Bones and stilettos

Donana said they were already missing me on the farm Teixeira. Guilherme and Renan, at the very breakfast table, only spoke in the presence of their lawyers. Mr. Teixeira asked if we had buried the bones. We said so. The dogs themselves buried the bones and we'll have to pray that they forget where they did. Renan didn't do much more than pestering me all the time. While the dogs still digested the man, they started digging a hole worth of all the bones left.

"Octávio, you know it is hardly the time for a question like this", Donana reproached.

Mr. Teixeira calmed down, more for the confirmation of the burial than for the reproachful talk of his wife. In Donana's case it is like she was repeating what Aparecida once said to me, "I'd never want to know about it, let alone find out about it this way".

Renan was out there sitting in the sun alone after breakfast. I walked up to him to have a few words with the kid. I wanted to know who the guy was who attacked me last night, the guy Renan had been laying siege to for a week, like he told me.

"Beats me", he shrugged. Renan didn't seem to be very willing to talk.

"Renan, you know who the guy is. You should know because you told me you have been after him for a week…"

"I know the guy was evil. Isn't that enough?" He looked at me with eyes half-closed by the sun right behind my head, that peculiar twisted face of one receiving the sunlight right on the eyes.

After a pause, he went on to tell me they were two in fact. There was another guy downtown, that used to hang out with the one who attempted to rape / kill / whatever me last night. He asked me whether I would feel safer if the other was found. Telling him I would feel safer (though I surely would) would be the same as to ask him to kill him for me. Someone who I don't even know. But I agreed to go downtown with him just to check it out. We'd make use of the trip to buy something for Donana at Souza's grocery store, a place he is rebuilding since the bulls and cows destroyed the spot almost a month ago.

Downtown. The normal movement of a place on a normal Tuesday in the city. Sunlight leaving everything more luminous. All very bright, of a daylight living color. The driver of the farm Teixeira parked the car at the central square. It's virtually impossible to get lost, everything runs here in the end.

At the store, I noticed Renan bought pencils, erasers, A4 paper sheets and… two stilettos. On Donana's list there were really stilettos marked, so it was alright with me. It is bad enough for a child to buy things off-list of their own volition, let alone when it came to stilettos. And the blades didn't even come with proper protective packaging around them. We stepped out of the grocery store with some bags that we left in the car. Renan excused himself for a moment and went to talk to a man that was lazily lying sitting back at a gazebo nearby. I saw Renan talk to the man for a while; I couldn't read the man's lips because he had his back turned to me. I saw Renan caress his belly gently and come back to the car, shaking his head.

"Poor fella, so drunk he didn't even understand me. I was going to ask him about the guy, you know who but no way, he had no clue even of who he himself was."

"But then we should look a little more around, see if…"

"Ah, we can deal with it later, now we have to take mom's things home", he spoke as though taking the goods home had been invested in some urgent sense of emergency and high priority.

"But we didn't even…"

"Ms. Grisam, can you possibly step in the goddamned car?"

I felt he was about to burst out with anger if I didn't do as told. He didn't seem so anxious when we came to town, but he was now extremely agitated. I decided not to stay there any longer, arguing like an idiot with him over doing something in fact I didn't even want to do to begin with. Donana's purchase had been a good excuse to come to town for a change after all.

Russian roulette | Shadowplay

Radio Universal: Shadowplay