The story
During the years Mateo worked night shifts in the wards of a hospital out on the sabana, the high plateau region, he learned to recognize the texture of a bad omen. There was a particular heaviness in the air right before a patient took a turn for the worse, an icy draft that raised the hair on the back of his neck for no apparent reason in the deserted hallways. Back then, he believed he already knew every possible form of dread. But three years ago, that dark premonition slipped out of the hospital wards and crept into the most intimate corner of his home.
He was barely eight days away from having his life shattered, though at that moment he had no idea. He was lost in a heavy sleep when a vision seized his mind with the raw intensity of something happening right in front of him. In the dream, Mateo pushed open the door to an unfamiliar room, faintly lit by the pale glare filtering through a window. The air smelled damp and stifling. There, on an unmade bed, he saw Marcela, the mother of his young daughter, lost in the secret embrace of another man. The gestures, their conspiratorial breathing, and the exact position of their bodies carried such agonizing clarity that his soul shrank in his chest.
Mateo jolted awake, gasping for air as if he had just been pulled from a freezing well. His throat was parched and his heart was racing, hammering against his ribs with wild fury. A cold sweat drenched his forehead, plastering his shirt to his trembling frame. The darkness in the room was absolute, broken only by the slow, steady breathing coming from the other side of the mattress, where his partner and their little girl were supposed to be sleeping peacefully.
That was the moment the real nightmare began in the waking world. A paralyzing dread took hold of his muscles. Mateo felt a sickening terror at the thought of turning his head to the right. The fear of finding the space empty, or of discovering that the woman beside him no longer belonged to him, kept him completely frozen against the pillow. He spent hours with his eyes fixed on the concrete ceiling, terrified that turning to look would somehow make the catastrophe he had just dreamed real.
Fate, however, had already run its course. Exactly eight days passed after that night of anguish. Reality didn't waver or alter a single detail: the scene played out with relentless, geometric precision. The same unfamiliar room, the same dying light filtering through the curtains, and the undeniable confirmation of the betrayal, exactly as his mind had witnessed it a week before.
The breakup was immediate and final. Three years after that story came to an end, Mateo still looks upon lonely nights with unease, knowing that while his hospital shifts had taught him to fear the shadows, it was a revelation in his own bed that taught him the true meaning of terror.
