Mira Corpora by Jeff Jackson Page B

idea or the ferocity. Maybe it’s something from one of the songs.
    The other Luchos awkwardly try to pull me off, unsure whether this is causing El Jefe more pain. His nose is squelchy cartilage in my mouth. I can feel it start to give. So can he. More screams. More cursing. I bite down harder. Around us the Luchos are barking like furious dogs. With a savage jerk, I rip my head to the side. His nose is in my mouth. A chunk of spindly, rubbery gristle. There’s less blood than you’d think. Everything halts for a moment as El Lucho Jefe gives a heart-shuddering, high-pitched shriek to the heavens. I spit his nose on the ground.
    This is when I first notice the pack of dogs has swarmed us. A teeming mass of thick-necked mutts, growling and gnashing their teeth. The Luchos who aren’t clustered around the writhing El Jefe lunge at the animals and fight them to reclaim that forsaken lump of flesh.
    I tear off down the nearest pathway. The loose soles of my sneakers slap against the concrete as I sprint for the park gates. My precious cargo is still zipped inside my jacket, cuffing against my heart as I run. Two frothing mutts are fast on my tail.
    I dash out of the park and spy the wall of a community garden across the street. As I scuttle up the steel fence, one of the dogs snaps at my calf. I give it a ringing kick to the jaw and climb higher. A metal barb peels off the knee of my jeans. More
scraped skin. Huffing and wheezing, I finally pull myself to the top of the fence. The dogs pace below with bared teeth. They have me tree’d but I don’t care.
    It turns out I’m pretty high up. A panorama of the entire park unfolds before me. Thick veils of smoke still heave from beside the band shell. The Luchos limply drag El Jefe toward the far avenue to hail a taxi. A handful of people lie face-down on patches of lawn. One of them, the elderly woman in the babushka, is dead. Not sure how I know, but somehow, from up here, I can tell.
    Black storm clouds mass overhead. A sour wind stings my eyes. The dogs continue their angry vigil, but I’m no longer afraid. I remove the walkman from my jacket and play the cassette from the beginning. I squeeze my skinned knees together against the fence and press my hands over my ears. From the first quavering notes, I can feel again how everything has changed. The city streets below aren’t the same streets as a few hours ago. The cardboard box behind the Chinese restaurant isn’t the same cardboard box. There is blood smeared on my lips, and I let it remain.

    The graffiti appears several days later. Or maybe it’s been there all along. The back walls of the Chinese restaurant are covered with slogans and scribbles, but this morning one particular tag catches my eye. It’s a silver spray paint sketch of a king’s crown with a line through it. A single word is scrawled underneath. It says “Seen.” I sit in my cardboard box and fixate on it for several minutes. I’m entranced by the flowing and interlocking lines of the design. They leave me with an inexplicable chill.
    My thoughts are interrupted by the sound of chorgling noises from the nearby dumpster. The fat kid must be back again. His head shoots up above the metal rim, his face smeared with the
runny leftovers of General Tsao’s Chicken and Egg Foo Young. He’s worse than the rats. He gorges himself on almost everything, including the greased plastic paper. I scoop some loose rocks and bottle caps off the ground and hurl them at him. “Get out of here,” I hiss.
    It’s the only way to get his attention. The fat kid is virtually a zombie. His eyes are dead, as if any spark of personality has been buried beneath an avalanche of bad fortune. He lets out a pathetic bleat and clambers up the fire escape, vanishing onto a nearby roof. Typically, the only edibles he’s left in the dumpster are the remains of the oranges the restaurant serves with its fortune