fall to the floor breathless. I focus on the roosters. Maybe there aren’t any. But I hear them. Inside me. Men and roosters. Come on, don’t be such a girl. They’re just cockfighters, dammit.
“This man, what’s our first participant’s name? What? Speak up, friend. Ricardoooooo, welcoooome. He wears a nice watch and some niiiiiice Adidas shoes. Ricardooooo must have moneyyyyyyyy! Let’s take a look at Ricardo’s wallet. Credit cards, ohhhhhh a Visa Goooaaald by Messi.”
The fat man tells bad jokes.
They start to bid on Ricardo. Someone offers three hundred, another person eight hundred. The fat man adds that Ricardo lives in a gated community outside the city: Riverview.
“A view poor folks like us can’t even get a glimpse of. That’s where our friend Richie lives. You don’t mind if we call you Richie, do you? Like Richie Rich.”
A terrifying voice says five thousand. The terrifying voice takes Ricardo away. The others applaud.
“Sold to the man with the mustache for five thousand!”
The fat man fondles Nancy, a girl who speaks with a thread of a voice. I know he’s groping her because he says, “Look at these delicious tits, such perky nipples,” and he sucks up his drool and says things you don’t say without touching and, also, who’s to stop him from touching her? No one. Nancy sounds young. Early twenties. She could be a nurse or a schoolteacher. The fat man starts to undress Nancy. We hear him unbuckle her belt and unbutton her jeans and rip her underwear while she says please so many times and with such fear in her voice that we all stain our filthy hoods with tears. “Look at this fine little ass. What a beauty.” He licks Nancy, Nancy’s ass. We hear the sound. The men jeer, roar, applaud. Then the slap of flesh against flesh. And the howls. The howls.
“Gentlemen, just some quality control for you. I give her a ten. You can clean her up real pretty and our friend Nancy will be a delight.”
She must be beautiful because they bid, immediately, two thousand, three thousand, three thousand five. Nancy goes for three thousand five. Sexy goes for less than wealthy.
“And the lucky man taking this lovely piece of ass home is the gentleman with the gold ring and the cross!”
We’re sold off one by one. The fat man manages to get a lot of information out of the guy next to me, the one with the eight-month-old baby and the three-year-old son, and now he’s the auction’s prized pig: money in different accounts, high-up executive, son of a businessman, art collector, kids, wife. The guy is a winning lottery ticket. They’ll probably ask ransom for him. The bid starts at five thousand. It goes up to ten, fifteen. It stops at twenty. Someone intimidating has offered twenty thousand. A new voice. He’s come just for this. He wasn’t interested in wasting his time on anyone else.
The fat man doesn’t make any jokes.
When it’s my turn I think about the roosters. I close my eyes and open my sphincter. I know that this is the most important thing I will do in my life, so I do it right. I soak my legs, my feet, the floor. I’m in the center of a room, surrounded by criminals, displayed before them like cattle, and like cattle I empty my bowels. As best I can, I rub one leg against the other, I assume the position of a gutted doll. I scream like a madwoman. I shake my head, mutter obscenities, gibberish, the things I used to say to the roosters about a heaven filled with endless corn and worms. I know the fat man is about to shoot me.
But instead, he busts my lip open with his hand. I bite my tongue. The blood drips onto my chest, down my belly, mixes with the shit and piss. I start to laugh, deranged, to laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
He doesn’t know what to do.
“How much for this monster?”
No one wants to bid.
The fat man offers up my watch, my cell phone, my purse. They’re all cheap, made in China. He grabs my tits in an attempt to encourage them and I shriek.
“Fifteen, twenty?”
But nothing, no one.
They toss me outside. They hose me down and then they put me in a car that leaves me wet, barefoot, dazed, on the side of the highway.
MONSTERS
Narcisa used to say that we should be more afraid of the living than the dead, but we didn’t believe her because in all the horror movies we saw, we were most afraid of the dead, the ones that had returned from beyond, the possessed. Mercedes was terrified of demons and I was terrified of vampires. We talked about it all the time. About satanic possessions and about men with fangs who fed on the blood of little girls. Mom and Dad bought us dolls and books of fairy tales, and we reenacted The Exorcist with the dolls and made believe that Prince Charming was really a vampire who woke Snow White up to turn her undead. During the day everything was fine, we were brave, but at night we always asked Narcisa to stay upstairs with us. Dad didn’t like Narcisa sleeping in our room—he called her the help—but it was inevitable: we told her that if she didn’t come up, we’d go down to sleep with the help in her room. That seemed to terrify her. And so Narcisa, who must’ve been about fourteen years old, tried to protest, saying that she didn’t want to sleep with us, that we should be more afraid of the living than the dead. And we thought it was ridiculous because how could anyone be more afraid of Narcisa, for example, than of Regan, the girl from The Exorcist, or more afraid of Don Pepe the gardener than of the Salem vampires or of Damien, the Antichrist, or more afraid of Dad than of the Wolf Man. Absurd.
Mom and Dad were never home—Dad worked and Mom played bridge with neighbors—that’s why Mercedes and I could go rent horror movies at the video store every day after school. The boy who worked there never said a word to us. We knew that the cases said over sixteen or eighteen, but the boy never said anything. His face was covered in zits and he was fat, he always had a fan pointing at his crotch. The only time he ever talked to us was when we rented The Shining. He looked at it, then looked at us, and said:
“There are some girls just like you in this. Both of them are dead, their dad killed them.”
Mercedes grabbed my hand. And we stood there like that, holding hands, in our matching uniforms, staring at him until he gave us the movie.
Mercedes was a big scaredy-cat. Pale, sickly. Mom said that I must’ve eaten up everything that came down the umbilical cord because she was tiny when she was born, a little worm, and I, on the other hand, was born like a bull. That’s the word everyone used: bull. And the bull had to take care of the worm, who else would? Sometimes I wished I could be the worm, but that was impossible. I was the bull and Mercedes the worm. I’m sure Mercedes would’ve liked to be the bull sometimes, not always tagging along in my shadow, waiting for me to say something so that she could simply agree: “Me too.”
Never me. Always me too.
Mercedes never wanted to watch horror movies, but I made her because a girl from school said I wasn’t brave enough to watch all the movies she’d seen with her big brother since I didn’t have a big brother—only Mercedes, the infamous scaredy-cat—and I couldn’t stand it, so that afternoon I dragged Mercedes to the video store and we rented all the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and that night and every night after, we had to tell Narcisa to come upstairs to sleep with us because if Freddy gets in your dreams he kills you in your dreams and no one knows what happened to you because it just looks like you had a heart attack or choked to death on your
