Ed's Fever Dreams: The Bull
When I was 12 years old, I went out hunting with my old .22 rifle looking for conejos. Not liebres, you don’t eat those. You can tell them apart by the rabbit’s white cotton tails. You don't forgive a cotton tail. The liebres you can’t eat because they are scavengers, they’ll eat anything. “Bad meat,” said my mother.
I went in the early morning, to catch them adjusting to the light. Walking through the green matorrales, I felt a warm presence approaching and big motherfucking bull, straight out of a bugs bunny cartoon steps out of the brush. This thing was fire and rage incarnate. It ran me up a tree and tried to use its horns to knock me down. I shot it 5 times and it shook off the rounds like they were nothing but annoying flies. Looked up at me in confusions and just left me up there in that tree.
I ran home to tell my mom about it. "Why did you shoot it if you were already safe in the tree?” My mother demanded. “Why not shoot to scare it off? Why were you in its corral in the first place?" Angry, my mother said, "It's probably out there somewhere suffering." She shut the lights off. I lay awake in the dark, thinking. My first night of guilty sleeplessness had begun. My first sigil.
I went out the next morning looking for it, and the next, but couldn’t find it anywhere. After the third day I gave up, a few more sleepless, guilty nights ahead of me. A month later, on a similar morning on the same trail, I heard something rustling slowly through the brush. In a panic, I ran up a rock on a hillside and saw a heavily emaciated / zombie bull emerge from the brush. The same bull I had shot a month ago, now with one blind, white eye and many bloated scabs on its back. It approached unsteadily and paused, standing in front of me. In a panic I raised my rifle but couldn’t pull the trigger. I ran back home.
When I told my mother, she told me, angry, “you fucked it up again.” Caught off guard, I asked what I could have done wrong in sparing its life a second time. She shook her head and told me, “He came to you for release…”
After two days of searching, I found it for the third time, two turkey vultures flying concentric circles of celebration over its corpse. I found the bull...
