The Last Cannibal (Excerpt)

  Ruben Aguilar: stalker of the dolled-up skeletons that prowl the streets by night, renting out their sacred
and lived-in skin to the empty shadows of men, who by day are the geniuses of finance, impeccable bankers, devout Catholics, and alchemist poets. 

Ruben Aguilar: lover of film, theatre, literature long forgotten by time and a generation of bastards, arias so beautiful they could resurrect even those who are most dead, mid-day siestas that remind him of a happy childhood he never had, and a faithful client of the local brothels that have more in common with the out-of-town festival meat markets than actual houses of pleasure. 

  Ruben Aguilar: embittered inveterate, crotchety old bastard, ritualistic loser, and barbaric manic depressive. 

All in all, Ruben Aguilar: professional motherfucker. 

In his youth, Ruben Aguilar, had been in love with a woman who was, both, married, and a mother to three children. Two of them died in a house fire less than a  week after Ruben Aguilar had declared his eternal love to Esmeralda at the end of that radiant spring. 

Even though the fire had been caused by her husband's abusive drinking and his incessant habit of lighting a candle for his family's saints every time he opened up a new bottle of tequila, Esmeralda blamed Ruben Aguilar for having spoken words of love and herself for having entertained such beautiful words from a boy who was only a few years older than her oldest son at the time of his death. 

Both Ruben Aguilar and Esmeralda spent a summer of hell, feeling a violent void so deep within themselves that they felt, both, every emotion and nothing deep in their gull bladders. 

Not only had two of Esmeralda's children died that spring, but a short while after the Holy Fire, as everyone began calling it, Esmeralda's husband had to be taken into the city and admitted into the insane asylum because he had suffered from a nervous breakdown that had left him with severe paranoia. 

Esmeralda's husband spent the rest of the twentieth century alternating between clinical trials of electro-shock therapy and experimental, stress-reducing waterboarding. In his downtime, he was strapped to his bed from where he helplessly watched as the Germans he had killed in the Second World War surround his bed with the violent demeanor of demons that wanted to hurt him. 

Esmeralda, on the other hand, tried to fill the void left by her two oldest sons and husband with the son she still had. Unfortunately, the young child was more scarecrow than child, and they spent the majority of that atrocious summer in the cineplex, run down by lack of maintenance and overall abandonment  watching foreign films with scenes much too violent and pornographic for the young boy, but Esmeralda was so deep within herself, she never saw what they were watching.
     Ruben Aguilar, suffering from his first broken heart and struggling through his first bout with depression and nostalgia, found the secrets of the modern man: alcohol and cheap meaningless sex.