The story
The dusty streets of the town held secrets that adults preferred to ignore, but that children always ended up discovering the hard way. That evening, once the sun had already slipped behind the Andean hills and shadows began stretching across the cobblestones, Esteban was walking home alone. The air was eerily quiet; not even the crickets dared break the stillness of the night.
Suddenly, without warning, the pitch-black road was swallowed by a blinding light. It wasn't the yellow flicker of a streetlamp or the white glare of headlights; it was a dense, almost solid glow that sprang from nowhere, washing over everything with an unnatural radiance. Esteban felt the air turn heavy, and as he looked up toward the source of that relentless brilliance, an odd pressure hit his face, making him feel as though his eyes were dilating far beyond their natural limits.
The next thing he knew was absolute nothingness. A gray void, a blackout in time where memory simply stopped recording the seconds or the hours.
Waking up was just as jarring as the flash. Esteban opened his eyes to find himself suddenly tucked under the covers of his own bed, in the apparent safety of his room. He had no memory of coming through the door, walking down the hall, or even feeling the cold wooden floor beneath his bare feet. His entire body vibrated with a dull echo, a sense of intrusion that never left him. Over the years, that isolated incident mutated into a chilling certainty, a quiet suspicion that he had been briefly ripped from this world by something incomprehensible.
That strange nocturnal visit seemed to open a door in his mind that never shut again. Every few months, with the punctual regularity of a cursed clock, the nightmares return to haunt his sleep. In his dreams, the sky tears open in apocalyptic shades of red, and creatures with impossible features descend through metallic mists. At times, the vision turns even more harrowing: he looks up at the parted heavens and watches the figure of Jesus descend to rescue his children in the midst of the final judgment, while he is left behind, condemned to wander a scorched and barren earth.
That flash in the street wasn't just a flash; it was the beginning of a journey from which, deep down, Esteban never truly returned.
