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“The dead!” the women cried.

Vaqueros tumbled out of their siestas and drew their weapons and commenced firing on the little graveyard, shouting, “Kill the dead! Kill the dead!”

Women fainted.

Tomás ran outside, his pistol in his hand.

He saw his men shooting at the graveyard and he started firing, too.

“Where are they!” he bellowed. “Where are the bastards!”

Segundo stepped lively and let loose with two barrels of a shotgun.

“Apaches!” he yelled.

“Rurales!” hollered Teófano, and he popped off a round with his old revolver.

“The dead! The dead!” the old women sobbed.

“Jesus and Mary, the dead!”

“What?” Tomás yelled as he reloaded. “What!”

“Ave María Santísima, Purísima!” Tía Cristina the torta lady testified.

Buenaventura ran up to Tomás and shouted, “Who are we shooting at!”

“I don’t know!”

“Teresita!” one of the women was blubbering, kneeling in the dirt and striking herself in the chest, flinging dust in the air.

Tomás stepped to her, holding his pistol up and away from her face.

He shook her, stared into her eyes.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“She’s awake!” the woman bellowed.

“Who is?”

“She is.”

The woman pointed to the doors of the parlor.

“No.”

“No chingues,” Buenaventura cursed.

Tomás staggered into the parlor, and his pistol dropped from his hand and thudded on the floor.

Teresita sat in the middle of the table, unblinking, her face showing a vague, reptilian curiosity as she scanned the room. She looked at the candles, and the coffin, at him.

Gaby shoved in behind him. Segundo, children, Teófano, Buenaventura.

“What is happening?” Teresita asked.

Tomás sputtered.

“Oh no. No,” he said. “No, you must be kidding.”

Teresita yawned.

“Why am I on this table?” she asked.

Buenaventura whistled, and Gabriela felt faint and leaned on the doorframe.

“This is your wake,” Tomás managed to say.

“My wake?”

“You’re dead!”

“I am?”

“Oh Christ,” said Segundo.

She turned to stare at the coffin.

“And this? What is this, Father?”

“This is your coffin,” he said.

“No.”

She shook her head.

“I will not sleep there,” she said.

She looked at him with a mild expression.

She said: “Someone will soon die, though. You can use it then. Expect a funeral in five days.”

She lay back down and closed her eyes.

“It was a long trip,” she said.

Even Tomás, then, made the sign of the cross.

They led her to her room.

She was terribly cold. Her passing chilled the air as if they were taking a block from the ice wagon into the house. She never blinked. Her head turned on her neck like a machine as her eyes took in the alien details of her home. The family didn’t know she could see through them. Their flesh to her was a shadow, and their bones danced within, visible to her as legs seen through a dress when the sun is bright. And deeper, still: the marrow in their bones glowed like thin wires of fire. Their skulls each held a clot of light, a charcoal ember. The burning marrow caused their bones to gleam within their flesh like narrow pink lamps.

She said, “I am tired. I have come a long way. Have you been there yet?”

Tomás coughed. How was one to be a father to a dead girl? Did one scold her? Correct her?

In her room, she lay back on her bed. She stared at the ceiling and disregarded her weeping father, the trembling Gaby, and the terrified house girls.

She said, “I am thirsty.”

They brought her water. She gulped it. They brought another glass. She took it in both hands and gulped it, too. Then she closed her eyes.

She looked dead again, save for her breathing.

They backed out of her room, fled silently down the stairs, hid in different parts of the house alone, drawing the curtains and pulling down the blinds, unable to speak of this moment, afraid somehow to face the day.

The next day, they found her sitting in the chair in the corner of her room. She still wore the burial dress. When Gaby tried to help her remove it, Teresita languidly slapped her hands away. When they brought her food, she left the plates on the floor. She drank