Z Street just got another hole. It is a beautiful, jagged and brittle hole. A perfect cavity, worthy of a perfect left foot sprain. Wet still in her amniotic fluid is just a small little boo-boo on the asphalt, but everyone knows it will grow and become a brand new hole.
No one knew for sure how it happened. It seemed that she would never again misstep. The last time the doctors said that no such thing would ever happen, that if she used the correct contraceptive methods, the humble Z, would not bring any more potholes into this world.
But there she was, still in pain, looking at her new crater, as one looks at the sky in full moon nights and knowing that it is inhospitable, cold and distant, but still seems beautiful.
Then the neighborhood fortune-teller said she knew. By chance she was awake at the time, at dawn, when two criminals raped Z. She confessed that she was afraid for her own life and therefore did not warn anyone. They looked very rough and although neon light illuminated the whole corner, she could not identify them. They had a pick, a crowbar and a shovel.
And Z neither complain, nor a cry, nor a plea. She endured in silence every blow, every insult. You’d think she was used to it.
Then she cried. When the pick opened the first crack she began to mourn. Actually she was doing it before they hurt her. A spring was running through her bowels since the previous delivery. Or was it the other, or the other? …
Her sorrow was old, and she could not remember when was the first time she felt the wetness breaking the foundation, soaking her to the limestone, wetting the primeval earth, that did not know of asphalt or concrete.
The last doctor said she had stopped crying. That black bandage should be enough; it would be years before she would break into tears again. But he was wrong. And there was Z, belly open, after two rough men raped her and removed the little dignity she had left.
If to name the streets of the district they had used numbers would have been maybe two or five, they often thought. It would be at the entrance, near the park, and children would skate and inhabitants of other realms admire its beauty. But then it became fashionable to use the alphabet and the rest of the story you can guess it yourself.
The fortune-teller did not say, but she saw Z rapists transformed then into healers. They brought the same black bandage and made the same promises of eternity, filled half of it and left. She felt it was wet, but said nothing. It was only expected and that she had experience. She had waited for so long…
At night Z tells her children, potholes newly made some, others just beginning to grow. She looks at the sky and stares at the whitish area governing tides and crops, and wonders if someday she will be so bleak, distant and cold for change that name and people start to calling her moon, for that of craters that are still being born.
Author
Abel Gonzalez Alayon
