Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Every mythology has its punished lovers and its cursed children, but only El Salvador has taken the child of its greatest tragedy and made him the best-loved figure in the national imagination. He stands about the height of a ten-year-old boy, because he has been ten years old for a thousand years and will be ten years old forever. His belly is round as a comal. On his head he wears an enormous hat — wide as a cartwheel in the tellings, big enough to shade his whole small body — and beneath it a grin of mischief that no century has managed to wear down. He eats ashes from cold hearths and bananas stolen from the groves, in some tellings the very plantains left to blacken because nobody else wants them. When girls come down to the rivers to wash, he watches from the reeds and tosses them pebbles and flower petals, giggling; when anyone tries to catch him, he is suddenly on the other bank, or on the volcano's shoulder, or thirty leagues away in another department, for distance means...