Work Text:
When Tio Bruno left, the house got loud. Mami cried, Tia Julieta cried, poor little Mirita cried. Dolores hid in her room until it was quiet again. Then it was too quiet, full of things she wasn’t supposed to hear. Frustrated sighs and slammed door. The whispers in the walls.
She told Mami, but the thunder was so loud. She tried to tell the other grown-ups. She knew that voice, she wasn’t wrong or tired or making things up.
“Don’t speak his name,” Mami told her.
“I know you miss him, but don’t upset your Mama,” said her Papi. “Or Abuela.”
“He has left us,” said Abuela. “It is just the rats in the walls you hear.”
Dolores didn’t mention it again.
But when she couldn’t sleep, she went down to the kitchen to ask the rats in the walls for a bedtime story. They always told the best stories.