Like Broken Glass

by Madeline Rosales

An Honorable Mention from the 2024 Flash Contest

It was the broken glass that took my husband’s life. That was all it was, just a little piece of broken glass from an old syringe, slicing through his palm during our morning search through the recyclables. We lived by the basurero, the garbage dump in Zone 3. It was where all the waste of Guatemala City went, although it was never waste to us. Like everyone else in the neighborhood, we turned plastic for a good price, collected the food scraps, and burned the newspaper and boxes on cool nights. We were happy. 

But suddenly came this broken glass, and the blood poured onto his pants, and the white tendons stuck out from his flesh like loose cables or maggots coming up for air. We pressed the wound tightly in strips of a pillowcase, but the infection grew; it was in his blood. By the end of the week, we knew that it had spread down his chest and through his organs. 

I read to him from our Bible, the Spanish one from our wedding, but he told me I should take up the English one instead. It was a gift from the missionaries, and their word has always been more sacred than ours. Yet the English meant nothing to us, and many of their names had been changed—from María to Mary, José to Joseph—it was confusing, it was wrong. It was nothing at all like the true book of God. And so we started crying together, feeling like sinners. I hugged my husband. I hadn’t known then that it would end up being for the last time. Later that night, he passed in a cold sweat beneath layers of old sheets. 

I lay above the body for two days, my head against his chest as though a heartbeat would come before the government worker arrived in plastic gloves and a white mask to take it away. I lay beside the imprint of the body for a long time. I’ll be waiting for you when you come back, I would say. Any day now. It must have been weeks. Eventually, the imprint faded, and I lay only beside empty air. I would look over, telling myself it was the space of his memory, but I could not fit his memory into that tiny spot. 

It was empty air. 

When my children asked me where I wanted to go—Boulder, New Orleans, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles—I remember scoffing. If they were all truly sanctuaries, I said, then what difference did it make? Just take me there, please. Take me away.

Published April 27th, 2025