But in the end, only their absences in the shape of people remain. Carlos del Puente Stories

 But in the end, only their absences in the shape of people remain.

The bodies of the people who appear in this novel spin like the wheel in a hamster's cage, endlessly, senselessly, a grotesque carousel of... and unfinished business. The twins, Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates tried to recite Shakespeare. Their parents, Count Dracula and Lady Macbeth, argued during breakfast about whether the blood in the oatmeal was symbolic or just bad cooking. The uncles and aunts - a rotating cast that included Nurse Ratched, Pennywise the Clown and Patrick Bateman - appeared uninvited, offering critiques on child-rearing techniques that generally involved forbidden psychological torment and the occasional hidden knife.

The neighbors, Dexter Morgan lived next door and could often be seen cheerfully trimming his hedge in a way that suggested he imagined it was made of human limbs. Across the street, Annie Wilkes baked pies with a smile so sweet it could only be hiding something unspeakable. Family gatherings were less meetings and more crime scene negotiations, where everyone insisted they had the correct interpretation of morality while discreetly stealing the rusty silverware.

The twins' secret language wasn't just words, but a series of gestures: a wrist movement that meant "I know what you did," a head tilt that meant "they'll never find the body." They spoke in riddles that folded in on themselves, phrases that began as threats and ended as lullabies. They maintained, with absolute conviction, that the moon was made of Gruyère cheese and also that it didn't exist at all. This didn't bother them. Contradiction was their mother tongue.

At the center of it all was the grandmother, a composite creature who might have been part Miss Havisham, part Freddy Krueger, sitting in her rocking chair knitting what looked like a noose but could just as easily have been a scarf. She liked to remind everyone that absence was the only thing that ever remained, that people were just outlines waiting to be erased. The family nodded along, not because they agreed, but because disagreeing meant you might be next to disappear.

The police investigation began when one of the uncles, Anton Chigurh, didn't show up for Sunday dinner, unusual only because he'd never missed an opportunity to lecture about the philosophy of chaos while flipping a coin. Detective Rust Cohle arrived, looking like a man who had stared into the abyss so long he'd started dating it. He examined the empty chair where Anton should have been, the faint smell of gunpowder and existential dread still floating in the air. The family insisted he had never existed, that the chair had always been empty. The twins laughed in their secret language, a sound like bones rattling in a can.

The detective knew better than to trust any of them. He'd seen this before - families where the lies were so thick they became a second skin, where absence was all that remained. He questioned them one by one, getting answers that tangled into nonsense. Patrick Bateman claimed he'd been at a business meeting, though his suit, for once, suspiciously lacked bloodstains. Nurse Ratched said she'd been tending to patients, though her smile suggested the patients were now part of the floor. The grandmother just rocked and knitted, humming a tune that could have been a funeral dirge or a nursery rhyme.

Outside, the world turned like the wheel in a hamster's cage, relentless and going nowhere. The detective felt it too, the slow unraveling, the way reality curved around these people like light around a black hole. He wondered if he was even still real or just another absence waiting to happen.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the investigation collapsed. The file disappeared. The witnesses forgot. The family returned to their dinners, their arguments, their secret languages. The detective stood on the porch, staring at the empty street, realizing too late that he had become what he pursued - a silhouette, a shadow, a man-shaped hole in the world.

Because in the end, only their absences in the shape of people remain. And the wheel keeps turning.

By Carlos del Puente relatos