La Atarraya

(This character piece is composed of snapshots of people at a party in Mexico, written the next morning, halfway hungover)

the ways in which we are unique are infinite; somewhere in Mexico a boy sits in the front yard in his underwear at a table, bare except for his notebook, a jelly jar full of water and a single brown egg.

An old man dances with two young girls at the same time. The girls are big, their necks wide and round, their thighs thick and fat, but they are graceful in ways that most women are not and their smiles light with youth. They are twin sisters and their brown feet stike the sand in unison, spinning beneath the old man's arms and twisting their hips at exactly the right rhythms... She was drunk and smiling and red in the face, running back and forth in the bar in what she would later claim as exuberance, but really just a wild energy swirling out of the golden pour of beer; two for ten pesos and third one if free... firmly planted in a plastic chair in the far corner, her hand wraps around a glass of red wine. From there the glass fills and the glass empties as she watches the kids in their foolishness, remembering herself in the same place in years past. The music is too loud but something in that sharpness makes her long for youth lost, for barechested men on the dancefloor. She finds the bottom of another glass and stands to realize she is drunk... it is out the back door that she finds air, a black-starred sky and an ocean breeze. Everyone inside is wild, they're disconnected, they're talking to nobody about nothing and dancing by themselves. This is the first party in years where she's been sober and, silent in the corners, she's beginning to realize she'd been wasted, what she'd wasted, a roomful of people acting fool and not knowing, she can't look away from their kissing... the little circles pool together to make puddles until the top of the bar is covered in a thin film of water, product of 1,000 cold beers getting warmer... life snapped into focus while he was on top of a table, jeans falling down his ass, hands pointed to the sky. A huge smile on his face and this urgency to be moving, shaking dancing laughing, it all seemed so exciting from so high; for an instant he can see all of the faces and they're looking at him, they're laughing, they're having a good time... something in him knows he's had enough to drink and he leaves his plastic cups half full in the hands of others, but something altogether stronger has him back behind the bar, fingers fumbling in the ice chest, the twist top on the Coke, the bottle of Fernet... her hands hold the edge of her green dress as she dances. She might be drunk, she might be high, she might just be in love with and enveloped in the moment with that perfect smile as she switches her hips, bare feet stepping one after another, the green tie playing down her back with the sparkle of glitter. The hand pulls the folds up past her knees, another twist and flash of thigh, beautiful and smooth... he dies watching her dance, it makes him uncomfortable in the most painful way; sick with knowing how beautiful she is, with knowing he cannot look away, with knowing that he has to say something or he'll break to pieces. He doesn't speak spanish, she's a goddess and an angel and him just a boy... everyone different and with seperate perceptions, seeing the world from beneath different drinks and drugs and traumas, through upbringings and value systems, filters of prejudice and love, and even form behind wooden tables and glass jelly jars. A single brown egg and a Longs Drugs notebook...