It was getting dark outside and Luis said he was going to cook something, if Gaspar wanted to eat. Gaspar decided to wait for the food in a lounge chair, looking up at the night sky. His head had started to hurt and, as always before a migraine, he was having minor hallucinations. Right now, for example, the tenuous light of the stars was producing a strange reflection, a kind of furrow that shook and opened, the first flower. The black flowers that grow in the sky. Suddenly, his father’s presence was so overwhelming that Gaspar could sense him standing there behind him, but he wasn’t afraid. He raised his good hand, to see if he could feel his father touch it.

Gaspar fell asleep on the lounge chair and didn’t wake up even when his uncle put a blanket over him before eating his dinner, alone, at the kitchen table. Julieta hadn’t wanted to come out of her room. She was really angry.

When he woke up and went inside to the sofa, the house smelled of grass, milk, and Julieta’s perfume. His headache was aggressively making itself known behind his right eye; his face was numb and he could barely extend his fingers, but still, he felt a kind of euphoria.

He heard his uncle’s unmistakable steps headed to the bathroom; he had to cross the living room to get there.

“What are you doing there? You startled me.”

Instead of going back to bed, when he came out of the bathroom his uncle brought a glass of wine from the kitchen. He couldn’t sleep either. He didn’t turn on the lamp: the moon illuminated the living room, and the patio light was on and the window curtain was open.

Gaspar reached his arm out toward Luis. It was the arm with the mark, the dark scar of a deep wound.

“This wasn’t an accident, Uncle Luis. Dad did this to me.”

The wine glass froze halfway to Luis’s mouth.

“He did what to you?”

“He cut my arm with glass. He bit me, too. Pablo is the only one who knows.”

“You fell in your house, you smashed into the window, Gaspar.”

“No. That’s the lie I told. I covered for him. He didn’t ask me to, though, he didn’t give a damn. Well, I don’t know: maybe he did care. Sometimes I think he needed to do this to me.”

“Needed to, dear God. What are you saying?”

“It has a shape, see? I remember how he gave it a shape. He moved my arm like he was drawing the cut. He didn’t stop even when the glass hit the bone. He was like that, and maybe I’m like that too.”