When little Ramón awoke at the hospital, the first face he saw was his mother’s. “What happened, Mommy?”
“Gabe, I ...,” her voiced quaked at first but then she gathered enough strength to utter, “He’s dead.”
The police had ruled out manslaughter; the nice officers agreed it was a simple case of self-defense, a battered mother protecting herself and her son from an abusive partner. During the ensuing struggle, the knife she had used to defend herself had ended up embedded in his jugular vein. Gabe bled to death on the spot.
Ramón smiled. Gabe was no more, life would soon get better. All it proved to Ramón was that sometimes you needed a sacrifice to turn things in your favour. And his mother had gifted Gabe’s life to the gods.
The first thing he asked his mother was if she could get him
