A Bullfight outside Mazatlán

This, my father says, is where we can see the real Mexico. He loves it here because he doesn’t have to count his money. No one’s gonna call him Speedy Gonzales or ask what he charges per yard. No, here, he’s somebody. He can wave down an open-seated pulmonia with a whistle. Strangers look at his beer weight and say, that’s a man who has it made. Here, he pays the locals’ price. Here, he makes enough to sit in the shade. 

Quiet. It’s starting. A toro most bravo is making his debut. This is no Ferdinand. This is a storm cloud on four legs. This is the biggest, blackest criatura that’s ever lived, hell-bent on bucking and raging into the afterlife. 

Respect. 

The matador sizes him up. He beckons and baits. Coats the animal with his cape. Insult to injury. The beast knows better, but he can’t help it. The anger, my father says, is not about the red. It’s about being cut off from the herd. 

Or maybe this mortal coil. 

Finish that thought. Here come the lancers, swift little pricks on horseback, with the stick-and-move. Here come the banderilleros, driving their deadly and colorful barbed flags—the worst kind of weapon of mass destruction—into shoulders to which they have no claim. 

Oh, the poor monstruo. He doesn’t know the fix is in. Charge. The hits keep coming. The head can’t stay up. Charge. Just keep breathing. I’ll remember you. I’ll remember you. 

Let’s pause for a second. Let me think: Should I be seeing this? I mean, my father did take me to see Terminator 2 when I was six. I still see the skeleton of Linda Hamilton banging on the chain-link fence in front of a vaporized Los Angeles—but only when I close my eyes. 

Back to our programming. Everyone’s on their feet, hungry for a piece of the soon-to-be deceased. The killer—because that’s what a matador is—sops up the roses and applause. He’s just a boy with a sword. Still, it’s a boy with a sword. He— 

—A shriek. The horns. He’s stuck. Dad’s licking his lips. Something dark and true pours through the sequins. Give a cheap shot, get a cheap shot. The boy staggers. He’ll live. The bull slumps. Exits on his own terms. He’ll sleep better knowing he got one in. 

They hook the corpse to a cart and drag his ass around the arena to whistles and applause. Glory in death. That’s how I’d like to go, my father says. 

Wouldn’t we all. Wouldn’t we all. 

Outside the arena, the clean-up crew is hawking game-used souvenirs. We pick up a spear with the tip punched through a paper cup. Safety first. My father can afford it, but he haggles for sport. Everything is negotiable, he always said. A used car salesman until the bitter end. 

We take it back to the resort on the Malecón. Back home to Seattle and beyond. I still have it. The colors are faded. The blood brown and chipped. But look closely: tendon and tissue. A piece of the creature. A piece of me. A piece of him. 

It hangs behind me like some holy relic. Which, of course, it is. 

VINCENT ANTONIO RENDONI

Vincent Antonio Rendoni is a 2022 Jack Straw Poetry Fellow and the winner of Blue Earth Review’s 2021 Annual Flash Fiction Contest. His work has appeared/will be appearing in the Texas Review, Juked, Fiction Southeast, Sky Island Journal, Door is a Jar, and more.