The Collector, through no shortage of hearsay, means and compulsion, met one M. Muñoz underneath the Old Bridge.
Birthplace unknown, age unknown, first name unknown, dubious wedding band on ring finger, Muñoz bled into his work—cut open his body and extracted from it the requisite organic supplies—though no one reliable had seen him do it firsthand. What they saw instead was Muñoz’s ruined forehead full of razor-thin lacerations like a wrestler who’d slit his skin to sell real violence to the masses hungry for real blood.
The Collector’s boot hit upon an empty wine bottle, cracking it, awaking the slumped artist.
Everywhere: brickmold, crushed tinfoil and cairns composed of what you’d assume were rodent remains. Center: Muñoz on a lawn chair, shirtless, near-skeletal, open wounds, ebony canvases surrounding him like a perverted offering. To whom? The Collector.
“That one, how much?”
From his stubbled jawbone Muñoz yanked a scab and spoke in a bombed-out voice: “Blacksheep.”
The Collector pretended he misheard. “¿Precio? Price?”
“Blacksheep.”
“Is that the fucking thing’s name then?”
“Blacksheep.”
Aha. Nobody’d mentioned this … peculiarity, thought The Collector. For all the firsthand accounts he’d collected about the starving and stark raving mad artist, none cited his repetitious tongue. All well and good. It’d cost him nothing but time to add a footnote.
The time for negotiation had passed. Now to close the deal with the one and true universal language.
The Collector unbuttoned his coat and from an inside pocket pulled out a wad of green, which he lobbed at the rotting huarache’d feet of Muñoz, the artist-in-residence of Old Bridge whose stinking wounds never closed—were always healing because the work was never done—whose response to The Collector’s money was, “Blacksheep,” repeated resentfully.
The Collector lunged catlike and seized a painting, fled, the painter’s howling rage trailing him like a lunatic shadow. He stopped at a park bench, breathless, no soul in sight, and inspected his palms covered in slime. Blood, from the smell of it. The rumors: all true. The canvas had been pre-slashed by a piercing object of the madman’s choosing. The paint, still wet, seemed to ooze from the wound, as if it were a bleeding, breathing thing, a living envoy of old Muñoz himself.
There was, The Collector detected, no discernible signature on the piece, and so he hastily fingerpainted one on its backside, perhaps underscoring its ghoulish purity. He titled it Blacksheep and shortly thereafter developed a hacking cough that placed him under medical watch. It was an infection. Outside, the air pollution did nothing but to further reduce his time here.
You can buy what isn’t yours, but it isn’t yours just because you can buy it.
When The Collector returned home from the hospital, not for the last time, he saw a swarm of flies buzzing around Blacksheep. The apples on kitchen counter were mealy with rot. Within a week, he sold Blacksheep to one M. Masterson, who shortly thereafter lost it following a historic hurricane that swept through and demolished his home, among other landmarks, including the Old Bridge.
The Collector’s cough eats away at him. His brittle bones will be, sooner than he thinks, foundation to a city rebuilt and renamed.
Alex Z. Salinas is the author of four poetry collections and a book of stories, *City Lights From the Upside Down*, which was included in the National Book Critics Circle’s *Critical Notes*. He holds an M.A. in English Literature and Language from St. Mary’s University, and lives in San Antonio, Texas.
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