is a previously unpublished story.

Paul had been thinking. The sun was not yet up, yet the sky was quite light. It was finally quiet. Not even a mosca. He slid out the back of the open van and inhaled the fresh air, the profound nothing, really reminding he smoked. He lit a cigarette. Then he sat on the bumper and looked at the mountains and his feet, proceeding to pull tight the laces and retie his American sneakers purchased here. The orange van nearby was now still and silent. Presently, he was well-enough prepared to enter the kitchen to put on espresso. Walking over a lot of broken glass into a pink hostel, finding less-than-ample supplies and preparing the beverage. He got to the last of the coffee first. Thirty drunk and sleeping others made for but one clean wine challis for this morning: precariously its base overlapping a misplaced container lid made for a Venn diagram of sorts. He lifted and held the challis at eye level, walking outside as he arced the steaming liquid in. Outside, he left the beverage maker down on a sill.

Still—ten minutes later—the sun was not up. It was still behind mountains and climbing slowly. It was probably up for Rome. So slow and peaceful, there was still time for mulling. Mulling over the course of the day previous placed him with his friend Rosa’s story of the couple, the bed, and the dogs. She was from Italy and it was from Germany. She lived in Berlin for a time. In Italian, she told Paul a story of the couple next door to her there, they lived in a thin-walled apartment and had dogs. Her kitchen window was facing a wall which must have been the bedroom’s, she said. Rosa’s voice was that of a pull-toy doll. It was soft and unusual and part of the genius behind each of her many stories. At this time, she was asleep between two caballeros in the back of the orange van.

Paul pictured that window opening up to the thin wall. Her story—in short—went so: in her kitchen, whenever the couple next door had sex, she could hear: the couple moan “Ohh… ohh…”, the bed sound “Creak… creak…”, and the dogs go “Woof! woof!”, and they had sex not without great frequency. He found the exceptional brilliance of the account in the window: composed with a frame he viewed invisible pairs. This story was, in fact, the high point of Paul’s yesterday. He paused to raise high his gaze so as to touch where the sky remained darkest.

A fly flew by. Another mosca landed on his cheek. Here in Spain, the word for fly was almost his first learned, learned to better direct hatred. He brushed off the mosca muttering “Fucking moscas.” Another landed elsewhere and he resumed his stroll after a missed swat. Unlike flies in the United States, these chaps were notably more tenacious. Of course, one got used to it, as morbid as it seemed to an American. The three naked bodies in the back of the van were covered with a sheet, moscas already buzzing the folds and twists of white fabric. Even from the distance of the middle of the road, the large, disappearing and reappearing black spots on the sheet and pale flesh of feet were easily seen.

He finished crossing most of the road. He was not finished thinking, but— he somehow felt—more or less. Or, almost. He paused. Something was near. He finished crossing the road, walked some paces to a place where there usually weren’t as many moscas. Something was, in fact, near. The light seemed to say it. It seemed truth was ready to be borne of the air about him, rise from cracks in the caked ground he stood upon. The perfect espresso he sipped, even. The fire of the sun slipping upwards and nigher to the day. Things were coming together. Elements beginning to gather and align on a jagged axis, maybe. He took another drag from a second cigarette. Not necessarily were things in any sense aligning. Whereupon Paul made to sip from his challis.

Paul began to raise his challis when he stopped. Mosca. “Fucking mosca” on the inside rim, no less, he said and thought. The winged and minuscule beast was prancing about the last of anyone’s coffee. Hopeless for him, Paul speedily reasoned. Balancing dead-still the stem in nimble fingers, without a second thought he blew the insect in. In the center of the beverage was the fly, vaguely attempting to swim. Liking swimming, he observed, slightly chin-up taking a drag with finality and triumph. And the sun had just burst the peaks. He proceeded to extinguish his cigarette upon the insect’s back. He had never seen the legs of a fly sprawl before: they did then. Some extra ashes floated. For a second, he studied in its entirety the peculiar circle in his hand, lobbed the brown liquid onto the golden earth before him. He didn’t have to bend down to note: the dying creature still twitched. With the twist of an ankle that was it. Pinkish light softly glinted the rim of the emptied challis. He felt a sense of completeness, that something had just been done that could never be done any more fully. He walked away without direction or the least sense of it.

Paul squinted in the sun at his watch for the time, chancing to notice the date, as well. It was a national holiday back home in North Carolina. Moreover, not just any holiday, but one he might say he­—as they say—“stood for.” He sat down on a wall made ages ago. The hostel would soon begin to wake from dreams in numerous languages.

He took out a yellow translation dictionary, the axis around which revolved most of his conversations had in this nation. A tiny phrase book kept in his cigarette box pocket was extracted. From elsewhere, a book of grammar and another of verbs. He found the loveliest words and things he could think to say, and sat on the wobbly stones until he heard sis in the distance. Flipping fast the thin pages of a triad of pocket language books, finally whispering Estoy escuchando “sís” en la distancia as he jotted it into his notebook. More accurately did the thought in the cadence of Spanish convey his thoughts. The sun was probably rising for North Carolina.