Funny how the mind protects us. Dolores can remember nothing of what happened after that and has only imagined scenarios. She must have tiptoed back into the house. She must have shut the door behind her. How did she creep up to Daniel as he snored? Was she behind the sofa or before him? She must have stabbed him dozens of times, there was so much blood. So much blood could only have come from slash after slash into Daniel’s chest and stomach, slash after slash after slash.

What she does remember: Daniel waking at some point and screaming. How she feared the girls would hear and wake or a neighbor in the distance would catch hold of the desperate shouts and come running, phone the police. (Were there police? Who was in charge, now that the rebels had defeated Batista?) But Daniel had been unable to stop Dolores in his drunken stupor; his screams had quieted quickly. All that was left then was Dolores breathing hard with a blood-streaked machete in her hand, was Daniel still as the moon, covered in sticky wounds, and soaking red deep into the couch.

Dolores waited even later—it must have been two in the morning. And panting and sweating and heaving, she pushed that whole couch out the back door and into the little plot behind the house. Few people could see into the back of Dolores and Daniel’s home. The nearest neighbor was a mile away, and she couldn’t make out the house past the thick bushes and palm trees. She took the coals they’d used to roast the pig and spread the same gasoline over their stony surface. She assembled wooden planks she’d saved to make a pit. She lit that whole couch and her unmoving husband on fire and watched them blaze into the sky, into the night. She watched the flames pop and crackle like a million gathered fireflies. There were no stars that she could see, but the flames were enough. As if a moon had descended into her own backyard. She could hardly believe what she had done.