Just as I promised myself, I would post this chapter on my birthday. It's February 8 already here in the Philippines but as long as it's still February 7 somewhere, I have still fulfilled my promise to myself and to some people who asked about this chapter.

Disclaimer: This is a shitty way to deal with paper deadlines though and I do not condone this way of thinking if you are making a paper to submit to a professor.

Even after death, the Rivera family was still making shoes.

It was only then did that that tiny yet very important piece of information actually registered in Miguel's brain.

The first time Miguel visited the Land of the Dead, he had been too busy finding Ernesto de la Cruz, reversing the the curse and saving Hector from his impending final death to give the deceased Rivera family's home and livelihood more than a passing thought. It was understandable since back then he was running on borrowed time and the Rivera family did not have any time to talk about their daily life in the land of the dead over bread and coffee, granted Miguel was too busy running away and they were too busy chasing after him. That time though, he was staying for good. He was officially a skeleton. There was no need to save himself from losing what he had already lost at that point. From what he understood, he'd be staying with them and naturally, one of the first things he started to think about was their livelihood,daily life and their home.

The Rivera shoe shop in the Land of the Dead was very similar to the one back home except a bit bigger and a lot more empty. He had almost expected the atmosphere to be as warm and familial as the one back home. As soon as they arrived in the workshop though, Imelda had locked herself in the workshop not even bothering to welcome him or show him around. Miguel guessed that she was still angry.

On the other hand, Hector still managed to maintain his good natured aura. He had given Miguel a mini tour of the workshop, or at least the outside of it. With Imelda's abrasive mood, the inside of the workshop was off limits. After that, he had guided Miguel through the cobblestoned yard and to the main house. He had let Miguel in the living room and was quick to go back out again when he realized as soon as they got to the living room that he had forgotten something. From his soft and vague muttering, Miguel could not make out much except for his self deprecating jokes about being too old for that. He was too in a hurry even to mention to Miguel what he had forgotten. In the end Miguel was left alone and with enough time to actually take a better look at his surroundings and ponder the everyday life of his deceased family.

Miguel settled on the sofa in the living room and surveyed his surroundings. Their home was similar in style to his back in Santa Cecilia. It was cozy and neat. The pillows on the sofa may have been neatly fixed, and everything had its own place. There were no shoes or socks thrown anywhere or shoes toppled over after not being placed on the corner properly, a sign of Imelda's nitpicky attitude. Miguel had to note though that even with the neatness, it was definitely lived in. A guitar was leaning on the wall to the side next to a bookshelf would books neatly lined up on them with other books that were propped on top of others. Miguel guessed that they were only read recently. His great great grandmother wouldn't have allowed it to be left like that, especially when everything else was in its proper place..

Where is everyone anyway? The style and lived in feel of the house only reminded him of his home back in Santa Cecilia. He thought of his cousins, his tios and tias, his parents and his little sister. The workshop back home was always bustling with the sounds of hammer on sole, footsteps, children screaming and running around and more recently, with the occasional tune or melody. When his mind flitted off to that, Miguel started to realize that in the house he was staying in then, it was just too quiet. Where was Tia Victoria, Tia Rosita? Papa Julio? Tio Oscar? Tio Felipe? He didn't have to think long for an answer because soon after he saw the sun starting to rise from the big window to the side of the living room.

Of course, they are asleep. He thought of his last visit to the Land of the Dead. It was night time then and he had gone back to the land of the living just before sunrise. With the lively nightlife he had experienced then, he had assumed that people in the Land of the Dead would never experience day lights like the ones back in Santa Cecilia. Why would they have a sunrise spectacular if the sun never rose? Miguel scolded himself for that minor bout of stupidity. For some reason, a part of him had lightened up at the minor scolding. He had been alone for a only a few minutes, somehow, though, that was enough to make him feel a little lonely. If loneliness is left to fester, it tends to bring out the other depressing feelings with it and Miguel had found himself reflecting on the inevitability of his decision. How long was he going to feel the way he did? How long it would be before he could actually go through his afterlife without feeling so heavy and down? At that point, his body was just looking for any small break from his reality.

Things were starting to look bleak. They felt bleak as well. It was only natural that he turned to anything that remotely meant companionship and warmth. Miguel turned his whole body towards the window, bringing his legs behind him. He leaned on the arm rest and silently watched the sunrise that he had missed by a few seconds only a year ago.

Miguel ended up appreciating that sun rise a little differently from other people. When watching the sunrise, many other people tend to look straight at the son or at least the horizon the sun appears from. Miguel would do the exact same thing when he wakes up early enough and had enough time to spare to watch the sunrise back in Santa Cecilia. Watching it in the land of the dead was a little different though. He found the changing colors in the sky and his surroundings a little more eye catching than the rising of the sun. A sunrise in itself was a sunrise no matter where somebody went. It is a ball yellow and orange that slides up slowly from one horizon. It was somehow magical on its own but one thing Miguel learned as he watched the sun peek over the horizon was that the most mesmerizing magic came from how it illuminated a place.

Santa Cecilia is a small and rustic town, the buildings almost all the same color, just varying shades of orange and brown. He had seen that same view, day and night for years and the glow of the sun bathing the rustic brown and orange hues of the town was something he had seen everyday or at least on the days when he woke up early enough to. The Land of the Dead on the other hand was a colorful place, and Miguel could have sworn that the first time he saw it was the first time he had seen so many colors in one view. As the sun rose higher and higher into the sky, his surroundings became a little brighter. The cobblestoned streets below started to look a little more blue and grey than purple. The buildings started to glimmer. As the light from the sun bathed the colorful buildings, MIguel almost expected the bright colors of the buildings to blend in with the brightness of the sunlight, only to be surprised by how the orange glow of the rising sun undermined the once bright and neon colors of the buildings.

Miguel considered sneaking out. It was one thing walking around the Land of the Dead at night. It was definitely another thing to do it in the daytime. Maybe, he would be able to find clues that can help him track Rodrigo.

It only took him a few seconds to brush away the prodding of his already guilty conscience. Sneak out! And you're not even going to tell your Papa Hector or Mama Imelda? It must have been trying to say. All Miguel had to do was remember how cold his Mama Imelda had been and how easily they had left him alone in that room to think that although they would probably miss him, they would not miss him too could maybe leave a note so they would not worry too much. Within a minute, the young boy was already starting to rack his brain cells, formulating a plan of how to maneuver the streets of the Land of the Dead alone. It was daytime, it would be much easier to maneuver the streets. He was trying to make out a path from the limited view of the skyline when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

Miguel jumped instinctively. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to-" He didn't have to finish his sentence. His mind already registered that he didn't say anything out loud so he didn't have to deny himself. That was only the initial reason he had stopped himself half way. The bigger reason why was because he was rendered speechless by what he saw behind him. As he turned around , he saw someone he had not seen in almost a year, more importantly someone he hasn't seen so strong and so lucid in so long. She was staring at him with eyes that were directed right at him, instead of as if he was just part of a fevered dream or a memory of long ago. As he made eye contact with his great grandmother, he couldn't help but try to recall when was the last time she had looked at him with that much perception and recognition.

"Mama Coco?" Miguel's eyes widened in shock, unconsciously mirroring the look of the face in front of him. He felt his mouth tremble and he realized that he probably would have been tearing up at that point if skeletons had tear ducts. The last time he had seen his great grandmother so lucid was when he was still writing the names of animals under pictures of zoos for his homework back in kindergarten. She was still young enough to teach him the names of the many animals in the zoos- el lion, el tigre, el elefante, el oso. By the time he was in grade school and learning how to write short essays about his family for his language homework, his grandmother was already spending seconds to even a minute, trying to remember the names of her great grandchildren and her grandchildren too. She would then spend an hour or so staring into nothing, dozing off after her investing so much of her already deteriorating brain cells trying to piece together who was related to who and who did what and what happened to who in the many anecdotes she used to tell him. While Miguel was starting to learn how to piece his family together in a family tree, Mama Coco was starting to forget. It was a slow process. Miguel was close to Mama Coco but he was young. He didn't understand the gravity of what was happening. It was a saddening experience to watch his Mama Coco gradually lose her awareness of her surroundings and succumb to the senile fate of anyone her age. It was like ripping a band-aid off slowly instead of all at once though, the pain spread out over years of naively observing the gradual deterioration and Miguel did not understand the poignancy of that whole ordeal until he saw a lucid and very alive Mama Coco in front of him.

The flashbacks had washed over him in less than a second and before he could even understand what he did, he was hugging Mama Coco so tightly, or at least as tightly as his bones would allow.

"Miguel… What…" Mama Coco didn't return the hug. She sounded surprised to see him as if she didn't expect that sudden hug. "What are you doing here?" Or as if she didn't expect him to be there at all.

Miguel slowly loosened his arms as he realized that although the reunion was a warm one for him, Mama Coco didn't seem so happy to see him. Before he could even pull away, he felt his great grandmother grab his shoulders and pull him at arm's length. He watched as she quickly scanned him from head to toe again and again. Each time she looked straight at him, she looked more and more unsure of what was happening

"Coco, looks like your Mama Imelda hasn't cooked anything yet…"

"Did you finish the leftovers from...Miguel?"

Miguel heard the sounds of footsteps coming closer and from his peripherals, he saw the familiar shape of the twins standing by the doorway.

"Tio Oscar, Tio Felipe..." MIguel managed to utter as he inched himself away from Coco's grip.

"Miguel… you're here again…" Tio Oscar said, looking too surprised to say anything more."

"Here, here here. For good?" Tio Felipe asked, his face looking like a mixture of shock and sadness. Tio Oscar soon mirrored the same face, that small fact dawning on him a few seconds after his twin.

"This must be a mistake… We're supposed to know about this… The department of family reunions would call us if anything like this happens right?" Coco said looking back at her two uncles. She looked back to Miguel pleadingly. "Why are you here?" She looked like she was begging to hear a certain answer from him, a reassurance that this was all just a sick joke that Miguel felt almost pressured to lie to her and tell her that it was shoe paint or he was cursed again as ludicrously illogical as it sounded. Instead, he did the next best thing he could do and looked away silently and pulled his jacket up, knowing exactly what they would be seeing underneath. No skin, just bones.

The two twins gasped from behind Coco. "Imelda might know what to do… Or we could ask Hector…"

"What are you all doing here? No one even bothered to cook breakfast…" Tia VIctoria entered the room, looking almost annoyed before she, too made eye contact with Miguel. Her eyes widened. "Miguel! What are you…"She stopped herself and turned to her mother. "Mama Coco… What's going on? When did he…"

All eyes were trained on Miguel and all he wanted to do was disappear. He almost regretted having watched the sunrise long enough to be discovered by his great grandmother, even if it meant not having had that reunion with his Mama Coco. He should have snuck out as soon as he was left alone.

Death wasn't supposed to make him feel this horrible for choosing to cross.

Somewhere between Life and Death

Even after death, the Rivera family still ate meals together. It was not something he had totally not believed. He had seen Hector drink a shot and had seen the skeletons indulge in snacks but the phrase "dead people eat too" was never an explicit phrase in his brain. With that, he never considered a family meal with the dead Riveras to be an actual occurrence, if he did though before that, he would never have expected it to be as awkward as the one he was experiencing then and there.

It was Miguel's first meal with the deceased Rivera family so one thing he was not aware of was the unwritten law in the Rivera household that Imelda makes breakfast. If it wasn't Imelda making breakfast, it was Coco. At that point in time, Imelda was far too distracted by current happenings to have even remembered to make breakfast. Coco was still too shocked by that recent revelation to even think up what go eat and the responsibility of cooking that days breakfast fell on the most level headed in the room Tia Victoria. She has never been one for cooking seeing as the responsibility of cooking fell on Mama Elena as soon as she was old enough to safely work a left the family with the only breakfast Tia Victoria could manage, a breakfast that was out of the refrigerator and into the plate in less than 15 minutes, a very plain fried eggs with bread.

Fortunately though, everyone was too preoccupied with other things to consider the banality of the breakfast. Unfortunately, this issue that the Rivera family was preoccupied with was far too serious to have anything that could be considered fortunate.

Miguel in particular could not find anything good about the situation at hand. The past few minutes, he had watched his Mama Coco make her way to her the workshop two strides at a time and rap on the door. He had then watched the salty exchange between mother and daughter. Mama Coco looked angry about the deception but at the same time desperately pleading for answers while Mama Imelda remained cold, insisting that her daughter would not understand what was happening.

They were talking as if he wasn't there and Miguel only felt more tempted to just leave the house.

As Mama Coco calmed down and Tia Victoria served the food, the situation did not improve. The family was too quiet and too tense over breakfast. Tia Rosita and Papa Julio snuck glances at Miguel but looked hesitant to ask anything of him. His Mama Imelda still looked cold and distracted. She was eating her food much faster that she could have been eating them two spoonfuls at a time.

Miguel glanced at Mama Coco who was silently eating her food. Their eyes had met and Mama Coco looked like she wanted to say something and stopped herself, the heaviness and the tension of the room, making it hard for anyone to even just break the silence that governed it.

That responsibility ended up falling on the most ignorant. After a few minutes of silent and very uncomfortable eating, the door to the dining room creaked open and Hector entered the room, his movements naturally quicker, obviously still unaware of the tension in the room.

"You wouldn't believe what I managed to get from customs."

Miguel would have wanted to gasp in surprise or just voice his astonishment at seeing the object Hector held out for the family to see. Miguel though was aware of the tension in the atmosphere and could not manage more than a jaw drop.

"Hector, a guitar is the last thing we should be thinking about." Imelda said coldly, and sounding a little exasperated as she broke the uncomfortable silence.

"No no, you don't understand, this is the one from the hospital, the one left by Miguel's bed. They found it on MIguel when he crossed."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Imelda asked. Her voice starting to lean more from a cold and emotionless tone to one of pure exasperation. "Oh who cares, if he just died, at least he has a memento to be help him remember how it felt to be alive? This is not what we're after Hector."

"Imelda. That wasn't what I was thinking when I got this… Are you accusing me of not caring?"

As the two argued, they did not even bother trying to acknowledge the presence of the other members of the RIvera family who was just watching the exchange silently. Miguel was starting to feel a little left out and frustrated. It was the same way back home. Adult talk was adult talk and nobody ever bothered to explain what they were talking about to him, even if it was about him. If Miguel was a few years older, he may have decided to step up and say something about it. He was beaten to it.

He heard a slam on the table and a clatter of glass a few seats away. He looked to the sound to see Coco standing up. From his seat, he couldn't properly see her face, but her tone was his enough for him to know that she was definitely not taking this lightly. "You're talking about this as if I have no right to know what's happening. This is my great grandson. I watched him grow up. Don't you think I have a right to know what is happening?"

"This is not your problem Coco. This is not your mistake. We will fix this." Imelda said, as if she was talking to a girl who had only lived less than an eighth of her life, not an old lady who had more than eighty years of experience in the land of the living.

The family argument was only between the first three Riveras and the Tios and Tias were quick to leave the dining room after finishing their meals. Tia Rosita had put her hand on Miguel and told him he could go to the living room or to the workshop if it was starting to make him uncomfortable.

It was more than uncomfortable for Miguel though, and he found himself frozen on his seat, trembling in anger as he watched the three fight. The argument felt like it was going in circles and the words were just mixing in Miguel's ears. Hector was insisting that he was definitely doing something. Imelda was scolding her husband for his laziness and lack of drive while telling Coco she had no right to know what was happening while Coco pleaded to know what was happening. The center of the whole topic though was Miguel yet ironically, none of them even bothered to just glance to the side even a little a bit, acknowledging the existence of the young boy.

Someway through the argument, Hector had propped the guitar on the wall, as if he didn't want the instrument to be part of the argument anymore. What he probably didn't think about was that he put the guitar in an angle which would be a tad more difficult to keep an eye on.

Miguel was angry, ignored and was seeing a conveniently placed guitar he could just grab and run away with, a good and convenient combination. He could easily just run for the guitar, out of the house and into the streets.

They wouldn't care anyway. Miguel thought. He glanced at each family member one by one, hoping at least one of them would make eye contact with him, acknowledge his existence, anything that would make him think twice about what he was going to do next.

It was as if the three were in their own world though and before Miguel could even think twice, his body was on autopilot.

He ran, grabbed the guitar and escaped to the recently illuminated streets of the Land of the Dead. The view was new and beautiful, a far cry from what he saw everyday back in Santa Cecilia, maybe if he wasn't in a hurry, he would have stopped and appreciated how the colors of his surroundings gleamed under the sun that had only recently risen.

Miguel was running without looking back though and he was blind to the natural beauties around him. And maybe even a little deaf to the voices that were calling after him.

I just wanted to say thank you again to for all the support for this story. Only recently backurapika/ donteatacowman (I think that's her name) drew a mini fan art for my story. It's somewhere in my tumblr blog, lemme tag it... SOON...

I'm actually late for class right now but I wanted to post this before anything else as a birthday gift to myself. My birthday wasn't the best one. I had 10-5 class, no breaks, no time to reply to any greetings on that day, no time to celebrate with the hecticness (is that even a word) of that day in general only to be surprised at the end of the day by a facebook message from my idol and a signed memorabilia my friends went through so much trouble to get. They managed to convince my idol (a local celebrity) to greet me on messenger and write out a small message for me on a piece of memorabilia which I'm probably gonna frame. I'm an embarrassing piece of shit but I legit teared up at this. I ended up for a while talking to this local celebrity on fb after she messaged me. Through it all, the hectic day ended beautifully and I had to share it. I'm still on a high with what happened but that was all the inspiration I needed to write a little more than necessary.

Moral of the story: A whirlwind of emotions makes great inspiration when writing

Tell me what you think! :D