Saul knows when he hears the truck’s growl fade. He knows it will be a late night for his brother and an early morning for him. He closes that math book, knowing he will sleep in the morning sunlight and his teachers will overlook his absence. In his mind he counts the bullets in his father’s gun.

When his mother cries, Saul says, “It’s alright, Mama. He’s still our Tesoro.”

On some evenings, rare evenings, Tesoro joins the family and tells stories while his father drinks cold cerveza. He tells the story of the old woman in a black berka, the woman whose wrinkled fingers looked like wet tissue paper on a piñata. Unreal fingers. Fake fingers. Tesoro talks about the talisman, the blessed scroll of paper he bought and carried in his shirt pocket, a superstitious custom to bring him home alive.

Old magic, she said in her tongue. Dark magic.

The other Marines laughed. Tesoro smiled and laughed, too.

That afternoon, a car exploded in a small, Baghdad market.

That afternoon, Tesoro didn’t die.

Sometimes, in Saul’s nightmares, Tesoro’s eyes shine with a yellowish light, an amber light. He pulls his shirt open, and then pushes fingers into the scar where the bullet broke his skin. His fingers pull back, and the blood pours out like oil, thick and dark. Tesoro smiles, and says, “Magia.”

Sometimes, Saul wakes with a cold sheen of sweat and listens to the songs of frogs and crickets floating on the night air. He waits for the sound of his brother’s truck, but it doesn’t come. He sees the faces of the children from school in ditches outside of town, dead faces with open eyes, staring at him. He knows it is a nightmare when the dead reach out, clutching with gnarled fingers, accusing with their blank stares. His father’s old handgun hides under his pillow, an uncomfortable lump, but Saul keeps it close.