Did I have the words confessor or culprit written on my forehead?
"If Hell has a price I'll pay for it. I'll kill the bitch!" Lazaro gutturally spit these words into the air.
My pupils dilated as I stared into the north. What the fuck was this?
I barely knew Lazaro.
He was the agent Claudia my photographer friend had introduced me to when we collaborated on my first poemario.
Lazaro wasn't familiar to me this way, I was in an awkward impasse.
Nonetheless the empathy in me proved to be stronger than my logic.
"What's the matter my friend, what blade have you been cut by?" I regrettably asked.
He was sobbing uncontrollably, this was a disheveled man.
I broke my fixed gaze to the north and walked over to him.
Placing my right hand on his slumped shoulder, I shook him back to reality and got him to look at my face.
His clenched jaw broke free only to deliver the message his turmoil released.
"Poet, I can't get the images of her bound body out of my mind."
"Poet, we met in junior high. I was her dance partner at her quinceañera. She was my sweetheart since before I became a man."
"We have five kids and what I thought was a solid marriage and now I find her in this sordid affair."
"The woman I knew as my forever rib is now gone and in her absence lives a sexual deviant."
This guy had been drinking my Mario kool-Aid. He had read the manuscript that would enshrine me in Pulitzer history and that must have given him the courage to vent.
I was now asking myself: Is he venting or crying out for attention?
Did he in a twisted Machiavellian way think that exposing his wife this way in my novel would purge the agony from his heart?
To be continued.
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