AQUELE QUE MADRUGA Dios lo ayuda. God helps those who rise early.

Acacia hears her mother’s modulated portuñol dialect in her mind as she lies under her handwoven red-­and-­white quilt. Her petite and muscular frame sinks into her bed, pregnant belly weighing her down. Clouds of wool expose themselves every couple of centimetres along the mattress’ torn seams. The sun peering through her bedroom window brushes a smile on Acacia’s thick, peeling lips, dimples forming on either side of them like fingermarks. Time begins to coil itself back into its stem, its root, its seed, back into the red earth of Rivera, Uruguay.