Mundo Cruel by Luis Negron

that Q uique can do your hair for New Year’s Eve.”
    Sharon tried to protest, but Willie insisted.
    â€œLet them make you look like Diana.”
    Sharon, as if by magic, was excited by the idea and left the room saying:
    â€œMe, like Lady Di? That’s crazy.”
    As if crazy were precisely the most brilliant thing in the world.
    I lay down next to Willie. He had recently taken a bath. He had changed with me ever since he became bedridden. For months he had ignored me as at the party where we had met. I wasn’t me, I was part of a duo with Sharon. “You two this, you guys that.” I looked closely at his body and passed my hand over his chest. His armpits were tender ground for little flowers. I hugged him gently. His bones felt fragile. Body, host. Orchard fed with alien nutrients. I sought his face, kissed the dry sores, brushed away an eyelash that rested on his cheek. I looked in his eyes and found, finally, after eight months and sixteen days, desire.
    I move his body with care to be able to put my arms around his back. His mouth, dry, like sandpaper, began to kiss me in rhythm with my lips craving his. His arms, thin like branches of a feeble shrub, tried to hug me tight. He smelled of recently primed earth. I rubbed my nose against his chest sticky because of the patches. He squeezed my skin as if not to fall, but his yearning sustained him. The disposable diapers, stuck to us, sounded like the rustling of dead leaves. We looked at each other. We continued in silence, sure of ourselves, safe.
    I stayed in the bed with him. I remembered the first time I came to his house, the two of us in the garden. He lit a roach and we smoked. He fascinated me, with his eloquence, speaking about philosophers and writers as if he knew them, with his natural, well deserved arrogance. After, naked in bed, him with a Virgin medallion on a chain around his neck, his breath heavy with marijuana.
    He looked at his pants hanging over the chair and with a smile he said:
    â€œI should be crying, and yet, I feel fine. You want to see how fine I feel?” he asked me leading my hand to his erection. It began to rain. I noticed he was getting goosebumps and I covered him with a blanket.
    â€œSharon says you’re going to die because of the party.”
    â€œI’m going to ask you a favor, Nesti,” he said, serious, in the same way his sister would. “Take care of Sharon. She wants to leave the house to you and she says that she’ll even build an apartment for you,” he was emphatic: “You know? Every single member of my family, absolutely all of them, were born under the sign of Pisces.”
    We watched the rain falling on the bougainvilleas. We fell asleep.
    When I awoke I went to my bathroom and took a shower. I loved that sense of security I felt after making love with Willie. I wiped myself dry and smoked pot. I thought of Sharon’s story and I smiled thinking that these people were my true family and that this moment of my life was going away with Willie. Everything was going to change. Afterward, with the high, the thought came to me that Willie had died. That he was lying dead in the bed. I imagined the police asking me the requisite questions and myself rambling, incoherent. I came out of the bathroom in my towel and went straight to the room. Willie was standing. He looked strong, healthy. He looked at me and said:
    â€œThat butt of yours works wonders.”
    We received Sharon in the garden. She looked radiant, and made faces coquettishly as she shook her newly done hair, retouched with blond streaks.
    â€œYou look absolutely gorgeous,” Willie rejoiced.
    Suddenly she came out of herself and saw that her brother, prostrate in bed for months, was sitting in the little garden chatting with her.
    â€œWillie, what are you doing up? Nestito, what’s Willie doing outside here?”
    I made a sign that she should leave him be and she understood. She straightened