Marisol
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 3
Efraín kept his word. The next morning he woke her before the sun and handed her not the .22 but the Mauser, a scoped 98 that had belonged, until three weeks earlier, to a government officer who had no further use for it.
“This is not a toy for tin cans anymore,” he said. “Everything I taught you as a game, you will now do as work.”
The training changed shape entirely. Where before he’d let her miss for the pleasure of watching her figure it out, now there was no room left for that kind of patience. He drilled her on distances that mattered — two hundred yards, four hundred, distances where a man on the road was smaller than her thumbnail held at arm’s length. He taught her to read a truck’s suspension for the weight it carried, to tell an empty transport from one riding low with soldiers packed into the bed. He taught her to build a hide from nothing — brush and patience and the discipline to not move even when a fly walked across her eyelid — and he made her hold that hide for hours at a time until stillness stopped being an effort and became simply a thing her body knew how to do.
“A moving target dies from being seen,” he told her. “A watcher dies from being felt. You will learn to be neither.”
She learned to move her rifle a centimeter at a time, so slow the eye couldn’t catch the motion even watching for it. She learned to time her breathing to the sounds already in the world — a rooster, a passing cart, anything loud enough to swallow the small sounds a body made — so that nothing she did ever arrived alone.
Three weeks after the barn, Higinio came for her before dawn.
“You’re ready enough,” he said, which was not the same as saying she was ready, and both of them knew it.
~ ☆ ~
The ridge above the government road was a two-hour climb in the dark, and by the time the sky started going gray behind the mountain Marisol’s legs had stopped complaining and gone numb in the way legs did after enough climbing. Higinio set her into position himself — a shallow depression behind a fallen log, brush pulled across to break her outline, the Mauser resting on a folded blanket so the barrel wouldn’t ring against stone.
“Three days,” he said. “You watch. You count trucks, you count what’s riding in them, you note the time they pass. You do not shoot unless I tell you to shoot, or unless not shooting means you die instead. Understood?”
“Understood.”
He left her a canteen, a handful of tortillas wrapped in cloth, and nothing else, and by midmorning she understood why the wait itself was the test as much as anything that might come after it. The road below was empty for hours at a stretch. The sun climbed and the log at her shoulder heated under it and a column of ants found the edge of her boot and used it as a bridge for the better part of an afternoon, and she learned to let all of it happen without answering any of it with movement.
The first truck came at 6:40 in the evening of the first day. She logged it the way Efraín had taught her — time, direction, how it sat on its springs — and let it pass.
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