After the islands, a loop through North and Central America. It was Karin who advised me to go.
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Veintiuno. Alice Part 1
When the woman I was making love to turned into a pig I knew that I had become too cynical. I watched her face fill out, her cheeks lose their definition and her nose turn up at me to form a perfectly cylindrical snout. Her skin became rough. It became pockmarked and covered in fine grey hairs and then her mouth widened and opened up to reveal a coarse and unclean set of teeth.
Then her ears retreated, grew longer into sharp points that flopped over like a dog’s ears. And her eyes too lost their shine and their beauty. They contracted and sank into the skin and they became red and as fired as a madman’s. I watched her and I laughed and cried for atop of this perverse metamorphosis was her hair, untouched by the transformation and spread loosely across the pillow: a blonde wig on the head of a pig.
It was the one hope for my salvation.
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Veintitrés. High Lands
Alone again, and I had all the time to look at the room. It was unseasonably hot and I switched the fan to circulate the heat from the walls. It started slowly, each blade cutting the air in steady breaths until it spun into a whorl that swept the hair away from my face. The light was off and from the window, dusk shifted a red and orange hue across the walls. I looked out and beyond the river. The silhouettes of corn terraces scanned the valley, black mountainside beneath red shimmered light, a dying sun that left colours in the water like blood on oil.
Veinticuatro. Alice Part 2
Alice slipped her arm under mine as if to seek protection in the folds of my body but I felt like a child warmed in her embrace. Each step we took through the mist revealed a new tree broken from its roots and lain flat on grass that shone with the morning dew. I asked: “Why does your father always talk to me about religion?”