We Eat Our Own by Kea Wilson Read Free Book Online

here tastes— different, somehow. Then, after a thoughtful squint, she said: Pale green.
    It tastes pale green?
    What? It does.
    You smiled, loved her again. You’re so fucking pretentious.
    No, Kay said. I’m a synesthete. I’m exact.
    Beyond the windshield, the sun dodged a fistful of clouds, and you finally saw what was in front of you: an outdoor art installation of lightning rods, a square mile of them glinting in the new light.
    Her voice was full of thrill and wonder. Do you think it will storm?
    It didn’t.
    The men in the club watch the girls drink. When you look them directly in the face, a sudden loneliness strikes at you, bruising a tender place deep in your chest that you didn’t knowwas there. Their hands look too big for their beer bottles. Their coats are all shiny fake leather, all look like they’ve just been bought new for tonight. The music is too slow, and they are not like you: none of them are dancing.
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    Here is something you do not know:
    The name of the girl who puts her tongue in the hollow of your ear as you dance. (Luz.)
    Why her breath is so quick. (She has never danced with a man before.)
    Why she limps as you spin her slowly to the music, her hips pressed tight against yours and held there, immobile, her hands clasped together behind your neck. You don’t notice, as you turn, that she looks at her friends over your shoulder and mouths the word Dios , and later, Ayúdame, laughing. Even if you saw it, you couldn’t decipher what she means. You’re gripping her waist too hard. You’re staring at the porno women projected on the wall, running their hands over each other’s corsets, their expressions so bored. You’re trying too hard not to let what you’re feeling show.
    You’re not drunk. You don’t kiss Luz, but you don’t stop her from kissing you, either. The lightning never came at The Lightning Field, and you have that feeling now, that feeling of waiting for something. A low red field, dusk. A charge in the air that makes you nauseous, all your skin alert to something you can’t see but know is coming.
    The women on the wall tie each other up in leather ropes.
    The music is in English, but you still can’t understand it.
    You said to Kay, This is bullshit. How long are we supposed to wait for something to happen?
    Kay looked confused. But waiting for it is the best part.
    Here is something you don’t know:
    Luz and her friends had followed her brother Andres to the club that night, waited outside until he left again ten minutes later with six teeners of coke sweating in the waistband of his underpants. Of course Luz didn’t know about the cocaine. She doesn’t know, still, about the copy of Das Kapital wedged in the space between his bed and the wall, or that he’s going to sell the cocaine to a man down the block from this club for a handshake and four grenades in a shoe box. Just like you, she doesn’t know about the revolution, but that is because she is thirteen and her mother hides the newspapers, won’t let her go downtown without someone to watch her.
    A few years from now, the minister of justice will be shot by a teenager riding a moped with an Uzi in his fist, and that teenager will be Luz’s boyfriend.
    But for now, Luz is dancing. For now, Luz doesn’t know about the car bombs, or what the M-19s are, or that her brother Andres is one of them. She doesn’t know how to kiss, and that is why her heart flips over as she puts her tongue into your ear, whispers something in Spanish that you can’t understand, that she is far too young to understand herself.
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    The next morning, you sit down to write Kay a letter.
    The pen doesn’t work. You try to carve her name into the paper with the inkless tip, but the paper is thin and keeps breaking. You are so tired. You are tired because you never went to bed.
    Then the pen