My mother said that when her favourite aunt died, when the youngest, coolest of all her aunts died, she dreamed the dying. She was in her teenage bed, in the old house in Bogotá, and she witnessed her aunt rising.

Past the mourners, past the doctors and the tubes around a sterile bed, a clinical non-place, where no one would ever make history.

She wasn’t waving as she rose but there was a spring — not in her step, but in the cloudless rising. And my mother’s sleep replied. She wasn’t surprised when they woke her, to interrupt this neural dialogue, to jab her first-hand knowledge with the news.

What kind of signal is this, not seen but often seen as obscene? They’d call it magical realism, especially if it happened in Colombia. They’d file it as a cultural thing.

It was just a synapse / exploding at the close.