We Eat Our Own by Kea Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

but the camera’s angled so you can’t see them yet. The director will be offscreen, watching from the shore.
    Richard speaks: From what we’ve gathered, ah, Veronica and her parents, famed anthropologists Amanda and Esteban Perez of Houst— Abilene, Texas . . .
    (You’ll make up all the names, of course. With the director staring at you, you’ll be too nervous to come up with better ones.)
    â€”they came down here to study the Yanomamö people’s cannibal rites, and um—unfortunately, it seems, were . . . ­ abducted themselves.
    (The director will have fed you the premise but not the specifics, told you to ad-lib the lines. You will tell him you’re no good at improv. He won’t respond to that. He’ll be the one who rolls up his pant legs and walks into the mud, pushes your boat out onto the water.)
    The deaths of Amanda and Esteban seem all but confirmed, unfortunately. Richard says: But Veronica, we still have hope for her. She was last seen by a traveling—um— fisherman, north of a Yakuma settlement, after an intertribal fertility ceremony. We’re headed there now.
    And here Richard pauses. His brow lowers to a squint andhis gaze spans out over the water, in a way you must think looks thoughtful, unaffected, a genius aiming his vision at the future of his medium. The oars lap and lap. Someone in the background murmurs Avvicinati, get closer—Ugo to the sound guy, floating in a nearby boat—but it’s quiet enough that the sound editor will mistake it for a whisper of water and leave it in the final cut.
    This isn’t a rescue mission, Richard says, finally. I’m a journalist. I’m not equipped to be a hero. But if what we find out here leads us to Veronica—if we don’t have time to signal to the capital, to wait for the heroes to arrive—well . . .
    He lowers the camera. If you look closely, you can make out the actors behind him: a woman at the stern, a man sitting wet-assed in the middle of the boat, rowing and looking annoyed.
    The heroes have failed, Richard says. So far. If a journalist has to be the one—
    This is when the boat pitches.
    The frame tilts. The woman in the back of the boat yips, flashes into the center of the frame: brown hair, a white shirt over a skinny rib cage, her oar flailing. There’s a loud thump in the built-in mic and a ray of sun flares as you hoist the camera higher. It happens in the space of a second: the whole boat turns over.
    The water will be hotter than river water should be. There will be an animal circling at your ankles, you’ll be sure, a crocodile or a river dolphin, or maybe just long ropes of kelp. You will keep the camera high, somehow. It will keep recording as you dog-paddle, filming the sun, the cloudless blank of the sky, trees and trees and trees, and finally, when you’ve adjusted your grip, the underseam of the boat, flipped and bobbing, gleaming wet in the light.
    Your chin will be craned high. You’ll be terrified of the water, of the parasites in it sloshing into your mouth.
    The actress will be laughing, pushing sheets of hair back from her face.
    The other actor, Teo, will be stern-faced and crawl-stroking, righting the boat.
    This should be an outtake, but it won’t be. Postproduction will tone down the background noise, the producers’ voices shouting, Get back in the boat, madre di Dio! They’ll salvage the film, in an airtight box full of kitty litter to leach out the moisture, a month after all of you are gone.
    This should be an outtake, in any other film it would be, but this—this is exactly the kind of footage the director wants. The negatives scraped raw by silt. The unpredictable, rising like a creature out of the water, bucking the shot. The director on the beach, out of frame, nodding and nodding.
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    The lobby of the Hotel Ignacio is painted teal and beige and has