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Mother called me to dinner, but when I entered the kitchen, Father was waiting by my pulled-back chair, and my drawings had been scattered across the table like the disordered panels of a comic. The lamplight waned along the man’s outline, as if he were hiding in the blind spot of an alley.

I would escape. I turned around, but the woman stood in the way. She shoved the door, which slammed shut. Mother’s nose jutted out from her silver, disheveled hair while she rummaged through the cupboard of pots and jugs.

Father pointed to the chair. I advanced as if a rope were tugging at my chest. When I sat down, the chair’s legs groaned. The man leaned in. I shrank back. His breath warmed my hair, and his gaze fixed on me like a gun.

He pressed one of the drawings with his index finger. That sheet showed the house set against a backdrop of hills, where pines jutted out like the bristles of a carpet. The door of the house was guarded by Father—a minotaur that had broken out of his labyrinth. His body, studded with iron spikes, bulged as if several men were merged into one, and in the black smear of his face—a chasm—the fire of his breath lit up his two eyes. The monster would pounce on anyone who dared to look at the drawing.

“Is this supposed to be me?” Father said.

My guts writhed as if tormented by a week of constipation; I hunched and clutched my forearms to my abdomen. My vocal cords refused to cooperate. My heart pumped clotted blood.

Father grabbed some drawings and scrutinized them while murmuring as if damning some world to a curse. When he palm-struck the sheets back onto the table, a whirlwind of air scattered more papers from the epicenter.

“I feed you and give you a bedroom, you exist thanks to me, but you waste your time painting fantasy towns, drawing me as a monster.” He seized a drawing and flipped it toward me. The sheet crumpled under his fingertips. “Tall as a skyscraper and breathing fire. Ungrateful bastard.”

“They’re prettier,” I muttered in a hoarse voice.

My words had taken Father aback as if a dog had suddenly spoken.

“What did you say?”

I tried to swallow through my constricted throat.

“Those towns are prettier. Those people are kind to me.”

“They don’t exist. You have this house. Us. The cows, the sheep. Work that keeps you busy. If you even have time for your imagination to fly, it’s a sign you need a heavier burden.”

My head swayed. I was breathing in hiccups. Hunched over, I clutched my abdomen as my guts creaked like an old house. The lamplight, along with the foul smell of garlic and onions, were scraping on my brain.

Although I imagined myself running to my bedroom and hiding under the blankets, Father seized my head with his thick fingers, as if restraining a nervous sheep for shearing. A shudder shook my spine.

“We appeared on Earth to fulfill our role,” the man said. “For us to survive, all three must carry our share. Your job is to tend to some cows and sheep, serve me, and keep quiet. When you refuse to obey or only half obey, you harm us, your parents. But as long as you obey, you’ll avoid bruises. You’ll have a plate on the table and a bed. That’s enough.”

“It’s not.”

As Father emptied his lungs, his scorching breath singed a patch of my hair. The hand gripping my head prevented me from looking away from the drawings that covered the table. Mother appeared to my right, holding a bowl and a glass bottle filled with milk and smudged with fingerprints. The man cleared a space on the table in front of me, where the woman placed the bowl. She handed the bottle to Father. The arm that had been pinning me to the chair relaxed as the man gulped down the milk with the sound of a shark gobbling down live fish.

When Mother folded one of the drawings and tore it into four pieces, I trembled as if she had slashed me with a razor. She dropped the fragments into the bowl.

My lips quivered. If I blinked, my eyes would water and ruin my last glimpse of the drawing the woman had torn.

Father leaned close to me and spoke an inch from my ear.

“Insulting us will have consequences.”

I tried to turn my head toward the man, but his fingers tightened on my scalp, imprinting the five tips in red.

“Why are you like this, Father?” I said, my voice cracking. “Someone must have cursed you. It should have been different.”

“Curses don’t exist, you moron. Such nonsense occurs to someone who wastes hours drawing, thinking up fantasies. An idle mind eats itself like an empty stomach.”

Mother had crammed the bowl with scraps white on one side and drawn on the other. The meaning of the strokes and colors was lost like in the scattered pieces of a puzzle. The woman folded the last drawing with her bony fingers, and tore it apart.

How long would it take me to glue these fragments back together?

Father’s free hand seized my wrist. He turned my hand over on the table, opened my fingers, and closed them around the warm metal of a lighter.

“Burn them.”

A jolt of ice pierced my heart as my muscles convulsed in cramps. I had to break free, yet his thick fingers squeezed my scalp as if drilling into my skull. Although ever since I’d drawn that first scene I’d known one day I would lose them, I had convinced myself I’d postpone that moment until I died.

“No.”

When Father yanked my hair, my scalp flared with pain, drawing a scream from me. One more tug and my skull would be stripped bare. The man panted against my face. Growled like a dog.

“Burn them.”

Tears welled from the corners of my eyes, painting burning streaks on my cold skin.

“They’re better than this.”

Father slammed my right cheekbone against the table with a bang. The impact reverberated through my skull, rattling my brain. My vision went white. Was I still in the kitchen?

The man shifted his weight onto the hand that was pushing my head, and on my crushed cheekbone, the fibers covering the bone were tearing apart. The right half of my face boiled; the burning spilled over the bridge of my nose, reddening the view of that eye.

“You’ll be useful to me even with broken bones,” Father said.

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “A Little God in My Hands” by Swans.