OH, TO BE HERE ON THE GROUND
Left behind, left behind, left behind, why is it always me who’s left behind, huh? Why don’t they care? Why don’t they love me? Why do they always leave me to rot and rust and die alone, alone alone you bastard you raise your horns to the crowd and you gouge out hearts and wings and carve life from the world like slices of cake on a platter, how could you take our name for your own and bring such hatred upon it? How? They stare at me more now then ever. I know it! Look at them. They say, ah, the bull. Not quite like the black one but, you know, they could all be alike, could know each other, could be spies. How many bull-horn men do you know? Very few, they say, because we all come from another place and time. Fuck you. I didn’t ask for these horns and in the end they were never enough. In the end what I needed was something to carry me into the sky and what I got was something to slough flesh from the innocent. That’s what he does, anyway. I would never. Never, never, never. An honorable man, am I, says he, says I. He must think he’s right. Well I’ll kill him, I will. I’ll kill him and it’ll be the most honorable thing I’ve ever done in my life. Die, El Rey, black bull. Die, die, die.
Had he wanted to celebrate? Why had he come?
Those were a lot of miles to be not-thinking about why you were going somewhere. He did think about it, truly; like sucking venom he siphoned gossip about the black bull and heard that he was a citizen of Denocte. Once upon a time, perhaps.
”I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you,” he spits, a few glasses knocked aside or shattered and more than one bar stool askew. The wood hasn’t been splintered by hooves or horns, not yet. But the stranger is trying Toro’s patience and may very well warrant furniture to the skull.
He imagines someone trying to stop him but no one does. He imagines someone holding him back from the edge but no one does. He imagines putting his horns through a man’s chest cavity but he does not.
It’ll leave a nasty scar, though.
Frank red blood splatters in an arc across the floor and the stranger is blinded. Toro isn’t sure if he took out an eye or just split the skin above it. He doesn’t really care.
He wonders how far they will let him go. He’s not even liquored up. He’s just angry.
From the wilds outside the city Hajduk thinks, You should’ve let me come.
@Erasmus
"What I say,"
What I think,
What Hajduk thinks,
