The film of residual soup on the spoon on the table by the bowl is drying, crusting, attached to wetter kin in the form of a drop that has left a now also drying, crusting, soupy wake en route to roughly the center of the stainless steel concavity, where gravity now tugs gently at the liquid, patiently. A fork had replaced said spoon in the boy’s hand, and the utensil’s leftmost tine is now futilely, but deliberately, attempting to stab right through the irremediably boring plant anatomy of one of only three other shriveled-up green peas which are independently, lonesomely, floating along on the agitated surface of the dark grey ocean. The night thunder keeps hitting the bright green canoe that’s making its way across the water, again and again, as the seafaring warriors aboard it valiantly row into the storm regardless, ever forward. The special magic potion that Loullourou, the witch doctor, had had the men drink prior to their departure is protecting them from the full charge of the relentless whiplash of the lightning blitzkrieg the rival gods have sent their way, but, alas -- the men row on, their powerful shoulders and backs and heads and arms glowing blue as that noblest of fires, the one of St. Elmo, would have it; as again and again lighting strikes the men and their green canoe, and the firebolts seem only to further energize the rowing warriors, as they row on and on, as lighting strikes the green canoe, again and again, and again and a…

“Marco? Earth to Marco?” the voice said.

Silence.

“Yo, yo… gargajito. I’m talkin’ to you…?!”

The boy looked up from his pea and his fork and his grey soup and he regarded the man across the table from him. “Yes?”

The man looks back at him quizzically. He raises an eyebrow. “Yes, sir, you mean.”

“Yes sir, sir,” immediately responds the boy.

The man looks back at the boy strangely for an instant, seemingly caught off-guard, then relaxes his look, laughs, and loudly says, “I’m just fucking with you, boy!” The man shakes his head, still smiling, says, “Yes sir, sir. Yo! Why don’t you finish that soup up for me? Huh? No need no beef from yo mom, now… enough for one day with that stunt you pulled with that salt in that bathtub, yo. Yes sir, sir.” He’s shaking his head, eyes open wide as he smirks, looking back down at his own plate now.

This supposed babysitter – which, by the way, what’s with his mom thinking he still needed one – the boy was pretty sure was, in reality, truly truly truly, actually deep down, really really really, banging his mom. He’d take anything he said with a grain of salt. No pun intended, of course.

The boy goes about finishing his soup, but with the lackadaisical lethargy of the acquiescent.

“So when cha gonna grow up, homey? Gonna hav’ta haul yo sorry ass ta a couple ‘em hot spots, right, namansaaaayn? Meet some fine ass bitches, yo! Ya daaaon mofo?!?!?”

Homey’s sho crankin’ ‘em ebonics up, reflects the boy.

“So yes, Marco,” the man begins. “Your mom and I, we believe… and we’ve spoken about this before, haven’t we, son? We believe it’s time you… you start to do more useful things with your time. Look around. Look at where you live. You got all you need here. And all of these books. Why not grab a book, every so often? And read, and discover the treasures literature, the great classics, the gothic, Verne, Hemingway, García Márquez, Kipling… can offer? Instead of messing up your mom’s plants? Filling the tub up with water and your mom’s salt? Or simply sitting around all day, staring into space, sporting that slightest of grins of yours, I mean. What is it? What occupies your mind so? Is it the opposite sex? Is it you’re thinking about women? God I hope that it. Girls? Someone at school? Who do you like? Or is it the teacher? Female, I hope?”

“The headmistress.”

“Heard she’s got ass! Haven’t had the pleasure yet of laying eyes, or anything else on it for real bruh, damn shame, homes... damn, damn shame… So? How bout ‘em honeys your age, playa??”

“No. Just like… normal.”

“Marco. You’ll be thirteen tomorrow. You’ll be… officially a teenager, you know? Time to…” the bespectacled man across from him, the residual natural light seeping defiantly through any uncurtained slot it can find providing not only a silver glow to the hundreds of thousands of specks of dust that give said light geometry in this dim, dark, stuffy, upholstered, burgundy velvet and navy blue carpeted living/dining/den filled with old pictures of a young girl, then teenage, ballet dancer, and more recent pictures of the boy against a lush green background then of the boy and the parents against a lush green background, but also providing a greasy-skin-aided specular three-dimensionality to his joyless-yet-condescending features, is now snapping his fingers repeatedly, “… you know, man up! Hell, boy!” He now brings his hands together in front of him, in front of the boy, with a really loud clap that the boy thought would make his eardrums snap, and glares at the boy with his dark, bulging, crazy eyes: “Instead of godforsakin’ thinking about making the salty seas, you should be godforsakin’ thinking about doing the salty seas!! You catch my drift?!?!”

This supposed father – which, by the way, what’s with his mom thinking he still needed one – the boy was pretty sure was, in reality, truly truly truly, actually deep down, really really really, leaving his mom. He’d take anything he said with a grain of salt. No pun intended, of course.

The boy goes about finishing his soup, but with the lackadaisical lethargy of the acquiescent.

***

Juan opens his eyes. All he sees are fuzzily-demarcated, maddeningly bright patches of light blue and green – a color he hasn’t quite laid eyes on in a while – and he offhandedly perceives that he is being dragged. About to lose consciousness again, his mind seems to subconsciously race against whomever or whatever’s dragging him along, to gather clues as to what the situation is; he finally realizes he’s on shallow water, clear shallow water on white sand… now some of the blue patch is largely blotted out by a patch that’s mainly the tone of copper – a man? Black hair? Naked or almost so? What… the…

Juan might have tried to get up, but simply, there’s no energy left. He’s unconscious again.

***

He opens his eyes. He realizes he’s lying face down on the sand. He feels stronger than before. He can clearly distinguish each grain of sand beneath him, sprinkling in the sun, inches from his eyes, scintillating. His feet feel warm. He realizes his feet are still close enough to the water that the gentle rolling waves come back to caress them – maternally? -- every few seconds. He starts to sit up, and as he’s doing so, notices the man who’s squatting in front of him on the sand, looking right back at him. Juan is startled, and gives out a hoarse grunt as he instinctively crawls back away from the man -- the man who’s, in turn, of course, unflinching. Juan remains frozen in position, halfway between laying face-down on the sand and sitting up. After a painfully long moment, without changing his stance, the Castilian’s the first to break the silence.

“God be with you,” says Juan, looking squarely at the eyes of the man in front of him. The man, however, responds only by maintaining, completely unfazed, the aloof, bordering-on-stern look on his face.

“What is the name of this place?” Juan asks. The man in front of him does not even blink.

“You do not understand me,” says Juan, “Of course.” He scoffs at himself. Then he points to the sand thrice and then rotates his wrist so his palm faces the sky, repeatedly, resignedly, asking in what he hopes is universal sign language for, ‘where are we’ or, at the very least, ‘what is this place?’ He tries to cross his legs as he continues his action of sitting up. For some reason, he flinches, then leaves his right leg extended. Now still again, sitting on the wet sand, he has to lean slightly forward due to the beach’s moderate incline towards the ocean. He looks back intently at the man squatting in front of him. And he looks around then some more. To his left – the man’s right – a large beached tree trunk is slightly sunk in the sand. Next to it, several straight, sharpened, rod-like sticks of differing thicknesses are laid down in the sand. Looking to both sides he also realizes this beach they’re at is limited left and right by low, also vegetated, rocky outcrops. He reckons that walking from one end of it to the other would be a relatively short walk – it might take a fifteenth of an hour, at most. He looks then past the man facing him, and at a beach behind the man that inclines up to a series of dispersed brownish-orange boulders, beyond which there’s a brief belt of tall grass, then lush tropical savanna forest populated by medium-height trees and tall palms, some of them the likes of which he might have seen along the African coast during a time that to him now seems even more far away than this strange land and its stranger seem to be from his beloved Andalusian coast. He looks back at the man facing him. Then turns his head around to look behind himself, towards the sea, and in doing so catches glimpse of a dark, convex wooden object that’s two arm lengths away from him at his right, partly laying inside the shallow water and which, in fact, looks like a man-sized piece of the hull of the ship he now more clearly remembers having at some plausibly recent point in time been aboard of. Then he sees movement and some faint splashing toward the edge of the wrecked piece of wood. It’s a remora almost the length of his extended arm. He notices that its spine, while slightly, is nonetheless evidently, crooked. It -- the fish -- keeps now undulating its caudal fin, apparently quite placidly.

Juan scoffs at himself again, wondering where his head’s at. Then he gestures -- as best he can, as he’s done quite a few times before on expeditions to foreign lands to communicate with many a non-Indo-European individual along the way that he may have needed to, as now, communicate with -- for drinking water.

It works. He thinks.

The man in front of him after a few moments relaxes the sternness of his countenance ever so slightly. Just enough to hint at Juan that the man had just then and there made some sort of a decision that was to he in some way pleasing. Without leaving his squatting position, he reaches back and retrieves a kind of bowl, and turns back to Juan, offering it to him. The man is looking straight at Juan, genuinely grinning now, and repeatedly raises the bowl toward Juan’s face, bowl which Juan can now attest holds a few fingers of crystal-clear water, which glitters playfully in the sun. The man says, “Tuna.”

The man’s voice is raspy and much deeper than Juan expected. Not that such a voice would be at odds with the psyche of the man in front of him – just that it seemed deeper than most men’s. He accepts the bowl – a deep, very round, rigid, very thin dish that seemed made out of some dried-out, large endemic fruit – and he tastes it first – lest this foreigner be offering him seawater – then upon confirming this is precious, God-sent fresh water desperately gulps down the entire contents of the bowl. Juan hands the empty bowl back, says, “Más!”

The man squatting in front of him, who’s serious once again, intently looking Juan in the eyes still, slowly shakes his head. Juan looks back at the man in dismay, but quickly resorts then to cupping up seawater from between his own legs with his hands, and then splashing it on his own face, several times. Juan, sea water dripping down his hair and face, now looks at the man more closely. He looks back at the unfazed, aloof man in front, who’s still squatting; his large, thick, angular fingers jutting toward Juan, at ease, in front of his body; arms extended, resting on his knees; torso leaning slightly forward; buttocks resting against his heels. Barefoot, the only garment on him below his shoulders are three rows of stringed white seashells right above his ankles, then what look like a red and white cord tightly woven several times around his lower leg right below each knee; then what look like a series of straw cords that provide skimpy privacy for his rather exposed gonads, and also serve as waistband to which what looks like a straw sheath with a knife in it is attached; then more red and white string woven around his arms right above his biceps and similarly around his wrists. Also a bracelet made of stones and/or shells of tones of color Juan had not ever seen before. A pair of apparently artificially-connected canines, probably some late big cat’s, are being used as a nose ring and more shells as earrings while feathers – long, blue, black, green – adorn the mane of black, shining hair. Several rows of white stringed shells serve as a necklace. A small red pouch hangs too from his neck, while last but in no way least, dark grey markings like Juan had not yet seen – geometrical dark grey markings – were drawn, symmetrically, orderly, carefully, along his torso and limbs.

Juan finally gestures, by drawing together his right fingertips and pointing several times with them toward his open mouth, for food. “Comida,” he says, to the unresponsive stranger.

Suddenly, the man in front of him points to the fish attached to the piece of the hull of the lost wrecked ship and looks at it and back at Juan, pointing then with his other index finger at the fish then Juan, the fish then Juan, repeatedly. Juan nods, seemingly meaning, yeah, sure, whatever.

Ballatagle regards the stranger, the foreigner, cross-legged on the sand in front of him with the sea behind it, the sea from which it came in, from which he, Ballatagle, himself, pulled it out of, a sea he, Ballatagle, won’t ever again be able to view as exclusively his and his people’s and foes’ and gods on account of this… intrusion? Of this… of whatever this alien being in front of him that cannot yet be considered animal but can’t possibly be man either, this being that’s barefoot as him but with skin that’s pale as the moon when it’s full at places; at others pona like the chest of the red-chested bird seen in bright sunlight, not to mention the pouches under the eyes the color of the rotten pepperfruit; but that’s nothing, because this somehow-speaking creature with teeth the color of piss that has dried on a mound of cottonstring seen at dawn has animal hair in places you would not expect to see – chest, face; legs; apparently arms too; hands; fingers; ears; earlobes… then this kind of papaya-meat-gone-stale-a-turkey-has-pissed-on-seen-at-dusk-colored second skin covering its legs and groin area… then a wide, gods’ apocalypse night-sky-colored belt with a huge, shining, square frame on it under where its navel would be, then a white cloth covering its torso and arms that’s ripped in several places. This… whatever it is, came out of the sea that he thought was his, his people’s, his foes’, his gods. This sea, he now understands, is not -- may have never been -- what he thought it was.

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Ballatagle gets up, and Juan regards a man far taller than he had perceived him to be while squatting. The man walks over to the splendid vegetation bordering the beach, around the boulders, another beached log, and across the narrow expanse of wild grass. He comes back with some dry brush and leaves in his hands, which he drops on the sand at the spot where he was previously squatting. Then he grabs some of the sticks at his right, and drives them into the sand. He produces a smaller stick from somewhere around his straw waistband, to which a small pouch is attached. Then he also retrieves from his waistband a flatish piece of wood that he puts on the sand at his feet, and again he squats. He sets one of the ends of the smaller stick against the piece of wood and rapidly twirs it against it using the palms of both hands until an ember appears. Then, carefully places this ember on the tinder bundle of dry brush and leaves and fans it with his hand until it soon produces a more-than-competent flame.

Ballatagle gets up again, and walks over to the placidly-swimming fish, which he yanks off the piece of hull with a violent jerk. The hull even raises slightly off the sand in the water from the force of the yank, even falls back down with a little splash. Expertly then, he makes a quick cut at the fish’s belly and with two fingers guts the fish clean. Juan notices that the man has not at any moment that he could notice actually done anything – other than maybe the yanking it off the hull – or, come to think of it, gutting it -- to deliberately kill the animal. He sticks it then whole, lengthwise, through one of the sticks, and puts it over the fire. And finally squats back down in front of Juan.

The light breeze, reckons Juan, makes the unyielding overhead sun somewhat bearable. He notices, however, that he’s perspiring profusely. He focuses for a minute on the millions of moist grains of sand beneath him. A sparkling drop of sweat drops from the tip of his nose onto some of them. The tide is ebbing seawise. With hardly any energy now, he feels, to even think, his memories wander back to Cádiz, and to a certain young woman who had warmed his heart. Ever the adventurous one, she had been the first to learn of his endeavor with the Queen-mandated expedition to the Eastern shores. And however adventurous, however, she had pleaded for him not to go. But onion-headed bastards like him don’t listen. Bonita situación en la que me he metido, Señor mío... His wavering eyes shut on their own. A sudden pang of vertigo hits him. Will he see his beloved Seville again? The countryside around it? If only he…

“Tubu.”

Juan opens his eyes when he hears the voice. The man is now standing in front of him, holding the stick with the fish on it up to him. Juan accepts it from him and then starts at it like a madman. The man squats back down, two arm’s lengths before Juan. And watches as Juan devours his meal.

After a while, the Castilian’s water and sugar levels seem to have replenished enough that his brain can again have at its disposal the energy required to allow its non-reptilian portion to also go about its business. But he may not know it yet, much less the other man, but Juan is not entirely "there” at all, at least not yet. The injuries to his head sustained during the wreckage may have affected his judgment a tad. Juan smiles, pieces of fish in both hands, and looks up at the stranger. “Gracias,” he says, gesturing to the food in his hands, chewing contentedly.

The man squatting in front of him just stares back.

Between mouthfuls, the Castilian asks, “Good man, may I ask? What is the name of this place? Is this some part of China?”

No response.

“This is actually quite good. Do you not fancy any?” Juan offers back a long pinkish-grey strand of remora meat to the stranger who’s feeding him.

But the man in front, never taking his eyes off Juan’s, slowly shakes his head.

Juan changes tactics. He says, “Me. Need. Go. You. King.” Each word, punctuated by a gesture or several of them.

Juan, one of the ones of the group that wouldn’t immediately yell out, ‘Yeah!!!’ would another in the group suggest, ‘Let’s play charades.’

Juan, not exactly looking too patient right now.

But ultimately, Juan guesses, the man in front of him catches his request, after not too long. At least, the man in front of him nods three or four times, not breaking eye contact with him.

“Good,” says Juan, taking a big bite out of the side of the fish. Chewing, “I would not want you to believe that I am not, God is not, the Catholic Kings are not, perhaps an entire country one day, is not, grateful that you pulled me out of the water, basically saved me… digo, I mean, not that I remember it, but I did have the presence of mind, somehow, while getting swallowed up by that maelstrom, to grab that…” – he points with the fish in his hand to the stranded piece of hull at his right – “glorious piece of her right there. The ship’s real name is La Gallega, did you know that?” Juan spits out a pin bone that lands on his by now ember-red right ankle, scoffs, “Of course you don’t know that.” He tenderly breaks out a piece of the cooked-beige fish flesh and puts it in his mouth.

The man squatting on the sand in front of Juan with his arms resting, above the elbows, on his bent knees, raises the index finger of his right hand and points directly at Juan. Then he extends all five fingers, exposing his palm, which he then quickly turns upward. Then he turns his palm again downward, and points again at him, and then, extends his fingers and turns his palm upward, again. He’s coupled that gesture with a quick nod upward and to the right, with a sort of light scowl, and lightly raising his eyebrows as he does.

“What am I, you ask,” concludes Juan, relatively fast. “Well, East Indian Man, I am a man that has from an early age taken to sea, a man who’s dedicated his life to God, Crown and Country. A man with a wife and a daughter. A man who will one day draw on parchment the very line that now dances before our eyes – pushing onto the instrusive landmass, then heaving lightly back home to the uniform, wondrous, mysterious whole we call Oceanum. A man who’s not sure how he got here, in fact, and Father and the Son and the Virgen María and the Holy Spirit are his witnesses. What I saw before is… well, it was not an edge, after all, but… is the alternate, possibly quicker way to the East that the old man first talked to me about over wine at that whorehouse in Palos… is the quicker way really past that great monster – which I believe spared us, by the way – and that crazy, gargantuan – you have seen this? You don’t really look like a seafaring man. But, anyway, if it is that, then… I think we might just have to keep going around the Khoikhoi and the Bushmen and up past the Indians. If the Silk Road remains closed, that is, of course.” Juan spits out another piece of bone. “Then we’ll use Bart Dias’ sea-road. The sole aim is to better do business with you guys… I’m hoping to my God Savior that it was all just a dream and that what it was is we hit a rock or something. While I was sleeping.” He shakes his head. “Damn pubeless gargajito. I knew he was going to err an err the size of a whale turd one day. I knew it!” Rhyme or not, that last line worked better in Castilian. He goes on: “What do you think? My name’s Juan, by the way. Did I already mention that?” Juan’s talking with his mouth full. He offers some of his meal to the stranger. The stranger slowly shakes his head, expression unchanged. Eyes fixed on Juan’s; on Juan’s mouth, hands.

Juan shrugs and puts the offered piece in his own mouth, chews some more. He shakes his head again, goes on, “Thinking things through a little bit better, Tuna, I think I’m soon going to be majorly depressed. I mean: if it was a dream which I had, then the Crown will surely order another expedition… maybe this time, a real expedition. Not the mess we threw together. And will find me. I hope to God.” The Castilian is licking his fingers and hands, the remora’s grease on them all that’s left of his meal now.

Juan does not know it, but what the man had meant when he pointed at him and turned his palm upward was not, “What are you,” but “What are you doing here.”

Juan does not know it yet either, but…

Ballatagle says, in a language completely incomprehensible to Juan, “This place is not what you think it is.”

Juan, “Come again?”

Ballatagle, lightly scowling, sizing Juan up, just says, in his tongue: “Foreign.”

Juan: “So, if you’ll let me borrow a hammock, we’ll be friends.”

Ballatagle says, “Ibaouanale.”

“Indeed,” says Juan, having no clue what this stranger that saved him, this stranger that fed him, has just said.

Ballatagle now takes his right arm off his knee and points energetically to the ground. Then he shakes his head and with his index finger extended, his hand following the motion of his head, moving lightly, but firmly, from side to side. Then finally he slowly points his big, rectangular finger dead square at Juan’s forehead.

“What?” says Juan, a pang of fear suddenly hitting him. “That I’m not welcome here?”

Ballatagle says, in a language completely incomprehensible to Juan, “Ibaouanale.” The corners of his lips curve slightly upward, toward his hardened, protruding cheekbones, then says, in the same language, a language completely incomprehensible to Juan, “Tomorrow will be a fine day.”

Behind the stranger then Juan sees movement. It takes him a moment to realize that it’s two women trotting. The women are spitting images of each other, and they’re rapidly, but pacedly, making their way out of the forest and around the rocks and boulders behind the stranger seemingly toward where he and the stranger sat. The women are young, surely half Juan’s age at most, and both have long shining black hair and, contrary to the man still staring at him, no loincloth or bracelets or necklace or even markings on the skin of any kind. No other hair of any kind, either -- just copper-toned skin. They are the most beautiful creatures Juan has ever seen. Born athletes, unquestionably; however possessing the perfect softness and curvaceous generosity that female sexual attractiveness is so fundamentally dependent on. Tall. He unblinkingly continues to watch the women as they focusedly, silently, keep making their way to them -- evenly, deftly, without slowing down, advancing toward them, but indirectly, avoiding obstacles -- turning, skipping, hopping over rocks, another beached tree trunk; the second one repeating the first’s movements, as if choreographed; they did not make it difficult for him at all to fantasize that they were actually performing for him, actually dancing, which he almost believed, were it not for the blatant deliberateness of their assertive path forward.

The man squatting before him says to mesmerized Juan, “Ibouinetobou?” and smiles widely now. Had Juan been paying attention, he might have wondered if it was his imagination or some optical effect or the angle or the lighting or did that man’s teeth all look like canines, but Juan is not paying attention; he’s still transfixed, enchanted, eyes locked on the newcomers. Not that it really matters anyway. The squatting man goes on, still smiling, “Tiamatu Teiha. Erenli.” But Juan’s not listening. Instead, he’s just saying, over and over again, “Qué majas. Que majas, hombre… qué majas de verdad.”

His senses betrayed by stupor, Juan hardly registers that the man has gotten up and grabbed a large, dark green, angular stone from behind him. And that he’s now savagely swinging his hand with the heavy stone at him, and the stone has now viciously struck just behind Juan’s left temple, putting the Castilian on his side. The Castilian instinctively brings a hand up to the wound, the immediate and utter pain unbearable, the exorbitant degree of his confusion further crippling him. In front of him, twin copper alien deities stride along the face of a wall made of sand, but how can they do this? They’re walking on their side, their slender sinous bodies propelled gently forward by light feet and muscular legs that follow the creeping lead of the dark, shapeshifting cyphers at their feet also moving along the wall toward him, and they are almost upon him. Are they coming to get him? Are they angels from God? Is this – all this around him, all this here before him -- what heaven was always supposed to be? Juan then feels upon his head a second strike, and now it all goes dark.

The woman standing over him is quite taken aback by the Castilian’s aspect. For a few moments she solely regards the downed man in apparent awe and cautious reticence. Without taking her eyes off the late navigator, she seems to ask something to the man standing across from her; to which he briefly answers as he drops to the sand at his feet the now hair-and-scalp-and-bloodstain-garnished green stone he has just put to good use. The woman looks back at the man lying at her feet on his side on the sand in a position that looks almost fetal. Then she gets on her knees and starts to remove the felled Castilian’s civilian clothes: first his ‘white’, weathered, linen camisa; then his belt, then his breeches, then a leather bracelet. As she did this, the stern-faced man across from her with the shiny seashells along his neck had squatted down once again but by the late navigator’s head this time, and with a long, flat bone that appears to have been filed to make it and extremely sharp blade, proceeded to cut the late navigator’s head off, which he is now holding by the hair from the scalp, with his left hand -- he has gotten up and has dropped the bone-blade down and picked up the remaining stick by the beached tree trunk, the thickest one, and has shoved it into the ground with his one hand and then vigorously, now with both hands, rammed the late explorer’s head onto the sharpened stick, producing a brief, extraordinary sound. By now the woman has started to pull, from the ankles, the felled Castilian over; dragged the naked felled explorer over across the sand with perhaps surprising ease over to the side of the beached trunk as the man with the feathers on his head, caninish incisors, slick copper skin turns now toward the beached like Juan, bare like Juan, felled like Juan, late trunk of a great tree beyond which the woman has just released her grip and dropped the Castilian’s feet heavily back onto the now-disarrayed sand beneath her; then the copper-toned man reaches over the felled tree trunk and grabs an ankle and a wrist, one in each hand, as so does the copper-toned woman at the other side of the trunk, and at his signal they cooperatively heave the broken mariner’s body onto the trunk, face up… or rather, chest up. The woman is now making her way over to the where the man with the dark markings all across his skin had dropped the knife as said man has now grabbed both of the late adventurer’s legs, just above the ankles with his large, powerful right hand and is now pulling the entire legs back, bending them at the pelvis towards the crimson-hued, grey-matter-splattered late mariner’s white chest, fully exposing the once-captain’s gonads, perineum, and anus, and the woman now with the sharp bone, blade turned upward, now makes a cut the length of perhaps her index finger vertically up the perineum from just above the bygone adventurer’s anus to the base of his scrotum. What ensues is simply, as of now and for the next few moons and suns, without going into too much further detail, the late mariner, late captain, late nao owner, late Castilian’s ‘field dressing’ and butchering, which includes gutting him, de-hiding him, and the cutting of his once-able body into manageable pieces for later consumption.

The image of the Castilian navigator’s head on a stick fills the screen now. Beyond it, the horizon; and beyond that, across that great ocean, one thousand two hundred leagues away in Cádiz, a young morena wonders how he is. And, as nearby man and woman continue about their handiwork, perhaps she would rather not know. And perhaps she would rather not see, in fact, see what the boy has seen.

The boy now, from his place on the sand, lifts his gaze up from beyond the horizon, beyond the Castilian’s head, beyond the man and the woman and the felled Castilian’s body and turns his sights to the eastern sky above all of that, as said sky now starts to go dark. And he shoots up then from his place on the sand and is instantly in that sky, and very soon no land is visible below anymore, only water. And he looks down upon that majestic ocean, that grandiose ocean where an adventure began with ninety men that chose to sail into uncharted waters. These grey waters below, kilometers below him that fill the screen now; these majestic grey waters which dwell at the threshold of the known and the unknown, the West Atlantic and the Caribbean, a zone which the great Castilian Cartographer Juan de la Cosa would one day, one better day than the boy could imagine, one real day in the reality we sometimes call ‘consensus’ -- one better, real day -- label simply:

“Marcoceanum”.

This great ocean which is looking darker now, is looking flat, is looking blank; as blank as a blank, white plain – in fact, as blank as a blank, white artificial plain assembled from mass-manufactured calcium sulfate dihydrate boards which are then assembled on site then skim coated with joint compound and painted over… in fact as blank as a blank, white, residential, family-of-three drywall ceiling seen at night with the lights off from the vantage point of a twelve-year-and-364-day-old about to set sail into the unknown himself. As blank as the ceiling atop the boy’s bed, ceiling which the boy is staring unblinkingly at right now.

The boy finally stops staring at the blank ceiling above his bed: he closes his eyes. But his mind again starts to go adrift, but then he grabs hold of it, pulls it back, keeps it close to home. There are important things to consider, too, here, close to home. It’s true: he’ll be a teenager tomorrow.

Talk about choosing to sail into uncharted waters. But is it really a choice, in his case?

Of course it is. Everything’s a choice.

His lips are sporting the slightest of grins. Yes. Tomorrow will be a fine day.