Marisol
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2
The war did not announce itself. It arrived the way weather did in the highlands — a pressure in the air before anyone could name what was wrong, and then, one morning, smoke where there hadn’t been smoke the day before.
Marisol was fourteen when she first smelled it on the wind instead of the usual woodsmoke and wet coffee leaves — something sharper, something that clung to the back of the throat in a way that made her stomach turn before her mind understood why.
Efraín was already outside, standing at the edge of the yard with his hand shading his eyes, looking toward the ridge two farms over.
“Papa. What is it?”
He didn’t answer right away. That alone told her more than any answer could have.
By that evening the whole valley knew. Soldiers had come through the Alvarado land at dawn, and by the time they left there was nothing left standing that could be called a house, and Alvarado himself was among the men the neighbors carried down the mountain wrapped in a horse blanket because there was nothing better to wrap him in.
Efraín went to help with the burial. He came back after dark with dirt still packed under his fingernails and sat at the table without touching the plate Marisol set in front of him.
“Papa. Eat.”
“They are not going to stop at Alvarado’s fence line,” he said, as though she’d asked him something else entirely.
“What does that mean?”
He looked at her then, really looked, the way he sometimes did when he was deciding how much of the truth a person could carry. She was fourteen. She would be fifteen by the time the rains came again. He seemed to weigh that against something else — against what he’d already put in her hands over the years, against the rifle in the closet and everything he’d spent teaching her to do with it — and he set his fork down.
“It means the war has stopped being a thing that happens to other people’s farms.”
He told her, for the first time plainly, what the men who came through at night actually were. Not friends exactly, though he’d called them that in front of her for years. Farmers, mostly, some of them men she’d known her whole life, who had picked up rifles because the alternative was to wait in their houses for the same soldiers who’d burned Alvarado’s land. He told her they called themselves defenders. He told her some of them had died already, quietly, in ways the valley didn’t discuss over breakfast.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because there was nothing you could have done with it before now.”
“And now?”
He didn’t answer that one at all, not that night. He only reached across the table and set his rough hand over hers, the way he had a hundred times over a rifle stock, and let the silence answer for him.
~ ☆ ~
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