Carlos Fentanes

Note from the editor:
I started this series months ago and I’m publishing weekly on Substack. I decided to share it here, in my own blog, I’m trying to depend less from the algorithm of social media.

I took my mom to the hospital last week. She’s… well, she’s suffering from Parkinson’s. We’ve tried everything science has to offer. I mean, everything. She was waiting for an X-ray, looking tired and pale, hands folded in her lap. The smell of antiseptic, the faint tang of old medicine… it clung. And there was this man sitting next to her — or maybe just nearby? I couldn’t be sure. Maybe seventy? Maybe younger? His face… it was worn in a strange way. Time had been uneven with him, uneven in some way I couldn’t quite describe. His eyes, pale, steady, like he could see something beyond me.

When the nurse wheeled my mom away, he looked at me. Finally. Silent all this time, almost invisible. Then — he leaned forward and handed me a stack of pages. A manuscript, old, yellowed, held together with a bent paperclip. He held it firmly, deliberately, as if the weight of it mattered to him. I couldn’t help noticing the contrast — my mom, struggling with Parkinson’s, barely able to hold her own cup of tea, and this man holding these fragile pages with ease, like they were unbreakable.

“I know how to cure Parkinson’s… well, not me exactly,” he said, voice low, almost a whisper.

“She speaks… or maybe not. Maybe it’s just me imagining. Maybe I’m tired.”

I stared at him. We’ve tried everything. Nothing works. And now this man… claims he might know something? Impossible. Absurd. But… I don’t know, there was a look in his eyes. Something.

“I wrote this,” he said, “but it wasn’t me who spoke. It was her.”

I blinked.

“Virgin Mary,” he added softly.

He leaned back, eyes closed, and began to recite. Not like sermons. Not like advice you ask for. More like riddles, therapy notes, or… I don’t know. Something you hear when you’re not ready. Every so often, he paused mid-sentence, like listening to someone else in the room. The cadence of his voice… low, steady, almost hypnotic. Spoken a thousand times, each time slightly different.

One line stuck with me:

If you cannot forgive the child you once were, you will curse the adult you have become. A man who despises his younger self is like a house divided: forever repairing walls, never able to live inside.

A chill ran down my spine. I tried to ask a question — anything — but the words died in my throat. The air between us seemed… charged. Electric. His presence… tangible, almost like a shadow pressing at the edges of reality.

By the time my mom returned, he was gone. Took the manuscript. Didn’t say goodbye. The chair… empty. But that line — that fragment of Conversations with Virgin Mary — kept echoing, stubbornly, in my thoughts.

I asked the nurse about him later. She said he’s often there, waiting, rarely speaks to anyone. I was apparently the first. She was curious, a little worried. And I was too. Why me? Why then? Chance? Or… something else?

The rest of the day, I couldn’t stop thinking about the manuscript. Hospital lights buzzed overhead, antiseptic clinging to my clothes. I felt… like I’d stumbled into something I wasn’t supposed to see.

I don’t know what’s coming next. Maybe I’ll share more, maybe not. But I feel compelled to record it, if only to make sense of it myself. Some lines demand to be remembered, even if the person who spoke them disappears into the noise of the world.

Perhaps that is what this first fragment is — a message that found me. Fleeting. Impossible to capture. Yet impossible to forget.