The town of Ventriloquist 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 bloodline 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 war 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 Slumbering Eye of Dreams, 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 catastrophe 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 bomb 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 The Slumbering Eye of Dreams, 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 TOLD YOU SO 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, Ventriloquist 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 The Slumbering Eye of Dreams, 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.

By Carlos del Puente relatos