The Village of Two Memories

Remedios straightened it once, then again. The cardboard had warped over the years and would not stay against the whitewashed brick, even with two pins. In the photograph, Silvestre posed in an oversized jacket, chin raised as though he had been caught just as he was about to object to something. He had vanished seven years earlier. No one in San Isidro had seen him dead.

Every Day of the Dead, the village remembers people who died here but survived elsewhere.