the dream. A dark shadow creeping stealthily down from the rafters slid noiselessly through the window to get at his cell phone. This is only a dream, he tells himself. But he reaches up just in time to grab the phone back. They struggle furiously until the shadow lets go, slithering away with a hateful sneer.

It seems like an endless lull before it returns. It lets go a black squirming blob of a dark malevolent fear. It crawls into the sleeping man’s chest. There it buries itself sinking into his heart. It is a paralyzing fear.

The sleeping man struggles to move. It takes every resource of will before he finally reaches into his heart where the darkness had planted itself to nest. He pulls it from inside him, his hands finally holding away its writhing octopus mass. It squirms, letting out a loud high pitched hissing scream. With hands and feet he wrestles with it, stretching it outwards into a thin band. He ties it in a tight knot on the steel bars of the vintanilla.

There, it continues to writhe and scream, clawing at him. But he was beyond its reach. And then he felt an absolute absence of fear, a sense of healing he had never felt before.

He woke up, but only into another dream. A body was wrapped tightly in white burial cloth. The cloth was stained by dried out blood, which only made it seem that much purer in its whiteness.

It was small enough to be a baby. A spindly old man was speaking over it in a strange language he did not understand. He seemed like the devil, if by “devil” you mean a comic ridiculous figure mumbling a whispered warning: “Keep them clean. Keep them chaste.” He felt more than knew this was a ritual of baptism. But not a regular baptism for a baby recently come to life. This was a ritual for those who died, a birthing ritual into the new life.

When he awoke, he knew immediately he had been through something he may not ever come to fully understand. It was morning. His daughter had shaken him from sleep. She was hungry and wanted now to go to the town market for an early breakfast of puto maya and sikwati. It took a while before he remembered how he had fallen into the darkness of sleep only to reawaken into this bright new fearless day.