The Dirty Kid
The narrator, a young woman,
lived in Constitucion in her family home which once belonged to her paternal
grandparents. It was a nice house, but Constitucion was considered a desolated,
dangerous slum shied away by most.
Within sight from her window,
she saw a mother and her child who lived on the streets. She had the bare
interaction with the five-year-old child, but the mother was hostile to the
narrator. The mother was obviously a drug addict, and both mother and child
were under-nourished, dirty and smelly. They begged for money and food.
One evening, the child knocked
on her door and told the narrator his mother was not with him. The narrator
gave him food and took him out to buy him ice-cream. On the way back, they met
his mother. The mother shouted rudely at the narrator to stay away from her
child. The narrator was annoyed that her kindness to the child was not
acknowledged.
The following day, both mother
and child could not be seen. It was however normal for the people living on the
streets to move around.
A week later, the narrator
heard from the news that a child had been decapitated. The narrator was
devastated thinking that the victim was the child who had knocked on her door
earlier. She regretted deeply not showing more care and attention to the child.
The body of the child was not claimed for a while because his mother was
delivering a baby in the hospital. The dead child was not the child she thought
it was, because it was a different mother.
There was a legend of Gauchito
Gil who had practically been decapitated himself.
However, many days later, the
drug addict mother turned up alone. The narrator forced her to reveal where her
son was. Her reply suggested that she had surrendered the child to be
sacrificed to the San la Muerte, the skeleton saint of death.
The narrator seemed to make up
her mind to move. She had isolated herself by living in this house, and she had
made up romantic stories about a neighbourhood that really was just shit, shit,
shit.
She would leave the
witch-narcos and shrines.
Suspense is gradually built up
in the story. Once we read of the shrines to less-friendly saints, a sense of
unease comes over. The narrator and her friends are a part of this
strange town where people are shattered by the gory murder.
The Inn
Florencia went to Sanagasta with her mother and sister to stay in
the family holiday home. Florencia met up with her good friend Rocio.
Rocio wanted to take revenge on
Elena, the local innkeeper at Sanagasta, for firing her father Mario who worked
as a tour guide. Rocio planned to sneak into the guest rooms, tear the mattress
and hide meat inside.
As Florencia and Rocio were
committing the deed, they suddenly heard the sound of a car and truck, and
people pounding on the shutters with something metallic, running steps of many
feet thudding around the Inn and the cries of men. and headlights of truck or
car shining into the room where the girls were. The girls were so frightened
that they screamed. Elena and her guard appeared and found the girls. However
Elena insisted that they had appeared only because the girls were screaming,
and there were no other noise and no other people.
Was the Inn being guarded by
something ?
The Intoxicated Years
The lives of three girls, Andrea, Paula, and the narrator, during
their high school years from 1989 to 1994. The economy of the country was
bad. The adults worry over inflation and unemployment. Government ration the
power and during the summer of 1989, electricity went off for 6 hours at a time
because the country had no energy. Andrea, the most beautiful of the four,
changed her boyfriend regularly. The girls took drugs, drank heavily, and did
not pay much attention to anything which could be considered fruitful or
meaningful. They met a rich girl Ximena and later Roxana. One of their
adventures is to look for a girl with eyes full of hate, a girl they
encountered once and who had walked into the forest. They returned to this
forest but could not find the girl with the eyes full of hatred. The story
ended with the girls hitting the latest boyfriend of Andrea, perhaps partly the
effect of drugs and provocative rock music (Led Zeppelin).
Adela's House
Adela had only one arm. Her parents said that she was born with
the defect, but Adela told other stories of how she lost her left arm. Adela
did not hide her stump. She was fearless of other children.
There was a deserted house with the window bricked up. It might
have belonged to an old foreign couple with children fighting for the
inheritance of the house. Yet no one had seen the couple or children. One day,
Pablo, Clara and Adela went nearer the house. The house buzzes like a hoarse
fly. The house vibrated. It felt like there was a frightening monster in the
house and it must be kept there. The house was even telling stories to Pablo
and Adela.
Pablo became even more drawn to the house. He persuaded the two
girls to enter the house.
Adela disappeared in the house. Pablo was deeply affected by the
disappearance and he went crazy and killed himself. Clara, the narrator and
Pablo's sister, lived to tell the tale.
An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt
Pablo is a tour guide. His
favourite tour is the murder tour in which he tells stories of big criminals,
the most notorious is the Big-Eared Runt who murdered children.
He wondered over the recent
hallucination. He saw the apparition of Big-Eared Runt and he got a bit uneasy
about it, though he would not tell anyone his apparition. He reasoned that this
could be because Big-Eared Runt's victims were small children, and he recently
had a baby. His wife had changed completely since the baby was born. She became
quite obsessive over the best for the baby, demanding Pablo to look for
higher-paid jobs for a better living environment in a bigger house.
As the story progressed, I
wonder whether the apparition would become real and even kill Pablo's baby, but
this was not in the story. The story ended with Pablo's finding a nail, and was
thinking of having this nail as a prop for his story telling of the Runt
driving a nail into a dead boy's head.
Spiderweb
The narrator travelled to Paraguay by car with her cousin Natalia
and her husband Juan. Both women thought that Juan was a terrible bore
and constantly complaining about everything and unable to help with
anything. Natalia told the narrator her current boyfriend had a plane.
During one plane ride, she saw a burning house but her boyfriend did not see
it.
The car broke down, and they
met driver and passenger of another truck. Natalia hitchhiked with them to get
help. The group put up at a hotel and had dinner and drinks together. Juan
later disappeared.
End of Term
"We'd never really paid
her much attention. She was one of those girls who don’t talk much, who don’t
stand out for being too smart or too dumb and who have those forgettable faces.
Faces you see every day in the same place, but that you might not even
recognize if you ever saw them out of context, much less be able to put a name
to them. The only striking thing about her was how badly she dressed."
Marcela saw a small man who get
her to hurt herself. She pulled out her hair, her eyelashes, fingernails. She
cut herself on her face. With these incidents, she was not welcome to school.
The narrator visited her at her home. Marcela told the narrator that the man
would also get the narrator to do the things that Marcela had done to herself.
The narrator left. On the bus, the narrator massaged her thigh until blood
flowed out from a would she had inflicted by cutting herself with a box cutter.
No Flesh Over Our Bones
The narrator found a skull and
brought it home. She named the skull Vera. She dressed it up with an expensive
blond wig. She even got Vera necklace with colored beads and surrounded it with
aromatic candles, and got coloured light bulbs to place in the sockets for
eyes. She also decided to eat less and lose weight to have more protruding
bones for herself.
Her boyfriend could not
understand or accept her action and left her. He told her mother about her
strangeness. When her mother visited, she lied to her mother that she was
preparing for a Halloween party but she did not want to get into a costume.
Instead she would bring along a voodoo tableau. The narrator pondered
over where she might find bones and built out the remaining skeletal frame for
the skull.
The Neighbour's Courtyard
Paula and Miguel rented and moved
into a house. On the first night, Paula heard loud pounding that frightened her
a lot, but Miguel did not hear it.
Paula suffered from depression
and took light medication. Paula visited a psychiatrist. Miguel had never shown
any other kind of prejudice; it was directed exclusively toward psychiatrists,
mental problems, madness. Miguel had admitted to her that in his opinion,
except for serious illnesses, all emotional problems could be solved by
force of will. Her mother Monica brought Paula's cat over to the new
place the following day. The second night, Paula saw a small man sitting at the
foot of her bed. When she looked more carefully, it ran away, and Paula thought
that perhaps it was her cat Elly.
Paula is thinking of leaving
her husband after she finished her degree course if there is no improvement in
their marriage life.
One day she saw a naked child
with a chain to his ankle in her courtyard. But when she brought Miguel to see
the child, and the child was not there, they had a row over her hallucination.
Miguel treated her like the
crazy woman she had never been, for a different reason: because he’d never
forgiven her for abandoning that little girl. He’d never been able to get that
image out of his mind: the sobbing in the night, the broken ankle. Or the image
of Paula laughing, her mouth reeking of beer. That was why he no longer desired
her. Because he’d seen a side of her that was too dark. He didn’t want to have
sex with her, he didn’t want to have children with her, he didn’t know what she
was capable of. Paula had gone from being a saint—the social worker who
specialized in at-risk children, so maternal and selfless—to being a sadistic
and cruel public employee who neglected the children while she listened
to cumbia and got drunk; she’d become the evil directress of
a nightmare orphanage.
Paula decided to trepass into
her neighbour's house in search of the boy with the chain. The house was dirty,
the pantry had rotten meat, there were strange anatomy drawings on paper, and
wall filled with writings. Paula ran home in fright. At her home, she saw the
child who had teeth like saw. He bit into Elly, killed and ate the cat.
He held Paula's house key in his hand.
Under the Black Water
Two young men, Yamil and
Emanuel,drowned in a river of very polluted water that passed through a Villa
Moreno slum. They were pushed into the Ricachuelo river by law enforcement
officer. Yamil's body had been found, but not Emanuel's. A pregnant girl visited
the district attorney, Marina Pinat, to let her know that Emanuel was in Villa
Moreno, and demanded payment for her information.
District Attorney visited the
slum. The taxi-driver would not even enter the slum, but stopped outside it.
The slum is filled with overweight but malnourished women and deformed
children.
"There were families who
lived by the water and drank it, and though the mothers boiled it to try to get
the poison out, their children got sick, consumed by cancer in three months,
with horrible skin eruptions that ate away at their legs and arms. And some of
them had been born with deformities. Extra arms (sometimes up to four), noses
wide like felines, eyes blind and set close to their temples."
She walked into the church to
look for the priest, Father Francisco.
"In place of the altar
there was a wooden pole stuck into a common metal flowerpot. And impaled on the
pole was a cow’s head. The idol—because that’s what it was, Marina realized—had
to have been recently made, because there was no smell of rotting meat in the
church. The head was fresh."
Father Francisco seemed to have
become insane.
"The police started
throwing people in there because they are stupid. And most
of the people they threw in died, but some of them found it. Do you know the
kind of foulness that reaches us here? The shit from all the houses, all the
filth from the sewers, everything! Layers and layers of filth to keep it dead
or asleep. It’s the same thing, I believe sleep and death are the same thing.
And it worked, until people started to do the unthinkable: they swam under the
black water. And they woke the thing up. Do you know what Emanuel means?
It means ‘God is with us.’ The problem is, what God are we talking
about?” He grabbed her fun and shot himself.
Outside the church, there was a
procession. "She ran between the precarious houses, through labyrinthine
alleys, searching for the embankment, the shore, trying to ignore the fact that
the black water seemed agitated, because it couldn’t be, because that
water didn’t breathe, the water was dead, it couldn’t kiss the banks with
waves, it couldn’t be ruffled by the wind, it couldn’t have those eddies or the
current or that swelling, how could there be a swelling when the water was
stagnant? Marina ran toward the bridge and didn’t look back and she covered her
ears with her bloody hands to block out the noise of the drums."
Green Red Orange
A young man, Marco, locked
himself up in his room and refused to see even his own mother living in the
same house who brought him food and left it outside his door everyday.
Marco is a hacker. The narrator
had never seen him, but connected with Marco through online chat program.
Marco's online status, either a green or red or orange dot, is the indication
of Marco's existence. Marco talked to the narrator about the deep web where
sinister and illegal activities are promoted. Marco wanted to probe into
the The Real Rape Community. "They have no rules. They starve kids to death.
They force them to have sex with animals. who kicks them. Then they rape her
until they kill her. The video of the torture is for sale, and so is an archive
of her screams that don’t sound like anything human and are unforgettable. And
I want to learn about the RRC,” he says.
“Today I read an article about
people like you,” I wrote to him one morning at dawn. “You’re a hikikomori. You
know about them, right? They’re Japanese people who lock themselves in their
rooms and their families support them. They don’t have any mental problems,
it’s just that things are unbearable for them: the pressure of university,
having a social life, those kinds of things. Their parents never kick them out.
It’s an epidemic in Japan. It almost doesn’t exist in other countries. Sometimes
they come out, especially at night, alone. To find food, for example. They
don’t make their mothers cook for them like you do.”
The narrator was in contact
with Marco's mother. The narrator thinks that when Marco stopped talking to her
online , she would lie to his mother that she and Marco are still talking
online.
Things We Lost in the Fire
A woman who had been burned and
disfigured appeared regularly in the subway to beg for money to survive. She
would tell the story of how her husband burnt her and claimed that she did it
herself. The husband was convicted only after she recovered sufficiently to
tell that it was her husband who tried to murder her. She would touch and kiss
other passengers in the subway. SOme passengers would leave the subway to avoid
her.
There were other women
mentioned in the story with similar encounter. At first, the men were burning
the wife or girlfriend to control or punish them. Later, the women decided to
burn themselves to make a statement. When all women are burnt and scarred and
ugly, there would be no pretty women for the men to desire.
