The story
Years ago, in the dusty and hot streets of Cimitarra, Santander, reality tended to blur when you least expected it. Joaquín, a sun-weathered countryman with a shifty gaze, possessed a strange and shadowy affinity with those who had already crossed the border of life. It wasn't a gift he wanted; it was more like a silent burden that ambushed him in the languid afternoons and freezing early mornings.
One heavy-breezed afternoon, while crossing the town's main park, Joaquín saw Ramiro, a local acquaintance, with absolute clarity. He was walking with his usual unhurried pace, wearing his same old ruana, a traditional woolen poncho, accompanied by two other relatives. Joaquín greeted him with a slight nod, surprised to see him back in town. However, the next day, terror ran cold through his veins when he ran into Ramiro's family members and asked about him. The pale faces of the people he was talking to revealed the unthinkable: the man had been missing for days. Days later, the horror was confirmed when authorities found the lifeless bodies of the three men, secretly buried on a nearby finca, a small country farm, after being murdered by the manager.
Time passed, but the apparitions didn't stop. On another occasion, as evening fell, Joaquín saw an old acquaintance cross the street, right in front of the municipal cemetery's entrance. Without a second thought, he waved warmly at him, expecting a response that never came. The man kept walking in complete silence, his gaze lost on the horizon. Hours later, when he mentioned it to his brother-in-law, the man stared at him with wide-open eyes and dropped a chilling truth on him: that man had already been eight days in the ground, buried right there in that very graveyard.
The most disturbing premonitions, however, happened during his long and lonely shifts as a night watchman in a residential area of the town. In the stillness of the early morning, when the air smelled of moisture and cold earth, Joaquín suddenly felt an ominous hunch that gave him goosebumps. Shortly after, he saw two black hearses pass in front of his security post, slowly moving toward nowhere. That vision left him with a bad feeling that wouldn't go away with a tinto, a small, strong black coffee. The omen came true the following Friday, when a neighborhood resident died suddenly.
But the worst was yet to come. Fifteen days later, on a random early morning, an ice-cold shudder ran down Joaquín's spine while he was making his rounds. Nervousness was choking him, making his heart pound violently. With a shaky voice, he warned his shift partners that something terrible was about to happen in the area. He wasn't wrong. Minutes later, the screech of brakes and a dull thud broke the night's silence: an out-of-control buseta, a local passenger bus, ran over and instantly killed a woman just a few yards from the security guard booth. Joaquín understood then that in that town in Santander, the living and the dead shared the same space, separated by nothing more than the blink of an eye.
