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-31El Dia del Muerte In that tepid tropical morning, bathed by wafting smells of preservative spice and cinnamon, she had sat alone on the terrace, drinking her sweet coffee. Sunrise streaked, full of portent, a lizard had darted up the flagstones and stopped beside her chaise-longue to stare at her with one baleful eye. He had raised his fan, hesitated, but he had forgotten his message (or had chosen, more cruelly, not to tell). He had hissed, then disappeared among the fronds. Clammy, uneasy, leaving her husband still in bed, she had gone to mass (in a Catholic church she had found using the tourista map). Afterwards he had joined her, barely smiling, at the parade up to the garden and tombs. It was there that he had said the word divorce. He had said the word, divorce, again, (to make sure she understood) and how he knew he should have said something before they came. He never looked at her, just kept his eyes on the mock procession, the faceless figures, the passing food, the trinkets. He had dropped her hand he had been holding. She had tried to refocus; she had tried to count, between her feet, as she continued to walk, the smashed sugar skulls inadvertently dropped. She had tried to imagine what those casings might have held before. -32Unblinking , she had glanced inside the tombs and had felt envious. She could see herself lying in bed, alive but cavernous inside, surrounded by prayer-filled candles creased fotografias. She began to feel drier, stiffer, not having to breathe, not having the disability of a heart. Back at the hotel there is a garish fiesta, a ghoulish masque, the waiters, dressed in skeleton costumes, bearing death’s-head multi-colored pastries. She hears the churr, the ripping rattle, the hiss of the papier mâché hair on the burro piñata, So close she smells the wood of the bat she wanly winces on each of his blindfolded, futile swings at the mindlessly jerking, moving, spinning target. She dully considers what that casing might hold. Then, abruptly, the sudden smash, smash and the spewing exhalation; she looks down, expectantly, fragilely aware of the omnivorous rushing for the scattered bits, the sweet intestines. ...

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