Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos

Author:Mónica Ramón Ríos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2019-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Those were the birds. A feather on every shard of stone.

The fifteen-year-old dreamed of rats that night. The week before, someone had shown him a video about ordinary people from all over this vast territory called the state of the union. The people fondly stroked their rats. The images made him feel the stirring of an unknown tenderness toward the dirty animals that scrabbled in the trash behind the building on the corner of Kingston Avenue and stumbled food-drunk through the streets.

The deepest dimensions of the animal self exist not at the level of the individual but as part of the collective group mind of the entire species, and that higher level is not a duality lesson per se.

The rats in the video weren’t rank or diseased. They scaled human legs. People bathed them and let their pets lick them with their mustached mouths. Something prompted him to close the window on his cell phone, something that pierced his retina and lodged itself in his body like a tremor. The feeling hounded him for weeks and forced him to tighten his sneakers hard around his ankles before he left the house.

He woke from those dreams with an unease that warped his vision and his hearing. Sometimes he confused the outside sounds with his mother’s voice.

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