Chapter 33. A Sip from the Lethe

Carlos had been in Vegas for three days, which he had spent bouncing between the hotel room and a bar nearby. And there was that one night at the casino where he lost over three thousand dollars. The hours had been a blur, mixing together like soup so he couldn’t tell which day was which.

He’d been having nightmares in the small hotel room. Nightmares where his mother appeared in that blue-green dress he remembered her wearing at the amusement park all those years ago.

He wasn’t even sure she ever had a dress like that, but it was there in his mind as sure as the sky was blue. The dress would sway in a wind he wasn’t quite sure where it came from in those nightmares, and she would scold him in rapid-fire Spanish that he was sure he couldn’t confidently follow in waking life, but in the dreams, he knew exactly what she was saying.

She expressed her shame over and over again in those dreams, and she would tell him that he was a disappointment. That the information w