Fierce Bitches (Crime Factory Single Shot) by Jedidiah Ayres Page B

and filtered the blemish through his lungs before pushing it out again, gently into the world, then another deep, cleansing inhalation, until a final breath which he held for one minute. As he let it go, something tore loose inside of him. Tears sprung from his eyes, mucous flowed from his nose, and he muffled great, racking sobs in her hair.
        Ramon cried for an hour, clutching Consuela–silent and stiff–to his chest until he had purged himself of weakness, and exchanged pain for anger. Rage for purpose.  He strode out of the shack toward the cantina in the last hour before dawn to where the gringo pig lay still beneath the picnic table.
        He already looked dead.
    *
    Mama Rita helped him. She packed water, food and medicine into a rolled up blanket, which she cinched at the ends with twine, and slung over his shoulder. Between the two of them, they supported a semi-catatonic Consuela beyond the border of the camp into the scant shelter of the nearest hills.
        When Rita left he told her to spread the word that he would return.
        And to prepare to leave.
    *
    The next day terrible sounds emitted from the camp. Cries and moans punctuated by flares of laughter and anger, but Ramon never moved from her side. Clouds of greasy smoke rose in the daylight and the shanty was lit with a sickly glow by night. Consuela slept fitfully throughout and regarded him in silence when she woke. Lucidity flared, frightened and fled from her leaving questions suspended like glow-bugs in the ether, but in the evenings when the shadows lengthened, the wind-born wailing of her sisters painted bloody murals along the corridors of her mind, and she walked it with purpose, a road now, decorated with crucified women sacrificing themselves for her chance at vengeance.
        Mi nombre es Spartacus.
        She possessed strength enough when she woke at dusk on the third day.
    *
    Ramon and Maria entered the shanty as one, inner arms slung about the other’s hips, outer hands filled with death deliverable by blunt trauma or organ puncture.
        Mama Rita sat, a lone figure out of doors in the heat, on a stool outside the cook shack, sharpening an ancient and irregular set of kitchen knives. When they appeared, she stopped her work, gathered her tools and slipped back inside the hut.
        They made their way down the thoroughfare, profaned with piles of charred animal remains sitting in puddles of grease and ash that added to the malodorous stew the atmosphere had become, gaining momentum with each step until they arrived at Consuela’s hut. In two minutes they had made a pile of clothing, rags and torn up magazines, doused it with the medicinal spirits they carried with them and put it to flame with the cigarette lighter Consuela kept under her mattress.
        Thin, black wisps of noxious smoke rose beneath the cleaner blaze of the alcohol, and they emerged from the hut with trails of the repugnant vapors seeping from the doorway and slipping between their figures, so that the African’s first glimpse of them they were framed in the mephitic smog.              
        The African called out to them, “Eh, you cunts, I wondered how many bitches had to burn before you came back.” Then he called to the camp, “Come see this.”
        As the inhabitants appeared, trickling from the cantina and sundry huts, the new arrivals pushed to the fore to get a good look at Ramon, the butcher who’d gutted one of their number and left his entrails blooming like a putrid rose, out of the desiccated torso.
        Mama Rita’s squat form was moving around the perimeter, a rotund satellite orbiting the scene and Consuela’s gaze followed the top of the old woman’s head until she stopped behind the black man. Consuela met his eyes and stepped forward. She raised the hand she carried her knife in and leveled it at him.
        The silence of the crowd was broken by the chuckling of some of the men. The African