Rocío García: The Object of Power is Power

If you give the chef with chicken feet a cleaver, he’ll take it. Swing it around, make use of it, act as if it won’t eventually come for him. He’s good at pretending he’s safe. He guards the wall of the beheaded dead like he didn’t put them there. In the land of chains, the headless man is king. 

How many times have you begged someone to tie you up? How many times have you begged someone to untie you? Why do pleasure and terror hover so close together in the blue light? Why do we insist on love laced with suspicion? Why wouldn’t we? Have you ever noticed how the bound do their binding? Have you ever noticed how sometimes the chained feel fast and free? Have you ever noticed how violently that stops? How quickly it starts up again? We are nothing if not creatures of distinct perseverance. Dizzy and silly and funny and cruel.

There is a word for saints who carry their own heads. We need to call them something. Cephalophores—those that cannot stay but refuse to go. They speak to us from under their own arms: 

Echaré de menos el olor a pan. 
My father told me that the one who strikes first loses, but honestly, today? I’m not so sure.
Build me a cairn at the edge of the sea.
I wasn’t even mad.
Моля, някой ще нахрани ли кучето ми? 
I was so happy the new year had come.
Nunca me suicidaría.
Please remind my daughter to deadbolt her front door.
Evil is the color of moss and shit.
No, no, el mal es oro. 

Hurt people hurt people, yes, but power is its own reward. You can see it: thick and unctuous and sweet as milk. It cannot fill you, but it can try, and being filled will feel possible, even at the end. The moon in the water is not the moon.  

-Carmen Maria Machado