El Colonel is smoking. A battered paperback's pages whip back and forth in the hairbrush-stiff breeze. The book is resting in the rapidly cooling palm of what remains of a severed hand. Blood, coagulating and red-brown, is beginning to weigh heavily on the pages now struggling to remain flexible in the harsh, swift air. A swarm of small black ants scrambles to remain free of the sticky bubbles trapped in- between the molasses-colored fingers. The pale blue skies of dawn are now greying temples on the portentous face of High Noon . . .
El Colonel is whistling a spaghetti western theme song. With a deft swoop of the hand he scoops up the barbecued-looking paperback. For an audience of no one, for an invisible camera, El Colonel gnaws hungrily at the blood-sauce dripping spine. Tearing off a few pages with his teeth, he chews them greedily and spits out some of the more hardened clots of blood-stained typography. He remembers his mother proudly showing off her "little child prodigy" who could "devour libraries" while the other children "gobbled up only cheap cookies."
Flying low in the dull grey sky to the South, a small private plane hurries its shadow across fallow fields and empty pastures. Masticating messily, El Colonel carefully removes a few "napkins" from among the "cleaner" pages of the disintegrating book . . .
