All Dogs are Blue by Rodrigo Souza Leao

animals. Blue is also the colour of her eyes. Granny comes and hugs me. She wants to dance a tango, but I don’t know how to dance so slowly. I dance to ‌ a different beat. Acugêlê banzai! 11
    I’ve been to Japan. It was a different kind of place. Not unlike an asylum. Full of people. Sometimes, when I think back on Japan, I remember Fearsome Madman. He was a nice guy. He’d killed six people. Strangled. Raped. He was a weird guy, but gentle with me. Like I said, he was afraid of my voice when I spoke in a lower, deeper pitch. Fearsome liked playing chess with himself. Who killed Fearsome Madman? It was a mystery that echoed throughout the little silence that existed in a place like that. I want to fill that silence with my voice.
    In my voice, a scream.
    But Haldol holds me back. It holds back my screams, whispers. I, having hidden tons of pills under my tongue, now take them all, no questions asked. Who knows if they help. I just know that I miss my two friends. Rimbaud appears and tells me he has AIDS. He wants us to become blood brothers. I agree to it and cut my thumb. Baudelaire appears and says he wants to become our blood brother too. Just the idea of dying from something other than the chip (or cricket) makes me happy. To die with Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Nothing could be better. Acugêlê banzai!
    I’ve been to China. Saying it like that makes it sound like I’ve travelled a lot. It was a very pretty place, full of people, bicycles and lots of clouds. The clouds, the clouds. There I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was a foreigner and I was madly in love with those far-away clouds, oh those wonderful clouds! Shapes in the sky. When the day is like that, a sunny day, a day like today, I no longer want to get out of here. I’ll sleep in the calm green of 6 mg of Lexotan. Hold on tight to my blue dog and enter into a pact with happiness. Remember China, its bicycles, its blood-red flag and, finally, those incredible clouds in the Chinese sky. I think I’ll be happier once I’ve taken the bloody blood oath. I want to die of anything, anything but of a chip I swallowed. I swallow the pills. One day, I swallowed three. Another day, I swallowed four. I don’t really know what I should do to get better. Simply because I’m a pterodactyl in a cage. A raven pecking at the belly of a scarecrow. A man who isn’t afraid of the terror of living without fear. Nevermore, no one here is afraid. Not even the Attorney General. He reminds me of a character in a Western or a gangster film. He uses a spoon instead of a knife. The Attorney plays that dangerous game where you stab the gaps between all your fingers with a knife, or in this case, a spoon. We only have spoons here. The old man does it skilfully, as if he’d been practising for a long time. Just for kicks. Letting the winds of adrenaline blow.
    Rimbaud appears during gales. The winds that bring him make me wrap up in his scarf. He smokes weed. Puffs of smoke from Baudelaire’s pipe disperse close to me. He tells me that he’s a macumba priest. He tells me he has powers. He renews my language. I believe him completely. Rimbaud is the storm. Baudelaire is the wind. One ‌ takes ether. The other, cocaine 12 . I’m just sad – I’m the guy who finds out that the coloured pills make me fat and stop me, more and more, from spending time with these old friends of mine. What’s life without friends? I’m like Emmanuel Bove, who secretly loved the friends he didn’t have. I’m friends with my eyes. They only see what I want. I look through my tinted glasses and see everything in black and white. Everything looks like a Bergman film.
    Actually, I look a bit like Charles Laughton.
    Just for a while, hopefully. Why drink coffee with sugar when you’re fat? Everything with lots of sugar. I look at clocks and coffee cups. I spit soap bubbles. I turn into a train that goes along without knowing where to stop. I transform myself into a writing machine and it writes