Still
I’m folding the towels in thirds the way Señora Valdez likes them when the truck door slams outside.
Not a car door. A truck door. Heavier. I know the difference now. My hands keep folding. Thirds, then thirds again. The towel goes on the stack and I already have the next one.
Señora Valdez is at the stove. She doesn’t turn around. “¿Qué fue eso?”
“Nothing,” I say. Flat. I’ve had long enough to make my voice flat.
But my thumb is already on the phone in my pocket. I don’t take it out. I just find the button through the cloth, the way Dad showed me, back when my hands were too small for anything.
Footsteps on the walk. More than one set. Boots.
Señora Valdez sets the spoon down. She looks at me and her face changes, quick, like a cloud going over the yard. She’s known longer than me.
“Go in the back,” she says. “The little room.”
I don’t move.
“Mija. The back.”
That word. She says it because he can’t anymore.
The little room has no window. I get two steps down the hall and stop. There’s a mirror on the wall. My face slides across it, pale, too still. Mirror, signal, breathe. Dad’s words, for the car, and my hands go to ten and two on nothing at all. If I can’t see I can’t record. Dad said. Let the phone tell the truth when your mouth can’t.
The knock is three hits, hard, spaced out. The kind that isn’t asking.
I take the phone out. Press the button. The red dot comes on. I breathe. I hold it low, at my hip, the screen tipped up at the door.
Señora Valdez opens the door.
They fill the doorway. Masks over their faces, just the eyes. Black vests, white letters. The truck outside has no words on it at all.
“Time,” I say, so quiet it’s just breath. “It’s morning. I’m recording.”
I’m not eleven anymore. They don’t need to know what I am.
Señora Valdez says her name, clear. She says she has papers, the box on the shelf. One of them is already past her, boots on the floor she mopped this morning. She steps into the doorway and fills it, big as she can make herself, and she doesn’t look at me.
One of them looks at me.
Over the mask his eyes are blue. Faded, pale, like a flag left out in the sun. He looks down at the phone at my hip. He knows what it is.
I lift it. I bring it up level and I put him in the middle of the screen and I keep him there. I don’t look away. I don’t blink first.
He looks away.
They take Señora Valdez by the arm. Not rough. Just sure. Like moving a chair. She keeps her body between them and me the whole way, and the last thing she does before the light takes her is look at me and shake her head. Small. Once.
The door doesn’t close all the way. It drifts. The morning comes in cold across the floor.
I’m still holding the phone up at the empty doorway. Red dot on. My arm doesn’t shake. I don’t cry. I don’t know where it went.
The truck starts outside. Pulls away. Gets smaller.
The towels are on the counter, half the stack neat, half still in a pile. I put the phone down, still recording, pointed at nothing. I pick one up to fold.
Thirds. Then thirds again. Wrong. The edges won’t line up. I do it again and it’s still wrong and I do it again, faster, and my hands aren’t folding now, they’re pulling, twisting, and the towel’s a knot in my fists and I’m squeezing it like I could wring the morning out of it, like I could…
I stop.
I smooth it flat on the counter. Thirds. Then thirds again. I set it on the stack.
Neat. Even. Nobody would know.
I pick the phone back up.
“Time,” I say. “It’s still morning. I’m still here.”
The red dot’s still on.
I’m still breathing.
