Quarantino

In the dense custard interior of my apartment I watched my wife breathe gently, her lungs pushing down into the uterine wall holding back our unborn child. A sealed myth awaiting release by a lone adventurer seeking renown and fortune. Her belly rose and fell like waves on a restless sea. It protruded like a well fed man. I gazed, marveling at the mass of flesh and bone, gestating a life from formless atoms. It made me hungry.

Without pause, I sought my pants, which I grabbed after like a lascivious ape, palming a grip of denim draped over an heirloom chair. Around my torso, I covered my chest in a soiled undershirt, thinking only of the greasy reward awaiting me six blocks away: a wasting hamburger. The sum of its parts in disarray, lounging in stainless pans, shivering in cold storage, dismembered on the block. My immobile spouse, eyed me in jealousy. I declined to convey to her grasp the sought prize. “It would be cold,” I said meekly, slipping on my socks. I truth I was complacent, living out the curse of Adam.

I gazed upward into a tree, bending against the demanding wind. Positioned at a corner, two blocks from my aging apartment, I was fixed, frozen in my steps, keenly suspicious that, somehow, the universe had appointed me a special privilege. An altercation fomented. Opposing one another, two men were enthralled with rage, gasping for breath between insults and jibes. Their coordination, serendipitous and immaculate, gave my heart pause, and I basked in their tomfoolery like an art gallery patron admiring the work of long dead masters.

“Fuck you looking at?” A stretched, tall man-boy, reaching indecisively for his man-bun. Fingers poised to disassemble the knot of greasy hair, to be draped over patchouli stained shoulders, barely covered by a two hundred dollar shirt made by the desperate poor. His wife was awkwardly positioned near, standing mute. I could not see her face, if she was embarrassed or frightened. There was no context her demeanor could offer me, save her folded hands crossing her hips protectively.

Opposite him, a kitchen worker, clothed in food stained cotton, obsidian like his heart, dispirited and crushed under the burden of Maslow’s second necessity. He did not hear the jibes at first. His gait slowed to a stop, as he realized that he was being verbally assaulted behind two fences.

“ Fuck you.” I heard the stroller pushing yuppie, his words apathetic as his footed feet.

The other, stopped, his body hunched and bent with exhaustion, craned his neck with exhaustion “What?” He called out, throwing his arms up indignant.

“Fuck you staring at, punto?”

The obsidian urchin began to walk back toward the street corner.

“Where you going, punto?” The yuppie called out shaking his fists. He raised the other, lifting his middle finger against the weight of his burden.

“What the fuck? Fuck, man! Chingada güey!” the urchin cried out, his chest puffed out like an ape perturbed, striking it with his fists.

Each were poised, the safety of half a block between them, railing insults at one another.

My pace was set, I would not interfere. My eyes stole covert glances at the belligerent knights acting in the manner laid out by Ramon Lull. But I could not defend the quixotic display, so antiquated and barbaric. In my own heart, I raged against the wind. My breathless voice cried out insults, and still I could not speak. I realized then that my own courage waned until it was nothing, in the face of these two stupid, brave men defending their honor.

“The fuck is your problem man?” The urchin angrily approached, hesitantly, only before stepping back again. “Chingada punto.” He thrust his hands toward his pelvis suggestively.

I watched the stroller yuppie grip the aluminum frame of the stroller tightly and dismissively cast off the urchin with a wave of its hand. As quickly as the bizarre altercation began, the two chicanos established an unspoken détente. The urchin go back his way, shaking his head despairingly in frustration. And as my eyes lingered, I hoped , desperately, to see the man continue their argument, or behold an act of domestic violence against the other. But as I passed the cracked concrete retaining wall, buckling under the rotting infrastructure of municipal neglect, nothing of the sort happened, and all hope of an explanation of the random act of violence passed, like the lights of oncoming cars in the twilight.