In a city ruled by fear and fire, a young man returns to his parents’ house on a night when everything seems normal—until they fail to come back before the alarm. Desperate, he goes out to search for them, confronting a neighborhood where danger is diffuse and the rules have changed. As he moves through dimly lit streets—past bonfires, vigilantes, and the echoes of lynchings—he discovers that the real threat isn’t always the one that’s announced.

---

Nº 02 | Short story | Horror | 3650 words | xelsoi | Spanish version | Translated by Trinidad Montalva

He called his mother’s phone one more time, but no one answered. The messages he’d sent marked both blue ticks, though. That night, he was left alone at his parents’ house, just like when he was a child. The streetlight, which inconveniently illuminated his room, reminded him of those days with nostalgia. Sometimes he missed the stillness of the neighborhood, burned only by the tires racing on the gloomy main avenue. Downtown, where he now lived, the nervous murmur of sleepless nights could be heard beneath the silence. Through the barred window of his parents’ house, he saw his former neighbors walking briskly back to their homes. The alarm was about to go off soon.

His parents had left after an early dinner, leaving him with dirty dishes overflowing in the sink. They went out to buy some drinks for later. The corner liquor store closed early those days because, otherwise, its owners couldn’t make it back to their home, on the other side of the district, before the alarm went off. Reluctantly, his mom had decided to go with his dad so he wouldn’t be out alone on the street so late. And he had stayed there, listening to the news telling stories that no longer grabbed his attention. The leftovers lay wet in the kitchen while he tried to contact his family. His third call also ended up on a useless voicemail.

In the cramped bathroom of his childhood house, dampness accumulated on the ceiling. As he shat, cold whitish drops fell onto his knees. In his head, he mapped out the other liquor stores in the area. Besides the one on the corner, there was one more in the neighborhood—the only one that sold to kids after school who wanted to drink coolers in the park. He remembered himself vomiting acid on the pissed-up grass at six in the afternoon. His parents weren’t going to that one, because those neighbors lock the gates of the alleys, so it would take a very long walk. He wiped his wet legs with toilet paper; the tears in the ceiling were crusty. The last one was a ten-minute walk, but they would have to cross dark streets that led away from the main avenue. Maybe his parents were still shopping on the corner, delayed because of a long line. He imagined his dad getting angry at the slow service and his mom constantly checking her watch. He imagined them buying sparkling wine and lemon soda, the drink of the moment. At any minute, he’d hear the sound of the gate and his mom would enter, talking about how full and slow everything was, that they had left too late, that when she looked at the time she thought they wouldn’t make it back because the alarm was about to go off, all while his dad poured them each a glass. But none of it was happening. His mom hadn’t checked the time, nor had she answered her phone.

Ten minutes before the alarm, he went out to wait. The neighbors screamed when he opened the front door. Outside, the wind carried the stench of burning garbage that engulfed the city at night. People, gullible, thought the fire would protect them. It was a rumor that had spread quickly on the internet and permeated generations. The two girls he lived with would go out and set fire to the street, along with other neighbors, guarding the four corners of their block with it. Sometimes, trusting in the heat of the flames, they would stay until the alarm finished its five-minute horn, rattling every window of the block. He didn’t go; he was afraid, but he disguised it as skepticism. Although there was no proof that these small fires protected them, they had never encountered the danger authorities warned about.

He poked his nose through the bars of the gate. He held them tight with his tense hand, scrutinizing the shadows to see if his family might appear. He wanted to go look for them, but he had only gone out once after the alarm. He’d had a shitty day calculating whether he’d survive the month, and decided to go outside his building to smoke a cigarette. It was a remnant of aristocratic architecture, abandoned to its fate in a city devoured by modernity. It only had two floors and was technically empty, so he left the apartment door open. His cat followed him without him noticing and, running in front of his eyes, escaped into the street. She wasn’t afraid. Occasionally, during the day, she did the same thing, but someone always came looking for her. The cat had reached the corner, her silhouette barely distinguishable among the charred remains of an extinguished campfire. His shivering hand dropped his cigarette as he crept toward her, more to avoid being discovered by someone else than for fear of scaring the cat away. As he stood behind her, the ash stinging his nose, he heard crying. He grabbed the cat and hugged her tightly, holding her by the scruff so she wouldn’t jump. A sobbing man called to him from around the corner. He begged him to let him sleep inside, that he had nowhere else to spend the night, that he would sleep in the hallway if necessary. He couldn’t answer, but he didn’t want to leave either. The man, desperate, ran toward him. He chased him to the entrance of his building, but he slammed the door in his face. He couldn’t let him in.

The alarm went off. Its powerful shriek burned away every thought. Lying on the floor, he held a memory in his head: the only time he’d seen his parents holding hands, walking along a sandy beach one January afternoon. The crashing of the waves erased the words they’d been exchanging, that dialogue he’d tried so many times to uncover. He liked to think they were confessing an important secret, a truth that could only be revealed in a cinematic moment like that. That day, he learned the importance of clichés. He remembered himself trying to repeat that moment with his boyfriends, waiting to hear those secret words the beach had taken from him. But he never heard them. The alarm stopped, and his parents didn’t arrive.

The walls of the house pressed in as he circled around, calling them over and over again. The slow beeps, then the rapid ones, wrenched his insides. Neither answered the phone. His parents’ bed creaked completely when he threw himself onto it. Half the gravel ceiling was smooth from a job they’d never finished. When he called them again, a lump lodged in his throat: he heard, from the depths of the room, a small vibration. He took it apart until he found both phones in a small drawer, with all his missed calls. There were so many, and all of them useless. Frustrated, he threw his cell phone away, which slammed against the tiled floor. With a sigh, he decided to go out and look for them. He grabbed the lighter from the stove and put it in his pocket before turning off the lights. He was going to go out and look for them.

He had barely closed the gate behind him when he saw his neighbor come out into the front yard. In her robe, with a cup of tea in her hand and a look of unease on her face, she stopped him:

«How dare you go out at this hour, boy?»

He couldn’t answer because he didn’t know either. He had no idea where to look for them, much less if he was going to find them.

«My parents didn’t come back.»

Frightened, the neighbor tried to convince him it was a bad idea. What if they caught him on the street? What if his parents had hidden away somewhere? What if he got lost? Her warnings turned on the lights of the rest of the alley, and people stared at him, shocked, from their windows. A whisper, as warm as it was threatening, broke the silence of the neighborhood. He opened the alley gate and, before leaving, he followed one last instruction:

«At least close the gate!»

He walked cautiously down an inner avenue. Abandoned by history, the streetlights could barely pierce the complicit gloom that dominated the street of his childhood. The master bedrooms rested under dim, warm lamps, while reality shows and game shows filled the awkward silences of its families; the dormitory commune rested safely before midnight. Beyond the gate, no curious person peeked in to discover him. Sudden privet rustling frightened him, but they were cats that had escaped from their owners’ captivity. He wondered about the last affectionate words someone had said to them back home, in an accidental farewell. He didn’t want to think about his own.

He was surprised to see cars still going by. The few that passed him honked their horns, but then sped up to avoid having to exchange words. Despite his mistrust, he felt a certain security in the fact that his route had those fleeting spectators. Just in case, he consoled himself, there would be someone who’d seen him one last time. He reached the first liquor store faster than he expected to: it was closed, armored with rusty brass bars and several giant padlocks. He knocked on those bars, which resounded loudly. He no longer cared much about being discovered. The discordant creaking of several doors opening made him jump: entire families were watching him from their gated gardens. He realized some of them were wielding sticks, rolling pins, and even frying pans.

«I’m looking for my parents,» he explained. The incredulous crowd demanded explanations he couldn’t give. The opening of a gate in the distance startled him. A teenager shouted from the house next door:

«Get in, you asshole! Get in!»

The imperative was repeated by a couple of voices. Families were coming out of their houses, slowly advancing toward him.

«Get in! Get in!» Little by little, the voices began to merge. It was a single chant, that of an entire neighborhood, ordering him to give up and stop searching. But he could still go to the other liquor store. He could still catch them hiding in someone else’s house, perhaps shouting at him right now, unaware that he was the one behind them.

«Get in! Get in!»—A man rushed at him with a frying pan, but he managed to run away. As he moved away from the block, more voices joined the chant. Banging on pots and grilles, they began to punctuate the syllables that revealed him: get – in. Not a single light remained off on the avenue.

The crowd stopped chasing him after a couple of blocks. The thin silence tensed the muscles in his back. He breathed with difficulty in the heavy night air, remembering the lynchings. The first ones were on the news, but then, to avoid collective panic, they were relegated to street smarts and oral history. During the week of the first alarm, a teenager went out to help out. Some neighbor saw him receiving the small notebook paper packet and raised the alarm via chat. But his message was misinterpreted: confused people thought the boy was the threat and hunted him down, beating him to death. They buried his body in the park, agreeing amongst themselves to be complicit. The news didn’t come out until a couple of days later, when his desperate parents asked everywhere for their son. Then, a neighbor broke the pact of silence and told them the truth. The authorities only gave a hollow sermon that no one remembered anymore.

He was greeted by the closed barriers surrounding the block of the second liquor store. They were funded by the money raised by an evangelical church that had taken over half of the square. The neighborhood was a bastion that once protected them from the myth of crime. Although the barriers were imposing, he thought he could climb them. They didn’t have points at the top because a child once thought the same thing, and was left hanging upside down with the flesh of his leg caught in the metal. He thought his parents wouldn’t have scaled the fence like the child or himself. He imagined them stumbling upon the enormous locked padlock, scared to death. Maybe a neighbor on the corner would have opened the door for them, and now they would be looking for a way to contact him. That was going to be difficult: the impact with the ceramic tile had almost completely destroyed the screen-protector-free screen of his phone.

«Woof!»

A dog barked at him from outside the block. It was a single, dry bark, audible only in the silence of the night street. He didn’t turn around, but he felt its quick footsteps approaching. He quickly climbed up and landed on his feet, feeling the stiff concrete rebound on his knees. He hid behind a car and saw its silhouette appear, sniffing something on the ground. It was the lighter that had dropped from his pocket.

From his hiding place, he could see the halo of a bright light at the heart of the square. A little closer, he came across a bonfire, guarded by two men. A pile of school chairs and desks were burning, as they chatted over a beer. At the foot of one of them was an iron bar. Neighborhood watches were rare because of the risk, but in some areas, they appeared encouraged by the fire. The men were talking about an American TV series in which a witch had invented a fictional suburb to avoid her duel. He hadn’t seen it, but the internet had brought him up to speed. Hugging the wall of a house, he continued in the opposite direction, toward the liquor store.

The store was small and located in the parking lot of a house. Its owner lived right there. The curtain revealed her figure, that of a woman who, sipping a cup of tea, was solving word searches. He watched her for a while, basking in the warmth of that intimate moment. The woman barely lifted her pencil and wrote the words quickly. She was sure of each stroke. He’d be upset if interrupted, he thought. If a stranger rang his doorbell at this time of night, he wouldn’t let them in. But the owner of the liquor store wasn’t like him. She rested confidently with the curtains open. So he rang the bell. The woman looked up, although she couldn’t see him. She stood still, her dismayed expression fixed on the glass. He rang the bell once more, and she stood up, still holding her magazine. As soon as she opened the door, he rushed to explain:

«I’m looking for my parents. They didn’t arrive before the alarm went off. I’m afraid something might have happened to them, and I think they came here. Have you seen them?»

She walked up to the gate with small steps. She asked him his parents’ names, and he told her. The woman pursed her lips.

«Oh, my boy, yes, they were shopping here when the alarm went off. They stayed with me until it stopped, but they immediately went home after that.»

With a great sigh, his body collapsed. His knees buckled, and he fell onto the floor. They surely had arrived just after he left. He laughed, thinking about the yelling he would receive when he got home, one he so desperately wanted. Normality was just a few blocks away.

«Get in,» she invited him. «It’s not safe outside, what with all this going on. You can have a cup of tea and sleep on the couch if you want. I’ll lend you the phone so you can let your parents know you’re OK. Your mom must be worried sick by now.»

The woman smiled at him through the bars. Behind her, he could see the worn wallpaper and religious figurines, a few photos of her grandchildren, and a couple of ceramics she probably painted in a municipal workshop. He already knew that house, but he’d never been there. Outside, there was the threat of night and the warning of fire. She didn’t gain anything by serving him tea and offering an extra blanket in case he got cold, and he wasn’t going to be able to sleep so far from home, under a stranger’s roof.

«Come in,» she insisted compassionately. But he didn’t want to believe her tenderness. He left the way he came, thanking her.

There was no one at the bonfire anymore. Then, he saw a man with a torch in his hand entering a passageway. Those were the signs of the guards, who were on patrol. The dog was now sleeping near the fire, next to a bowl of food, its lustrous fur illuminated by the blaze. It had been a long time since he’d seen a stray dog, he realized. His heart stopped when he heard his name being called from behind. It was one of the guards, approaching him with a fire in one hand and an iron bar in the other. He turned around and raised his palms. He approached the bonfire, trying to convince him that he wasn’t a threat. As his face was exposed by the flames, the guard called his name one more time.

«What are you doing here?» he asked, confused. He recognized him too: the guard was a guy he used to hook up with. He’d met him on an app that, since his teens, had been the only interaction with his peers in the neighborhood. They’d met several times, even gone on dates where they didn’t fuck. But neither of them knew if that was love and, confused, they drifted apart without ever saying goodbye. Today they only exchanged brief replies and support messages when appropriate; they were cool. But the iron grip in his hand was too firm.

He wanted to explain the situation, even though he knew it was ludicrous. He didn’t say how he’d gotten in, or that he’d already seen the dog, now growling at him from the side. The guy didn’t believe him. He called him shady and a liar. But, even if he had, there wasn’t much he could do about it. He thought of the neighbors accusing him the next morning for letting a stranger spend the night so close to them. And they would have been right. He promised he’d leave, and that he’d never return to that neighborhood again. He even reminded him that they had once kissed right here. But the guard warned him back that he couldn’t let him go. The dog barked furiously at him, and they both cornered him toward the fire. He wouldn’t be able to escape by jumping over the gate; they’d catch him first. A glass of rotten soda and sparkling wine would wait forever on the table for him to never arrive. The animal lunged at him, and he responded with a kick. Through his sneaker, he felt one of its bones break beneath its soft stomach. He heard its wail as it fell into the flames before darting away. The guard shouted, but didn’t chase him. People were starting to leave their houses as he ran fast towards the barrier. In the distance, the woman from the liquor store closed her living room curtains.

From the other side, he could still hear the guard’s crying. He heard it all the way home. He dragged his feet along the rough sidewalk. He was comfortable in the darkness—at this hour, there were no more lights on. He could feel movement around him, in the trees, among the bushes, but he didn’t turn around to discover what it could be. He knew this misguided night would end with one last bad decision. He entered his block through the other side, the one near the bus stop where he had barely landed on his feet after parties so many times before. It had been years since he’d walked through the neighborhood at midnight, and he saw it differently. He understood it differently. For the first time, he looked at the plants that embellished his neighbors’ gardens and was able to name them. These were plants that needed a lot of light to survive, the ones that bloomed in the summers and were watered regularly. He couldn’t have them in his apartment, which was never touched by the sun. He missed waking up with it in his face in the mornings.

There was a commotion on the avenue at the other end of the alley. He quickened his pace. He wanted to sit on the plastic slabs in his parents’ yard and tell them about the things he’d suffered—his father’s compassionate caress and his mother’s encouraging words, dissolving his anguish with some hastily but lovingly prepared cocktail. But the lights in his house remained off. The weight of his body slumped against its flimsy gate. The memory of the beach left him blind and deaf as he fumbled for his keys. But the turmoil on the avenue had grown louder and managed to catch his attention. Several security guards surrounded a couple of people who were trying to dissuade them. From their windows, neighbors threw trash at them and urged the police to catch them. He could see one of the guards point in his direction before running toward him. He quickly opened the gate and locked it. With his hand on the inside bolt, a suspicion paralyzed him. He managed to turn around as the guards shouted that there was an intruder. He regretted it. He entered the darkness of his house and closed the door behind him.

---