Twenty five years after the death of Bassil Da Costa, a national martyr permanently censored by the regime, on a warm May night in Caracas, Venezuela, the city’s familiar whistling frogs sang their typical song. Besides this, it was an especially quiet night, most people were already resting at home or on their way there.

At eight o’clock at night the first doorbell rang. A mother opened the door and saw her deceased son standing in front of her. She let out a scream of desperation, joy and confusion that drew the rest of the family to the doorway. It even drew in the neighbors who came out to witness the miracle of an impossible reunion.

One by one family members embraced the deceased boy, followed by his friends and everyone who had watched him grow up until the day of his premature death by homicide. Shouts, laughter and music filled the air carried by the wind through every street that made up the “barrio’s” maze.

The electricity, which had been absent for days, joined the celebration. Soon after, hundreds of doors echoed in harmony with the salsa and vallenato songs. Hundreds of families reunited with relatives they had lost to the hands of the regime. The wind carried the celebration beyond the neighborhood so the rest of the city could join in. Sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, grandsons, granddaughters, uncles and aunts celebrated what the heads of the country had taken from them.

Just as some of the deceased brought joy to their families, others only confirmed their biggest fear. The “disappeared” brought an end to their families’ endless search, filling the emptiness in their hearts while extinguishing the hope that they were still alive. Lost parents embraced their grown children, disappeared children embraced their aging parents.

Everyone danced as if it were the last night on earth. Time, conspiring with the Moon and the Sun, turned this night into the longest night in history. The three waited until the living were exhausted before returning to their natural rhythm. Gradually the frogs began to whistle the city’s familiar lullaby. This was the sign that turned the miraculous welcome into a farewell. After their final embraces, the deceased marched toward the city’s palace.

Neither animals nor insects, nor wind nor sound, dared to approach the palace repulsed by it. The heads of the country, three serpents twisted around one another occupied separate rooms tending to the abuse that thrived inside that cursed house. One of them had spent four hours hurling insults and threats at imaginary enemies while watching and listening to itself broadcast its circus on national television as it did every night. Another rested naked in bed, the air in the room was replaced by tobacco and incense. White powder covered its body and every surface of the room alongside hundreds of bottles and the most expensive women Latin America, Turkey and Russia could offer. The third head, bound to the second one in a cursed marriage, was surrounded by a cloud of palo santo and showed complete indifference to her cursed husband’s activities. She was accompanied by babalaos and priests who mixed together their rituals and prayers to keep her young, free of illness and in power.

The heads avoided being in the same place at the same time except when addressing the nation, moments when they needed to take up as much space as possible on people’s televisions, an easy task given their corruption bloated bodies. Amid suspicion and betrayal, the serpent heads became so entangled they no longer knew where one began and the other ended. They lived under constant threat and fear of biting themselves by betraying the other.

Their soldiers, their security, the strongest pillar keeping them in power, their “witches”, were busy that night with endless drills meant to entertain their leaders. That night the soldiers felt especially safe and untouchable, unaware of their own victims marching toward their gates. The sound of metal drums followed the march with every step like a moving cloud of noise. By the time the sound reached the witches’ ears, the deceased had already surrounded the palace. As soon as the soldiers reached the entrance, the noise swelled in volume and intensity. A deep, piercing pain erupted in their heads. The strongest soldiers moved toward the deceased hoping to stop the pain, but instead discovered two impossibilities.

The first one was that the noise came from the open mouths of the bodies in front of him, a sound they finally recognized: the clash of wooden spoons against metal pots, something they had learned to ignore over the years, the sound of protest ingrained in every Venezuelan. In complicity with the deceased, the sound chose to enter the palace for the first time despite its revulsion. The serpent heads shouted through their radios demanding information about the situation outside, but their voices were drowned out by the noise. The soldiers tried to dull their pain by searching their memory for the most effective method of repression they had, ready to once again carry out what they had practiced so often without consequence. They thought about which method would earn them the most attention from their leaders but as they drew closer to the deceased, they encountered the second impossibility. They were staring at the faces of their victims. No matter who stood before them, the faces continuously shifted into those they had murdered under the excuse of national security. They noticed the rot of the corpses, the stench of death aged by years, congealed blood, gases trapped and discharged across the corpses.

They had run out of excuses to frame their actions as good or even necessary. They could no longer hide their cruelty from themselves. The cursed veil had finally been lifted.

Their screams of fear and pain, and their prayers for protection never reached the pagan saints they worshipped in their homes, dead criminals sanctified by their own hands. Demons in life revered as angels. A cloud of ashes surrounded the soldiers, filling their throats, lungs and eyes with the same sensation as the tear gas they loved to use. The ashes coated their teeth and tongues in gray, and tasted like burned rubber, blood and rotting flesh.

In desperation they tried to assert one last shred of authority, raising their weapons, but when they pulled the trigger they fell silent. With no other options, they moved in to strike the protesters, but at the first contact, the witches collapsed to the ground. They felt the burns, the blows and the torture they had inflicted on the deceased all at once. The pain multiplied with every family member who had suffered that loss. One by one, each stone of the pillar raised its hand, and one by one fell in agonizing pain until the final stone of the palace’s protective pillar collapsed.

The radios broadcasted fear from the palace disguised as orders, barely understandable amid screams and metal drums. The serpent heads were left alone and cut off inside the palace. The same palace that had endured more than 25 million daily curses, years of opposition and even internal betrayal. The same palace that had kept them safe from consequences. The same palace from which shame had been expelled, where abuse was always welcome, invited and even celebrated for so many years, finally gave way. They felt a pressure it took them more than ten minutes to understand. It was a sensation they had forgotten decades earlier. They were trapped, imprisoned.

Without any planning, the three heads were startled to find themselves together in the same room without their witches. Their screams at each other were barely enough to be understood. One of them could not even speak, tobacco and incense residue clung to the walls of its lungs. They tried the radios, but the only answer was static. The pain in their throats made every scream harder, as if needles were tearing at their necks from the inside. Their throats demanded payment for years of nonstop lies, forming a new knot for every lie they had told the people.

They heard the metal drums directly outside the main door. They ran through every room without finding a way out. Their own refuge betrayed them, exhausted by the rot inside. When the doors finally opened, it was not the marching deceased who stood there. Before them was a skinless millipede made of raw, living flesh. It barely fit through the doorway, its head a shifting amalgamation of every person who had lost their life because of them.

Sadly, the country never learned what happened to them, but fortunately for you, my dear reader, we did.

As it seized its prey, the millipede’s heads formed a single smile stretching across every face. It finished off the serpent heads laughing. It tore them apart one in front of the other, consuming all their evil until not a single drop of blood remained.

The serpent heads awoke naked in a rainy, cold, dark jungle within the country. There they began an endless march, hunted by the millipede and other entities just as tireless and insatiable as they had been in life, devouring them piece by piece again and again and again. They lived every torture they had ordered, barely able to move, feeling the hunger of an entire nation, the pain of every father and mother who could not feed their children. They watched as beasts murdered their loved ones after long tortures, accompanied by relentless screams.

As soon as the sun rose the next morning, the families of the deceased gathered their courage like never before. The entire city agreed to march toward the palace and not return until justice was claimed for their dead. The footsteps of the march could be felt in neighboring states. When they arrived, they found silence and calm, broken only by the sound of macaws’ wings. They saw soldiers’ uniforms scattered on the ground outside the palace, empty of those who once wore them.

They crossed the entrance and walked down the street until they reached an immense field of orchids, thousands of orchids of different species arranged in a circle. It took little time for the protesters to realize the orchids now occupied the space where the palace once stood.