“And in my dismay
I said, All men are liars.”
—Psalm 116:11
My story is older than the paper that pretends to keep it,
older than the maps that split our blood from the land,
older than the silence that learned how to hide itself.
This is the Land of Enchantment.
The light here can make you believe in God.
The air feels ancient.
You can smell the rain before it comes,
taste the chile on your tongue,
and know you are home.
We lived this land longer
than we have been written about.
Before borders were drawn,
before another man’s God
renamed the mountains
and told us what they meant.
Our names, our prayers, our sins—
buried beneath other men’s stories.
The silence they taught us was not peace.
It was obedience.
And for too long,
I mistook it for belonging.
I can feel it still,
that old hunger,
circling the edges of my breath.
Not gone.
Not forgiven.
Only waiting—
patient as bone beneath the soil,
patient as names we no longer speak.
The land remembers everything.
What was taken.
What was swallowed.
What learned to survive by disappearing.
And some nights,
when the earth is quiet enough,
I wonder
if the hunger is sleeping—
or if it has simply learned
to be quieter
than the men
who lied about it.
ACT I — THE GHOST OPENS ITS EYES
CHAPTER ONE
Carmilo
The desert doesn’t care about you.
Not your name.
Not your prayers.
Not your sangre.
But it remembers what you do.
Always.
People say the first thing you kill stays with you.
No, hombre.
What stays is the first time you obey.
That part nobody wants to admit.
Because killing can be an accident.
A mistake.
A moment that outruns the man holding it.
But obedience—
obedecer cuando sabes que está mal—
that hollows you out from the inside.
Leaves marks no priest can wash away.
The moment you say sí
when every part of you is begging to run—
that is the wound that never heals.
I was a niño when the men told me hazlo.
Do it.
No crying.
No questions.
And I obeyed.
The goat was tied to a post, quiet, watching me like it already knew.
The pistol they put in my hand felt too heavy, but I held it anyway.
A boy doesn’t argue with men like that.
A boy learns to keep his breath steady.
“Despacio,” one of them said.
Slow.
Do it right.
So I did.
The shot wasn’t loud.
The silence after was.
They nodded.
That was all—
approval,
ownership,
the door closing behind the boy I used to be.
People think that’s the part that makes a monster.
No.
The goat was nothing.
A test.
A measure.
The real things—
the things I don’t speak of—
came later.
A lawyer on a dusty road.
His young son beside him.
Neither of them ready for the kind of men trailing behind me.
El señor y su niño no tenían ninguna oportunidad.
There was a night in the desert when the wind died
and even the coyotes kept their distance.
Men stood behind me again.
Voices low.
And one of them said the words that stayed in my bones:
“Si tu matas, tu entierras.”
If you’re old enough to kill,
you’re old enough to bury.
After that, I made a mark.
Simple.
Sharp.
Snake Eyes.
A way of saying:
I was here.
I obeyed.
I survived.
Years passed.
Men changed.
Secrets didn’t.
Then one day, I saw her—
una niña pequeña with eyes too still for her age.
Quiet.
Watching.
I saw myself in her,
and something inside me twisted.
The men would see it too.
Especially the Vegas boy
watching from the shadows with a hunger he didn’t understand yet—
but would.
So I stepped in before they could.
My choice.
My burden.
She didn’t flinch.
And in that little girl’s silence,
I heard the desert shift.
I told part of the truth to my son.
He told part of it to her.
And now she carries just enough
to make the wrong men nervous—
enough to wake the old dust
and stir the things we buried without prayer.
La verdad always comes back.
Even when you bury it deep.
Even when the desert tries to keep it.
She will learn the truth.
She will learn mine.
And she will learn her own.
My footprints are gone, but the ground remembers.
And the desert is watching.
Waiting.
Quiet as a loaded gun.
To see which side she chooses.
Painting is how I listen. Writing is how I answer.