Grave of Hummingbirds Read Online Free

began. At first soft, it grew louder, as if one, then dozens of claws were scraping the ceiling boards.
    Everyone looked up, except Alberto.
    “But a llama isn’t a camel. She’s a . . . ,” he said, coughed, and then shuddered. “Camelid.” He shook his head, as though to free it of water after a swim. “She was bitten by a puma. Sweet Caroline fought for the sheep. Maybe . . .” His voice dropped to a whisper, so that again his interrogator had to lean in close. “Maybe I should have fought like that for her.” He squeezed his eyes shut, and a memory leaked out of the corners, streaking tracks through the sweat and blood.
    As protective as she was, Sweet Caroline was no match for a hungry cat. Alberto had shot the puma with his father’s gun.
    The scratching in the ceiling intensified. It sounded like the purr of a hundred or more small, beating wings against the roof.
    One of the cylindrical blue-white globes shattered.
    Spooked, the guards ducked, and the smoker leaped from his chair. They whirled at a loud knock on the door. With a growl and a curse, Alberto’s interrogator lunged across the room to snatch it open. He stepped out, then came back for his jacket and shrugged it on. Just before he left again, he eyed the ceiling and snarled at the men, “When we’re done, see to those fucking bats. Birds. Whatever.”
    Once he’d left, the room settled. The guards grew nervous, eyeing the ceiling.
    Alberto sank into his aching joints. His pulse gradually steadied as he concentrated on his twitching muscles. The second hand of the clock on the wall clicked again and again against the same minute mark before it stopped.
    On the dark insides of his lids, Alberto saw himself as a child, playing outside with a group of five-year-olds, knees dusty and bare feet crusted with mud. His mother, Penelope, boiled water on the stove for eggs and pulled fresh-baked potato bread from the oven. Onion soup simmered, and steam rose off the red kernels of fresh corn in a bowl on a wooden table. She wore a white cotton smock and had drawn her long, tangled hair into a thick ponytail with one of his father’s broken shoelaces.
    When she called to Alberto, the fragrances of food brought him and his three friends to the door in a stampede while behind them their mothers moved toward the house at a slower pace. One carried a bowl of tomatoes and aji peppers, another a length of calico, and the third a flask of chicha morada , thickened with pineapple chunks and flavored with cinnamon and cloves.
    In the buzzing lights of Búho’s central police station, Alberto imagined the taste of fruit on his tongue, instead of blood—apple pieces and pepino he nibbled while sitting on his mother’s lap during the meetings she’d held at their house.
    It was late evening when they came for her. His father was playing chess with Rufo at the café. Alberto lay in bed as Penelope read to him from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s El principito .
    His grandmother, arthritic and given to bouts of uncontrollable weeping, was visiting and planned to spend the night. Although she lived nearby, a late walk home up a steep hill was out of the question. The old woman sat alone at the table, listening to the melody of Penelope’s voice, when sadness took hold again.
    Alberto watched the tears slide silently down her face. They appeared silver in the light.
    He had just begun to nod off when they heard the stutter of gunfire across the bridge. Penelope jumped up and his grandmother stood, leaning heavily on the table. Alberto had a hiding place: a depression in the wall behind an ancient closet, and his mother wedged him in before dragging the furniture back into place. She didn’t have time to close the cupboard, and he could see through a hole in the wood.
    Three men broke down the door and burst into the house. Alberto’s grandmother stepped in front of Penelope, pushing her into the corner and screaming for help.
    No one came.
    They broke her