I wandered through town without direction, feeling eyes follow me.
Some people recognized me.
I could see it in their faces.
In their whispers.
In the way they pulled their children aside as I passed.
Eleven years later, I was still the woman who had gone to prison.
Not the one who left.
Not the one who survived.
When I reached the old grocery store where my younger brother used to work as a teenager, I found a girl stocking sodas in the fridge.
I asked her about him.
She let out an awkward laugh.
“No one from that family works here anymore.
They say they moved to the other side of the valley, where they built new houses.”
New houses.
For illustration purposes only
The words burned through me like fire.
New homes for everyone.
Except me.
That night, I realized I had nowhere left to go.
I slept sitting behind the chapel, clutching my bag against my chest, the cold creeping down my spine like a slow blade.
At dawn, a stray dog stared at me from a few meters away.
Thin.
Still.
As if it saw in me the same kind of abandonment.
I followed its gaze toward the hills.
Then I remembered something the old women in the village used to say when I was a child:
that up there, among the brush and black stones, there was a cursed cave no one had dared to enter for decades.
They said those who went inside heard voices at night.
That the mountain kept what people wanted to hide.
I would have laughed once.
After eleven years in prison, a cursed cave didn’t seem like the worst thing anymore.
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