De Soto Vigil

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In El Paso, where two bare mountain ranges lean toward each other and let the river through, there is a low place by the water that has been taking the dead for ten thousand years. It has never once been full.

Hector used to run ghost tours. Now he watches empty buildings at night and he carries one belief that keeps him getting up: that on the worst night of his life he reached into the dark and saved his son.

The young person who walks up to him out of the dark is not his son. The one wearing the boy's body is Margarita and rode a bus a thousand miles to tell Hector a truth he cannot survive hearing.

A few streets south, a developer is pumping the water table dry and tearing out a whole city block, and the grief packed under the streets is rising to meet the machines. It is asking for the one thing no one has given it in all this time.

You cannot cast that out. You cannot win against it.

There is one thing that works, and it is the hardest thing there is.

De Soto Vigil is a story about grief, about the dead a country builds on without looking down, and about the difference between fixing a thing and finally being willing to witness it.