Two dead (First love)
I shot him in the chest. Four times. I realised I’d gone too far when I saw the expression change on his face. He didn’t look pleased.
“Fucking brat. You’ve soaked me.”
He pulled the wet cloth from his skin, two wrinkled nipples forming under his fingers. I had seen him without his shirt on once. His chest was smooth. I don’t like hairy men.
“I’m not a brat,” I protested. “I’m thirteen.”
He seemed surprised. First he looked in my eyes, as if he might find there the truth or the lie in my words. Then he let his gaze drag over my body, until settling on my breasts, so I thought, though it was hard to tell what he was looking at: he had the sun in his eyes and had lifted a hand to his forehead.
I felt hot. I didn’t have the nerve to keep staring at his face so I lowered my own gaze to study the stain of water I had left on his T-shirt. He was wearing a black T-shirt, as always; he must have had ten or fifteen the same. The black where I had fired at him was even blacker than where the water hadn’t touched. How can black be blacker than black? I wondered. But looking at it closely the black wasn’t pure but greenish and cheap and I thought that probably the fabric or the dye they had used to colour it was inferior and cheap and that he must have bought that T-shirt because it was black – of course – but also because he was poor, like everyone else in our neighbourhood, and I thought “but if I’ve always known he was as poor as everyone else, how is it that I’ve only just realised?”
By then he had finished examining my chest and was watching the neighbour’s budgerigar which had escaped again from its cage and was singing its victory from the highest branch of the jacaranda which stood in the centre of the patio, a green and yellow blur contrasting with the lilac.
I sat down next to him on the ground. We saw Remedios come out of her house with the cage in her hands. The cage door was open. It was a scene that repeated itself often. We all knew that Rocky would enter of his own accord. We all understood why.
“You should buy yourself a bra,” he said to me then without taking his eyes off the woman and the bird.
Then he took the pistol from my hands and he shot me in the head.
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