The Family Clinic

The next morning, Esperanza couldn’t shake the image of Luz standing guard outside her room. That quiet, constant watchfulness stirred something unsettling in her. Why did her own sister seem afraid of her ?

Their parents had left early, called out to a nearby farm where several cows were suffering from an infection, leaving the sisters alone for the first time since her return. Luz bent over her fourth-grade teaching manuals, preparing lessons with a concentration that felt forced, almost staged.

“I’m going out for a walk,” Esperanza announced.

“Where ?”
The question came too fast, almost sharp.

“Nowhere in particular. Just around the village. I’m allowed to take a walk, right ?”

Luz nodded, but her eyes tracked every movement, as one would watch an unpredictable animal.

Outside, Esperanza let her feet choose the path, and they carried her straight to the veterinary clinic. The white wooden annex at the back of the property had once been the cradle of her vocation. As a child, she had spent countless hours there, watching her parents work, eager to help with her tiny hands.

The waiting room, bathed in a milky light, still held its warmth despite the cold tiled floor. A colorful retablo of San Martín de Porres — the saint of the poor and of animals — stood in a niche on the wall. Shelves were lined with alebrijes, fantastical wooden creatures painted in vivid hues, silent guardians over the space. Brightly patterned Zapotec tapestries hung like remnants of forgotten rites.
Everything here breathed a quiet fusion of faith, myth, and medicine.

When she pushed through the back door, the familiar scent of disinfectant greeted her, faintly laced with the musk of animals. Surgical instruments lay perfectly aligned, bottles arranged in alphabetical order, cages spotless.

Yet the place felt like more than a clinic — part medical practice, part sanctuary. As if every operation concealed some secret ritual. As if here, flesh bent to forces older than science.

Esperanza set her hand on the operating table. The chill of the steel sent a jolt through her. Her vision blurred for a heartbeat, swaying between present and past. Something in the light, or maybe in the antiseptic smell, unlocked a memory buried too deep and too raw to ignore.

Images flickered, fragments of an old film torn and scratched. She saw herself at ten years old, perched on a stool to reach the right height, wearing the tiny lab coat her mother had sewn to make her feel useful.

Then came the memory of the accident.
She had been playing with a scalpel, mimicking her father’s gestures, when the blade slipped and nicked her palm. Bright red drops welled against pale skin. Like any child, she had instinctively brought her hand to her mouth to soothe the sting.

But the taste…

The taste had done something to her, indescribable and terrifyingly comforting. That salty, metallic warmth had awakened a thirst she had never known. She had licked her palm slowly, savoring it, not to ease the pain but because it filled her with a strange, primal satisfaction she could never forget.

More memories tumbled after it, clearer with every breath. In the following weeks, she had waited for any chance to sate his newfound thirst. When her parents treated wounded animals, she volunteered eagerly to clean instruments, stealing blood-soaked gauze to hide in the bathroom, sucking every drop in secret. Each time she swore it would be the last. Each time, the pull grew stronger.

Soon she had begun sipping directly from syringes used for blood samples. Only a few drops, never enough for her parents to notice. But the craving swelled, no longer a curiosity, now a compulsion.

One memory rose with painful clarity. She must have been eleven. A dog had come in for a minor procedure. While her parents’ backs were turned, she had leaned over the anesthetized animal and made a tiny incision in its ear, just enough to let a few drops of blood bead up. She caught them with her tongue, savoring each forbidden nuance.

Her father had seen her.
The look on his face — horror, revulsion — seared itself into her memory. The man she admired stood frozen, unable to speak, paralyzed by incomprehension and fear.

From that day on, the clinic became off-limits. Her parents claimed hygiene and safety reasons, but now she understood. It wasn’t about rules or risks. It was because she was the danger — to the animals, to their trust in her.

Every vacation after that, they sent her to her aunt in Tokyo. To broaden your horizons, they said. In truth, to keep her away from the clinic, from animals, from temptation.

And in Tokyo’s sanitized urban world, far from the smell of fur and blood, the urges had faded. She forgot them, locked them away, convinced herself they had never been real. She thought she chose veterinary medicine out of love for animals. Now the truth stood stark and ugly before her.

Esperanza collapsed into a chair, the weight of revelation crushing her chest. Everything clicked with a dreadful certainty: her parents’ hesitation about her career, their unease since her return, Luz’s constant vigilance. They knew. They had always known.

And worse: coming back here had awakened what she thought was gone. The metallic taste each morning, the magnetic pull of this place, the reaction she had to that injured cat…

She wasn’t becoming something new. She was becoming the creature she had once been.

Footsteps in the doorway made her flinch. Luz stood there, her face a fragile balance of sadness and fear.

“You remember now,” her sister said softly. It wasn’t a question.

Esperanza nodded, mute, tears spilling down her cheeks — guilt and terror twined together.

“Why didn’t you tell me ?” she finally whispered.

“Because in Tokyo, you were fine. You were normal again. We hoped… we prayed it would stay just a bad memory.”

“And now ?”

Luz didn’t answer right away. The silence stretched, heavy with inevitability.

“Now,” she murmured at last, “you need help. Before you become a danger — to yourself, and to all of us.”