Irony

My father returned home from the land of opportunity in a coffin. He'd been going back and forth for years, working in the states, then making brief visits to us with his earnings. He had drown in a vat of acid at the mill where he was working.

I imagined him inside the dusty coffin, his face mangled and eyes gone, as the cura blessed him amid the weeping women and men in black. As hard as I tried to remember what he had looked like the last time he left, the mangled eyeless corpse was the only image my mind could conjure up.

America was supposed to be safer than Mexico, wasn't it? I wondered to myself as they lowered the coffin into the dusty hole.