Enrique's Writings

 The barn stood empty and unmoving, its silence weighed down by the gravity of past events. The atmosphere was thick and quiet, infused with the musty scent of dust and old hay. Beneath these familiar barn odors, a sharper, metallic undertone lingered, subtle yet unmistakable. This lingering note, perhaps a memory of blood, claimed the air long after the evidence had faded from sight. Sunlight slipped through the gaps in the barn’s wooden slats, forming thin, uneven lines that illuminated drifting motes of dust. These tiny particles floated aimlessly, seemingly unaware of the violence that had disturbed them only hours before. The floor, uneven and comprised of packed earth and splintered boards, was strewn with stray pieces of straw. Here and there, the muted shine of something metallic caught the light, perhaps a dropped tool or a fragment of something, whose significance had already faded with the moment. At the center of the barn, something small lay almost insignificant agains...

 Meeting the First Saint In 1978, as a new law student, I began volunteering in the legal department of the Archdiocese’s Human Rights Office, then known as Socorro Jurídico (Legal Relief). For many of us, volunteering there was a way to gain practical experience in legal procedures, investigations, and case documentation. The Faculty of Law encouraged students to seek such placements to build professional skills. As new volunteers, we were not directly involved in frontline human rights defense; that responsibility rested with a dedicated team of lawyers and senior students. Our role was mainly investigative and focused on documentation. Many of us worked full-time while studying full-time, which limited the hours we could dedicate to volunteering. In my case, I contributed during the early morning hours from seven to nine. Immediately afterward, I rushed to my job at a hardware store, where I worked until six in the evening. From there, I hurried to the Faculty of Law to attend l...

 The rain came earlier than prior seasons. The rain that year appeared to be harder than before. Calling the storms, rain didn’t describe the storms anymore. The water fell in sheets that pounded the roofs until they buckled and carried off whole neighborhoods into the swollen Otonabee river.  That evening Anna pressed her forehead against the window, watching the streets vanish beneath brown waves. Only the tips of streetlamps marked where roads had once been. She remembered when spring used to mean planting season and flowers. Now it meant alerts and emergencies. All of a sudden, her father said: “Pack what you can,” his voice was calm and yet firm. It was the tone he always used in emergencies, as though his steadiness could hold back the flood. But Anna could see the fear on his face. Her father was aware she knew they were running out of places to go. The family had fled three times in the last few years. Each time they fled they were searching for higher ground, safer gr...

 Since the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero in March of 1980, El Salvador had been under a “state of siege.” The military dictatorship, through the Legislative Assembly, declared measures to suspend civil liberties, strip away basic rights, and instill fear among the population. It was enforced by a strict curfew from six in the evening to six in the morning. Anyone caught on the streets during those hours risked being shot on sight. That was the context in which I got married, and the context in which my first son was born, in December of 1981. It was around two in the morning when Ana Maria woke me up and told me the baby was coming. Neither of us had gone through this before. We were still newlyweds, and this was our first child. Her pregnancy had been healthy, but we had been worried early on due to a previous miscarriage. Under normal circumstances, labor pains might have filled us with nervous excitement. But the curfew, the soldiers in the streets, and the constant t...

  “ It was about midmorning when we received the notification that the war was officially over ,” the old man said to his captive audience, concluding his talk. The old soldier had been sharing his experiences as an infantryman in Belgium during World War I. That afternoon in 1968, after his speech, another speaker was scheduled, a veteran of World War II. The audience had gathered for the inauguration of the “War Museum” in the small hamlet of Otonabee North. The town had contributed more soldiers than any other in southern Ontario, and its residents were proud of their heritage and longstanding support for veterans. The next speaker was a well-known and beloved member of the community, a quiet farmer who lived alone on a small dairy farm that had once belonged to his parents, in the very house where he was born. His family's story was a solemn reminder of the harsh reality of war. He was the only survivor. His older brother, a pilot with the First American Volunteer Group, also k...

It was a Thursday morning. I was in the kitchen, doing what I usually did at that time of the day, trying to call my mom. Every Thursday, I called her, just to hear her voice, to make sure she was okay. That morning, the home where she lived, call it a nursing home would be stretching it, didn’t answer. I waited a bit and called again. Still nothing.  A little uneasy, I dialed my brother to ask if he had heard from her. He didn’t answer either. I started to feel something, a vague, creeping discomfort. But I brushed it off.  Then suddenly, out of nowhere, the clock hanging on the kitchen wall crashed onto the floor. The glass shattered across the tiles, and the clock hands flew in different directions. The sound was so sharp, so final, it stunned me.  I stood there for a moment, trying to make sense of it. A gust of early spring wind, I told myself. Just a coincidence.  I opened the cupboard, pulled out the broom and dustpan, and began sweeping the glass. But as I mo...

 In the pre-dawn hush, Bartholomew Smith Wells awoke to a silence that felt foreign and yet familiar. The last thing he remembered was drifting off at his desk cluttered with papers and the dim glow of his flickering light bulb. As he woke up, he felt guilty about falling sleep with unfinished thoughts—essays, manifestos, half-composed letters he was preparing that evening. He blinked at a ceiling made of strange patterns like an upside-down floor, and the air tasted faintly of ozone and wildflowers. He sat up, heart thumping, and tried to piece together his fragmented memory. The room was unfamiliar: shelves suspended with no visible wires, books with screens instead of pages, and a wall of frames that seemed to pulse gently, shifting with colors and pictures that appear in a random pattern. A gentle chime sounded, and one of the big frames on the wall blossomed into a scene he recognized, it was a photograph from his youth. Bartholomew remembered the original picture. It was a se...