Las Terrrenas
By Porter Fox, Nowhere Magazine (October 18, 2010)
The pistol creates a space in the air. The barrel is chrome. It gleams in the sun. When the man in the hooded jacket talks, when he beckons to me to be quiet, when his partner pulls my hands behind my back and pushes my girlfriend toward the bedroom, everyone refers to the gun.
I was watching sunlight spread across the hilltops when they came in. The winter sun doesn’t penetrate the mountain valleys of the Dominican Republic until noon. Before then it’s dark and musty in the house. When I woke, I opened a window in the guestroom to air the place out.
Now the two shapes suck the light from the room. The shorter man has a towel wrapped around his head to conceal his identity. The taller one is wearing a Northwestern State University Demon Sweethearts windbreaker with the hood cinched around his face. The pair are hunched over, as if trying to crawl through something, over and under something, like the way people step through barbed wire. Push down, pull up. They stare at me like I’m a museum exhibit, spread the wire and step through, the whole room crisscrossed with fencing.
For some reason I walk toward them. I can’t hear their footsteps. The tall one lifts his finger to his lips. The pistol cuts across the room, two shadows gliding behind it. The shorter man reaches for my hands. What he is about to do is not happening. The gunman erases it before it happens. He holds his finger in front of my face, wide and pink at the palm, deep brown across the knuckles, and levels the pistol three feet from my forehead. He’s not shushing. He is suggesting we are not here. We are by the ocean, under a blue sky and puffy clouds. The sand is golden and there are tiny ripples on the water.
This day is already over, he is saying. Or most of it, anyway. Perhaps there are a few things left to settle.
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