Tender Is the Flesh

by Agustina Bazterrica

It’s how they spend most of their time. They watch television and wait to die.

The words are there, encapsulated. They’re rotting behind the madness.

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.

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.

the birth, the euphoria, the happiness, the death.

she screams as if the world didn’t exist, she screams as if words had split in two and lost all meaning, she screams as if beneath this hell there was another hell, one from which she didn’t want to escape.

…like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast… SAMUEL BECKETT

“The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus.”