The story
Hernán had been delivering envelopes through downtown Bogotá for twelve years, and he knew every loose cobblestone on Carrera Séptima. That afternoon the sky wore that heavy gray that warns of a downpour, and he walked fast, the leather suitcase thudding against his hip, thinking only about getting to the last office before it closed.
When he turned a corner he almost ran straight into a woman.
It was only a second, but he saw her whole, like you see someone in a photograph. She was tall, wearing an old‑style gray coat, leather gloves, and a small bag slung over her forearm. Her hair was pulled back with a care no one usually takes on an ordinary Tuesday. Her lips were painted a dark red; her eyes were lined with firm strokes. And her skin… her skin was the thing that didn’t fit. Not just pale, but white like the paper of a letter that’s been stored far too long.
“Sorry, ma’am, watch out,” Hernán managed to say, stepping around her.
She didn’t move. She looked him up and down, unperturbed, with the calm of someone who already knew he would pass by. Then, in a low voice that cut cleanly through the bus noise, she said,
“Too bad it wasn’t you.”
Hernán kept walking two, three steps, on pure inertia. The sentence hit him a moment later, like the first drop of rain. “Too bad it wasn’t you… what?” He turned around to ask her.
The sidewalk was empty.
There were no gates nearby, no open shops, no taxi idling. Just the long street, the minutes‑seller keeping his table on the opposite corner, and a faint scent of dried‑flower perfume dissolving in the damp air. Hernán stood still until the seller shouted at him, asking if he was feeling all right.
He didn’t sleep that night. He ran the phrase through his mind a thousand times, trying to find a kind meaning, and found none. The next day, in the newspaper someone had left on the café table, he read that the previous afternoon a man had been hit by a car two blocks from that corner, roughly at the time he had passed. No name was given. Only the age: the same age Hernán was.
Since then he changes sidewalks whenever he sees a woman in a gray coat. And even though he tells himself it was a crazy story, a joke, a coincidence, there’s something he can’t explain: the woman didn’t seem to threaten him. She seemed disappointed.
