“Nah.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t tell him.”Laughing, Dante slipped the cigarette in his mouth, flickered the lighter, then brought the flame to light the end.And since they were talking, he decided to ask, “Tadeo told me about you.All nice things.Are you really a lesbian?”
Some smoke huffed out of Joana’s nose.“Yup.”
“Hm.”Dante shifted.“You know, I’ve sucked some dick before.In the military college.”
“Ok.Didn’t ask ifyouwere a lesbian, did I?”
Again, Dante cackled, almost choking up on his cigarette.“Just trying to make a friend.”
“I’m going to go.”Joana swiped the cigarette and lighter from the soldier’s hands, shoved them into her pockets for the last time.“Good luck with your family.I hope they’re alright.Are you—” She stopped.“Are you going to leave this place too?”
“I want to,” Dante admitted.“Should I?”
“You can try.If you want to see your family again before the world ends, you should probably try.”
Smoke burning his throat, Dante returned his eyes to Tadeo.Placing a hand on a woman’s hair, the terrible gash over her face began to close, and he seemed like a proper Messiah, like Jesus with all the worshipers.Dante’s mother would kill to be here, wouldn’t she?‘She would push through the crowd, ask him for help.She would tell me that Tadeo is here to answer our prayers after so long begging for God to send us help.’But she would come away disappointed.‘I tried to tell you,me’.’Mother, in his indigenous language.‘You don’t want a Messiah.You want her back.’Dante’s older sister.‘Fuck.’He wanted her back too.‘How the fuck is praying going to help us?’he used to snap at his mother.‘How is it going to helpher?’
Joana had just walked away from him, and Dante hadn’t even realized until he was alone for several minutes, thinking of his mother and his missing sister.He counted all the fallen stars to try to soothe his fears, but Dante had seen so much death throughout his life, and he could perfectly imagine the empty look in his mother’s brown eyes, the trail of dried blood falling past the edge of her lips, her limbs tense and sprawled.When someone’s shot, their arms go stiff for a moment, and their body jerks like they’re going to seizure.People defecate after they die, they urinate.Dante had seen it, had found it so frustratingly gross.It was like nature had wanted to mock humans in the end, remind them that they’re just animals, foul and dirty as they are.He’d seen decay, seen the roaches and the bone fragments.If it weren’t for his disappeared sibling, he might’ve become a trafficker and led the sort of life that worshiped death.
He couldn’t blame Joana, couldn’t blame Tadeo.
The world was cruel, and there was no God to blame, and they were all just insects trying to make something out of their puny lives.And yet his older sibling had loved insects, had loved those as beautiful as monarchs and as dirty as roaches.She’d fed Dante grasshoppers once by hand, and she had told him that this was a beautiful place, this planet.Dante had always troubled with romanticizing ‘the land’ and tradition.Hell, he liked modernity, he liked cars, he liked eating foreign foods, he liked modern medicines.But there was a gaping hole in his chest, the same as there was an empty chair at the family kitchen table.Maybe it wasn’t so terrible to be an insect, to live simply and be small and meaningless.
Dante finished his cigarette, left the house, and then he wiped his eyes of the tears that’d escaped.
Tadeo, on the other hand, stayed in the square for hours, until it was past midnight.He hadn’t meant to, or wanted to, but the crowd had grown wider and wider around him even as the red moon continued to rise.It was only thanks to one of his cousins, who noticed the anti-Christ slumping, that he was allowed rest.She shouted out that Tadeo was exhausted and then, afterward, she’d hurried to grab him as he stumbled off the crate.Gasping, then coughing, feeling his body tremor like the Earth with every expel of hoarse air, Tadeo almost succumbed to the dark spots in his vision.
“Let him rest!Let him rest!”His grandfather’s voice.
In the fog of shapes that constituted the crowd in Tadeo’s exhausted gaze, he tried to find some grounding.Briefly, he thought he saw a face like that of the Jesus he’d always seen in paintings, in books, but then he blinked, and he saw his father.Then, he blinked, and he saw a man again — this one unfamiliar but dark-haired, dark-skinned.And the passages in the Bible of Jesus duplicating food for a crowd flashed in his mind, suddenly, without explanation.‘Did they crowd around you too, Christ?Did all the people beg for miracles until you dropped in exhaustion?’No, no, the son of God shouldn’t feel exhausted, and Tadeo ought not to compare himself.He was his opposite, after all.Anti-Christ.
Tadeo felt hands guide him down onto a bench, and he breathed out shakily.His head pulsed in pain.His body was heavier than he’d ever felt it.All he could do was shut his only eye for a moment, even when he heard the sound of the soldier — Dante — nearby, his voice, asking if Tadeo was alright.The anti-Christ wanted to ask him what he was still doing here, but instead, he kept feeling his thoughts on Jesus, on the Bible.He thought of walking on water, he thought of Christ in Gethsemane, begging his Father for the strength to die, to be sacrificed.He could almost see it — the olive trees, the grass.The shadow of a man, and then the armor of soldiers.The lips of a disciple, cold, angry.
He felt himself wanting to beg for God’s mercy like Jesus in the hour before crucifixion.
“Tadeo,” came Dante’s incessant calls.“Tadeo.”
Groaning, Tadeo fluttered open his eye to see his family still trying to lead the people away — easier now, due to the hour — and the soldier leaning to his height.“Fuck,” the anti-Christ grunted, then rubbed at his face tiredly.“What do you want?”
“Did you hear that the electricity is dead?”Dante hesitated, then asked, “How long do you think it’ll be before we all start starving?”
“Don’t say that.”Tadeo sighed, before lifting his gaze to the red moon.If nothing else, the fallen stars were illuminating the town nicely, almost beautiful in its haunting.Each of them breathed, and huffed, and sometimes one of their tongues would flick at the air.“No one is… going to starve.”He hesitated before tilting his head up at Dante.“I thought you were going to leave.”
“Kind of hard to do that, and uh, if the world is ending, I want to be with the guy who thinks he can stop it.”
Tadeo winced.“I’m not sure if I can stop anything anymore, Dante.”
“Me neither,” Dante laughed bitterly, which oddly made Tadeo’s lips twitch in a terribly sad smile.
Tadeo, then, looked to his family nearby, sharing bags of chips now and talking.Curious at that, he walked his gaze further, then pursed his lip at a convenience store nearby with its doors wide open, shelves presently being emptied by dozens of people.“I’m sorry,” he said, to Dante and in general, though he felt his stomach begin to gurgle.Weirdly, he had no want to fill it.Like starvation would be enough to clear his head.Sometimes he desperately wanted pain as its own painkiller.
“Why are you apologizing?”Dante snickered.‘I’m the one who’s fucked up.’“You healed my hand.”He showed it off, wiggled his fingers.
“I’m also the guy who broke it.”
“So what?”Dante tried to drop the tension from his own shoulders.“I shot you in the head, and you don’t hear me apologizing, do you?”
