The Seventh Steer

Men pierce women with words; women pierce men with silence. This much I know at this point in my life. Mere hours ago I had been blocked-out and cut-off socially by yet another woman whom I’d believed to find me to be at least something--intelligent, kindly, or even amusing--something worth keeping around. Instead she chose to turn to me with a cold shoulder when I saw her in person and to not respond to my messages. Circumstances such as these tend to bring about an anxiety within me, one with anger and resentment that I, polite as I try to be, always refuse to unleash on anybody; however this ultimately puts that energy inward, causing me to feel somewhere between mildly depressed and bat-shit crazy.

It was the kind of thing that made a young man feel that he was simply born to lose, as if there was no true free will, that your lives, whether in riches or in misery, were preordained and inscribed in you from the moment you were born.

I’ve managed to this day, in my twenty years, to avoid doing anything illegal or harmful to anyone, including myself, as a result of these neuroses. Tonight is the closest I’d ever come to that.

And really, who was I hurting? A young student home from university, of legal age, wandering the more abandoned and ghostly parts of town? For it was not in the name of finding or meeting anyone that I snuck out of the house for the first time (up to a decade too late…), nor for the doing of anything vandalous, I just wanted to scuff my shoes amongst the cobblestone streets of Pamplona and hope that my dreadful intuitions would evolve into optimism. Thus far, no luck.

Tonight I wasn’t only enraged by any of the Lucianas or Sofias amongst these women, however. It was after much protests that I’d finally submitted to my dearest mother once again, opting to not partake in the “Running With The Bulls” event being held this Summer. I’d figured the event to be a head-clearing and validating event that would prove to my peers, and to my parents that I was not only a man in that I’d passed the legal age and started university, but one in psychology and stature.

Instead I wandered the scarcely traversed ghost-town section of Pamplona known as Misteriosa. Essentially the Spainard’s Bermuda Triangle, it encompasses the many highlights of the Triangle’s eccentricities-- people have often vanished in this area of empty apartments and abandoned businesses and those who walk out from its surrounding morning-fog are known for their bizarre recollections and aftereffects to their experiences within. And I knew for certain that the mob-mentality that accompanied the Running would distort or diminish any or all interest in such crude and absurd nonsense. It was just me and the discarded shattered pieces of glass and mirror that occupied the street.

I scoffed and winced for what felt to be the hundredth time over; not at any of my recent obsessive miseries but at what I’d done on this night; having snuck out of my parents’ home after two decades of life (rather than fifteen or sixteen years of it) had been giving me the occasional strikings of shame and guilt as I had journeyed here.

But now I was here and saw no purpose in turning back. If I could not allow the six enraged oxen to chase me to an early grave then I’d roll the dice here, so I supposed. From here I could see the vaguest of outlines of the Pyrenees Mountains, particularly one of the curves that people would sprint away from the glorified cattle.

It was black-against-black but I felt I could make out a slight dent in the outline, a hole in the road where an unuseful and ironically-thin fence was once stretched out. Squinting and putting my hand above my eyes (as if the Sun had been out the preceding hours), I pondered what had happened. As I drew no conclusions and my attention wore thin, I heard a small kicking of granite from behind me and the clicking of footsteps.

As my heart jumped up and gave me a brief choke, I spun around to see a figure, barely luminous from the full moon. He was silhouetted, and had come from behind a small complex only so many yards away from me. I was uncertain if he caught sight of me; I breathed slowly to remain still, and waited.

The fears were validated when he spoke in a voice that gave off a conflict between a comforting softness and a sparse amount of sharpness, just enough to maintain a bull-runners’ heart rate.

“You’ve overstayed.”

My hands went numb from shaking, while the rest of me was statuesque. “...What?”

The man (?) hissed: “Youuu have to leeeaave…”

“...Okay, okay; I’m going home.”

“No.”

Freezing drops shot onto my forehead: “...What?”

He stepped out of the shadows and into the moonlight, a presence just as menacing as before; bright red eyes, dressed entirely in black, a pale ghoulish disposition and facial features, slicked black hair, and an unfavorably large septum ring dangling from his nostrils.

“Your time on Earth. It ended long ago. It’s time to leave.”

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In the midst of a dumbfounded beat I lived in after the mysterious figure spoke, a cloud passed, and, having gone past the moon entirely, I saw him (it?) more clearly now. He was just as ugly, if not uglier, in the glow.

“I don’t understand.” I uttered.

“You know I’m right.”

“About… ?”

“Your time. It’s expired. You were meant to move on this past decade.”

I felt nauseous.

“It didn’t quite matter when, so long as it was before the full moon, this full moon.”

“...”

He kept moving towards me. I held still, fooling myself into thinking I was merely “standing my ground” when in reality I was petrified with terror.

“And that’s how fate brought you to this town, to me, on this night.”

A mere ten feet away, I chose then to turn and dart. Although I was not convinced my running from this man would change a thing in what I could only conclude to be a predetermined path, I did so anyway.

And in my anxiety-addled exhaustive state, I felt an overwhelming feeling of ironic joy. Whilst walking about to reflect on my hopelessness (and perhaps even consider my own demise) I had in this moment chosen to be alive. It was as if I were carrying a heavy pack that I had just unstrapped and dropped. Unnecessary emotions and unuseful cares had fallen onto the ground and into the earth.

And even though this drove me to likely run faster and further, it did not immortalize me. I stopped to catch my breath.

“Sonny...” said a familiar voice creeping from behind a nearby tree-trunk.

He came around. It was the same being. “You oughta know better.”

I garnered the courage and oxygen to speak: “Please… Stop.”

“Why?”

“...”

“We both know it was what you wanted.”

“What?”

“Come on there, sonny. You know you’re absurd. You know you’re a waste of space. You’re nothing without the others, and even less without the kindness of the strangers out there.”

I just kept panting, wanting to hear what he’d say.

“Men pierce women with words; women pierce men with silence…” he muttered.

I perked up: “What did you say?”

“But not you, right? You aren’t here piercing anyone, anywhere, anyhow. You just suffer through the silent bullets of silence, right sonny?

“Stop calling me that.”

“Why the hell not? See, a man would’ve done something now. But you’re just a son. A commodity, accessory, a fucking liabilty. A man isn’t you, so why bother calling you one?”

Breath was getting harder to catch as my heart sped up. “Stop…”

“Stop? Stop what?”

“Yelling… Stop yelling at me.”

He cackled and stepped closer to me. “Sonny, I haven’t yelled a single damn time we’ve been out here. All you hear is yells.” He took out a small blade. “Let me silence them for you.”

As he turned the blade in my direction, that is when the moonlight’s invisible yet ever-present beams caused the glistening blade to show a reflection. Not of myself, but of the figure. And from that moment on I was affirmed that he was no man at all.

With that, I snapped out my arm and grabbed his wrist as he plunged toward me. Knocked to the ground, I kept crawling my fingers through the dirt, finding bugs and pebbles but no stones. Finally, I withdrew and gave up, snapping upward and hitting the figure in the process.

I’d never thrown a punch before, being all-too-timid to ever start such a confrontation. In the aftermath of this first, however, I found myself resenting having to do it, though I was not-at-all plagued with regret.

The figure collapsed, knocked to the ground, muttering as if in mantra: “You’re overstaying now, sonny, you’re overstaying.”

I saw his hand fiddling with the dirt as mine was mere moments ago, and, through the fog of adrenaline coursing my mind, I realized he was searching for the blade; and a split-second later I saw the faintest of moonlight glisten from the dirt in a way that could only be the blade.

“You’re no runner, sonny, you’re just a boy…”

Not a moment’s thought nor hesitation, I snatched it from the dirt, only to be later met with searing pain, upon realizing it was no real blade but one of the multitudes of glass-shards that laid about Misteriosa.

In an effort to get the shardblade back, the figure pounced on me, and, curling his fingers, beat me mercilessly without hesitation nor notice. The knuckles were large and brutish, like being slammed with bricks. With every swing came about black spots in my vision, each one larger than the last, with accompanying ringing tones of accelerating volumes, screaming against my eardrums.

With no real autonomy or sentience to speak of, I plunged the shard into the figure’s neck, and, when he flinched to register what I’d done, I finished the job by yanking the septum piercing from his nostrils, skin and all. A fountain of red spattering from his neck and nostrils, he rolled off me defeatedly.

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Twenty verbally-counted deep-breaths later, I stood up and brushed myself off when I heard a loud and masculine groan from beside me. I craned my neck and was strangely unsurprised that he had taken the form which I’d seen in the reflection, rather than the one I saw.

A gaping, ebony ox lay beside where I stood, and it still breathed these shivering, scared, quick little breaths. It looked at me with all-too-familiar glowing red eyes, demanding not hospice nor even a compassionate touch, but for a different form of mercy.

I grabbed the ox’s horns and twisted in a singular motion, one where my heart dropped through my intestines and tears flooded my eyes. This did not halt the smile from cracking across my face in the act I’d performed from mercy, rather than rage, loathing, or anarchic self-pity. A smile that would form again when I’d heard of the newly-added seventh bull added to the Running With The Bulls this year, the one that’d escaped and broken the fence, and was yet to be found.