On the Lips of Children

*Between 2008 and 2012, US authorities discovered at least seventy-five drug-smuggling tunnels along the length of the 1,950-mile border between Tijuana and Southern California. This is the story of one of them. When her child dies of a fatal heart defect, the intense grief gives Erin Facinelli the urge to cut her skin, same way she had as a teenager. Instead, she gets a tattoo, and soon falls in love with the sweet sting of the tattoo needle as well as the tattoo artist himself, Macon. Macon fathers her second child, his artwork starts to cover her old scars from cutting, and years later they travel to San Diego where Macon plans to run a marathon. But the trip becomes much more than a footrace, and it is here that the cutting continues. During the darkness of a predawn warm-up run, Macon is greeted by a three-headed dog at the trail's entrance, and stumbles upon a network of homeless men who stalk him. Soon he falls prey to a bizarre, Tijuanese family who live in a drug smuggling tunnel with their two children, and survive by hijacking and then carving the skin of their victims for food and money. A harrowing, twenty-four hour test begins for Macon to rescue his family. Their love will be tested in extreme, horrific measures. Family meets family, and mother meets mother, in a world where the saying is confirmed: "Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children."