"Death Has Slow Wings" excerpt
At last, with less than two hours of light left, Pir managed to snipe one of the embassy’s helicopters while the aluminum magnate it had been reserved for was throwing up behind the bean shed. He took us straight up through nine circles of different-colored smog and west out of the basin past Peyuca. Six months of waiting, and it took us at last only twenty minutes to arrive above the S. Agapoula lava fields and the shallow, seasonal lake in which we had placed our hopes. Pir told us, as we began our descent, that the color of the water – a brilliant chemical turquoise – indicated that the lake would be dry in a week at the most, and that most of the peliconquins would have already begun their long trek to Tierra del Fuego. He kept a tiny darbouka nestled in his crotch and drummed a counterrhythm to the rotors with the fingers of his left hand. I thought of all the Naciremas who must have died building the massive levee that we were coming down to land on, its nearly straight lines disrupting my sense of the landscape’s scale.
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text by "er Cotogno"
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