El Penumbra
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¡Historia!
Dia de los Muertos: Part I
I'd stopped dancing, but the beat only got stronger. How often do things continue though we've ceased participating? I could feel the wandering beat of the festival in every nerve of my skull and in every drop of coagulating blood coating my cheeks. My senses should've been dying out instead of touch and sound intensifying in one leviathan of pain.
I could feel every scrape, every attempt at hollowing by the switchblade. I've heard of pain becoming so overwhelming that your body shuts down, shuts it out. That's what I concentrated on—seeing if I could make the feeling stop if I focused every ounce of me on that one thing. I couldn't.
The smell of his stale breath lingers in my mind, as does the feel of his warm sweat dripping on my face while he cut my sight out for seeing something he'd done a hundred times before. My first day in Mexico ended on a pier in Vera Cruz trying to die. Trying to tell my body to just stop and let go.
I found myself floating. I felt hands on my back and shoulders and legs and over my harvested sockets. The crowd of hands said nothing. There were no footsteps to be heard. No breathing. I only felt the hum of something coming from there bodies and going into mine. I opened my new eyes as they were walking away from me. And in a glare of sunlight thrown from dying waves, they were gone.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to my parents.What they thought when I didn't come back from the festival. I wonder what Daniel got from the market and street vendors while I was wandering through alleys half drunk and looking for the right place to piss. Today, I mostly wonder why I was chosen to have my eyes replaced. And why I was denied my embrace of the light.
Kept in the penumbra.
Dia de los Muertos: Part II
Before I realized I was walking, I found myself following my own trail of blood to the original splatter. For a few minutes I just stared at the blood. The part of me that quit. I dipped my fingers into the smear. Tried to feel it harden. Solidify. He must've wiped off his boots because there was no trail, and the amount of blood that came out of my face should have covered his feet from heel to toe.
I ran into a young boy trying to sell me cakes, leftovers from the day before. At first, I thought it was my broken Spanish that left him unable to respond. But I noticed that he couldn't stop staring into my eyes. And his face was growing dark, like some new shadow was falling over it, though the sky was clear, the sun a burning gleam, as always. The light parts of his eyes started to shrink as the dark middles attempted to outgrow their spheres.
I threw my hands over my eyes.
"¿Sabe usted dónde puedo conseguir gafas coloreadas?"
He remained frozen. I grabbed his shoulder and gave him two shakes.
"¿Sabe usted dónde puedo conseguir gafas coloreadas?"
"Sí. Mi padre tiene unos en mi casa," he said.
"¿Piensa usted que él se preocuparía si tomé prestadas sus gafas?"
"No."
The boy returned with a pair of amber-tinted spectacles. I wiped the dust from the lenses with the tail of my shirt and slid them onto my face. I asked the boy how they looked. "Como mi padre," he said, smiling.
That's when I knew these eyes weren't really my own. That they'd been forged from some dark and ancient truth with some power over men who'd forgotten the vastness of night, the balance darkness holds with light.
"Gracias. Muchas gracias. ¿Usted está seguro que su padre no se preocupará?"
"No. Él está en el Cielo. Con los ángeles y mi hermano."
"Gracias. Volveré con ellos."
I thought about the man I'd seen killed in the alley. I remember his mustache trembled until the blade was smothered by his heart and how his eyes went wide. I thought about the feeling of being held down, helpless. It was almost as if some order had conspired for me to stumble into that certain alley at that certain second, and what happened was always supposed to happen and I couldn't have escaped even if I'd had the might or will.
I felt the same hum in my body as when I was raised from the pier. I walked to the end of the alley and saw my fingers disappear into the black infinite of the shadow's embrace. I waved to the boy as I surrendered my whole body to this new darkness.
¡Poderes Súper!
¡Enemigos!
¡Conocidos!
¡Música!
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OOC
