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His brain warns him that there are words that cover up the world. There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.
Teaching to kill is worse than killing.
Change, transformation, shift: synonyms that appear to mean the same thing, though the choice of one over the other speaks to a distinct view of the world.
The words carry the weight necessary to mold us, to suppress all questioning, he thinks.
He thinks that Señor Urami needs to reaffirm reality through words, as though words created and maintain the world in which he lives.
A world that could fracture with one inappropriate word.
He wishes these words could rip open the man’s smile, perforate the regulated silence, compress the air until it chokes both of them.
grandiloquent
homogeneous
are incomprehensible, the mechanical words spoken by an artificial voice, a voice that doesn’t know that all these words can conceal him, even suffocate him.
“This is prime-grade meat, Tejo,” El Gringo says in a low voice, approaching him.
Now she’d be vulnerable and fragile, opening her eyes so that he could enter, there, beyond the cold.
At first Spanel copied the traditional cuts of beef so the change wouldn’t be as abrupt.
The label read “Special Meat,” but on another part of the package, Spanel clarified that it was “Upper Extremity,” strategically avoiding the word hand. Then she added packaged feet, which were displayed on a bed of lettuce with the label “Lower Extremity,” and later on, a platter with tongues, penises, noses, testicles, and a sign that said “Spanel’s Delicacies.”
Before long, people began to ask for front or hind trotters, using the cuts of pork to refer to upper and lower extremities. The industry took this as permission and started to label products with these euphemisms that nullified all horror.
He hands her forms to sign that certify her interaction with the Krieg Processing Plant and state that she doesn’t adulterate the meat. These are formalities, because it’s known that no one does, not now, not with special meat.
“I don’t get why a person’s smile is considered attractive. When someone smiles, they’re showing their skeleton.”
“I know that when I die somebody’s going to sell my flesh on the black market, one of my awful distant relatives. That’s why I smoke and drink, so I taste bitter and no one gets any pleasure out of my death.” She takes a quick drag and says, “Today I’m the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle.”
“I’m surrounded by death, all day long, at all hours of the day,” she says, and points to the carcasses in the fridge. “Everything indicates that my destiny is in there. Or do you think we won’t have to pay for this?”
Spanel has an arrested beauty about her. It disturbs him that there’s something feminine beneath the brutal aura she takes great care to give off.
He knows he can raise her, that it’s permitted. He’s aware there are people who do so, and who eat their domestic head alive, part by part. They say the meat tastes better, claim it’s really fresh. Tutorials are available that explain how, when, and where to make the cuts so the product doesn’t die early.
He remembers there was a sentence that everyone repeated, horrified: “Slavery is barbaric.”
And though he wasn’t crying, the tears were there, behind the words he couldn’t say.
Señor Marcos, how are you doing? Come on in, we’ll bring Don Armando over in just a moment.”
He saw infinite lights surrounding them and felt that her voice could lift him up. That her voice was a way out of the world.
After what happened with the baby, Cecilia’s words became black holes, they began to disappear into themselves.
There’s a TV on with no volume. It’s a rerun of an old show where the participants have to kill cats with a stick. They risk their live...
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disinterred
Time stifles in this place. The hours and seconds stick to the skin, pierce it. Better to ignore its passing, though that’s not possible.
“I need you to sign the authorization form. It’s for Don Armando’s own good. You know I don’t like to do it. But your father is sensitive. He can’t go eating whatever he wants, it’s not good for him. Besides, today it’s a cake, tomorrow it’s a knife.”
The words are there, encapsulated. They’re rotting behind the madness.
“Kids today, Tejo. They want to take on the world and don’t even know how to walk.”
He thinks this man is dangerous. Someone who wants to assassinate that badly is someone who’s unstable, who won’t take to the routine of killing, to the automatic and dispassionate act of slaughtering humans.
How many head do they have to kill each month so he can pay for his father’s nursing home? How many humans do they have to slaughter for him to forget how he laid Leo down in his cot, tucked him in, sang him a lullaby, and the next day saw he had died in his sleep? How many hearts need to be stored in boxes for the pain to be transformed into something else? But the pain, he intuits, is the only thing that keeps him breathing. Without the sadness, he has nothing left.
Ency because he was like an encyclopedia.
Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything.
Cecilia’s words were like a river of lights, an aerial torrent, like fireflies glowing.
The moon seems a strange god.
The prospect of seeing his sister weighs on him. Visiting her is an errand to be taken care of when he has no other choice. He doesn’t know who his sister is, not really.
“The government wants to manipulate you, that’s the only reason it exists.”
baby cats.
Parents who name their children after themselves are stripping them of an identity, reminding them who they belong to.
tacit
simulacrum
Gastón Schafe smiles and recites the Church of the Immolation’s creed passionately and with conviction: “The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus.”
decadence
It’s been a long time since he felt that this house was his home. It was a space in which to sleep and eat. A place of broken words and silences encapsulated between walls, of accumulated sadnesses that splintered the air, scraped away at it, split open the particles of oxygen. A house where madness was brewing, where it lurked, imminent.
“There’s a vibration, a subtle and fragile heat, that makes a living being particularly delicious. You’re extracting life by the mouthful. It’s the pleasure of knowing that because of your intent, your actions, this being has ceased to exist. It’s the feeling of a complex and precious organism expiring little by little, and also becoming part of you. For always. I find this miracle fascinating. This possibility of an indissoluble union.”
He thinks that Urlet collects words in addition to trophies.
Urlet selects each word as though the wind would carry it away if he didn’t, as though his sentences could be vitrified in the air, and he could take hold of them and lock them away with a key in some piece of furniture, but not just any piece, an antique, an art nouveau piece with glass doors.
