The Father: Guantanamera, 2002

The sun cuts a slice of light into his head. The stellate light streams through the window and blinds him. His last word is ¡Guao! The bullet fragments in his Broca’s area and splits the infinitive making its way through his synapses. His face a frozen distortion. His last word unnoticed by another.

What is left of him—his locked body—falls through the air on its ineluctable path to the terrazzo floor. What remains of his consciousness seeps out with the type O negative from his ragged head. The shrapnel sizzles in that now useless brain—the organ loses its way in this world.

The cafetera hisses on the stove top as the revolver spins on the floor syncopating with the tinny transistor radio version of Guntanamera.

Fragments of his head are embedded in the valence and jalousie panes. The air is burnt cafecito and spatter.

The photographs of him and El Comandante on the wall are commingled with parts of his frontal and parietal lobes—the very lobes that once devised entertainments for dignitaries, wooed countless women, and gave voice to the orders to shoot 183 gusanos in the revolutionary reprisal squads.

“Next you will want to make a list of the materials needed to build your fence. Some people find that their fence needs to be made of wood or metal; other people prefer to make fences out of their soul-parts, or their skin. Refer back to your fence’s main purpose to deduce what materials you will need.”

—Carolyn Zaikowski / In a Dream, I Dance by Myslef, and I Collapse