What did you do Maria Marimacha?

What did you do Maria Marimacha?

The story begins in Lima, Peru in a small town in a rural area, where people knew each other and enjoyed every little thing they got. A girl named Maria Marimacha lived with her mother and siblings. They spent their time helping each other with financial needs; since the age of 8, Maria was sent to work to sell candy in buses and the streets of Lima. It wasn’t unusual for kids to start working at a young age, and Maria had the responsibility to work twice as hard to provide for her family, so they can have a meal every day. Maria’s mom would also work all day doing the same thing, they didn’t always receive a lot but when they did they had more than rice and water for dinner.

From time to time other family members would visit and in particular, an uncle from her mother’s side would come to visit. He had told them he wanted to spend his birthday with them, and Maria’s mother wanted to celebrate his birth with a good birthday dinner. They thankfully gathered enough to buy the ingredients they needed to prepare this meal. So after a whole month of saving money for this dinner, the day finally came, Maria was asked by her mother to go purchase some items in a flea market nearby.

For this dinner, mom had thought of keeping it traditional and making “Anticucho” which is a kebab made of cows heart as the meat. Maria had to buy the heart, oil, and ground black pepper, she was given the money to strictly buy these items and nothing else. Her mother knew Maria very well and she knew that she could get distracted and not make it on time to start the preparation of the meal. Maria’s mom was right and Maria did get distracted, she saw a couple of her friends playing with marbles and betting; Maria decided to join. The game for Maria got intense, so she decided to bet some of the money her mother gave her and in the end, Maria lost all of it. When she realized there was no going back, she started to think fast on a solution of what to tell her mother but then she got another idea. This idea was nothing out of the ordinary, it would only require her to beg the vendors to lend her the items, and then she would return to pay them back with the money she would earn selling the candies.

She made her way to the flea market, there she started bargaining with the vendors, and unfortunately, no one wanted to just give her the items even though she explained to them what had happened. While making her way back home Maria decided to think about what she could do to not get in trouble because her mother trusted her to buy these things. Eventually, she came up with something and this time it was inhumane, she found an empty oil bottle first she started to spit on it and then she decided to urine in the bottle this was to make believe that it was oil. Later she got a tiny bag which she then filled with sand, the tiny ground of rocks and this was to be the “ground black pepper”. The last item was hard to figure out, Maria thought of one thing which saying it out loud makes your skin crawl; she made her way to the cemetery close by her house, and there she knew her father whom she wasn’t too close to was recently buried by his “other family” as her mother would say. Here she found a shovel, dragged it across the cemetery creating a trial right to her father's tombstone. Maria then started shoveling as much as she could, took her a couple of hours and she finally found the mummified body of her father, with the same shovel she cut the fabric around his body getting closer to his flesh. Maria could smell the body decaying, with blisters on her hand she didn't think twice and cut his chest open then she went in and grabbed his heart out.

Maria now “had” everything she needed and decided to go home. In her walk home she thought of what to do if her mother questioned her about the ingredients but never in her mind did she think of what she had done. Once she made it home, she placed all the things on the table hoping her mother wouldn’t question her; she ran into her room and just stayed there until her mother called her out. After hours she knew her mother didn’t realize and her uncle came. At the dinner table the anticuchos were steaming and Maria herself couldn’t even stand to look at it without thinking about all the nasty things she did. Her mother offered her a plate and Maria lied and said a vendor had given food so she wasn’t that hungry, then her uncle thought she was just being modest and offered her the plate again. After dinner, her mom, her siblings, and her uncle decided to take a walk to the bus stop where he would then leave, but Maria decided to stay. At this time now she was sick to her stomach thinking about what she had given her family. It was dark out and no light was shining in Maria couldn’t get this feeling out of her and then the door opened. From her room she called out to ask who it was but she did get an answer, she then got close to the door of her room to hear who it was, but all she could hear is one person walking around. She decided to open the door and look outside and to her surprise, no one was there.

Maria then started hearing someone say her name over and over again. She looked left and right, went through her whole house, and nothing! No one was there… Maria went back into her room and closed her door and went to bed thinking the person left but no. The voice came back asking her why she did that? Why would she do that to her family? The cries of a man were heard everywhere, Maria left trapped like this voice was following her, she kept hearing footsteps but couldn’t see anyone around. As she searched for another hiding place she went into a closet in her house, brought her blanket, and hoped for it to be the end. Her family came back feeling sick, they had some tea and went to bed hoping that nothing else would bother them but they were wrong. Maria couldn’t stop hearing voices and after her family went to sleep she decided to make another choice and this was to get rid of her family so the spirit of her dead father stopped wandering around. She thought because they ingested him he stayed in the house and her solution was to start killing her family. Maria killed her younger siblings first, then killed her mother and then ended her own life.

The following morning word went around about some patient from the asylum escaping and was going around tormenting people, and getting near their windows crying for answers to why people did not want him. In the end it was Maria’s guilt that ended her and her family's life.