1
“Well are you going to sit there all day or are you gonna drink” said my very drunken, very obnoxious drinking partner, who hadn’t even the slightest idea that I wasn’t even halfway drunk or even planning to get inebriated that night, which was mainly because id have to consume an entire years worth of guaro for me to at least feel the screws at the back of my tongue starting to get loose. My drunken friend whose name I think is Juan bobbles back and forth in the wooden stool, the one with the shaky legs that barely support my behemoth of a friend, who’s currently eyeballing me from head to toe, which I suppose is his way of intimidating me into another drink, hoping this meant he would get another one for himself on my tab, I was happy to oblige.
It wasn’t long before my friend had passed out on the floor and the bartender started calling some locals to help him out of the place and onto the curve, while this is happening I pulled out a cigarette and placed the filtered end on my lips, then I proceeded on putting the tip of my finger on the opposite end thus lighting it, everybody is too caught up on Juan’s indecorous removal of the establishment to notice me doing this, and even if they did the talk about town would still revolve around poor Juan.
I begin to breathe in the charred smoke and start feeling the radiating heat from the cherry on the lighted end, I stare fixatedly at the brown beer bottle I’m clutching in front of me, then the feeling suddenly hits me and I feel this humanity starting to grow on me. The smoke fills my mouth and the scorching heat it produces begins to burrow into the floor of my mouth and digs out this protuberance that slowly starts developing into my tongue, next the heat starts opening a cavity in the back of my mouth, and begins shaping my pharynx and larynx, this continues until my entire respiratory tract is formed.
I exhale.
I am dizzy.
This human transformation is always uncomfortable; my lengthy body starts to shorten, my hair loses its glow and my nose begins to protrude, my lips start forming and my eyelids open slowly. At first I cannot speak the way humans do, and do most of my communication by suggestion, a wink here and a wave there, most humans get it without much problem. Its not until a few hours that I get my respiratory and digestive systems, alcohol and cigarettes usually help speed up the process at first I thought this was what people refer to as pain, but when I describe it to most humans they say that my symptoms resemble a mild case of dyspepsia and nothing more.
Then the hearing starts kicking in, and I feel like a boot stomping on my face for all eternity, and the searing trumpets destroy the little fleshy parts at the side of my head, until my brain receives the so called music humans twist and turn to with such joy, almost like invoking God and the Devil into one same mix.
“Yo soy el cantante”
“Mi negocio es cantar”
With these sounds reverberating inside my hollow shell of humanity, they start materializing all the primitive nervous systems these meat puppets need to exert their will on their environment, to interact with their surroundings.
I am human.
Its funny how these so called modern and advanced mammals are so oblivious to what their eyes fail to see, as if all that lives and all that exists is visible to those rudimentary camera boxes the old creator saw fit for them. This is not an opinion of mine but it’s proven fact, or how else would a room full of people ignore a 3 meters tall humanoid with no face and feathery wings sprouting from the back of its hulking body. They’re incapable of feeling all that exists, all that doesn’t exist, all that will exist and all that will cease to exist, that is their burden, that is their reason of their unhappiness.
I have been human many times before in various different shells, this one is most definitely the strangest body I’ve inhabited. My skin is the color of mud not really black or brown but somewhere in between, my hair is straight and jet black not unlike the strands of a broom, and for the full grown man I’m supposed to embody, my stature is the same as a child of ten. My dress is peculiar as well, with a pair of strappy sandals that show my ash colored feet with their crooked, yellow, dirty nails, a pair of discolored jeans obviously too long and too large to fit my scrawny body, a shirt with more holes than the bible and big as a kite, and sitting like a crown on my head is a big straw hat with rough edges, making look like the king of the eyesores.
I take a final swig of beer, the foam sticks to the whiskers on my upper lip and as I lick it off with my new tongue, I give the bartender a few pieces of paper to pay for my tab and take care of whatever disaster Juan might have done while I had fun poisoning his body with alcohol. Apparently the quantity of alcohol a male human being could consume reflected the extent of his virility, his success with women and could even decide who the alpha was. According to this unspoken rule of human behavior I had a bigger manhood than Juan, and if it needed to be corroborated by any type of authority I could show the appendage that had just painfully sprouted in between my legs.
The raucous music continues to play and the rhythm becomes more frantic, motivating people to gyrate their pelvises towards other pelvises, and begin grinding on each other when they finally met. They all shout when the singer shouts, they all jump when the beat makes them jump, some kiss, some laugh, some extend their arms into the sky and some slide theirs onto the behind of some fellow dancer. I could probably stay all night and watch them enjoy their miniscule lives go by, but I wasn’t sent to do that, was sent to go look for tortillas.
I step out of the bar, which is colorfully named “Rey del Bongo”, and begin moving on the dirt-paved roads, without a single sign to tell me where I was standing at, looking for some tortilla stand in that clear black night. People passed by me; without a single look of joy in their eyes, their footsteps marching to rhythm of the hunger pangs in their stomachs, no one acknowledging one another, this was the loneliest place in the world, where only flies and sickness could make a living. There where mounds of garbage that were piling all around the town, where parentless children played with broken soda bottles and newspaper scraps, competing with bony dogs for whatever little left over food they could find in those endless mountains of pestilence.
In one of the heaps I saw one of these damned infants had a bony dog by the throat, slicing its body with a shard from a broken bottle, the dog had a piece of rotten meat in his mouth, which was probably the main reason for the pain the boy was putting him through. I began to walks towards him and saw the boy had a deformity in his back that made him much more morose looking than the other kids lurking around, the dog’s skin had shed all the hair in its back and emanated the same stench of death the boy did.
“What are you doing to that dog, you little grunt? He didn’t do anything to you!” I demanded from the boy as I placed my hand on the hump that was probably a sign of his malnourishment.
“I didn’t do anything to anybody either, and I was left to die anyways,” answered the little hunchback with a calm and vicious ferocity “the day I was born they tried to drown me in a bucket, but I could make it long enough to run away and live like this dog scrounging for food in the trash.”
“But how will this cruelty make your life any better?” I asked with a strange embarrassment at myself after what the boy had told me.
“It will give me pleasure, because cruelty’s pleasure is all I’ve known, I was denied love, a home and a name. Who could love a little hunchback anyways? But if it’s the dog you care about, here, you can keep his skin and bones,” said the little hunchback while he snapped the dog’s neck. After the dog breathing stopped, the little hunchback threw the lifeless body at my feet, his eyes looking as dead as the dog’s, as this happened I realized that the trash diving children where just specters of this world, where life and death is one and the same. The little hunchback took the piece of meat from the mouth of the deceased dog, and started chewing on it not caring for the taste or the smell it had, then he looked at me with his hollow eyes and smiled wickedly showing me his cavity filled teeth and all the little sores around his lips, his face and hair caked with dirt, this was the face of the nobody people.
As I walked away I could no longer tell the difference between the trash divers and the bony dogs.
2
Finding tortillas in a place like this is not a hard feat, for some people it’s the only food they’ve ever known and all you really need to do is just go to the park, which is where im heading to right now.
Parks in this place are funny things, because there are no trees, there are no beautiful flowers or happy lovers walking down a meadow, that’s a sight for people with better luck of being born in other places. What we have here is no man’s land,there are bums and drunkards laying on the street (as a matter of fact Juan is sleeping off his drunkenness here), young girls who may or may not be prostitutes, the ever present sketchy character who may or may not be a drug dealer and of course, the lovely tortilleras, who keep all these lovely, seedy people well fed.
