The Little Angel’s Exhumation, by Mariana Enriquez (translated by Joel Streicker)
Read it here in about 10 minutes.
Thinking about why I love it…
Enriquez includes enough details to make the setting and characters of grandma, the narrator, and the narrator’s father feel real, but pulls back from writing realism by using a non-emotive first-person narrator, jumping through time from the narrator’s childhood directly to adulthood, and including a non-verbal rotting ghost baby. I love this style of writing, as someone who hates writing realism myself; I always try to include or exclude something to move away from it, which can create an uncanny effect, as it does here.
The ghost baby itself is fantastic: it can only be seen by certain people; it cries when it rains; it’s still rotting, despite having been dead and buried for a very long time; it doesn’t speak, but can nod and point. I love that the narrator initially tries to strangle the ghost baby – what a reaction to being haunted! – then has a change of heart and uses a face mask and backpack to accommodate it. The ghost baby’s existence raises lots of questions, such as why now, why the narrator, and what does it want?
By the end of the story, nothing is resolved – the ghost baby seems intent on following the narrator around forever, and the narrator, frustrated by this, behaves cruelly by refusing to pick up the ghost baby and put it in her bag. The ending makes the story, and the narrator’s world, open up; the reader may imagine other scenarios in the narrator’s life, or their own, involving the ghost baby, far into the future.
