City of the Dead

A recurring theme in Diego Navarro’s drug addled nightmares was his family’s plot in the Recoleta cemetery. Before becoming the man he was he would visit with his parent and brother every Sunday; to visit relatives, and make sure their eventual place of rest was cared for. Though the visits to the city of the dead were common in the affluent circle of society the Navarros belonged to, Diego had never been comfortable with the old place, feeling claustrophobic when inside its grey walls. What really made his skin crawl were the cats. They were everywhere, somehow having found away to sustain their populace in the quiet citadel, unafraid of the humans and often fed by the visitors. Diego’s nightmares had since them feature himself, closed in a small wooden coffin, feeling tight and breathless. He would be wearing his best suit, used for weddings and such, and he was surrounded by coffins and dust. He would then realize that he was interred in the family crypt, and when began to feel nervous, the real terror would start. In the darkness he would still somehow see the cat. The cat would come from some corner in the crypt, and it was large and grey and had green eyes. It would advance on Diego, eyes and fangs shining with light from some unseen source, its breath hot on his face. He always awoke before it began to eat him alive. His parents would shrug off his dreams, saying that being buried in the cemetery was a great honor, and expensive. And that he would never be buried alive in the crypt, or that cats didn’t eat corpses. It didn’t soothe his fears. As he got older, he outgrew the fears, at least for awhile. As a teenager, he was curious, and rich. A bad combination. It started small, cigarettes and alcohol, then cocaine and ecstasy, and then heroin. Soon all he could think of was heroin and his next score. He tried to stop, but after the high wore off he felt a pain in his legs so intense he had no words for it. It was like fire pokers and knives and glass. Then it got worse, and he got kicked out of his home, a beautiful penthouse that looked down o Buenos Aires. People looked like ants from there, and they really were nothing but bugs to his parents anyway. When he was cast out, he too became an insect. He lived in an old rotting abandoned apartment building, with the other junkies, on a ratty mattress needles in his arm, his head in the clouds. The drug dreams started out well, blue blue skies, sweet smelling grass, fast cars, beautiful women. Then the skies turned dark bloody red, the women into harpies, the car into a coffin. And the cat came again. This time, Diego could not pull himself out of the drug addled stupor, and would feel horribly lucid as he experienced the feeling of the cat’s jaw eating his face. Soon the drugs became too much, a cruel mistress and Diego dreamt only of death, no blue skies or women, just monstrous cats and grinning skeletons. One November night, with the steely needle in his arm, Diego felt something different, like a snap, like his lifeline finally became too weak and frayed under his weight. He felt his skin bubble and burst, his head float and his feet simultaneously freeze and boil. An overdose, he thought, with clinical detachment. He was dying, and he knew this. Idly, with his last breath, he wondered if he’d be buried in the Recoleta. Strange, he thought with a smile, the cats and the creepy old place seem like home now. Then his heart stopped.

This was created during a dinner table conversation where my mom reminded my brother and me that drugs were bad and heroin the worst possible drug, and then we veered off into our trip to Argentina and I remembered all the cats at the Recoleta. This piece is…weird, I know.