Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldaña París

the corpses of large mammals, thinking mammals, mammals with skirts.
    Confronted with these pure possibilities, I feel overtaken by events. I have the sudden intuition that it wasn’t my liking for things rural that led me to move next to the plot, but a propensity for catastrophe and a tendency toward the sordid that goes beyond my conscious undertaking to convert myself into a mediocre, spineless man. So I decide to take a roundabout path through other shady areas of the lot to avoid contact with, or simple closeness to, the bag possibly full of intestines. I stoop to pass below a branch that hangs, as if brought down by lightning, over a heap of trash. And as I move into the darkness, with the foliage of the lianas and the general vegetal disorder covering my body, I feel a blow on the back of my neck. And I fall. I fall as if going beyond the ground. Like Alice when she falls while following the rabbit. The rabbit whose form can be clearly made out in the scar on my arm, and on the moon, so they say. The rabbit that, in my case, is a stray and—who knows?—even imaginary hen, let loose in the weeds of my inertia.
    17
    I’m woken by a beautiful ray of sunlight falling directly onto my face and the cackling presence of the hen, who is pulling up worms a couple of feet from my ear. I pass my tongue over my lips and discover the taste of dust. I can also sense the dryness of the earth on the skin of my arms, the palms of my hands, my eyelids, my whole body. I’m lying faceup. I received a blow to the back of the neck, and I’m lying faceup, covered in dirt. I probably fell on my front and took the opportunity of an instant of consciousness to turn on my own axis, like a predictable planet.
    Pain. Pain very close to the back of my neck. The blow wasn’t exactly on the back of my neck. It was on my head, to one side, a few inches from the ear now listening to the clucking of the hen. It was a blow on that part of my head where the infestations of lice always started in my childhood. In the finest, most vulnerable hairs through which I would run my hand to feel the gritty lumps of blood, the pain. Pain and confusion.
    I can’t have been lying here for long. One or two hours at the most. Cecilia hasn’t left the museum, and the sun is still high, so it’s somewhere between midday and early afternoon. Two hours maybe. Not more. A few short hours disconnected, absent, lying faceup in the lot—my beloved waste ground next to my building—accompanied by the intermittent clucking of my wardress, by the pain of her victims, the worms. Worm pain. Neck pain. I sense and look at my grimy body. I extract a twig from my mouth. I wipe the earth from my eyelids with the right sleeve of my shirt, which is less dirty than the rest of me. My slow efforts to stand don’t seem to surprise the hen, whom I’ve never before seen at such close quarters. Now I can appreciate the dull opacity of her plumage, the unhealthy look of her legs, the food fighting for survival, wriggling in her mouth. Worms.
    Once on my feet, I’m overcome by a slight dizziness, accompanied by the precise sensation of blood flowing and veins pulsing in the area around the wound on my head. I check that my belongings—keys, wallet, cell phone—are still in their usual places—left pocket, back pocket, and right pocket, respectively—and as theyare, I discount robbery as the motive for the aggression to which I was subjected, if that’s what it was, and not a falling branch or a stone or a piece of drywall someone threw over from the street, imagining the lot to be empty as usual. Maybe I saved the hen from that very same blow that, I say to myself, given the size and fragility of the bird, would have been lethal.
    Though it seems more likely it was a calculated attack. What was I hit with? A bat, a piece of rusty pipe from the lot, a tree trunk struck by lightning, the perpetrator’s own wrath?