"Escaped? Who?"
"Mika Mendes, 18. That patient in ward no.301. Sir, I made sure she had the sleeping pills tonight. How--"
"That patient who was filing missing complaints of people who didn't exist?"
"Yes sir. The Hospital's reputation is in danger...
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Vineville
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Chapel of Our Lady of Monterrey, Vineville
🎶 Oh, Sin City's cold and empty(oh) No one's around to judge me (oh) 🎶
---screeches the loudspeakers at the oldest chapel of the town today, loud enough to split your ears. The next hill echoes it perfectly, and the wind brings the grumpy curses of all the villagers on it who have nothing to do with the screeching but are being disturbed notwithstanding.
Townsfolk mark an ancient custom today, Saturday, which has been weekly observed since 1939, when a gang of alchemists turned-coal-robbers founded this town and named it Vineville.
Saturdays.
I love Saturdays.
The whole town smells like spices on Saturdays. Bright faced neighbors and scrawny teenagers rise early, bathe in spite of the cold, suit up and pass by my window in the morning. Around their wrists, they bear woven wooden baskets full of sugar skulls called calaveras, Aztec marigolds, champagne or rice wine, and clusters of apples and citruses.
Children laugh in the golden light as they scoot ahead, chasing butterflies and cotton seeds. Or real tiny fairies, as little as your thumbnail, as thin as a dry insect, and always vanishing like a secret when you blink. No adult ever acknowledge them as real, but deep inside, they know that anything is possible in Vineville.
This town, you see, has this strange side, full of fairies and eeriness, which some worship, some dream of, and some just dismiss as unreal.
I count them go with 'Concise Physics' for students of the fifth grade, open before me. Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty...all towards the graveyard.
I wish I could have been among them.
But Mother hates the procession. Even closes the drawing room windows to keep their frankincense and burnt flower petals out of the house.
She has developed some sort of acute disgust to religion ever since her miscarriage three years ago, which she keeps on blaming for tearing apart her stormy marriage, full more of screamings and throwing things at each other, than love.
