Miranda in one of her dreams, must have heard the three women speaking to her and asked herself in what dark backward of father-less time she fled to in fear. In the past she'd wondered into dreams and been told that were she to become aware of the fact that she was dreaming than she could control the dream, become that quetzal with its red and green plumage scattered about its head and flee, burn through the walls, before the voices beckoned her to walk through the empty corridors. By that time she wouldn't know what was dreaming and what was waking. By then she would hear them calling first with a whisper and then amongst themselves, the laughter, and her name, in "wonder," and her body would follow. ¿Hace cuanto tiempo no has venido a vernos? ¡Ingrato que sos! Veni, veni. In desperation she would think of ways to fall through the open cracks of the floors or crawl beneath a door como esas cucarachas que mamá said had crawled into her aunt´s ear and eaten half of the ear drum, but she would crawl into her bed, into her study, into her life and close the door behind her, as she´d always done. As she´d always been told to do. How easy it could be. But night would have a way of seeping into her skin like the voices and she'd know at that moment that even if it was a dream, it was the only thing she had now, this journey to them and to waking.

Yo también lo he hecho, lo he comenzado a escribirlo en las paredes, remind yourself, porque, sí, lo he oído mucho, lo he visto mucho, lo he entendido mucho, por mucho tiempo, oído mucho, pero tomaré lo que me han contado, como mi madre, y escribirlo en las paredes par que no se borre, tintado por cualquier cosa que mi madre me ha contado, lo que todas me han contado, y lo dejaré allí como esas sombra quemadas de la gente ya huyendo y suspendidos en el aire. Pero al final ya he hecho la cosa tan estúpida que los gringos hacen en contarles a todos, a todo el mundo si pudrían, la manera en que una familia sufre, there is no need to tell everyone what one has suffered, why be so stupid? ¿Por qué escribirlo, esta cosa que tú estás tan dispuesta hacer, por qué contárselo a toda la gente, nada mas recuérdatelo, cuéntatelo a ti misma, see, that's why I tell it to you like a secret, you will always remember? ¿Por qué contarle cualquier cosa a cualquiera? Ya es tiempo. Because we are all traumatized and it has affected us a lot, but one can't keep returning back to where one began, that is to be like the crab, like reversing and in life you can't keep reversing - Ya es tiempo. Pero ¿por qué hacerlo entonces? Remind yourself. Here, here it is, I tell it to you, what I begin to think, what I begin to ask myself, remembering that night in which after so many years I again met Trinidad. But you begin to question if you remember or don't remember that night in which you had lain next to this older woman Trinidad, waiting for the moment when you couldn't hear her breath you'd begin to think that perhaps the time had come for her death after having lived so long, after having suffered so much (could it have been a dream or a story?). And it was that same day that you sat next to her looking at the reflection in the television in her glasses and imagining that if what she saw were only the images or only the colors so different from her memories like a blind woman always imagining the complete body piece by piece. But, perhaps it didn't even matter to her. And why would it matter to you? And you remained quiet waiting for her because you'd heard so much told of her life and you waited for when she herself would tell it to you and know what was lie and what was truth and what existed in the solitary space between both. But you always waited. You that were already from another world, another time, sometimes feeling part of that other world of telling that you couldn't even remember, but which you always had in the words of your women always telling you these their rosary beads, in the back of your mind that always belonged to that world. And you denied it when you spoke that other language of the gringos, that language so cold (of the 'intellectual' you told them) preparing yourself to abandon that world that was like air for them, even if it was a bit rotten. And you were already like a ghost, having to make a step backward to take a step forward because they told it to you so often and you couldn't separate what was yours from what was theirs and that's how it went.

It seemed, you told it to yourself like those endless, deformed beads, that this man, Brigido Ramirez who came from who knows where, Honduras, left his woman and his, who knows how many children, over there, fleeing from something or someone and he got with Trinidad, not by her own decision, but by force and they had many children in that backwoods they called Mecetas. And he had livestock, and he had land, and he had his farm, that after the war between the United States and who knows who else he was left without anything and with many children. And the woman who should have been the companion and love of his life was the one that he beat like a mule without a where or a why.

And all the daughters saw and heard, but nobody told them. And then came the fall and the poverty. They all lived together and he harvested what he could and then he died. From diabetes? Who knows, but the only ones who were left were the women and the the boys playing the role of the Father and then they separated and many came to The North and nobody knew anything else about the dispossessed.