Treasure of the World by Tara Sullivan (free ebook reader txt) 📕

I don’t see Daniel.

The dust and the acrid smoke that linger over the mountain taste like death. Grit lodges in my molars, and every time I try to swallow, a small avalanche scrapes its way down my throat, raw from screaming.

Where’s Daniel?

I hear nothing but pain, see nothing but confusion, taste nothing but the mountain. I don’t know how long I stay, but I stay after the wounded have been carried away in trucks. I stay after Don Marcelino drives home with my father’s corpse. I stay until the last of the miners leaves for home and a special shift reports for duty, heading into the still-smoking tunnel to start to clean up the mess so that business can go on as usual, exactly like it has every day for nearly five hundred years.

I stay until César forces me to go home, promising me he’ll go in with the next crew and search for my brother.

I walk home without Daniel.

I stagger into the house after a walk home I don’t remember, sobbing.

“Hush.” Mami places a cool hand to my face. She looks a hundred years old.

For a moment she holds me, and I collapse against her comforting warmth, wishing we could stay like that forever. But eventually she lets me go.

“Go fetch hot water. We need to prepare your father,” she says.

A feeling of unreality settles over me when I realize that Papi is lying in their bed, like usual. But now he’s a corpse and she and Abuelita need to get it ready for burial. I hurry to obey. I don’t want to watch them strip the body.

When I come in again, the pot steaming in my hands, we begin. Mami and Abuelita do most of the work. I wash his hair and try to scrub the rock dust out of the creases of his face with a rag. Pushing on his face is like pushing against cold clay, slowly setting. It doesn’t feel like touching a person. I shiver.

Mami and Abuelita pray aloud as they wash and dress him in his best clothes. He’s heavy and it’s a struggle to get his arms and legs to move. We end up having to cut the back of his shirt and jacket and then re-secure them with a few loose stitches. I take a sharp knife and trim his nails. Lying there on the bed, arms by his sides, he’s cleaner than he ever was in life.

“It’s almost like he’s sleeping,” Mami says around a sob.

I stare at the thing that used to be my father and don’t say anything. Yes, his eyes are closed, but I can’t bring myself to agree with Mami. It doesn’t at all look like he’s sleeping. His face is gray. Rigid. It’s as if the mountain, not content to simply take my father from us, is slowly turning him into stone.

“A woman who loses her husband is called a widow,” Abuelita murmurs. “A child who loses her parent is called an orphan. But there is no word for a parent who has to bury their child. It shouldn’t happen. How can God be so cruel?”

Mami snaps at that. “At least you have a body! I’ve lost a husband and a son in one day! Where is my son’s body for me to mourn?”

“No!”

I realize the shout was mine.

“No,” I repeat, forcing a more reasonable tone of voice. “You haven’t lost a son. Papi is dead, but Daniel’s only missing. He’ll be home soon.”

For a moment they just stare at me.

“Oh, Ana,” Abuelita says finally. “Once the mountain takes someone, you never get them back. Once, there was a man—”

“Daniel’s not dead,” I grind out, cutting off her story. For once I don’t want to hear what Abuelita has to say. My brother’s not dead. He can’t be. Beyond the impossible heartache, it would just be too cruel. If Daniel and Papi were both dead, it would mean that all our lives were truly over. It would leave us with no men in the house, forever. Without a man’s salary we couldn’t make rent. It would mean I definitely would have to quit school to make money. It would mean sooner, rather than later, I would have to get married.

Unable to watch them cry any longer, I turn and walk out the door into the deepening night.

When I finally lie down, I barely sleep, and when I manage to, I have no clear dreams, only a crushing feeling of fear. Every time I wake, my eyes fall on my father, laid out on the bed, and my mother asleep on the floor beside him, and it feels like the waking world has become its own nightmare.

Around four thirty, even though it barely counts as morning, I force myself to get up, light a fire, and make tea. The ritual of the motions soothes me and gives me a chance to think.

I carry a mug of tea in to Mami. I don’t let myself glance at the bed when I hand it to her.

“I’m going to ask Don Marcelino if we can borrow his truck to take Papi to the cemetery,” I say. I don’t add that I’m also going by the mine to see if they’ve found Daniel.

She nods, but her face has an absent expression on it, and as I close the door behind me, I wonder whether she really heard me.

The path down the mountain to school is a dark wash of a road over the streaked brick and tan rock of the mountain face. As I walk, I pass little entrances to the mine—small mouths that choke quickly on their own darkness. On the edges you can sometimes still see the dried blood from last year’s llama. The miners sacrifice one every year and bathe the lintels of the mine they’re working in with its blood to convince the devil inside not to drink their blood instead. I glare at the rusty