Thursday Afternoon in Villa Golf
By Abner Dorset

Nathaniel wipes a tattooed forearm across his forehead while a brown street dog smears his bloody, mangled ear on my khakis.
I can’t help anyone, I’m sure of it, as I study the pattern of perspiration droplets on my shoes where dust used to be. I’m not sure why I’m here.
The garden gate is open, a rooster scratches by in a feathered blur, and Deolinda peers out from her behind the kitchen door.
“Que tal?” I am in pain as she quizzes Nathaniel.
I hear my voice tell her about my life, the pleasant childhood, the embarrassment of riches, the Void, the apparent need for me to hop a plane fourteen hours south
to stand here looking stupid and preppy and not speaking her language.
She’s going to call the police, or worse, her husband watching an Argentinean soap opera in the other dark room of this house with the cement floor on dusty, rocky Neuquen Street at the stifling end of an Austral summer.
She looks sad as she stands now in the gateway leaning against a pile of bricks.
Nathaniel shifts his lanky frame and looks down at the ground, taking my words and offering them to Deolinda, whose name sounds like it must mean God-beauty or something.
I am finished. I have nothing more. My ankle is swollen from the futbol mishap, and I cannot feel it. Nathaniel is finished. He looks at me, Deolinda looks at me, expectation on their faces. “She is prepared” he says and that makes one of us.
We pray together, these, the first words we have in common. And the last words.
Gifts among friends, gifts among strangers. I have a sister and she a brother.
And now the sadness is different. A sadness that she now understands and is complete and completes her.
And she smiles.