I looked around for Anna, for any friendly face at all. No luck. Omar was a tiny figure in the distance, busy sawing wood with the other men for the jaguar hunting platform to be installed in a tree whose massive limbs hung over the Anaconda Bar.

As I stalled, the women whispered to one another, shifting from foot to foot but making no move to help me. Even the dogs eyed my every move, panting and whining in the growing heat, their tails thumping with impatience on the hard earth. Only later did I learn that FrannyB treated more dogs than she did people, since so many of them were ravaged during the hunts and had to be sewn back together.

Sunlight had broken through a thick blanket of clouds, spiking the heat. The air boiled with humidity; water left my body at every surface, even my elbows and fingers. Heavy knife hanging from one sweaty hand, I approached one of the fish; the women parted to let me by. Its scales alternated gray and bright red; the rest of it a decaying sort of blue, the eye a hollow moon with a black center. Its square jaw drooped open in its flat triangular head; rows of pointy teeth looked ready to bite off a finger, even in death.

I dropped to my knees with the knife. I had never cut any sort of animal before, alive or dead. It’s dead already, I thought. You’re not killing anything. Just do it. Unable to stand the suspense, one of the dogs got up on its hind legs and lunged at another’s throat; one of the women yelled and jerked him back by a rope. I hadn’t realized they were all tied together.

Unfamiliar fruits from an unknown tree, orange and hairy, plunked down on the ground beside me, rolling to a stop nearby. I felt the women approach in a group, a dark wall behind me, closer and closer, each with their own knife.

I plunged my knife into the tender gills of the fish, ripping it across a line of pasty-white belly scales. As if it’d been under pressure, the flesh made a ripping sound as a mass of blue and red entrails burst out in a hot wave. Behind the guts, the big red heart still pulsed and quivered, shocking me. It kept on pumping for several seconds before sputtering to stillness. I stumbled to my feet, gagging, the loudest sound in an unearthly silence that had settled over everything. I spun around, searching the faces of the women for some shred of kindness, of pity, even humor, just: something. But I saw only hatred, or what I took as hatred, or gloating, or worst of all: apathy. I felt desperate to run, but knew that would seal something I couldn’t unseal. And where in fuck would I go? I refused to run to Omar like a child. I straightened my shoulders, blinked the sweat out of my eyes. A strange lull followed the appalling silence, before another round of guts glugged out by my feet.