tics of Eternal Twilight: Why Shadows Deserve Health Care,” which Felix and Felicity set to music using a theremin and a kazoo orchestra. The family’s debates crescendoed into operatic absurdity: “The eclipse is a masterpiece!” shrieked Esmerelda, hurling a candelabra at Barnabas. “You’re just jealous because your beard photosynthesizes better than your ideas!” “It’s a celestial dictatorship!” Barnabas retorted, ducking behind a taxidermied wombat. “Even the moths are writing self-deletion notes!” “Moths are overrated,” sniffed Felicity, adjusting her eyepatch made of smoked glass. “They’re just winged nihilists.” The device’s inaugural test flooded the town with a light so harsh it caused existential sunburns—patches of skin that glowed with the unsolicited wisdom of Socrates. Reginald’s sundials burst into flames, screaming, “We told you so!” in ancient Babylonian. The twins’ ear-conjoined brains short-circuited, leaving them temporarily convinced they were a failed telepathy experiment from 1967. In the aftermath, the eclipse retaliated by birthing a second eclipse, smaller and petulant, which nested inside the original like a Russian doll with a grudge. Time curdled. Tuesdays became Wednesdays’ drunken hallucinations. The family’s parlor rug grew teeth and ate Aunt Drusilla’s favorite limerick (“There once was a hen from Nantucket…”). Barnabas, now a pariah, took refuge in the attic with the expired candles, who comforted him by whispering, “Every flame passes away, but the darkness? The darkness is tenure-track.” He opened a vein and let his crimson liquid ink a treatise titled “Apology to the Shadows: A Coward’s Manifesto,” which the family used to line the birdcage of their anarchist parrot, Nietzsche Jr. The eclipse, satisfied, settled in for another few centuries. The Pembertons adapted. Felix and Felicity opened a blackout-themed bed-and-breakfast. Reginald took up knitting timelines out of unraveled sweaters. Esmerelda married the scarecrow in a midnight ceremony officiated by a moth priest. And Barnabas’s left hand, having secured its union demands, retired to a beach in the Bahamas that didn’t exist anymore, sipping margaritas made of existential salt.
The town of Ventrílocuo floated on a lake of mercury, its cobblestones glinting like misplaced teeth in a cosmic jaw. Its inhabitants, a genealogy of contradictions, resided in houses that leaned away from one another in perpetual disgust, their roofs sprouting chimney smoke that curled into cursive profanities. At the center of this delirium stood the Pándemo family, a clan whose crimson was less a tree and more a thorny shrub grafted with radioactive lichen. The patriarch, Don Cosme Pándemo, had a face like a crumpled map of a conflict no one remembered, his left eye replaced by a pocket watch that ticked backward to spite linear time. His wife, Doña Serafina, communicated exclusively through the language of moths, their wings dusted with phosphorescent pollen that spelled out prophecies no one cared to decipher. Their children—twins Lázaro and Lázara, born conjoined at the shadow—argued ceaselessly over whether existence was a palindrome or a poorly written limerick. The uncles and aunts were no less peculiar. Tío Ramón, who believed himself a reincarnated chandelier, hung from the ceiling during dinner, rattling with indignation whenever someone mentioned electricity. Tía Clemencia, a woman made entirely of expired lottery tickets, wandered the streets reciting numbers that corresponded to the screams of distant stars. The grandparents, a blend of biological and marital accidents, included Abuelo Fortunato, a retired anarchist who planted bombs filled with confetti in mailboxes, and Abuela Griselda, who knitted sweaters from her own hair and claimed they could ward off meteors. The central tension arose from the family’s feud over the Ojo Adormecido, a mythical eye embedded in the town’s cathedral, said to gaze into the void where lost thoughts congregated. The eye, according to legend, could awaken only when someone dared to walk backward through the seven dimensions of errancia—a state of purposeful wandering that defied all maps. The Pándemos had spent generations debating whether to rouse the eye. Don Cosme insisted it would restore order to the town’s liquefied chronology. Doña Serafina’s moths fluttered in dissent, spelling out catástrofe in glowing loops. The twins, meanwhile, dueled with spoons, each clang punctuated by existential axioms. It was Lázaro—or perhaps Lázara; their voices merged like radio static—who first suggested prying the eye open with a crowbar forged from existential doubt. The uncles and aunts erupted. Tío Ramón’s crystals shattered in protest. Tía Clemencia’s numbers spiraled into a Fibonacci scream. Abuelo Fortunato tossed a confetti explosive into the fireplace, turning the room into a snow globe of futility. Amid the chaos, the youngest cousin, Amadeo, a boy with a head full of tumbleweeds and a heart full of misplaced commas, slipped out to enact the heresy himself. Amadeo’s journey to the cathedral was a ballet of absurdity. Sidewalks yawned open to reveal basements where pianos played requiems for extinct insects. Clouds rained tadpoles that sprouted legs midair and scampered into sewers. By the time he reached the Ojo Adormecido, his pockets were full of dehydrated tears and a parrot had nested in his left ear, reciting sonnets in reverse. The eye, a colossal orb veined with fissures resembling subway maps, loomed over him. Its pupil was a vortex of static, humming a tune that made his bones vibrate at the frequency of regret. He raised the crowbar—a relic he’d stolen from the attic where the family stored its grudges—and struck. The eye shuddered. A sigh escaped its cornea, carrying the scent of burnt dictionaries. Then, it opened. What poured forth was not light, but a thick syrup of errancia, a liquid paradox that dissolved the cathedral’s walls into origami cranes. The town of Ventrílocuo began to unravel. Don Cosme’s pocket watch exploded, spewing gears that burrowed into the ground like metallic ticks. Doña Serafina’s moths combusted into miniature supernovae, their ashes spelling I already told you in the sky. The twins, mid-argument, fused into a single being that spoke in perfect iambic pentameter, a harmony that annoyed even the clouds. Amadeo, now half-solid and half-metaphor, stumbled through the collapsing dimensions. The awakened eye pursued him, its gaze turning sidewalks into quicksand and citizens into abstract sculptures. Tía Clemencia’s lottery tickets decoded into obituaries. Tío Ramón, unhinged from the ceiling, rolled through the town square like a tumbleweed of glass and regret. The grandparents’ sweaters unraveled, releasing a plague of metaphorical moths that devoured every perhaps and maybe from the townsfolks’ vocabulary, leaving them stranded in declarative doom. By dawn, Ventrílocuo had become a diorama of its former self, a snow globe shaken by the hand of a bored god. The Pándemo family, now a collective of mismatched limbs and unresolved arguments, huddled in what remained of the town square—a patch of grass that grew in hexagons. The Sleepy Eye, having exhausted its wrath, closed again, but its lid remained slightly ajar, a perpetual wink at the folly of seeking direction in a universe that preferred to meander. Amadeo, now more metaphor than boy, sat on the edge of a nonexistent well, listening to the parrot in his ear recite the final sonnet. It ended with a line that tasted of salt and unsent letters: To wander is to breathe; to awaken the eye is to drown in the breath.
The day the clocks began melting, Elías Deshistorizador III sat at the head of the mahogany table, spooning lavender-infused honey into his tea while his twin brothers, Polidoro and Polidoro—for they shared not only a face but a name, having refused differentiation at birth—argued over whether time was a sneeze postponed or a taxidermied owl. Their disagreement was not philosophical but practical. Polidoro the First insisted that history, like a sneeze, was a spasm of inevitability, while Polidoro the Second contended it was a stuffed bird with glass eyes, forever watching but never blinking. Their mother, Dame Hortensia of the Perpetual Mothball Aura, interjected by hurling a butter sharp object at the wall, where it stuck quivering beside the portrait of her late father-in-law, a man who had famously attempted to erase his own shadow and succeeded so thoroughly that the family had dined on it for weeks, fried with garlic and regret.
Elías sipped his tea. The honey tasted of forgotten summers and the sweat of bureaucrats. He had inherited his title, Deshistorizador Oficial de la República de los Recuerdos Inconvenientes, not by merit but by a clerical error in 1987, when a dyslexic bureaucrat mistook dentista for deshistorizador on his lineage certificate. His duty was clear: to unknit the sweaters of history, to pluck the threads of what was until only the fuzz of what might have been remained. His tools were not textbooks but a brass tuning fork tuned to the frequency of collective amnesia and a pocketwatch filled with liquid paradox that dripped upward when held to the light.
The trouble began with Uncle Federico, a man shaped like a question mark who spoke exclusively in palindromes. A man, a plan, a canal: Panama! he barked, slamming his fist on the table, rattling the cutlery into a fugue of clattering dissent. Federico had always opposed Elías’s work, believing history to be less a tapestry than a poorly organized sock drawer. His latest grievance was existential: If Elías erased the historians’ history, what would become of the sockless? The uncles and aunts—Tía Margarita, who communicated via origami spiders, and Tío Ramón, who had replaced his skeleton with a coat rack in 1963—nodded in unison, their movements synchronized to the hum of the refrigerator, which tonight was humming the Argentine national anthem backward.
Elías’s father, Don Hermenegildo, a clockmaker who had retired after inventing a timepiece that ran on existential dread, wiped his spectacles with a handkerchief embroidered with the words Tempus Fugit, Sed Memento Mori. He cleared his throat, a sound like a passing accordion. Son, he said, you cannot deshistorizar the Sunday roast. This was a metaphor. The roast, a leathery beast marinated in ancestral guilt, sat center table, oozing a gravy that shimmered with the faces of gone politicians. Elías’s mother, Lady Clemencia, whose hair was a nest of starlings trained to recite Pessoa, poked the meat with a fork. History is a wound that won’t scab, she declared. Pick at it, and you’ll unleash a hemorrhage of whys.
The twins, meanwhile, had escalated their debate. Polidoro the First now claimed time was a sneeze trapped in a pepper mill, while Polidoro the Second brandished a stuffed owl he’d hidden under his shirt. The owl hooted, Who cooks for you?, though whether it referred to the roast or the futility of archival labor was unclear. Elías’s sisters, Gemela and Gemela—conjoined at the opinion—began singing a dirge about the passing of cause-and-effect, their voices harmonizing with the refrigerator’s backward anthem.
It was then that Abuela Soledad, the matriarch who had not aged since the invention of the rotary phone, floated into the room. Her body was a composite of smoke and newspaper clippings, her voice the crackle of a gramophone needle on bone. Enough, she hissed. Elías, you will deshistorizar the Battle of Tucumán by dawn, or I will revoke your inheritance: the family’s collection of expired library cards.
The room froze, save for the honey dripping from Elías’s spoon, each drop crystallizing mid-air into a tiny replica of the Berlin Wall. Here was the crux: The Deshistorizador’s task was not merely to erase but to replace, to fill the voids with whispers of alternate pasts. Last Tuesday, he’d transformed the discovery of penicillin into a ballad about mold’s unrequited love for bread. But the Battle of Tucumán? That was personal. His great-great-grandfather had allegedly ridden into combat on a llama named Libertad, hurling empanadas at the enemy. The historians, of course, had written it as a cavalry charge. Lies, snorted Abuelo Gaspar, the in-law grandfather, whose face was a topographical map of the Andes. We fought with empanadas. The llamas were a tactical necessity.
Elías stood, adjusting his cravat, which was patterned with labyrinths. I’ll do it, he said, but only if Tío Ramón lends me his left femur. The room erupted. Tío Ramón’s femur, being part coat rack, was rumored to open portals to Versailles on alternate Thursdays. Outrageous! shouted Tía Margarita, launching an origami spider at Elías’s forehead. It unfolded mid-air into a love letter from Napoleon to a guillotine.
Outside, the melted clocks pooled in the streets, forming a sticky river of numerals. A cat walked by, wearing a tricorne hat and muttering about the mercantile ambitions of pigeons. Elías inhaled the scent of jasmine and impending paradox. His work would begin at midnight, when the moon turned into a wheel of queso fresco and the archives wept ink tears. But first, he needed that femur.
The day Uncle Mortimer plucked out his left eye with a melon baller, the family was gathered around a dining table shaped like a dissected clock, its gears fossilized into the mahogany. The table, like the family, was a relic of contradictions: half Baroque grandeur, half junkyard scrap. Mortimer’s remaining eye —a jaundiced orb floating in a soup of broken capillaries— rolled toward his twin sister, Aunt Calliope, who was busy knitting a scarf from her own hair. Meanwhile, the plucked eye rested on a saucer, staring fixedly at a portrait of Grandfather Eustace, a man who had spontaneously combusted during a debate about the moral weight of spoons. Mortimer’s act was not an isolated incident but the culmination of a decades-long feud with his reflection. You see, the Voss family suffered from a peculiar affliction: their mirrors reflected not their faces, but the collective regrets of their ancestors.