Tío Bruno, la familia & the Fish Lady

Forgotten Memories

Once the nervousness from the wacky news diminished, he began to feel heavy and...sick? Since there was no passageway behind the painting like in the old casita, he crept behind the garden facing the river and nestled himself between two bushes that Isabela had recently grown. Upon sitting down with the mild urge to vomit, he hadn't even realized his eyes were brimmed with tears. What in Dios' name was this reaction he had to something so trivial? Bruno leaned his back against casita and stared off into the palm tree canopies with the river in sight.

His mind drifted to the miracle candle and how it had changed his self-perception from the age of five. Protecting Mirabel was something he would never regret, but how she was treated in the end before now was something he did. He wouldn't dare admit it, but his gift was what allowed him to hate every fiber of his being. No. His father's sacrifice was not the reason he hated himself, it was the backlash from the people in his life who couldn't bear accepting what the future held in store for them. What hurt most was that the people closest to him scapegoated him for nearly forty years, and he hadn't dared thinking that was true if he was indeed deserving of it.

His mamá and hermanas promised they would be there for him. Although they failed, he still loved them more than words could convey and was grateful for their efforts to be better. He saw his sobrinos when they were young, but now they were all essentially adults. He had met his youngest, Antonio, just this year. Watching them grow up through the holes and cracks of casita was heart-wrenching in itself. When he bobbed his head along to his familia's song about how they didn't talk about him, the pain he felt was dull then, but something as small as an admiration letter compounded with watching casita crumble and confronting family issues in the past few months caused it to all bubble to the surface. He couldn't wrap his head around the idea that some stranger could appreciate his presence when he disappointed his own family. Instead, he convinced himself that this was part of the pranks some of the villagers had pulled in the past.

This wasn't the first letter he had gotten. One time when he was a teenager, he received an anonymous written threat telling him to stop spending time with Naomi, a girl he befriended almost forty years ago. Unlike most of the people he'd given fortunes to, she didn't think Bruno was bad luck; they had similar superstitions and shared a love for acting, but after the day he opened the letter, she avoided him like the plague. Naomi and the few other childhood friends he made gradually disappeared, already leaving him alone before the time he left to protect Mirabel.

The last ten years were a blur. His mind wouldn't let him remember them vividly enough until the past couple months. He remembered whisper-singing one-hundred ten "Happy Birthdays" and ten more to himself without Pepa and Julieta. He sat through over three-thousand dinners while hovering over his hand-drawn plate adorned with the scraps of food he was able to take from the kitchen without getting caught. Not once did he miss a gift ceremony. Although he made a lot of sweet and adorable rat friends along the way, it didn't take away the sorrow he felt knowing that his life, family, and happiness could only be seen through a crack in the wall. Although his family hurt him, it hurt more being away from them. Ten years was not something he could buy back. Isolation after his last vision did not help his already-existing obsessive compulsions that developed as a result of internalizing himself as a bad omen. Sure he was a bit socially awkward and couldn't help knocking on wood or throwing a little salt behind him when he needed to keep his nerves at bay, but he only ever cared about those around him. Yet it seemed that he only brought pain to those he earnestly tried to bring kindness to. He lied to himself that he was always at fault for the way people treated him, but he internalized it as the truth.

Bruno wandered down to the river, curled in on himself, and cried.