The story
Andrés was eighteen years old when he started spending his afternoons at the serviteca, an auto repair shop he shared with his father, Don Ernesto. The smell of gasoline and the sputtering of engines were the backdrop to their conversations, the kind that break off between the sound of the drill and the noise of customers arriving with broken-down cars. Every day, when work was over, they followed the same route through the streets of Bogotá, under a sky that turned gray and damp as the city braced for the night.
That afternoon, the sun was hiding behind the buildings and a light mist was starting to wrap around the road. Andrés was walking behind his father, listening to the echo of their footsteps on the wet asphalt, when a clear voice, bodiless and with no visible origin, slipped through the noise of the traffic. "Your father is going to die. What are you going to do?" the voice stated with a calm that froze the young man's blood. The sound seemed to come from the wind itself, but it carried a certainty that paralyzed him.
Fear took hold of Andrés. He felt his heart pound against his chest like a funeral drum, and, without knowing why, he decided not to say anything to Don Ernesto. The voice had left the question hanging, as if waiting for an answer he couldn't offer. He kept the secret deep in his throat, while the shadow of doubt stretched out over his father's figure, who kept walking without noticing the strange warning.
A few days later, the tragedy became reality. Don Ernesto suffered a stroke while repairing a customer's engine and, because of the hemorrhage, passed away at the hospital. The news fell like a slab of concrete on Andrés, who could still hear the echo of the voice in his mind, wondering if it had been a premonition or a cruel coincidence. Grief mixed with dread, since the certainty of the warning had been etched into his memory, accompanying him with every step he took through the city.
Years later, now an adult and with a distant relationship with his girlfriend, María, Andrés lived between the routine of an office job and the nostalgia of the days at the serviteca. The couple had started to drift apart, and the lack of communication had led them to a sort of silent truce. One night, after a dinner where silence had been the main guest, Andrés fell asleep on the couch and had a dream that shook him with the same intensity as the voice from his adolescence.
In the dream, an ethereal figure spoke to him again: "María is pregnant. You must step up." The scene repeated in a loop, as if the voice were waiting for a reaction. Upon waking, Andrés felt the same mix of fear and curiosity that had paralyzed him years before. Without thinking too much about it, he picked up his phone and dialed María's number, dreading an answer that could break what was left of their bond.
María answered in a tired but clear voice. "Yes, Andrés, I'm pregnant." The confirmation fell like a rain of relief and surprise. The fear he had felt at first turned into a strange certainty: the future, sometimes, reveals itself in whispers that appear when you least expect it.
With the news, the couple decided to leave their differences behind. The pregnancy brought them back together, and shortly after they got married in a small church in the north of the city, surrounded by family members who had known Don Ernesto and remembered the serviteca. They built a home where the echo of the mysterious voice was relegated to the past, but it was never erased from Andrés's memory. Every time the wind blew through the neighborhood trees, he smiled, knowing that although fear had accompanied him, it had also guided him toward the life he now shared with María and their son.
