Volume III, Number 8 – Content Warning: Language and Horror

The gaucho reached over the horse’s shoulder and with two quick jabs of his facón he punctured the animal’s eyes. It screamed. It kicked but its legs were bound. Now it was on its knees. Blood sprayed on the sand. I accepted the knife from my man.
         Across the courtyard my daughter knelt in her filthy wedding dress, weeping, hands behind her back. As behind me they wrestled his famous stallion to the dirt I crossed to her, cut her zip ties and flung the knife to the ground.
         That last of his will trot freely on our estancia, I informed her. Blind, it will receive no harm or help from no one, until finally it loses its footing on a river stone and breaks a foreleg, and is eaten by foxes.
         She wailed, and clawed at the dirt.
         As for the man you call your husband, I have personally cut off his penis and balls, and thrown them to my cats. Later, when he died, my men put aside their baseball bats and took up hacksaws. There is much of him still around, if you care to look.
         In two years, I said, you will have learned from our Sisters at—
         A horse’s scream behind me.
         Some manners and propriety, I said. A spray of sand hit the back of my neck. I turned.
         His rodeo stallion, blind and enraged, its hoofs crusted with gore, my men sprawled at its feet among the broken ropes. It rears and rushes; a horse-cock huge and crimson swats me as the stallion tramples by, punching divots in the chests of my fallen men. It stops before my daughter, who stands to kiss the shredded eyes, and mounts him. She digs her bloody fingers into its mane and spreads herself on its back, and they ride away without a look back from her.
         The ground is black. Everywhere is the smell of piss and copper. Someone gurgles. Something, I realize, is leaking from me.
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