@anthonyscribbles
There’s a man outside my window who wears my father’s face. The first night that I saw him, I couldn’t believe my eyes. He stared up at me from across the street, a strange little smile contorting his lips. Our gazes held as a car drove by, its headlights giving me a glance at his green uniform. I ran.
Down the stairs I flew, to find my mother nursing a bottle of wine in the dark. From the kitchen came a scent of pupusas, burning on the stove. A knock at the door.
“Don’t answer that,” I said, but I guess all she could hear was my dad’s voice calling, “Amor? I’m home.”
My mother stumbled through a thick haze of smoke and grief. My hand clasped hers over the doorknob, and she looked up at me with empty eyes.
“Your dad is home mijo.”
“No Mom. He isn’t.”
I had to take her hands in mine, or she’d have gone for the deadbolt after hearing his voice again.
“Amor? Can you open up? They didn’t give me my key when they let me go,” he said.
For a moment, I indulged the lie. It was nice to believe he was free; that they’d turn him loose. My mother pulled away, but I held her tight.
"We can’t leave him out there,” she whimpered, “What if they come back form him? What if they’re out there?”
“Mamá,” I took her by the shoulders, “they are out there. Only they’ve come back for us, not him.”
She flew into a panic. “If they’re out there, we have to let him in! ¡No se puede quedar afuera!”
A shadow came over the window next to the door. He knocked on the glass, his silhouette cast upon the curtain was a perfect puppet of my father. The shadow grew as he leaned against the glass and tried to look inside.
I fell to the ground, and brought my mother with me. A finger pressed to my lips demanded silence. She stared, but did not acknowledge me.
“I see you in there, cariño,” he said, but we huddled against the wall. Even in daylight, it couldn’t be true.
“Aquí estoy,” she started to shout, but my hand muffled her words. A moment too late. The shadow perked up, and moved from the window. Less than a minute later, the back door rattled against its frame.
“Who’s that?” my mother asked weakly.
“No one,” I whispered, staring across the living room and wondering how he’d gotten over the barbed-wire and into our backyard.
But then, the front door rattled, too. His voice came from behind both, and from the kitchen, plumes of smoke poured into the room. My father’s increasingly desperate appeals paused for only a second when the smoke alarm screamed itself awake. I left my mother muttering on the floor and burst into the kitchen, threw one flaming pupusa into the sink and turned on the water. As steam hissed towards the ceiling, I ran back to the living room, where a pig-headed monster held my mother’s hair in one fist, a fiery cross & my father’s face in the other. It stood in the doorway with her at its feet, and sicced its brothers on me with a point of its blazing cross.
In the kitchen sink, the pupusa’s ashes washed away, but the one still on the stove burned without charring.