FALL 2025, SHORT STORY, 2500 WORDS
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Rosendo had no intention of raising roosters. He couldn’t even be sure he liked them. He inherited them, like one inherits baldness after thirty or the habit of bringing out the small table on hot afternoons to play dominoes with his neighborhood friends. He took care of the animals because no one else in town was interested in them, and someone had to feed them after the crowing.
His father raised roosters. He didn’t like them either. He raised them only because of what he called the “principle of tradition”: if his grandfather raised roosters and his great-grandfather too, then roosters were here to stay in the family. However, Rosendo, who was born what he called “genetically exiled,” studied mathematics in Havana.
He went far enough to believe he was convinced he wouldn’t return to San Andrés, a town that Google Maps forgot. Nor was it well-known on the bus routes and other motorized transport, even old ones like the almendrones. It was only reached by tractors that survived the ten million harvests owned by one in twenty residents, or by horse-drawn cart, and sometimes even the horses got lost in the woods.
His thesis, “Topological models applied to fractal structures in the context of predicting microhistorical chaos,” was never published. The university congratulated him on the day of his defense and asked him not to insist. Someone on the panel told him it was too poetic. Another, more sympathetic, asked if he couldn’t do something more useful, like work in a winery.
Rosendo returned to the village when the news reached him. In the end, he concluded, one always returns to places one would rather forget. Sometimes due to illness, sometimes due to death, and sometimes due to a desire to disprove one’s heritage. He arrived in town with a folder of unused equations and an ego wrapped in cellophane. The chicken coop was still there.
His father claimed that roosters were meat clocks. And that very thing killed him. A poorly programmed clock that didn’t crow. From then on, the roosters stayed with Rosendo, who learned that everything that crowed broke something; sometimes a dream, sometimes twelve o’clock. Sometimes, they broke life.
His mother, asthmatic, lived in an epilogue. She never complained. She breathed with difficulty. She spoke very softly, almost silently, and classified things into two categories: “what’s useful” and “what hasn’t yet proven itself useless.” Rosendo belonged to the latter.
“Are you going to take care of the roosters at last, or should we make a pot of soup for the town?” she asked him at their first dinner, when the boy hadn’t even shaken the dust off the threshing floor.
“Yes. I’ll take care of them. Until I find something else.”
“Then make sure they crow.”
Rosendo didn’t understand a thing. The roosters always crowed. On time. At the wrong time.
Upon his return, he discovered that his mother had developed the habit of bottling her own air. She did it at dawn, before the dust closed in on her chest. According to her, it was a way of protecting herself.
“Mijo, this air I blow into the glass is mine, it’s unique,” she said. “No one else has used it. Virgin air, son. Like me before your father.”
Rosendo found that, in addition to tending to the chicken coop, he had to help his mother organize the bottles on the porch. Some had labels written with a marker that had less ink left than gasoline in a rural tractor: fresh air at 3:03 a.m., left lung with wheezing. 6:00 a.m., sigh of dissatisfaction for a son who didn’t meet expectations. 2:18 a.m., air before the rooster, 4:00 a.m.
Rosendo had serious doubts about his mother’s practice. The bottles were empty. Once, secretly, he opened one with the note Disappointment. 2:15 a.m. He immediately felt a strong, hot slap which made him fall on his buttocks in the doorway. A good old-fashioned slap, the kind that would crush the nose if it hit in the face, just like the ones he received as a child when he went to the river without permission with his friends to cool off in August. From that day on, he gave up on opening bottles and let them multiply.
However, his mother’s real warning came with Ciclón, Rosendo’s first rooster of his own, reddish and half-witted. He didn’t even know how to impregnate chickens. Every time he crowed with his tender hoarseness, someone ceased to exist.
At first, it went unnoticed. Olga never opened her guava bar shop again. A man who fixed radios disappeared from his window. The girl who brought them bread vanished like a bag carried away by the wind. Every time Ciclón sang, the town began to shrink.
Rosendo pointed this out to his mother.
“That’s paranoia, mijo,” she said, sealing the early morning air, classified as the smell of onions between my teeth. 1:14 a.m. “Here, everyone who leaves comes back in different forms.”
A French tourist who appeared in town was the first to buy a bottle of air from Rosendo’s mother. A pale man, with a face that had just emerged from a hole in the ground. Understandable, given that San Andrés was hard to find. He stopped in front of the doorway where Rosendo’s mother was taking stock, asked about the bottles. The woman explained the contents and said he could try one. If he liked it, she would sell it to him at a good price.
The Frenchman, intrigued, uncorked one without any notes. Immediately, he cried out loudly. Between sniffles and sips, he stammered that it was art. In broken Spanish, he said: “Air with memory sells well.”
Rosendo, who remained present at all times to prevent his mother from being scammed, said nothing when his mother confessed that she had breathed her childhood into the bottle. The Frenchman bought five more bottles. He paid fifty euros for each and left a cell phone number that was of little or no use in San Andrés. He never returned.
Meanwhile, Rosendo concentrated on Ciclón, on his random songs, on the townspeople who vanished like dandelions when the wind blew. He took out his old university notebook and began creating equations, solving for variables. He drew columns: name, time of crow, missing, body found or not, atmospheric condition, Mom’s breathing.
It became an obsession for Rosendo, who stayed close to Ciclón as much as possible. Later, he created a model. Mathematics was impartial. It didn’t create ghosts. Rosendo wondered if the rooster’s crow was an algorithm programmed to erase people. Or if it wasn’t the crow, but the silence that followed.
“That rooster crows in hexameters,” his mother said one morning, while vacuuming in front of the entrance. She had created an entire community that bought her bottles. Many would bring her the first container they had at hand, and she had to hurry to expel all the air she had stored. “The country crows in prime numbers.”
“And how do you know what a hexameter and a prime number are?” Rosendo asked her.
“Just like you know what it’s like for a mother to bottle up her lungs for fear of dying.”
Rosendo felt a lump in his throat. Because he had begun to believe, and this was the first time he felt doubt. Not of his mother, who was always strange, but of himself. Maybe he had imagined everything. Maybe there weren’t any missing people.
He went to look for Olga. The house was boarded up. No one remembered buying guava bars there. He asked for the mechanic. A drunk told him there had never been radios in the town. He looked for the girl. They asked him which one he was talking about. The one with the bread, Rosendo clarified. There was no answer. The guy selling coffee on a bicycle, who was passing by at that moment, stopped to ask if he was okay.
Rosendo went back to his notebook. He read the equations. They were perfect. There was beauty in the logic. Also, a bit of horror. One day after the hoarse sound of Ciclón at dawn, they found the body of Nando, the man who sold yuca in the pasture. On his skin was an equation written in blue ink: one of those Rosendo had created according to Ciclón’s singing patterns. The police asked him if it was his, given that he was the only mathematician in town.
Before they broke into his house to look for the notebook or destroyed his mother’s prosperous bottled air business, Rosendo confessed that it was his, but that it was also Pythagoras’s, if you looked at it with goodwill. They didn’t arrest him because the town was very small and crazy people caused trouble. It was enough to greet them with reservations.
And the second rooster in Rosendo’s brood was born: Bendición, with a tomato-red comb, a golden breast, and a dark tail. He named him that despite the fear of what his first crow might provoke. Bendición’s song was sweet, strong, and emotional, and even stranger than Ciclón’s, it turned out: people returned every time he sang. Olga reopened her guava bar stand. When Rosendo visited her to ask what had happened, she claimed she had bought some air bottles and taken them to the neighboring town to sell, as a favor for Rosendo’s mother.
The mechanic returned, and Radio Enciclopedia was playing in every house. The little bag of bread appeared hanging on Rosendo’s doorstep after a song of Bendición, and he could see the girl with longer braids walking next to the man selling coffee. And people began to say that Nando, with a different equation written in black ink on his skin, was on the main road, with his little stand of yuca that fell apart at the sight of the pressure cooker.
Rosendo had another problem to solve, since Ciclón was disappearing people with his singing, and Bendición was returning them with implausible excuses.
“When you arrived here all Havana clad, I told you had to make sure the roosters crowed,” his mother reminded him one morning while she was labeling her bottles. San Andrés, suddenly, was on Google Maps. Foreigners were coming to buy bottled air. Rosendo suspected the Frenchman. “This place almost got screwed!”
He blew into a plastic water bottle with the Ciego Montero label worn. He closed it quickly and wrote: Finally, damn it. 1:19 a.m.
However, Rosendo created new equations for Bendición. Sometimes he found patterns with Ciclón’s. Parallels that anyone else would have ignored, but not him. He was determined to understand the mystery of the crowing of the roosters. He tried to intervene. He gagged Ciclón’s beak, leaving him the bare minimum for a drink of water. Someone cut his rope. He gave him a drop of alcohol to make him faint. He resisted, such an idiot, and crowed anyway. In the rooster’s moments of silence, which were more frequent than Bendición’s, dawn took a very long time to arrive. People fled dazedly from their houses, arrived late to work, to the fields, and his mother had more time to expel the asthmatic air from her lungs to refill the bottles. Demand grew. Rosendo went to the town doctor, who looked at him like one looks at a bucket full of dirty water when he showed him the notebook and his theories.
“Hum, so, let’s begin… Do you hear voices?”
“No. Only roosters.”
“Yeah. Sure. Do roosters talk to you?”
“No! No way! How could a rooster talk? They don’t have the appropriate vocal apparatus for…”
“I understand, of course. You need to understand that I’m just here to help you. H-e-l-p-i-n-g y-o-u.”
“Doctor, why are you talking weird?”
“Weird? Not at all. So, back to the topic… And…do you think people die when this rooster… Lung…?”
“Ciclón. The reddish one.”
“Yes, that one. Do you think people vanish when he crows?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know what to say. Because Bendición makes people come back. Exactly five days later, at six-thirty in the morning, according to my calculations in my notebook…you see? Is this equation…at that time, Bendición crows and the people return. They come back changed, but they come back.”
“Then it’s fine. If you are sure, if people come back, no matter if with one more or one less gray hair, then there is no problem.”
After the consultation, Rosendo cloistered himself. He didn’t speak to anyone, not even his mother, even though he heard her blowing into bottles every morning and the murmur of people in the doorway reached his room. The hens and roosters began to follow him even when he wasn’t feeding them. They perched on his bedroom window like silent witnesses and stared at his notebook.
A new rooster had been born: Silencio. Soon he became Rosendo’s shadow. He still hadn’t crowed. It was impossible to create an equation for him, or to know what would happen when he sang his first note in the early morning. Rosendo was afraid. Ciclón made people disappear. Bendición brought them back. He wondered what Silencio would do.
So, one night, Rosendo entered the chicken coop and grabbed Silencio. He severed his vocal cords with a surgical precision that was unheard of, as if instead of studying mathematics, his future had been in medicine. The rooster looked at him with an ancestral sadness.
That night, it rained.
At dawn, Rosendo’s mother wasn’t there. He couldn’t find her anywhere. The house was empty. He called her several times and received no response—not a scream, not a deep cough, not a wheezing, not a complaint, not a demand. He went to his mother’s room and found the place covered in dust, as if years had passed without anyone using the bed. Rosendo ran to the front door to check the balance. Nothing. The porch was empty. There was only an unlabeled bottle.
Rosendo picked it up. It was warm. He hesitated. He opened it.
A warm breath hit his face. It sounded like asthmatic breathing. As if his mother were on the other side of the glass neck. It was a cough. Two, three times. And then, nothing.
From then on, Rosendo only cared about making sure Ciclón and Bendición sang. He cut the vocal cords of the rest of the roosters. And he feverishly immersed himself in creating equations to predict the next clutch, because roosters were meat clocks, and those too were perishable.
And in the early mornings, Rosendo bottled the air of his lungs at the last minute before the rooster crows.
Just in case.
Malena Salazar Maciá is the author of the novels La ira de los sobrevivientes, Aliento de Dragón and Los errantes, among others. Her texts have been collected in both national and foreign anthologies. English translations of her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Dark Matter Magazine. Her work has also been translated into Croatian, German, Italian and Japanese.