x Tx - Billie the Bull

There are dreams I’ve had since childhood; dreams that continue to this very day. Things I want when awake but can never have. Never. Listen to the density of that word. So substantial it can break things. Never. But we were speaking of dreams and you do not care about my never. When I wake from them it is like falling from heaven, through earth and into a blackness I can never escape from. Many times I beg to never wake. I’ve often wondered, if I were to die, would I return to the dreams? My personal heaven to live in the body of my dreams for eternity. So, yes, I understand when you say you cannot live without knowing this dream of yours, this deep wanting, but just because you have the means to make it real, does that mean it should be so? Even at the expense of another? A mother? Me? Taking. Always taking. For what you need. What you want. Everything. Nothing you truly need, with the exception of me you say. And what if I do not need you? It is unimportant, this is what you tell yourself, what you have always told yourself. Justification, certainly. You hold my son, so I will “play” with you. Completely bare and so intimate with a man who will never be able to truly love me. A man I never asked for, never dreamed about. But I comply with your dreams. A small degradation I can endure for the times you allow me to spend with my son. How you can be fine with this I will never know. Your tireless need outweighing your shame. Megalomaniac or just an egocentric? It does not matter. I will endure. Your Finderman endures.

Do not look at me with such dismissal. Can you not see? Do you even study his eyes after his reporting to you? Do you see him at all? I do. I see him. I see how he receives your orders. Your orders that have no regard for the uniqueness of the treasures, true treasures, he continues to bring to you without fail. Things that should belong to all now only belonging forever to you. Your flippant disregard I am so tired. This talking is as useless as this existence I have been given. Please can you leave me now? I only want sleep. Sleep where I may dream, if there is any pity from a savior.”

What is a Finderman who can no longer find? What is a Collector if everything, to him, has already been collected? These are questions the Finderman has been asking himself since bringing in the most wanted.

The scroll sits. Still. There are no needs remaining in it for The Collector to read. The scroll reads only the nothing in his mind; spaces poised and full.

He misses the spin, the snap.

The Finderman sits amongst the everything he has brought, now nothing. Wasted and overflowing.

There is a sadness and a question of purpose he has never felt before. He tries to look away but there is nowhere for his eyes to go.

Why? he asks himself.

“Her,” he answers.

Choices gone, Billie lets him take. She smothers. She carries, lifts, and rocks. She opens herself wider, please wider, you can make it wider. I am almost immersed! Submerged! Buried! Drowned! Yes! There is pain but it is never acknowledged, only pushed. She now lives in the past; this is Paul’s punishings, this is her taking the stones, the lashes, the words, arms behind her back, head down. This is the men making the bull, their winches, their ropes, their taking, their leaving. This is her father’s unseeing eyes. This is the children at the park, the mothers’ cheers. It is a daily reliving.

He will never tire. This she knows. He never tired in the finding, and he will never tire in the having.

He says. She does. Endless.

Only the payoffs get smaller.

“Where is my son?” now the whisper of a kicked dog.

The bull lies down on the dirt; spent.

(When the bull finally falls, first to its knees and then to its side, it lies dying while the victorious matador waits to receive his traditional prize: the ears and tail of the failed bull. Knives are used to carve them from the bull.)

Billie willed the fourth growing, not because it might’ve been something he would’ve wanted but because it was something she needed.

Billie willed the fourth growing, but the Finderman does not know this. He does not know how she had taken all that she could, for the last time. How she had decided it was time for all taking to end, finally. How she begged her naked body to make its newest ways. How she pleaded for it to stretch and strike and save her from this man who collects all and cherishes nothing.

The Finderman only knows what he sees before him; the most real thing he’s ever seen in his lifetime. And the Finderman has seen so much.

He stares. The word, ‘carnage’ would be too kind , he thinks.

Billie willed the fourth growing and it came, harder than any of the previous. Harder than the one that killed her mother.

The hardest.

He was there. It was playtime. Now, her time.

Sudden and strong she let it take her; a heavy blessing. It whipped her limbs, fractious, cracking the walls. A thunder carrying an agony so torturous and necessary; her final penance. Her thighs tightened and crushed. The Collector’s screams one with her own. Muscles spasmed, stretched then torn. Her bones ripped from and then punched through the rags of her muscles, the shreds of her skin. Blood let free, bathing them both. The hard frame of her now longer than her skin, now outside.

The growing that should’ve never come. Never so hard. Never so quick.

Billie brought it.

For once, she had made the choice. Had control of bringing the uncontrollable.

The Finderman sees.

The Collector is pierced through the torso by a fork of ribs; facedown and suspended as if floating. His legs an X by the bedside. Billie’s mass so broken, it’s a perversion of a puzzle undecipherable by not only a man’s eye, but a man’s mind. A swim of guts piled and strewn, the steam from the insides coating the oversized room. The bloody demolition of what once was human shreds. The intellect with horror at what it can’t possibly be seeing.

The scene shrinks the Finderman inside of himself, into a place reserved for passage.

He wishes he could disappear. Completely.

He vomits a measly puddle. His mess white against the red — so many shades of red.

The Finderman leaves the room, for once sorry about what he has found.

(The bull is then hooked up to a team of mules who pull him around the ring while the crowd boos and jeers, sometimes pelted by beer cans.)

Billie Marcus

Grade 5

Social Studies

BULLFIGHTING

Bullfighting is a tradituonal Sport from Spain that has been practiced for many years. It is a contest between the brave matador who boldly risks life and limb to tackle a mad and ferocious beast, which is the bull. It is made up of three thirds: The Lancing Third, The Third of Flags, and The Third of Death. Each part is announced by a trumpet sound .

In the first part, The Lancing Third, the matador comes out in a sort of parade and is dressed in a traditional costume of brilliant colors. There is also music. And he has some guys called banderillos to help him. Then the bull runs into the ring and is tested by the matador with his cape to see how he will react. Then picadors on horseback come out and stab the bull’s neck with their lances so he loses blood and gets weak .

In the second part, The Third of Flags, the three banderillos each stick two sharp barbed sticks into the bull’s shouldery. This makes the bull angry if he was already getting tired from the blood loss from his neck cut .