BY Angela Giaimo
*Content Warning: physical/political violence, supernatural/body horror, poverty.
My nightmares began when I was a kid living in Cartagena. It was the early 90’s so I must have been five
or six, and Colombian violence was at its peak of car bombs and drug wars. I remember standing in the
yellow kitchen of our tiny apartment with my nanny, Carmen, watching our old television cast breaking
news: Pablo Escobar Escapes Prison. We did not have AC so our windows were open, letting in a salty
breeze, the taste of ocean water, and the sounds of panic in the street. By this point in history, the man
had achieved legendary status in the country. He was a household name for every family and no
different than Café Sello Rojo or Gabriel García Marquez. People talked about him with simultaneous
awe and terror, saying things like “did you know he has a whole zoo full of wild animals on his
property?” Or “remember when he blew up flight 203 midair?”
So much of my childhood feels like a fever dream. I don’t believe our kitchen was actually
yellow, perhaps just the countertops. But in my mind, I see a yellow room dipped in a golden sunset,
saturated with dusty cookbooks and secondhand kitchen ware, a gas stove with water boiling for
drinking, and a beat-up television where I watched evening cartoons with Carmen, hoping to postpone
the fear of nightfall and the end of safety, as I always felt dismantled by the peak of twilight.
“He doesn’t look scary” I said to Carmen, staring at Pablo Escobar’s mug shot, his homely
features, dark hair, and painter’s mustache making him look unremarkable and boring.
“They never do,” she said under her breath, and to this day, I’m not sure she meant for me to
hear that. Regardless, I got the message despite my age; always be suspicious. As a poor woman from
Tolu Nuevo, Carmen understood these things more than most. She knew that I was sensitive to the
drunks fighting outside our window, to the hungry orphans at the beach, to the tragedy of a tourist
town that only pretended to be safe. She took it upon herself to comfort me as we tried to live an
ordinary life, despite the detonation of an entire country in the background.
Living in Colombia meant that as a child, I couldn’t tell the difference between real and
perceived threat. I lived in perpetual hyperarousal, my sympathetic nervous system troubled by spectral
anxieties for as long as I can remember. It’s no surprise I found comfort in the macabre and the
grotesque from a young age.
I listened to Carmen’s stories because she was the only adult that didn’t treat me like a child.
She used to say that daytime was for the living and nighttime was for the dead. She often saw ghosts in
the hallways, and she taught me that it was best to ignore them. That’s how they go away. I remember
one morning she said she had seen her grandfather in her dreams, sitting on a rocking chair and calling
out her name. A few hours later she found out he was dead. I understood that she had felt his death in
her sleep and that some people see beyond the physical, and I realized I was one of them.
My fixation with ghosts and ghouls quickly became my favorite distraction from the real world. I
found calm in controlled danger. I snuck around catching glimpses of horror films, that’s how I watched
Poltergeist by myself. I listened for secrets in the dark, fighting sleep for as long as I could. And I loved a
good scary story during sleepovers, unaware that I was conjuring demons with concerning ease. I never
knew true innocence. Instead, I became haunted.
***
I still remember the first time I woke up screaming.
An ape was chasing me down the streets of my hometown, then it swallowed me whole.
“Last night, King Kong ate me alive,” I said to my cousin, Luisa Fernanda. We were the same age
and confided in one another the way that sisters do. One evening during a family dinner of burgers and
hot dogs, she pulled me aside to tell me her parents were separating. I watched my aunt take a bite of
her burger, a bit of sauce collecting in the corner of her mouth. I heard the ghost stories weeping from
the bruises on her wrists.
I can’t remember a time when these things weren’t commonplace. Guards with machine guns
rounding the parameter of our school, my mom helping my aunt pack her bags in the middle of the
night, Luisa Fernanda and I telling stories in the dark. I quickly grew desensitized to the real threats in
my life, despite being constantly afraid. This fear was insidious. I couldn’t feel it when our friend’s
brother was kidnapped on a Tuesday evening at his family’s farm, or whenever I saw poor kids my age in
rags and barefoot, begging for food with their ribs protruding and bellies distended. But I knew it was
there, and it needed to come out. So, I let it out during sleepovers at my grandfather’s house, where a
painting of El Sagrado Corazon de Jesus hung next to the bedroom, and all I could focus on was the
bright red heart with thorns cutting into it. I let it out when our school would flood during a major storm
and the sky would darken in a matter of seconds, all of us ushered to the main assembly room, my
thoughts drowning between the sounds of thunder and sobbing children. I let it out when playing hide
and seek at sundown, when the rush of being found felt like a boulder crushing my chest. Our world was
not fine, and neither were we, but we kept each other company in the horror of our very own liminal
spaces.
Luisa Fernanda’s palms were always damp with sweat. I never questioned this, that’s just how
she was. But the night that she told me the story of Maria Angula and The Tripe Soup, her hands were
wrinkled and leaking fear from their pores.
“Anyway, one day, Maria Angula’s husband asked her to make tripe soup for dinner. But she
didn’t know how to make it. She went to her neighbor for help, but the neighbor hated her. So, she
pranked Maria Angula. She told her to dig up a fresh body at the cemetery, then cut its guts out to make
soup with them.”
“Maria Angula went to the cemetery and dug up a body, then she went home with the guts and
cooked the soup. That night, her husband devoured a huge bowl and even asked for seconds.”
I wondered what tripe soup tasted like. I wondered if anyone had ever eaten anybody else. I was
terrified but fascinated, and the images of true hunger and true death, which haunted the streets
outside our front door, faded from my mind until all I could see was Maria Angula and the exhumed
corpse.
“That night, Maria Angula woke up to the sound of heavy footsteps from afar. But they were
growing closer, and closer, and closer. Then she heard a voice calling her, Maria Angula, Maria Angula,
give me back my guts. She sat up to wake her husband, but it was too late. She found the dead man she
had dug up with his hands in her husband’s bleeding stomach, eating tripe soup right out of his flailing
body.”
I remember feeling bad for Maria Angula. I remember the night light in my bedroom, the shelves
and the rag dolls, the metal blades of the fan whooshing, moving hot air back and forth while the voice
of Night whispered through the cracks of our old windows. It told us to keep going, to dig our claws into
that fear, to silence the news about the church hostages and the bomb collars and the dead man
wrapped in barbed wire in the middle of the road, the one that blocked the main route to our school,
making all the buses turn around.
***
Sometimes, I picture hell right as I fall asleep. Or I yell at the footsteps down the hallway, so they
quit messing around. I tell Jane, the old woman in the basement, that this is my house, not hers. On
really special nights I step out of my body and watch myself sleep. Everything is dark and beautiful
behind the veil. None of this is new to me.
But I make my son wear an AirTag so I can track his location at school in the event of a shooting.
I bought a Dechoker in case the Heimlich Maneuver doesn’t work. I lock and latch the front door three
or four times for good measure. On nights when I’m feeling really nervous, I wrap my arms around
myself, and I cry.
I know why I’m like this.
Life in Colombia remained unsafe. Eventually, Pablo Escobar tried to flee an ambush in Bogotá,
but he was caught on a rooftop and shot to death. During the funeral procession, his open casket was
carried down the street by swarms of his disciples dressed in black. People approached the body, they
put their hands on his face. I saw all of this in that old television with Carmen in the yellow kitchen.
Luisa Fernanda and I lost touch once she moved in with her father. I was only allowed to visit
her new home once, a big apartment with white walls and minimalist furniture. Her hands were
sweating when I came over, I suspect they still do from time to time.
I moved to Maryland with my family after years of instability and political unrest. Suddenly, I
found myself living in a brand-new townhouse in the eerie quiet of suburbia. We had to leave Carmen
behind, even though I begged my parents to bring her along. I often think of her warnings:
“There are things in the dark that we can’t explain. So, you need to be good. Remember to listen
to your mother. And don’t forget; never leave your room after midnight.”
I’ve realized that hell is a beautiful town by the beach. It’s a family farm. It’s a good school in the
middle of the woods. Hell has a body, a mind. It consumes those of us who cannot look away,
swallowing us whole. And it always asks for more. More tripe. More flooding. More massacres in a war
zone.
Angela (She/They) is a queer Latine writer based in Maryland. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and her work has appeared in Witchcraft Magazine. She is certain that her house is haunted. You can find more of her writing at angelagiaimo.substack.com