Even having been an awful student, I still remember Newton’s third law: for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
I should be in prison after all the damage I inflicted on others during my youth. Now that I am someone completely different, I can admit that I was a goddamn bully. Since kindergarten I’d humiliate the weak and take advantage of others' kindness Through fear and force I always imposed my will, as the fragile, insecure and petty fool I was.
Many switched schools to escape my cruelty, and every year I’d manage the sobbing of a teacher or two. That pattern even continued to the early stages of my career, where I’d relish in annihilating the competition and taking advantage of my colleagues, only to cut them off once they were no longer useful to me.
I must once again clarify: I’ve changed. But that still doesn’t undo all the pain I’ve created, and I’m aware I deserve to suffer for it.
For years during that season of my life, my friends called me “”knucks”. The nickname was born from a gift my uncle gave me while I was still in high school: a set of brass knuckles, under the condition that I’d never use them “unless necessary”.
He clearly should have known better. I was now dreaded in the hallways and at parties for always carrying them with me, and darkened my reputation through blood, bruises, lacerations and more than one chipped tooth. The fear of my fists, and my family’s influence at school, never failed in granting me immunity.
The last time I brandished my uncle’s present was at baptism from the Juárez family, where the victim who changed my life forever was in attendance.
Richard Juárez, the cousin of the baptised baby, was my favorite prey. Our father’s were close friends, so I saw him regularly, and each encounter was a new, delectable occasion for my malice; like the start of a soccer world cup.
Thing is, no matter how much I bullied Richard, he still wanted to be my friend. He’d take all sorts of degradations just to be in my circle, even as a jester. Whenever I mocked him he’d season my laughter with loneliest, saddest giggle in the world.
This time, me and a couple of my friends orchestrated a plot to steal the holy hosts and wine from the chapel where the baptism had just taken place. The theft would take place while the rest of the guests had lunch at a yard just outside the place of prayer.
Desperate to be in on it, Richard volunteered himself to carry out the steal. Trying not to laugh, we allowed him to do it, already knowing that we’d deny him even a taste of the sacred loot.
Which is exactly what happened. We ripped the wine and the hosts from him the second he returned.
“Stop whining” I ordered him, while munching a mouthful of communion bread. “I said you could be here, not that we’d share with you.”
“Don’t be an asshole Manuel, the priest almost caught me” Richard pleaded. “I’ll do whatever you want for a sip of wine.”
I drew out the brass knuckles from my pocket, my fingers already coiled in its handle.
“Deal” I told him, “if you can take a hit we’ll give you half of everything.”
Richard immediately went pale, and tried to run away in vain. I quickly reached him, and landed a right hook on his left cheek.
My perversion didn’t allow me to realize I had just punched him, with all my might, at the top of a marble staircase.
Richard rolled down violently. He broke the landing’s wooden handrail upon crashing against it, and dropped down 20 feet. He fell face first on the floor of the chapel’s entry.
Thanks to the degree of damage from the “accident”, and the terrible autopsy services in my country, I avoided any suspicions that my brass armored fist had caused him one of the worst injuries. Me and my friends maintained the lie that Richard had simply tripped at the top of the stairs, before chaotically descending from it to his death.
At the funeral, my parents granted me permission to see him inside the coffin. I’ve always thought corpses looked like wax figures, but I remember being impressed by the work the funeral home had done on Richard. It seemed like he was merely sleeping.
However, the makeup wasn’t able to conceal everything, and I noticed a long and thin bruise on the top of his left cheek. It was similar to a flat caterpillar, pale blue and with black pores.
It was, without a doubt, the spot where my knuckles struck him.
Not long after the service I permanently stored away the brass weapon inside some now-lost box. Not because I had any intention of changing my ways; there was still a long way before that. I simply, and correctly, assumed the repercussions of my jokes couldn’t be this catastrophic, or deadly.
But in the coming years, I began to witness how late it was for that.
A few months after my graduation, Richard’s youngest sister passed away. A sudden allergy to nuts killed her after she tried a snickers bar, at only five years of age. With that, her parents were now childless.
Everyone thought that had to be the reason why the mother was devoured, two years later, by a ravenous lung cancer: a sadness that overwhelmed her defenses, and that eventually also took her husband away, in the form of a heart attack.
On the day of the burying rituals, I took a peek inside my father’s best friend’s casket, just like I had done with his sons’. And something caught my eye.
The same bruise, long, blue and with black pores, imprinted on his skin. Protruding from behind the neck of his shirt.
“You know, that also caught my attention,” mom told me that night. “Not only did I notice it on Richard and his father, but also on his mother and sister. It was in different parts of their bodies, but otherwise it was exactly the same.”
Perhaps at that time I was too dull to figure out what was going on, so I assumed it was all a strange coincidence, or a hereditary condition.
Over time, however, I contemplated the progressive demise of the Juárez family.
One by one, Richard’s grandparents, cousins and uncles began to perish due to all sorts of ailments: strokes, alzheimer's, diabetes, cancer. It eventually became a rumor that they were a truly unlucky dynasty; a withered family tree whose leaves waited for their turn to fall.
And with each and every passing I learned, through others or with my own eyes, that the same lesion that years before I stamped on Richard’s cheek, that odd bruise, was found on all of his relatives' corpses. Regardless of them being close or extended.
There it stayed, in all shapes and sizes. Like a death mark. Many of their loved ones say that, although each time it reappears on yet another Juárez the stain is increasingly smaller than on its previous incarnation, all it takes is a microscopic trace of it to watch it grow and destroy its host with some unforeseeable disease.
I can now accept that it is all my fault. I don’t know how, or what kind of perverted curse this is, but apparently I’m responsible for the extinction of a last name.
It’s as if my punch to Richard’s face had the same effect of a stone being thrown into a lake: the ripple travels far beyond the initial impact.
Only this time the ripple didn’t travel through water, but blood. Moving across Richard’s genealogy, in search for each and every one of his family members.
And that ripple has now reached Laura, his second cousin. The person who changed me with her kindness, and gave me the opportunity to become a better man.
I didn’t want to mention it till now, but I met Laura, my wife, at that baptism. Unaware that, over a decade later, we’d coincide professionally and fall in love with each other.
One evening, not long ago, we were dancing at home. I was just about to kiss her, when I saw it. Just beneath her right eye.
The bruise. Minuscule, but also blue and with black pores.
“Don’t worry Manuel” she said to me as soon as she saw the anxiety on my face, and knowing her family’s history with the strange lesion. “I think it’s only a mole”
But I knew that wasn’t the case.
Day and night, I live inside a desperation without equal. The bruise keeps growing, and I’m unaware of what evil desires it has set out for my wife. She doesn’t deserve this.
For every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
If that was remotely true the least severe reaction I deserve is to die. That my fist had shattered as soon as the brass knuckles grazed Richard, and that all of my cells metastasized, right then and there.
Laura, who’s innocent and the best thing that’s ever happened to me, shouldn’t have to pay for the cruelties of the man who she mistakenly chose to love.
