There are bones strewn in arroyos and fields here that weep in their marrow.
Bones of little girls, their skulls and femurs; bones of teenagers, small ribcages
and delicate metatarsals; bones of young women, pelvises and spinal columns.
Twenty years of bones scattered like casual debris from over six hundred girls—
their laughter and giggles broken from their mouths, their tears burning the
dry soil like acid. Even the desert sparrows sit dazed on their branches; even the
lizards shrink from their own shadows. In houses all over Ciudad Juárez, mothers
and fathers sit stupefied by their windows. Their hands tremble as they reach out
to open their doors, when they touch their daughters, their breathing daughters.
What has happened to the beautiful girls of Juárez—the ones who blushed at
their quinceañeras, who walked dry fields at dusk, never returning from work
at the factories? Who raped and tortured them, burned and disposed of them?
What kind of men are these, what kind of men, I ask you, who have black bile in
their veins, whose minds overflow with toxins, whose hearts are concrete—and
why, oh why has no one stopped them?