The next to be born was quite small, about the size of a sweet potato. The midwife said nothing to the mother at first but, upon leaving the room, warned her that the girl might not survive. No one seemed particularly concerned; after all, if she lived, it would be one more mouth to feed.

Later, looking her over more carefully in the morning sun, the mother, too, suspected that the girl wasn’t going to thrive. The lion’s share of milk from her shriveled breasts should therefore go to the boy, born first and almost twice the size of the girl. She didn’t have the courage to tell her mother-in-law or her husband, but she sensed that her left breast was making more milk than her right, so she positioned the babies in such a way that they’d nurse on the breast destined for each. Whenever the boy grew restless and cried out, alerting his mother that his source of sustenance had dried up, she’d place the girl off to the side, then offer her other shriveled breast to satisfy the boy’s hunger. The girl protested with minimal gestures, but who’d worry if she was hungry, with her fate fastened to a tiny, fragile body?

Deprived of so much, the shrunken girl resisted. She stayed alive, but in a permanent state of illness.

Fátima’s application for retirement benefits was still under review — that’s what the woman explained to her without looking away from the screen. “But it’s taking so long,” Fátima replied, fidgeting with the straps of the bag hanging from her shoulder.

“Ma’am, there are folks who’ve been waiting much longer than you.”

“More than six months?”

“Yes.”

She’d used up her money for the bus to the social security office. Now she’d have to walk — for how long, down how many streets, she had no idea — back to the outskirts of the city.

But that wasn’t her biggest concern. She didn’t have money to buy cleaning supplies. Or food. Her power had been cut off for more than two days. She spent her nights by candlelight, her shadow projected with haunting grandeur on the wall, and she’d become rather perplexed by its size. When dusk fell, she spent long stretches of time making subtle movements, contemplating the vastness of that other body living on the wall, testing its limits.

And when the last candle went out, Fátima, without the company of her shadow, found herself alone.

The girl on the couch was swinging her short legs, which didn’t reach the ground. She was tightly holding the doll stitched together from her grandmother’s scraps of fabric. Sure, the doll was smaller than she’d wanted, but it was her loyal companion as she watched images jumping out from the TV, which was turned to maximum volume in the living room, and she whimpered with all the pent-up tears of her young life.

She wanted to understand what was happening. Why couldn’t those birds, immersed in a black oil, fly anymore? But her grandmother was in the kitchen preparing dinner, adding vegetables to the soup, making toast from stale bread. The girl couldn’t just abandon those animals on the other side. She was hoping that at the end of the program someone might show the birds wiped clean and flying, free of that hell that sometimes took on the contours of absolute darkness, with bright green lights suddenly marking targets that exploded.

She couldn’t hold back her tears. First, she let them fall, then opened her mouth wide and began screaming. Her grandmother came from the kitchen wanting to know what had happened. But the girl didn’t speak; she just wept. The birds no longer appeared on the screen.

What she remembers is a black wing dragging across the sand.

They opened the small casket, which had been faded by time and humidity, chewed by insects. When they removed the lid, I heard a noise from the rotten, brittle wood like a door breaking apart in the air. I lowered my eyes to the rosary in my hands; I needed to pretend to myself that some strength would come from it. In this way, I avoided looking at your remains, now bones and dust. But the last image of you that I carried with me, no matter how much I tried to imagine you alive and well, was the image of your sick, feverish body. It had grown pale, then entirely inert, beset by cold, rigid, finally, like a paraffin candle.

I’d been asked to attend the exhumation; the time remaining for you to lie protected among the dead and their silences had expired. For years, I’d visit you often, making sure that the grave remained closed, that you were protected from intemperate weather. I’d grown accustomed to the quiet and melancholy of the tombs, the corridors, the dates of birth and death. But that supposed peace was interrupted by the lack of money required for you to remain there. Soon you’d be back in my arms, unprotected, the two of us wandering off to a place I couldn’t yet imagine.

I shooed away the small black beetles that insisted on getting close to my face; they flew off aimlessly. As soon as I was handed the small box, the package to which you’d been reduced, I thought of your weight when I held you the first and then that final time; I thought of the breath that leaves our bodies without making what’s around us any heavier.

I couldn’t bring you home. I wouldn’t abandon you in a discreet corner of the living room like something of no importance. It wouldn’t be dignified to hide you in the back of the closet as if I were ashamed of putting you in plain sight. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be right to frighten the other children, and I’d have to answer their inevitable questions and contradict the fanciful story that you inhabited an illuminated place in a sky always clear and blue, under the care of our good Lord.

I didn’t even have money to buy a spot for you in the ossuary, the more affordable option, cheaper than a burial plot. “What will I do, dear Lord?” It was a question I asked myself again and again, pressing your remains against my body, in which, for months, you’d once slept. I could take you to a park, I thought. Maybe some small, abandoned garden. But I couldn’t escape from the passersby; I couldn’t do what needed to be done without calling attention to myself. I could’ve been arrested for disrespecting your mortal remains. Who would have believed us, a woman and her daughter, with nowhere to go?

I could toss you into the sea, I thought, somewhere I never took you, just beyond the rocks. But the waves would carry you back to the beach, and then the news would report that the remains of an unknown child had emerged in the darkness of those days. These were the stupid ideas I entertained as I walked aimlessly looking for some place to leave you. That’s when the Church of the Resurrection appeared in the distance. I asked the sacristan there for permission to go down to the basement. In the marble ossuary, I found my father’s photograph. The small lock. I asked the sacristan where the key was. He asked if I was family. “The key stays with the family,” he said.

“This is where I’ll leave you,” I whispered. “But for now, let’s go to your grandmother’s house.” Again I pressed the rigid form against my chest.

When the robot arrived at the couple’s home, it was nothing more than an ordinary appliance, one that swept and did other chores. The lady of the house had recently fired Fátima, her tired-looking maid, who was increasingly inefficient, though the couple recognized that, for the many years Fátima had been there, her work had been impeccable. But the required contributions to social security, since Fátima was on the books, and the natural disadvantages of her advanced age ended up being decisive; they traded the maid for the machine.

It didn’t take long for the lady of the house to realize that the machine wasn’t as efficient as advertised. She had to program it many times; she couldn’t simply tell the machine what to do, then forget about it. She doubted it understood her commands. She ended up calling the number for customer support. The sensor was working well, because the robot didn’t crash into her furniture, but perhaps this explained why the machine didn’t quite reach the corners of a room, the most susceptible places.

But, overall, it had been a smart purchase, and she was able to relax in front of the screen that took up a rather large section of the living room wall and offered a universe of entertainment in three dimensions. She had more time now to respond to the messages she’d receive through her social media accounts and to talk on the phone. She even bought herself an e-reader in an attempt to acquire the habit of reading, very much in fashion in those circles frequented by her husband.

Months later, while in absolute distraction, she was startled by a thud. It sounded like something had crashed to the floor. When she arrived at the foot of the stairs, she found the fallen robot spinning around its own body, infrared lights blinking, indicating, perhaps, some sort of malfunction. Not knowing where she’d left her smartphone, which allowed her to control the robot and program its chores, she picked up the object and carried it in her arms. She’d have to try turning it off with its internal switch. That’s when she looked at the robot’s face, which was now flashing its lights intermittently.

They were the eyes of a malfunctioning household robot. Weak as the eyes of her mother. Tired as the eyes of her former maid. How many times had she seen eyes like these without doing anything to revive them?

Before she could turn it off, the object shut down on its own. By this point, the woman was already quite upset. The ghosts of her past had returned, reflected in those fading lights. She embraced the robot as if it were a defenseless child, just as she had once embraced a doll, stitched together with scraps of fabric, in front of the TV broadcasting the Gulf War in real time; or as if it were the remains of her tiny sister, the bones her mother had once carried in her arms through the streets of the city, and she felt a deep affection, like nothing she’d experienced before.

“You showing up here — something happen?” my mother asked as she opened the door.

“Yes, I need to leave your granddaughter in the ossuary where Dad is.” I moved back far enough for her to notice what I was carrying in my arms.

“But it’s only big enough for two. Your brother bought it for me and for your father,” she replied, turning her back to me and heading toward the kitchen.

“You’re alive. And well. And I have nowhere to leave her.”

“Your husband should have thought about this, planned for this moment, don’t you think?”

“He left me.”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s the father. He should have thought ahead.”

“But she’s your granddaughter.”

“Your brother’s the one who bought those spots for us in the ossuary; he’s got the key.”

“You’re lying. You’ve got the key.” I looked her in the eye to confirm my suspicion. “My brother’s a part of this government, and if they hadn’t hidden this disease, she’d still be alive, isn’t that right?”

“You’re blaming your brother for what happened to her?”

“He’s in the military. Aren’t they in charge?”

“So now you come up with this? Just leave us alone. I don’t have the key.” She was already heading toward her bedroom.

I once heard my grandmother telling one of her sisters that my mother didn’t breastfeed me the same way she did my brother. Throughout our lives, she’d allocated the best food, the best books, the best clothes to my twin, born first. That same indifference was extended to my children, who were always passed over in favor of my brother’s children. The pain I suffered in that hospital with its cold, blue tiles, and the loss of my daughter just a few hours after she was born, none of it moved my mother to redeem herself for the love she’d denied me, for that enduring disregard of hers — like a small mouth devouring me for my entire life.

I placed my daughter’s remains against the corner of the couch and walked over to the vanity in the bedroom, but my mother was standing in the way. I asked for the ossuary key; she insisted she didn’t have it. In a small box with Indian carvings she kept in the second drawer, my mother used to hide things she didn’t want me to lay eyes on. That memory had returned suddenly; it was guiding my hands to the drawer. My mother had anticipated this; that’s why she’d turned away in order to reach the bedroom first.

I tried to pull her away from the drawer, but she gripped the sides of the dressing table with all her strength. She began screaming for help. I tried to muffle her cries with my hand. I yanked her by her fat arms, but my physical weakness, which had always been part of her plan, prevented me from being able to move her. The image of my belly when I was pregnant with Ana came to me. How beautiful I used to feel with my modest belly as I gingerly walked around. And if I could, Mom, I’d return Ana to my warm, warm womb, and I’d carry her forever in this sick body of mine, just so I wouldn’t have to hurt you to get my hands on the key to an ossuary.

I grabbed her by the hair and pulled hard until she finally moved away from the vanity, then I was able to open the drawer. In that carved box, there was a single pair of keys, small enough to fit the ossuary lock. Mom was cradling her head between her hands, her hair bun undone, weeping as I wished she’d wept at her granddaughter’s funeral. She screamed that she was going to tell my brother what I’d done. I felt sorry for her as she sat there on the floor, the sleeve of her dress torn. But in my silence I also felt satisfaction.

I lifted Ana’s bones off the couch and held them against my chest. I headed to the church. At that moment, with the evening breeze bringing some relief from the heat of the day, I pressed against my chest the rigidness of my daughter’s bones, bones that would be small forever.

And I laughed, because that warm chest of mine was what you might call Love.

One morning the following week, Fátima headed back to the social security office. She’d had a restless night full of strange dreams of relatives she’d never met. Someone in the dream had said that it was so good to have a tree all to herself to live in, and that someday Fátima would have one, too. They were all very small women, like she’d never seen before.

Hours later, in the distance, the office building appeared before her again, just like the question that had been tormenting Fátima for days: what awaited her?

She’d smile at the agent. Who knows, the woman might even smile back, and all the tension would dissolve.

Fátima sighed and said to herself: “God knows what He’s doing.”