Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
The first time Bolivar died, he died hanging upside down, strapped to a telephone pole, on a Thursday afternoon.
It was cloudy that day. A hot wind blew with maddening persistence from the south-east. A ‘murder wind’, the local gauchos called it, because on days like this and with a wind like this, fights tended to break out over small things, and they tended to escalate quickly to violence.
Bolivar had been sweating as he climbed up the wooden telephone pole that held it’s piece of the 70km of wire that was connected the small town of Domingo and the rest of the world. “What’s wrong with it?” he’d asked the foreman as they’d both looked up at where the wire met the pole. The wire buzzed and whined strangely as it swayed back and forth in the hot wind. He’d never head a telephone wire make a noise like that.
Bolivar’s foreman, known to his crew as El Serpiente, had once mutilated another man’s face with a bottle opener for the crime of sitting on his favourite barstool. El Serpiente was a big man, with a mixture of fat and muscle that made him look like a bear – bulky and dangerous. His face was a tree bark of scars, and his hands were short one pinky.
El Serpiente surveyed the wire, his face frowning and blustery. “How should I know?” he spat. “Climb the damn pole and find out.” He stomped off, while Bolivar dipped his head to hide a scowl.
Two minutes later, Bolivar was being electrocuted at the top of the telephone pole. The part of his mind that was not being flayed by voltage thought regretfully, “This was not the plan. I was supposed to be playing soccer today-“ And then, hanging upside-down on the pole by his safety leash, Bolivar died.
A minute later, Bolivar was alive again. Eduardo, one of the other crew members, was giving him CPR on the ground by the pole. Bolivar’s eyes flickered open. Eduardo shouted, “Boli, Boli, you’re alive!”
Boliver mumbled something.
“What, Boli? I can’t hear what you’re saying.”
“Is it…is it human?” Eduardo’s eyebrows raised in puzzlement. Before he could respond to Bolivar, the rest of the repair crew picked the electrocuted man up and carried him to their truck, while El Serpiente watched impassively, his hands on his hips, face hovering between amusement and annoyance. As he was being carried, Bolivar stared into the scrubby bushes on the side of the road. “It’s watching me, Eduardo,” he whispered, with a fear in his voice so intense that Eduardo felt a shiver work its way down his spine. “It’s watching me.”
Eduardo followed Bolivar’s gaze. For a moment, he thought he saw something. Something thin, dark, shaped like a man but as tall as three men, crouching in the bushes in a way that a human spine would make impossible. And then the vision was gone, and Eduardo saw only bushes and the desert. Bolivar began to sob.
Soon, the truck roared and dusted and drove away, and the only sound was the murder wind and the strange whining and buzzing of the wires as they swung, ceaselessly, back and forth.