Hallo-Zine Fall 2021
Burrowed and Used
Written and Illustrated by John Paul Amaral
14
I was born into this valley countless years ago, back when grizzly bears nibbled blackberries under massive oaks, and the tule deer swam across the changing river. Turning acorns hung heavy on branches where squirrels and woodpeckers fought to add on to their bronzing caches. Those times, however, changed. Those rancheros trafficked our ursine family from deeper and deeper beyond Pacheco, just to chain them up to the oaks and fight their bulls. Barred from intervening, I saw those monsters gore into the berry-eaters. Not that I could intervene, but doing so would risk my already Spartan living where they paid me to live with a bed and off beef and bread, not with cash or tanned hides cabaneros received. Tools mattered little when any farm implement served to dig a man, too. Their machetes slashed flesh the same as how longhorns gored pelts. Such were the ways with a life tormented by Californios who fancied themselves a fiesta now and again.
an old vaccaro. My last mortal pleasure is knowing I deprived those land-hungry Barbarians the satisfaction of good news when they found out that I died when they wanted him dead instead.
The somber days arrived for them, too, when the drunken Ossos led by that adulterer Thomas Fallon paraded down the streets of San José. We shared the same burden: live to work, work to live, but rarely did we live for ourselves. The time finally arrived for me to die. I passed away in a single-room house on the property of
Rotting wood barred me from my escapes and complicated the afterlife further. I needed to leave my body and belongings behind to make my trip along the western mountains, across their threshold, and down to the waves for the fourth sunset before parting onward. Due to that filthy rosary, a noose around my neck, and
I wanted to be with my loved ones and to go the way they departed. Yet, the old vaccaro and Padre made that decision for me. They thought enough to grant me a Catholic burial. Their heaping loads of sentimental muer did as much good as their criss-crossed religion. Instead of a holy grave, they sealed me away in a wooden coffin worth fifteen hides, dug out a spot outside the graveyard, and made that my funerary plot. Their sickening thoughts and prayers aided little to my lot, except to pin me down in the dirt. A Catholic burial did me no good since my parents dissolved my baptism at the good age of two, but at least I won’t see that vaccaro in Hell.
Poets and Writers Coalition Hallo-Zine Fall 2021
