Читать книгу Mozos - Bill Hillmann - Страница 7

CHAPTER ONE:

THAT FIRST TIME

2005

I fell to the zigzag bricks flat on my back—astonished at how the glory unraveled so quickly. A mozo dropped his knee into my chest and my leg popped up in recoil. The 1,200-pound bull swooped in, his foreleg collapsed as he swung his head low and graceful. The point of his horn struck my inner thigh. I felt a needle prick then a vast universe of nothing. He lifted me in a majestic lunge. My leg sailed between the planks of the barricades. No pain. I grabbed my crotch and thought, Thank god it’s not my balls. I want to have kids. The horn slid out. I fell to the coarse bricks again. I scampered out on my backside, then the medics pulled me through and for a moment I was alone.

I looked down at the baseball-sized fleshy wound—half expecting it to not be there. What have you done to yourself?

Mid thigh, a deep gouge gaped open with the skin torn in three triangular ribbons like undone wrapping paper. Blood streaked down the backside of my calf from a second hole and filled my shoe.

I peered into the deep, mangled flesh—like a concave bloody eye—and a voice inside me calmly said: Accept it. You knew this day would come.