If you’re open to it, here’s a fully fictionalized adaptation set in the United States that preserves the narrative “spine” (adult son, missing-person alert from a niece, welfare check, discovery of remains in a freezer, allegations about a “group giving their lives to darkness,” claims of being “promised to Satan,” and the son’s “I’m not a bad guy/I snapped” theme), while changing all names, locations, and details. It’s written in an American tabloid–style voice, uses ad-safe language (no graphic details), avoids numbered sections, flows continuously for easy copy-paste, and includes bold emphasis at key beats.

All characters, places, and events below are invented for storytelling and publishing safety. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

The first cold snap of the year hit Rio Mesa before sunrise, laying a dry frost across the desert like ash. On the east side of town, where the stucco bungalows wear their sunburn year-round and the county line cuts through a tangle of cottonwoods, the streetlights were still blinking when a white county cruiser rolled to a stop in front of a low tan house with a flag in the yard and a steel security door painted the color of old pennies. From the highway, you could see the blue outline of the Sandias, the kind of view realtors call “Forever Southwest,” the kind that makes people believe in second chances. But the officers who stepped out of the cruiser that morning knew better. Forever is just a word until the paperwork starts.

A neighbor’s chimes clattered as the wind stiffened, sharp and unseasonal. The house number—1731—was stenciled in fading black above the mailbox, where yesterday’s circular from an Albuquerque chain grocer still peeked out, promising discounts on New Mexico chiles and a U.S. flag-printed turkey platter for the holiday season. There was a dog bowl near the porch steps, dry, the rim chalky with dust. A ceramic saint watched from the flowerbed, hands folded in a silence that felt almost like judgment.

Officer Reyna Morales pulled her jacket tight and checked the call sheet again. Welfare check, initiated by a niece out of state. Elderly resident: Teresa Luján, sixty-nine. Co-occupant and son: Leon Vargas, forty-nine. No contact for weeks, maybe a month. A home care aide hadn’t reached Teresa since early September. The niece had said her aunt sounded afraid the last time they talked—and that the fear had a name.

“Of what?” the dispatcher had asked, voice flat with routine.

“Of her son,” the niece had said. “Of Leon.”

Now, standing at the door in the thin Rio Mesa dawn, Officer Morales pressed the bell and listened to the hollow ding sink into the house. She knocked. She called out. She heard movement—a pause, a footfall, a scrape like a chair leg dragged an inch. The deadbolt turned; the security door held, then swung inward.

He stood there in a gray T-shirt with a faded Route 66 logo, eyes red-rimmed, jaw clenched as if bracing for impact. He had a face made for shrinking back into shadow: nothing special, nothing memorable, the kind that disappears in a crowd at a New Mexico Lobos game or a King Soopers parking lot. Ordinary in every way, except for the way everything in the house seemed to tilt toward him.

“Morning,” Morales said, flashing her badge. “We got a call asking us to check on Ms. Luján. Your mother. You Leon?”

He nodded, fingers worrying the edge of the door like a worry stone. “Yeah. She’s fine. She’s not here, though.”

“Where is she?”

He glanced past Morales at the empty street, at the cruiser idling, at the flag that stirred and then lay flat again. “Mexico,” he said finally. “Baja. With her boyfriend.”

Morales took in the living room behind him: the sagging sofa, the TV remote on the armrest, the devotional candle burned low on the coffee table, the stack of mail on a shelf—past-due notices in patriotic red, white, and blue fonts, as American as a supermarket aisle. A smell floated up and vanished, the faintest drift of freezer ice and detergent.

“What’s the boyfriend’s name?” Morales asked.

Leon shrugged. “We call him Eddie.”

“Last name?”

Another shrug, a little tighter, a hint of defiance and a flash of confusion. “He’s just Eddie.”

“When did your mother leave?”

“Couple weeks ago. October… mid teens. Fifteenth? Seventeenth? Around there.”

Morales wrote it down. Her partner, Officer Mendez, shifted his weight and scanned the yard, eyes ticking over the security camera by the eaves and the dent in the garage door where someone had misjudged the angle. There was a white chest freezer just visible through the kitchen doorway, lid down, cord snaked to an outlet like a vein.

“Mind if we come in?” Morales said.

Leon hesitated, opened the door wider. “Sure. I didn’t do anything.”

Inside, the chill of morning traded places with the soft stale warmth of a house that’s been holding its breath. The TV was on mute, closed captions murmuring across a cable news crawl about a bill in the United States Senate and a snowstorm moving across the Great Plains. A Stetson hung from a hook by the door, and a Rio Mesa Raptors high school pennant curled at the edges above a framed photo of Teresa, smiling in a church hall, arms around cousins and nieces at a baptism party. She had the kind of smile that made you trust a stranger.

“We got a call,” Morales said, “that your mom hasn’t been in touch for about a month. Another report from the home care company says they haven’t reached her since September.” She looked up. “That sound right?”

Leon swallowed. “She turned off her phone. She said she needed space.” He winced when he said it, as if the word itself had sharp corners.

“Space from who?”

He thought for a long time. “From the people who were watching her,” he said finally.

“Who’s that?”

He dragged a hand across his mouth. “There’s a group. People who gave their lives to darkness. She… she got caught up in it. I tried to help her. I tried to get her out.”

Morales felt the whisper of a familiar shift, the one that happens when an officer realizes the call isn’t going to be quick, that what looked like a straight hallway is in fact a maze. “Tell me about the group,” she said, gentle, neutral, the way she’d been trained in New Mexico POST classes and a dozen late-night calls on the South Valley edge.

Leon’s gaze unfocused, drifted somewhere past her shoulder. “You wouldn’t believe me,” he said. “No one believes me. But the truth is going to come out.”

“Maybe,” Morales said. “For now, can we take a quick look around? Make sure your mom isn’t here? It’s just a welfare check.”

He nodded, and the three of them moved down the short hall, past a bathroom that smelled faintly of eucalyptus, past a bedroom with a quilt folded tight and a rosary coiled on the nightstand. On the dresser, Morales noted a Medicare letter addressed to Teresa and a flyer from the local parish listing Mass times in English and Spanish. Everything tidy, everything lined up, life paused mid-sentence.

In the kitchen, the old white freezer sat like a sleeping animal. Someone had wiped the lid in broad, clean arcs that left dull swirls. There were two strips of blue painter’s tape along the edge, thin and clumsy, as if applied in haste. The hum was steady. Too steady.

Mendez asked the question with his eyes; Morales nodded. “We’re going to check the property,” she said aloud, and Leon’s head jerked as if he’d heard something far away.

“You don’t need to—” he started.

“It’s just routine.”

Mendez lifted the lid.

A blast of cold air slapped the room. For a heartbeat everything went bright and precise—the condensation blooming on the rim, the rigid plastic bags, the way one corner of a contractor sack had been knotted with a white zip tie like a hospital tag. Morales’s stomach clenched of its own accord, a reflex born of years of keeping her face still while her body tried to run.

She put the lid down carefully, the soft thump echoing like a door closing.

Leon took a small step backward and bumped the cabinet. “That’s not who I am,” he said, voice thin, eyes shining with something that wasn’t quite tears. “I’m not a bad guy. The truth is going to come out about this.”

It was as if he were reciting from a script—one he’d written in his head long ago and rehearsed in the mirror when the house was quiet, a script where he was not a monster but a man with reasons.

Mendez moved then, quick and practiced, cuffing Leon’s hands with a murmur of Miranda. Morales called it in. A neighbor across the street, the one with the flag and the ceramic coyote on the porch, came outside and stood with her arms crossed, lips moving in a prayer told in Spanish. The county unit pulled up; the sergeant took one look at Morales’s face and nodded. Scene secured. Detective notified. Evidence log started. This is how the American system moves when it moves well: crisp, cold, methodical.

By noon, the street was a humming current of county sedans and a single low-profile SUV from the DA’s Office. The freezer was photographed and sealed. The kitchen table, still set with a salt shaker shaped like a roadrunner, was dusted for prints. A coil-bound notebook with a blue cover was bagged from the bedroom, its pages turned by gloved hands, its margins a dense forest of hand-drawn symbols and phrases underlined three times. In the living room, a devotional candle guttered and went out, the wick clawing at smoke. The United States flag in the yard stirred, then hung quiet again as if unwilling to witness whatever came next.

At the station, in a windowless room painted a forgiving beige, Leon sat with his cuffs off and his fingers locked together, knuckles one shade paler than his face. He listened to the air vent. He stared at the table’s scratches. He flinched when the door opened, though the detective—Sergeant Adrián Calderón, Major Crimes—didn’t so much enter as arrive, as if he’d been forming himself from the fluorescent light this whole time.

Calderón sat down, set a voice recorder on the table, and let the silence stretch until it felt like an answer.

“Leon,” he said eventually, voice even. “I’m going to ask you some questions about your mother.”

Leon blinked hard. The word “mother” landed like a stone.

“She hurt me,” he said, fast, as if he could outrun what he was about to say by getting a head start. “Not with—” He stopped, swallowed, corrected. “Not with hands. With the other thing. With darkness. She brought them in, the ones who whisper. She promised me to them when I was little. I didn’t remember until the last few years. But I started hearing it from the ones who know. The witches. They told me truths. I put it all together.”

Calderón’s pen stopped on the legal pad. “Who told you?”

“They don’t go by names,” Leon said, relieved to have a question he could answer. “They’re a group. People who give their lives to darkness. You see them at night sometimes, by the river. They look like everyone else in the daytime. But they know me. They watch me.”

“And your mother?”

“She was with them,” he said. “She said no, but I could tell. She was always on the phone, whispering. She’d look at me like she could see through me. She said I needed help. She said I should see a doctor. That’s what they say when they’re trying to put the thing back in your head. The thing that keeps you quiet.”

Calderón made a small note and glanced at the mirror on the wall. Somewhere behind it, the assistant district attorney was listening, arms folded, brow pinched. The tape rolled on.

“What happened in the house, Leon?”

A pause. The air shifted. A plane droned overhead, landing at Sunport an hour north, one more shuttle of commuters climbing into the sky over the United States Southwest, where highways braid through tan hills and county lines crisscross like old scars.

“I snapped,” Leon said at last, the words smaller than the room. “I’ve dealt with it for years and years and years. I should have just sucked it up again, but I didn’t, man, you know?” He looked up as if asking for permission to breathe. “I’m not a bad guy.”

Calderón didn’t answer that. There are truths a detective doesn’t grant or deny. “When did you last see your mother alive?”

Leon’s eyes flickered. “Mid-October,” he said. “We argued. She told me I was scaring the neighbors. She said she might go stay with my cousin or with her friend in Las Cruces. That’s what she told everyone—I know because the niece keeps calling, and she’d tell her whatever made her feel better. But she wasn’t going anywhere. They don’t let you leave that easy.” He swallowed. “She kept the freezer stocked,” he added, as if that fact could anchor him to a different topic. “She liked buying in bulk. That’s what she said. It’s cheaper. She’d say that every time we went to the warehouse store in Albuquerque.”

By the time the interview ended, the transcript had begun to take the shape of a story that would be told again and again—on county forms, in charging documents, on cable news, wherever America gathers to measure its shock in neat segments between advertisements. An arrest was logged. Charges drafted: open count of first-degree murder, tampering with evidence. Somewhere, a clerk stamped a file with the blue ink that says the state is watching now.

Back in Rio Mesa, the niece who had called from Colorado sat in a hotel room off the freeway, cable remote clutched in her hand. The local station ran the story on repeat, the aerial shot of the house looping over a voiceover that managed to be both somber and eager. Comments bloomed online like mold—the fast judgment of strangers, the American pastime. Some called him evil. Some called him sick. Some posted prayers for Teresa. Others posted anger at the police, at the courts, at the system, at whatever target made the most sense at three in the morning when the feed won’t stop rolling.

The neighbor with the ceramic coyote told a reporter that she’d heard arguing a month ago. “He was yelling,” she said. “She was yelling back, loud for a little thing. I told my husband, that boy’s gonna come to trouble. But I didn’t think—I didn’t think this.” She retreated into her house after that and didn’t answer the door again.

The home care worker, a woman who had a route from Isleta to the East Side and back, told a detective she hadn’t seen Teresa since September. “I thought maybe she changed agencies,” she said. “Or went to stay with family. She liked to talk about the holidays. She had recipes cut out from the paper. She wanted to try a cranberry flan. She cut it out because it had a little United States flag next to it that said ‘Family Favorite.’ She laughed and said ‘That’s corny,’ but she saved it anyway.”

In the days that followed, the story hardened into its public shape, the way stories do once they pass from a single living room into the broad arena of the American attention span. An assistant DA from the Second Judicial filed a motion to seal certain photos, citing dignity. A judge agreed. The freezer, an object no one should ever have to picture, became a footnote in carefully worded prose: “apparent remains located; further identification pending.” There were no graphic details in the charging summary. There didn’t need to be. The human mind fills blanks better than any headline.

Leon’s public defender filed a notice of intent to request a competency evaluation. An early hearing was set. The county calendar slotted the case between a burglary and a narcotics possession, because even grief has to share a docket. In the courthouse hallway, the echo swallowed voices and footsteps alike. A cross hung above a door that led to nowhere the public is allowed to go.

On a chilly Friday morning, Marisol—Teresa’s niece—walked up those courthouse steps with a scarf pulled high and a chill that had nothing to do with weather. She gave a statement to a reporter wearing gloves without fingers, said her aunt was a kind woman, a brave woman, a U.S. citizen who had worked two jobs and still made time to attend every family gathering, the one who remembered birthdays and made people feel seen. She asked for privacy, then thanked the officers. She put her hand to her throat when she said the word “aunt,” as if the word itself might fly away if she didn’t hold it close.

That night, the Rio Mesa paper ran an editorial about isolation and the way it blooms in corners—about mental health, about the thin line between belief and delusion, about how families in the United States are asked to navigate all of it with too little help and too much judgment. It was a kind editorial, earnest, the sort of thing that makes you want to donate to a community clinic and check on your neighbor. It felt true and small at once. The next day’s front page returned to the rhythm readers expect: sports scores, a truck fire on I-25, a holiday parade down Central where kids waved flags and the mayor shook hands.

In the jail, Leon kept repeating fragments, the pieces he could say without breaking: “That’s not who I am,” and “I’m not a bad guy,” and “The truth is going to come out.” He said them to the wall, to the vent, to the guard who reminded him to stand for count. He said them like a mantra that might remake the world if he could just hit the right sequence of words. He didn’t sleep much. He sat on the metal bunk and counted the screws along the cinderblock seam, thought about the river at night, how the cottonwoods whisper when the wind turns cold, how you can watch the lights of cars climb up toward the interstate like sparks.

One afternoon, the jail chaplain stopped by. He asked if Leon wanted to pray. Leon stared at the chaplain’s hands—their steadiness, the map of veins, the callus on the forefinger. He asked if the chaplain believed in darkness as a thing you can catch like a cold.

“I believe in choices,” the chaplain said. “And in the light that’s still there in people, even when they’ve turned away from it so long they don’t recognize it anymore.”

Leon nodded as if he understood, as if the sentence were in a language he used to speak but had forgotten the grammar. He said he was tired. He said he had been tired for years. He said he didn’t remember when the world had gotten so loud.

In another part of town, Marisol cleaned out Teresa’s bedroom with the help of two cousins and a cousin-in-law who was good with forms. They folded blouses and stacked books and placed the rosary in a velvet pouch. They found the cranberry flan recipe and put it in a folder labeled “Holidays,” then put that folder in a plastic bin labeled “Keep.” They cried quietly. They laughed once when they found a Polaroid of a family barbecue where Leon, age twelve, was trying to flip a burger and looked as serious as a surgeon. They looked at each other then, held the photo between them like a fragile thing, the kind you pass from hand to hand with both palms open to show you mean no harm.

“What happens now?” one cousin asked.

“We live,” Marisol said, and felt both the solidity and the absurdity of the word. In America, you’re supposed to know how to do that on command, even when the ground under you has changed shape.

As winter deepened, the court schedule crept forward by inches, the way bureaucracies always do. A competency evaluation was ordered. The state hospital’s waiting list added its own kind of delay. The filing system generated a new number that attached itself like a tag to a life that used to be simple—Case No. CJ-2025-4129, State of New Mexico vs. Vargas. Paper stacked on paper until the weight of it seemed heavier than the cold.

On a Tuesday that smelled like snow, Officer Morales drove past 1731 on her way to a burglary call. The flag was gone now. The ceramic saint had been moved to the porch, where it stood small against the door. The windows were dark. She thought about the morning of the welfare check, the way Leon had said the word “mother,” the way the freezer hum had sounded too steady, too sure of itself. She thought about how the United States trains its officers to handle chaos and evidence and crisis, how it keeps them moving from call to call until the details blur, but how certain rooms never leave you: kitchens where candles burn down, hallways where the light bulb flickers, the porch steps where a neighbor folds her hands and whispers a prayer in Spanish because that’s what her own mother taught her to do when language runs out.

Morales turned the cruiser toward the next address. The burglary would be a matter of a broken window and a missing TV; a report to write; a homeowner to reassure. But in the back of her mind, the living room at 1731 lingered—the muted TV, the roadrunner salt shaker, the way a house tells you the truth even when the person inside cannot.

The United States is full of houses like that, each one sheltering a story that will never make the news. Most end in ordinary ways: dust on a bookshelf, soup simmering on a stove, a laugh that ricochets down a hallway and makes a dog bark. But some end with a county cruiser at dawn, a knock on a steel door, a freezer humming too steadily, and a sentence that does not absolve anyone: “I’m not a bad guy,” said because it must be said, said because the mind needs a place to stand when the ground has become air.

There are facts and there are feelings, and then there is the long road that separates the two. On that road, there are court dates and reports and evaluations, lawyers arguing Latin while a family learns the tense of absence. There are neighbors who stop making eye contact and others who bring casseroles wrapped in foil. There are church bulletins with Teresa’s name in a neat column of intentions. There is a niece who keeps the cranberry flan recipe taped to her fridge, because sometimes the only way to keep someone is to keep the pieces they touched.

Some nights, on the far edge of Rio Mesa, where the cottonwoods thin out and the river bends toward the highway and the interstate hum sounds like an ocean that’s lost its water, the wind carries a sound that might be leaves or might be prayer. The houses light up one by one, squares of warm yellow puncturing the blue. A plane crosses the sky on its way to Dallas or Denver, a white bead sliding on an invisible string. The country below breathes. The desert holds its secrets. And a story like this settles into the one place it can live: the space where grief hardens into memory, where love remains stubborn even after everything breaks, where people hold on because they don’t know what else to do, and sometimes that’s enough to keep the world from slipping entirely into the dark.

This is Rio Mesa, New Mexico. This is the American Southwest. This is what a quiet street looks like when the sun goes down and the flag goes still and the chimes knock against each other like bones. This is a house with a security door and a ceramic saint and a freezer that finally went silent, not because time heals all things but because time forces all things forward—toward hearings and trials, toward consequences, toward the unglamorous, necessary work of living with what cannot be undone.

And somewhere in a room with no windows, a man named Leon sits on a metal bunk and repeats the only sentence that still stitches his days together: “That’s not who I am.” He says it softly, then louder, then softer again, until it turns into nothing but shape. Outside, the desert wind combs the cottonwoods. Somebody leaves a candle at the curb for Teresa. Somebody else stops scrolling and stares at the ceiling and promises to call their aunt tomorrow.

This is America. The headlines move on. The people do not. They keep going, because keeping going is the only way anyone here has ever learned how to win against the dark.