During the summer, I went to Mexico to visit my family. It had been 10 years since the last time I had visited. The mountains were a dark-green color that stretched from one corner of the country to the other. To get to San Sebastian, a magical little town, we had to drive into them. Our car twisted and wound up along a road that turned from smooth asphalt, to gravel, to dirt, and then cobblestone. The further up we went, the more my ears began to pop. The air that blew into the car window became fresher and cleaner. As we made our way into the town, my grandpa asked the driver to pull over to the shop his brother Pedro owned.

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We stayed there all-night listening to my grandpa and his brother catch up, while we ate all types of spicy chips. As the town grew darker, the bugs buzzed louder. The sounds of the dense mountains and all their life were constant throughout the night. My aunt and I decided to leave the shop and go for a walk up the road we came into town on. The streetlights offered us slivers of light, but the spaces in between were large gaps in darkness. We approached the edge of the mountain and looked below the town. It was too dark and foggy to see anything, but it still felt just as vast as it did during daylight.

 

We walked past this large chocolate factory where they sold over-priced sweets. About two minutes down, there was a cemetery. My great grandparents are buried there, as well as two babies my grandma lost a few months into her pregnancy earlier in her life, and Tio Cheme. My aunt Emma whispered, “Have you heard the story about Tio Cheme?” I didn’t even know I had half the family I visited on the trip. It was no surprise that I had only ever heard of Cheme when I learned that he passed away. He had a whole 30 years of life with no health conditions. When he died of a heart attack, it was a major shock to everyone.

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My aunt continued, “He had a routine where every day he would walk through the town and somewhere along the way a trucker friend of his, Leo, would pick him up and drop him off wherever he needed to go. It was always the same place around the same time. This continued as the years passed. Then last year, something odd happened. It was in the middle of the night, and the fog was heavy. Leo was a mile or so from San Sebastian when he saw Cheme standing along the side of the road, alone in the darkness. Leo pulled up to him, and Cheme got into the car without a word. He was different. Something was off, but Leo could not get a word out of him. They made their way into town. Right as they were passing the cemetery, he opened the car door. As soon as Leo slammed on the brakes, Cheme jumped from the car and headed straight for the cemetery.”

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Emma and I arrived at the entrance to the cemetery and made our way in. I scanned the yard for anyone else and checked behind me too. The graves were so close to one another that it made it impossible not to step on someone’s headstone. Almost every grave had a big bouquet of vibrant flowers, they added a pop of color to the pitch-black night.

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Emma continued, “Leo was confused. He kept driving on his route and stopped in the next town to get a coffee and a meal. At the restaurant, he told the owner about the exchange that he had just finished having with Cheme. He was not able to get too far into the story when the owner cut him off ‘what do you mean you picked up Cheme? That’s not possible, Cheme died three days ago.’ Leo turned pale, he couldn’t finish his meal, and got a fever forcing him to stay the night in town.”

Cheme hasn’t been seen since, the town thinks he was still passing on to the afterlife that night he was picked up by Leo.