When Bone was born his mother insisted that he was a miracle boy, full of blessings and meant for great things. For as long as Bone could remember, he was convinced of the opposite. True he was smarter than most of his contemporaries (at least academically), but he lacked street smarts or malicia. The only reason he kept surviving against all odds, he thought, was to provide the gods with more opportunities to try new ways to screw up with human existence.

When he was born alive and kicking everyone was in awe, his mother used to tell. Most women in town delivered stillborns that spring. They had all got a strange fever that turned their bellies into boiling pots. Years later, reflecting about that anecdote, Bone concluded that maybe that explained his bad luck. He was an unpaid debt to the gods of death. His life enraged them and kept them coming at him with more outrageous forms of humiliation, affecting the whole country, taking everybody’s life but his.

Even Chavez was dead, and he had all the power, “red witches,” and resources to last a thousand years. Then, when everybody thought Chavez was the worst thing that could happen to any country, Maduro came. Bone was more than willing to offer his life if that stopped the gods’ sadistic game.

Bone was sure he was cursed. He did not think about it much, though. He was not going around invoking pestilences; shit just happened to him and those around him. That’s why he would have preferred to be single and sterile. Instead, the gods had him marry thrice and father half a dozen kids, all of which, except his only daughter, had left the country, just in time to avoid the post apocalyptic times they were living now.