Cielo de la Puta

This is not the time for dillydallying. Time is momentary and fleeting, not durational or all-consuming. Time is reckoned in minutes, seconds and hours, not in hammer strikes and uppercuts. Uproars beget pandemonium’s beget mayhem beget chaos beget upheavals and tumults beget rackets and hullabaloos. Mayhem begets bedlam begets anarchy begets disarray. Nestor Sargent, lifting the latchkey well over his head, belayed ‘best keep your feet aboveboard… the seas are crummy this time of year’. Never before had he thought that the sea would toss him overboard tacked as he was to the planking. The silverfish floundered swimming lazily alongside the boat, dorsal fins cutting a piano-wire thin incision in the blue green water. He felt like a rock bottom fish swimming against the encroaching tide. Wave upon wave crashing, booming, in his ears. Eyes sisal red and weepy. The back of his head spun with kelp and seagrass. Gulping breath after gasping breath of ocean spray, a din raging in his heart and liver, the outside world spinning round around and round. ‘best keep your feet aboveboard… keeps a man hale and undrowned’.

(That summer his da got la palmada from a puta dentada torcida, La señora del Cielo de la Puta, una cara grave puta with a quick temper, threatening him with la maldición de la puta if he didn’t keep his chancrous yap shut).