Santana left as soon as she came, she took off from this world to new planes and horizons, where mountains fly and buildings are as tall as infinity. Also, sooner rather than later, the moon kisses ran out.

That minuscule taste of what lurks beyond the veil of reality, of the mountain of madness, made us grateful for the pumping of blood through our arteries. But without mushrooms we need new alternatives....

Breathe in the leathery smell of the briefcase, the rust of the machines, and the radiation of the monitors, slave common man. You, the scholar or the nonconformist, taste the happiness of your nerves blooming with Ecstasy. Throw yourself into the K-hole as dark as Limbo. Embark on a sea of lysergic acid under a shower of angel dust falling from smiling clouds.

Nice whirlwind of dyes. But it's time to go further. Where else...?

"The meat" Daniel proposed as he vomited a cocktail of Doritos and alcohol into the toilet. I held his hair. When he finished, I flushed the toilet.

The night is our friend. I wore ratty pants and a white anorak I bought for nothing at a yard sale. Daniel wears skinny jeans and a sleeveless shirt that reveal a tangle of interlocking slashes running up from his wrists to crown the middle of his arms. As he passes under a streetlight, the light brings out those deep, intrinsic webs opened by razors and razor blades, badly healed by time.

"On special nights I don't hide them" Daniel once told me. "It is believed that the full moon brings out the worst in people. Nonsense. It only shows us how we really are"

And the round star now rules the sky. It sends us a wink in celebration of all the rapes, overdoses, murders, cheating, and suicides cradled in this barnyard called Earth. But how naughty they are! Such hopeless little devils. I almost heard her scoff.

Whores are the courtesans of the night. The game is simple, you pay and you get, like going to buy bread. They are all cold but they still come out scantily clad, and bathe in perfume to mask the stench to other men. It's a marketing thing.

I remember about the first one, Daniel gave me a condom, a pat on the back and wished me good luck before he saw me enter the motel. I had a fake ID in my pocket, but I didn't even have to show it, it was enough to pay for the room. Her pseudonym began with a "P" and ended with.... "A". I forgot the middle. What I do remember is the tattoo of a blue rose on her abdomen, next to the C-section scar, while she moved on me like a slug trying to eat me. It took me about ten minutes to ejaculate.

The next few sessions were longer, but just as tasteless, and I would even say embarrassing. Then Cherry appeared, hunched over by the trash cans like a battered stray cat, with her hand in her mouth and blood leaking through her fingers, the gift of a well-delivered blow from an annoying customer.

Daniel and I exchanged glances. Cherry almost crawled up to us and offered us fellatio in exchange for a handful of dollars. Tongue, saliva, tears, and blood made for a nice, warm, pleasurable, and playful combination that I recommend you all try at least once. She took the trouble to swallow without complaint. Daniel paid her for both, and she also wanted to pay for the attention of the guy who hit her and left.

"That's not necessary, honey"

"Come on, it's only money" Daniel insists with the favor.

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She finally accepts and thanks us, still hugging herself. I look her up and down, her arms and legs glistening like fields of holes, desecrations of many needles fighting to find a vein. Something small and red falls from her. I bend down and pick it up..... It's hard, and white behind the layer of blood. A tooth. I wipe it on my anorak and try to give it back to her. Cherry shakes her head.

"Keep it, honey. Maybe it will bring you good luck"

She tells us her nickname, in case we want to repeat another day, and walks off back to the concrete garden.

On the way to the apartment block, I ask Daniel:

"What if something hit us? There are like twenty thousand venereal diseases now, dude. Each one worse than the last"

"Relax. It's not like we're going to last a hundred years either"

"That's true"

The next morning, the beaten face of that prostitute comes back to my mind. Also in the afternoon, superimposed on Tiara's face as she tried to convince me to enter a rehab clinic. I couldn't call Cherry beautiful, her expression more fitting of a victim in a domestic crime documentary than a living being. Maybe that's what attracted us... An asphalt flower ready to wilt, sugary femininity mixed with bitterness from beyond the grave. I closed my eyes and imagined the beautiful, healthy young woman she once was, degenerating into the wreck she is now.

We hired her for ten consecutive days. At first we took turns: First Daniel. Then me. Then both of us at the same time. Daniel preferred the tightness of her ass. I preferred the intimate and aphrodisiac juices of her vagina. The mouth remained on neutral ground, but I admit the girl was talented enough to graduate to giving great blowjobs. She loved the joke.

We would talk after sex, and I got to a point where I wanted that more than the carnal act. I discovered that we shared the same age, but she looked 10 years older because of her pimp's drugs and beatings. I wasn't aging like fine wine either, these months of searching took their toll on me. I told her so, and she replied I'm not that bad. Her laugh was beautiful, so much so that it seemed alien, and I felt the urge to ask her to marry me, to run away and start from scratch somewhere else...

We would recover, we would be happy, a house in the suburbs and a couple of little kids, then this whole stage of our life would be behind us, I know. A halfway happy life.

So I held back.

Then, being so drunk and stoned that we were mistaken for demons, I tied Cherry on the bed and Daniel brought along a stray dog who, with his tongue, made her reach a wet and embarrassing climax. I watched it all from the doorway unclear what was true and what was a dream. Daniel couldn't see it, he passed out in a corner.

Three days later Cherry's body was found in the same alley where we met her. The chronicles and news reports describe that all her teeth were knocked out and her face was so bulging from the blows that it was hard to recognize her.

A pig (Policeman) held a press conference blaming the criminals from the neighboring county, and a pig from the neighboring county held a press conference blaming our criminals. The public accepted both versions, it's easier to live with that fantasy of distant evil than to think about the whores murdered a few blocks from the church or public school.

In case you doubt it, Daniel and I never hurt Cherry. We used her in many ways. We licked and touched those corners of her body that even after years of prostitution were virgin (Her regulars lacked our imagination). But whoever plucked her from the garden was surely her pimp, or one of those angry guys who then put on the mask of a parent.

The beloved grandmother falls down the stairs and is devoured by cats. The kid with good grades stumbles on the road and gets his head crushed by a truck. The unfaithful wife passes away with a smile in bed next to her husband of decades, surrounded by a ring of other men's children. What a tragedy. What a comedy. And who is Cherry? And where did she come from? And who was the father of her unborn? No one knows and no one seems to care. Life is a very long joke.

"Death visited our friend. It was not beautiful, not cathartic. She deserved better. We could have given her something better" Daniel says. He tosses a half-finished beer can into the Mississippi stream.

"If life has no charm, why should death?" I ask, sitting on the wet sand with my arms around my knees.

"I don't know. But sooner or later, yes or yes, I'll have to find out. Especially now that I'm starting to get bored with orgasms"

"Are we done with the meat?"

"Not yet. Let's fall in love with a nice young girl from a good family. Virgin, if that still exists. I want to corrupt something beautiful"