From the dust path behind the lodgings, the motel urchins shout. After flushing the toilet,
I look through the bathroom window. They have found something neither spoor nor
afterbirth nor carrion.  I slam the front door and walk behind my lodging. With sticks
they poke at the meat-clump shivering in gelatinous aftershocks like a beached jellyfish;
some of the brats kick up dust with their sneakers or spit filaments of mucus on it. The
children have encircled the glob and they ignore me as I peer over them.  It is a clench of
coiled fibers and purplish rills of flesh, one meshed within the other. I pick up a twig as
well, shove myself between two children, and commence prodding the flaps and bloody
pocks in order to see if it might reanimate. The boys and shrieking girls around me
compete for chances to puncture the pulp, as if it were a piñata; this continues for a
minute until the commonsensical grandmothers and cousins who care for the children
enter the path and shout at them to come back inside and eat supper. I remain on my
knees.  Because of this brutal discovery, the thing is dust-clotted, splattered with dark
crimson splotches. Twilight finds me slapping dust from my pants as I stretch and turn
back to my lodging with my left palm, which clutched the twig, still trembling.