NO SHELTER HAS APOLLO: a short story.

Part 1

The day had been warm and sunny. The windows of the house were all wide open, to allow more wind to enter, cooling the heat that had accumulated during the afternoon. The two-story house that shyly overthrew itself over the sidewalk below was a small dent in the landscape of tall buildings.

As if seeking to touch the sky, most modern buildings occupied places that once belonged to houses like this one. But that small corner resisted, together with a few sister-houses, side by side, as if hand in hand, to gentrification and the elevation of smaller and smaller habitats.

Marisol's mother called them cages.

And when she looked at one of the buildings that now stood a little too close to her house, she found that the resemblance was uncanny. The building, which, by her calculations, would have more than twenty floors, was still under construction. It was located right in front of where Marisol liked to sit to watch the sun go down, in her small balcony. Little by little, the buildings were getting closer and, she had no doubt, would soon take over her neighbourhood, her street, her townhouse.

That's what her mother had predicted, before she succumbed to the disease and started trying to fight those buildings with her own hands. Not figuratively, but literally. In one of her crises, Marisol's mother had walked to one of those construction parks wearing only her nightgown and had screamed for hours on end at the gate for the "monster" to get out of her way. It was only when she decided that she would have no answer that she broke into the place by jumping over the fence and threw herself against one of the walls with a sledgehammer she found on site. One of the neighbours heard the noise and, thinking that construction had resumed during the night, called the police.

Since that call, Marisol had kept her mother close, tending to her at all times, unable to sleep. She was thankful every day for the bookstore and café that operated downstairs in her house, from where she got all her money, so that she would have the time and means to take care of her mother without both having to beg.

As her mother's health deteriorated, every shop in the neighbourhood, and the place itself, flourished. The influx of people was no doubt attributed to the amount of them that these new developments had brought around.

Her mother, she knew, cursed her state daily. When the disease caused her to lose all her hair, they both cried. Some days were better than others, when they both sat by the window or on the porch to watch passersby and to drink tea over some talk. That day, however, Marisol drank her tea alone.

It had been a little over a week since her mother's funeral, and this had been the first time she had been able to boil water on her own, as well as open the curtains, windows, and doors. Not because she wanted to see the outside world at all, but because the smell of the waste her dog had thrown around the room was making her queasy. That's what you get for not taking care of the house for more than a week, she thought.

The bookstore downstairs would continue to operate despite Marisol's insistence on keeping it closed. Her friend, Julia, who worked as one of the managers of the establishment, had come to her house every day to bring her food. Marisol wouldn't let her in, out of shame for the state of her house and because she didn't want to stain the house with the presence of anyone else. That place would be a shrine to her mother, forever untouched, in ruins.

That day, however, Julia had entered. Marisol allowed her to come in and convince her to take a shower and open the windows. After Julia left, Marisol took some medicine and blacked out on the living room couch.

She had awoken, however, because of the raindrops that the wind was whipping against the inside of her house. When she touched her feet to the floor, she noticed that the carpet was soaked and her dog, equally soaked, was in the corner, trembling with fear because of the rain and thunder. She picked him up, caressed him, and took him to dry, after closing the window and deciding to deal with the mess later.