Bullfighter

(Seattle)
There's an oil painting of a bullfighter, mesmerizing a wild-eyed bull, hanging in our dining room. It used to hang above the fireplace in the Palindrome House. The painting is old and crackly, beginning to lose flakes of color and layers of vividity. Its kitsch value keeps it around, as well as the inexplicable draw it seems to have on every person who spends any time with it. Yesterday I noticed something new: the painting is pocked with dozens of tiny holes. Like from dozens of tiny moth mouths.
Or from the edges of a shotgun spray.

Now I can't stop staring at it.

They're probably not shot-holes, though, right? I mean, every other shotgun blast I've ever seen (like the one through my bedroom wall) leaves holes a bit bigger than the ones in the bullfighter's bony hip, in the bull's meaty flank, peppered through the mustard-and-gangrene sky that seems to sicken them both. And the painting was still hanging when I went through the old house, so I have no idea whether or not those holes continued through the wall behind. Still...

It's everywhere. I can't go anywhere in this town without feeling the tap-tap of tragedy on my right shoulder, waiting for me to turn around so I can see its wide, bloody grin.

I get it, already. Jeezus.
Leave me alone.

...Of course, it won't leave. Can't leave. Is maybe bound up here forever, caught in the silken nets of fog that extend over the valleys, tripped up in the pointed tops of needled trees and in the teeth of mountains. My shoulders are not big enough, despite my Atlas-training, to shake this grinning, gnawing beast free. I have to get outside the pit, outside the fight, to see what I'm dealing with. It may only be a tiny thing with big teeth and bigger bark...but it may be a monster. Either way, I am ill-equipped to continue fighting. I need to recharge, to shift my perspective. I cannot in good conscience keep ruminating our little Tragedy when we live largely untouched by the Great Tragedy of the world. I need to go and meet people wiser than I, people who live beside the Great one all life long and grin in spite of it. Or because of it. People with wider views of suffering and joy.

UnAmerican.
Unspoiled.
Uninterred.