Sun beating down like a million ants on the trees, the dirt, and Hong’s arms. He is short, tan, and his forearms are very muscular. I don’t want to say that he is sinewy, but, truly, his arms share certain features with mangroves, and other trees that grow in weird shapes because of an owl’s nest, or some electrical wiring. He is wearing a red Marlboro cap, and a red Oxford shirt with short sleeves. He is wearing jeans with smears of wet dirt on them. He is hacking away at bamboo.
Hack, hack, hack. Sweat forms on his brow, and he wipes it away. The cap is getting wet. His shoes are those of a miner: black and hard and heavy.
The sun is very hot. As Hong hacks at the bamboo, the individual stalks rub against each other, and the sound of the rusted machete hitting once, twice, completes the sound there: a full sound, an old sound.
There is under his wet, patted down, greying hair, under the red Marlboro hat like a billboard, or a promotional item at a Shell gas station, more hair, dark and curly. Hair like a cobweb in a dark, dingy bar where hardened men drink, where Hong drinks, where young women whisper in ears, and smoke, and drink the bottoms of drinks, and share whiskeys with men. Below the hairs, the eyes…the eyes, the eyes. The day is hot, and Hong is old now, and tired, and so he does not know what these eyes are any longer.
Children now populate his mind. Running around in cement courtyards, playing under the water of a hose, screeching and giggling. There is Hong smoking, here he is chopping bamboo.
This terrain: the sun, the sweat, the dirt, is inclement. Chopping away, hoping to make some money for something nutritious. To lie in a cot, and sleep.
Santiago Aguado’s work has appeared in Rejection Letters, Expat Press, SpillWords, and El vestíbulo.