To Give Papaya and Suck a Rooster

like a little picasso

José Macario was the recipient of many nicknames, Josema and Maca foremost, since he wasn't so much a force of chaos like his twin, or tenacious like his father, or gregarious like his other father. There were others, like gatico, azucar, all things denoting his gentle disposition. If José María was a wolf, said those in Puyasapo, then he was a deer. But these attributes weren't mutually exclusive. In fact, they were often muddled, bleeding into each other like the various pigments in a watercolor painting. José María was the type to observe and analyze. José Macario, a more intuitive breed, leaned more toward depicting.

And one of their neighbors, Fausto, was fond of pointing this out. "Eres como un Picasso chiquitico," he'd say playfully, "always drawing or painting or some other." He'd often come across José Macario at the normal beach, not the pink one, which was a frequent and more convenient source of inspiration, since it only took ten minutes to walk there. "What are you working on right now, if you don't mind telling me?"

"I don't know how to describe it," would be the older Josema's reply, but he'd show him anyway. His work was often hyper-detailed but simultaneously abstract, the more distinguished people in the neighborhood would note, a simulacrum of the horrible and beautiful. How could such a sweet mind imagine such things?

But Fausto didn't judge. In fact, he was enthusiastic to see.

What he showed Fausto today seemed to strike a chord with him: a roughly depicted sea of fire ants, lapping hungrily at a woman's nude body, which floated among them, bright and pristine. The ants broke through her skin and feasted upon the slick, bulbous flesh of her belly. She nonetheless retained the vivaciousness one would have at the peak of life. "Where did you find the inspiration for this one?" Fausto would ask. He looked upon the sketch with slowly widening eyes. The feeling then was indistinct yet undeniably intense, sweeping up into the air and gathering into a thick, crested wave.

"I don't know," José Macario said. "It just kinda came to me. Like a flash."

What glared most bright and red along the gore was a uterus, dragged out from the gaping hole in her abdomen and trailing blood from the skin below.