#1
Red paint all chipped all over coloured the barn and soaked up the summer sun to a burning atop the hill. Even from a distance it appeared like a half skinned man, kept alive only due to some defective ounce of kindness in the soul of his torturer that brought him only greater pain. The long foot path scorched like gunpowder, so I opted to walk through the grass, assailed by clouds of insects. It would be no relief to shelter behind those red walls inside what must be a morass of manure stenched by the heat.
Passed a half rotted fence a stone’s throw to my left, whose wooden gate was half split and tethered only by rope, a great bull with sunken eyes and high curved horns watched like a sentry. Its short hair teemed with sweat. I met its eyes—its horrible black hole eyes—and was frozen stiff up the spine by the sallow hatred inimical to all mankind it seared into me: I felt the ground open below my feet and pull me deep deep into hell where, on my knees, I prostrated myself before the unmoving fly-clad beast and begged for one hundred and one mercies to be granted because no matter how many ends or beginnings I had been made by god to witness I never myself wished to be granted the former, even if in so many trivial moments I said “end it all” and meant it.
A child, stick thin limbs with a round belly, gripped me by the shoulder and helped me to my feet. He chewed a reed and was dirty all over his burnt-brown skin. Rising, the cloud-white trim of the red barn looked somehow cool on that all-hot day. On the field opposite the bull I saw two white horses. Three foals, each with the awkward limbs of adolescence, trotted behind them, somehow alive in the drought. One cloud angled above us, its shade due to pass overhead any coming minute. I filled my belly with grating air, nodded at the kid, and entered the barn without looking to my left.