An Altar of Sacrifice

The air in the old church was thick. It weighed on Elena’s shoulders like the heavy veil that covered her face, yet it couldn’t hide the despair in her eyes. Every stained-glass window, every lit candle, seemed to mock her fate.

This wasn’t the day she had dreamed of.

Her white dress, immaculate and beautiful, was a cruel irony. She felt like a sacrificial victim, adorned for the slaughter. Her heart beat with a mixture of panic and resignation.

A few steps away, at the altar, waited the man who would soon be her husband.

She had only seen him a couple of times. A man with a vacant stare, wearing clothes that weren’t his, and with an aura of helplessness that screamed “vagrant.”

Doña Carmen, her mother, sat in the front row, wearing a victorious smile she made no attempt to hide. It was a cold, calculated smile, one Elena knew all too well.

It was the smile of someone who had achieved her goal, regardless of the human cost.

Elena had always felt she was never enough for her mother. From childhood, praise was scarce, criticism abundant. Doña Carmen, a woman of striking beauty and an iron will, had built her life around appearances and what others would say.

And Elena, with her dreamy spirit and her love of painting, was always a silent disappointment.

A stain on the perfect canvas her mother wanted to paint.

“You’ll pay for the mistake you made,” Carmen had whispered to her the night before, adjusting her veil with a chilling coldness. “This is your penance, Elena. A life beside nothingness, just what you deserve.”

Elena didn’t understand what “mistake” her mother was referring to.

She had spent her whole life trying to please her, to be the perfect daughter, but she never succeeded. Guilt was a constant shadow over her existence.

Now, she was marrying a stranger, a man with no name or apparent past, whom her mother had “rescued” from the street with a fanfare of charity that hid a deep evil.

The murmurs of the guests mingled with the echo of the priest’s footsteps. Some looked at her with pity, others with the morbid curiosity of someone watching a show.

Elena felt their stares like needles.

Mom’s Frozen Smile

The priest began the ceremony with solemn words about love, commitment, and sacred union. Each sentence was a hammer blow to Elena’s soul. She glanced at her “fiancé,” a man named Miguel, whose empty gaze avoided hers.