DR. MONEY 

If I have a child I think I will die during the birth, like with skiing. Some people die, people snap, when they go. Something happens to their spine, as soon as they ski. They take one lesson. A child, like a lesson, would not sit well in me, and they, the hospital, would save him, and set my body into a river, of blood, for death. 

Dr. Money, I met him on the plane, and he invited me actually on a ski vacation. 

Obliquely, he mentioned he liked to do things like this. Back in the states. On the plane we were headed there. Spain was done. He was newly divorced. 

Back in Spain I had felt unresponsive to the child, free of feelings about her–I would sit at a desk at the convent, and they'd bring a cuteness to me, like a sacrament, would dip their child down, aggressively onto the fragility of my laptop, threatening to break it with the cute fat of a toddler girl, breathing, their punishment. For knowing my limits. What will kill me. For my breasts of ungluggable small breadth. For not even thinking of having anything, not even cash. Who will give me my money? There would be punishment, extraction for all of this, not least of which would be: my paranoia, my happiness. 

BLOOD SAUSAGE 

Soups of lentils and spinach and onion–blood filled them. It filled me. 

I imagined it was sheep blood. Sheep are like moving bushes of dredding tampons. 

But blood sausages are full of pig's blood, I know now, I learned, like the juiced neck of a pomegranate pig.

ACID 

My stomach was too full of the acid of a pig's head. The pharmacy had been closed forever. I wanted Tums. Or Spanish Tums. My stomach tore. I chewed like a madwoman Susana's ginger, which is hard to find in Spain, she sought out and bought ginger root at health food stores back in Cordoba, and I drank the juice of a lemon, also hers, an antioxidant, but it didn't work. I was in need of synthetic mastery over me. The pharmacy was always closed, for parades and naps and Sundays, Spain like a sitcom, like a drama, like a film with so many, too many, commercial interruptions, only the commerce is the story that tradition, inanity, culture (I write against you) interrupts–commerce should be there, an enduring vapor, and it is awful to plan, to consider where you happen to be. The pharmacy would not open for days, due to a twist of holidays and Sundays and naps. All twisted up. I wanted something synthetic, like Tums, or Spanish Tums, but now, without anything so simple even at all available, for indigestion, I wanted anything, any drug, out of rage, at Spain, so I took something, the thing that I had, half of a packet of a powder called Frenadol, for bad colds. It felt so good. Like speed. I felt articulate and focused, and one with the sunset. I sat at my desk. I smashed the dining table into a desk, by writing on it. I felt full of love. Drugs are beautiful, they do not end with what they mean, and mean to cure, and what they end, a bad cold, and they aren't the end but the beginning of beautiful writing. 

A PRICK

My buttons were undone to allow the acids to travel to my lower bowels. I am thin but my stomach bulged, a pregnancy of pig fat. He was talking about his Spanish girlfriend. She was Sevillana, but she was going to come here, within southern Spain, to Aramingo, to visit him in Manuel's house. The house Manuel stipulated would be used after his death only for artists. The latest artist was this boorish person and he called me Vera, the name of the other one like me, to him: to us we were different and close. Vera and I were friends. 

He didn't care. He called me Vera in the morning, in the kitchen, to ask for something he wanted for himself, and he took over my desk. In truth, it was the dining table. I was the one who wrote there, and looked at the sunset from that, and watched films there, the sunset, the slashed breast, the bruised back collapsed on the velvet divan or it's charcoal orangine, the photography of clear hazel fluids ripped on a lightboard of lit mauve—but you took it, you scoundrel. 

He went to Exeter and was a writer for Esquire. He said, “I love Spain I love bullfighting and the salsa," and was having his own Spanish girlfriend, like a ride at Disneyland with the theme of Spain, this cool and beautiful Sevillana who could not read the cues américaine, that he was an obnoxious boorish person and not sufficiently handsome. She couldn't see this, because of cultural difference, or blindness, or will, though she was an artist, a muralist, and would paint a mural on a wall of Aramingo for something Catholic that was coming up, again, another parade, something that lasts in the night, the wall white again soon, when she was gone—a temporary mural on a designated building. There is white paint. That is why she was there, to paint it, what they'd paint white, a commission, and to visit him, because she was his girlfriend, in the house with Vera and I, and Susana. 

But his girlfriend had not come yet. She was coming. He snored in the next room like a breathing condition like a sleeping condition like a roar through the house like everything is wrong, like a beast in the bedroom next to mine. Like his wealth in breath, screaming at us all night. His past. He must have driven the prep school mad, the close quarters, the old wood, they must have murdered him with goose pillows every night, but he rose to a position of writer at Esquire and was here, in Spain, to write about Spain, directly, about bullfighting and salsa dancing, in Manuel's house for some time, and at my desk, which I concede was the dining table. 

He said that his Spanish girlfriend, a Sevillana woman, would come, and sleep with him in his room. She'd be with us. She would then paint a mural here for the new Catholic holiday—the parade, with pagan puppetry. She had proposed it to the town, in a letter, and would come, for and not for him, clever woman, woman wanting to seem casual like she has her own thing going on, has these other reasons, other art than this art of loving, of boring a future into a person, but he said, this jerk, the prick, over pig head, over its fat like birthday cake squares of pig fat, that she utterly bored him, and he was, in truth, done with her. He said it as if to warn us that this was the case. He prepared us for her visit, obliquely. He said, over pig, "It's one of those relationships, you know, where one of the people is desperate about it, wants the relationship more than the other, and the other one is actually just very bored. Has totally moved on to other things. Do you think you know what I mean?" He checked. He prepared us to understand that a woman was being humiliated by him. He humiliated her to us. He humiliated me when he called me Vera. I was not her. My heart was burning with me. 

"I'm sorry she's bored with you."

"No. You don't understand." 

"I get it, she wants to move on. She's very bored." 

I ate the pig's ear, my pants unbuttoned and waiting. For all the acid pain. I wanted to go home. To Manuel's house. To walk without him so not to walk with him. To write in the salon all evening, to write nothing, the same sentence again, like The Shining, just to keep the reservation. I'd stay all night. To have my desk back in the morning. I don't care that it was the dining table for everyone. I don't care to dine with anyone.