The Dinosaur

I think when the devil fell from heaven, he brought black dresses and white lilies with him.

I pick at a loose thread on my sleeve and grind the toe of my new Mary Jane into the dirty carpet. The movement leaves a black scuff mark on the white faux leather, and I smile. Mom’s going to be livid, and I don’t care.

I think buying new shoes for a funeral is morbid.

The priest has been rattling on for over twenty minutes, but I’ve tuned him out. He’s old enough that this funeral should be for him, not for the little boy in the photo across from me.

It was taken at a beach two years ago, before the doctors and the hospital bills. The sun made his sapphire eyes squint, and his long blonde curls were battling the salty ocean breeze because Mom never got around to cutting it. He wore a navy swimsuit and flashed a bright white smile—the one I had taught him how to brush while Mom worked night shifts. A frog was thrust toward the camera, clutched in his tiny hand. Under the photo, black calligraphy reads:

Mateo Luis Santos

2020-2026

A cardboard printout shouldn’t make me feel like dying.

I drag my shoe across the carpet again.

My cousin kicks my ankle. “Your mom’s going to kill you for that,” she whispers.

“Shut up.”

“—peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard—”

I grit my teeth to bite back a laugh. Everyone keeps talking about peace as though it showed up with the casseroles. Every pew is full. People line the walls. Mrs. Hernandez from the bakery is crying into a handkerchief, and Coach Williams is wearing a suit that doesn't fit. Half the town is here.

But peace never came.

It died in a Henry Mayo hospital room, in a bed too big for the child in it.

I think knowing he was going to die made Mateo grow up too fast.

He spent weeks deciding who should inherit his treasures. His Lego sets went to the neighbor kid. His favorite books went to the children's ward. But his prize possession, a ragged stuffed dinosaur Dad bought before he left, came to me.

“Can you look after Pete for me?” he’d asked a few weeks before he passed. “He’s going to be lonely.”

I told him yes, then went to the bathroom to cry.

By the time Mateo was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, the doctors said it had spread too far. We tried to fight it anyway. I hadn't realized then that death isn't a rival you can defeat, only one you can delay. Somehow, we stole eleven more precious months before that night.

Mom wasn’t even there.

I think cancer is a bitch.

When I look up again, the priest has abandoned his pulpit, and some sombre instrumental leaks from the speakers as people stand up to visit him one last time.

“Blanca.”

I don’t bother turning around.

It’s one of my mom’s friends from work, still in her black nursing scrubs. “I’m so sorry about your brother’s passing.”

My eye twitches.

I think if one more person tells me he's in a better place, I'm going to scream.

“Thank you,” I say.

“I know this probably doesn’t help, but when my mother passed last year, what really helped me was—”

I stand up so fast my chair crashes to the ground, and shoulder her aside as I beeline for the open casket.

I think people who offer advice at a funeral should be arrested.

I don't want to visit his casket. I want to remember Mateo as the happy, lively boy he was—not as some dolled-up corpse in a box. But he was always my safe place, and I don’t know where else to go.

The child in that coffin is not my brother.

Mateo had cheeks flushed from running outside and eyes that sparkled with life. This… thing is an unnatural color, with closed eyes and stiff hands clutching—

Pete.

I don't think.

I grab him.

The small crowd gathered around his casket gasps. Every head turns.

“Blanca!” My mother's voice tears through the chapel. She shoves past shoulders and flower arrangements, mouth hanging open. By the time she reaches me, she's shaking almost as hard as I am. “What are you doing?”

I take a step back, Pete clutched against my chest. “No!” The word ricochets off the high ceiling. “You can't bury Pete!”

“He loved Pete,” she cries. “He took him everywhere. He would want him with—”

“He gave him to me!”

“Blanca—”

She reaches for Pete, and I jerk away. “I promised I would take care of him!”

“Please.”

“No! You don't get to do this!”

Her face twists. “Don't make a scene.”

“A scene?” I laugh for the first time in weeks, but it comes out broken and wrong. “You're going to bury his best friend!”

“Blanca, Pete isn’t—”

“He’s going to suffocate!”

“He's a stuffed animal!”

“Not to Mateo!” My voice cracks. “He said Pete would get lonely. He trusted me to take care of him!”

My chest burns. I’m trying so hard not to cry, but tears are burning my eyes and I can’t breathe and I can’t think and words are tumbling out of me so fast I don’t even know what sentences they’re making.

“But you wouldn't know that, would you?”

She goes still.

“Because you were never there.”

No one moves. No one speaks. I watch the blood drain from my mother’s tear-streaked face and wonder, distantly, if I should have said that. But I don’t care. My brother is dead, and the remaining pieces of my heart are screaming, “Do something, do something you useless bitch,” but there’s nothing I can do, and what good is an older sister who can't save her little brother? I am a collection of useless thoughts and feelings, incapable of helping anyone. This is all I have left to fight for.

I promised. I would have plucked the moon from the sky if Mateo had asked, and all he wanted was for me to look after a stuffed dinosaur.

She's scrambling for an excuse, as if there is one for not being there when your child dies. “I-I was working to pay for his treatments. Besides, there was nothing I could have done.”

“You could have been there.”

Suddenly, the nurse is by Mom’s side, her hand steady on Mom’s elbow, hazel eyes turned on me with no small amount of sympathy. “Why don’t we all sit down? Maybe take a drink of water.”

But I don’t want water. I don’t want Bible verses. I don’t want Mary Janes or casseroles or cards or tears. I want Mateo, and I want this stupid stuffed dinosaur.

So I hold Pete tighter. No one tries to stop me as I turn and walk out of the chapel.

I couldn’t save Mateo.

Death doesn’t get Pete too.