SNAKE EYES: First Stanza

I NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE and into that office across the hall, cov­er me!

The shoot­ing pours out behind thick nau­se­at­ing smoke from lit tires stacks all around. A few of the trig­ger-squeez­ers on auto­mat­ic weapon are mid­dle-aged, the wide gal­va­nized steel pipe mor­tar canon shoot­ers were the more cor­pu­lent of the younger forces and prac­ti­cal­ly none them are actu­al­ly old. Some of the rest are young; many are just boys and butch girls. The kids the (Aso­ciación para la Pre­ven­ción y Errad­i­cación de la Vio­len­cia) APREV had brought in from the slums to run around, chuck con­tact bombs and shoot rocks with sling­shots at the cops. They were for the most part the front-line rioters—dark-skinned gang members—in their teens and twenties.

Since what seemed like for­ev­er, the local broad­cast news reports, ush­ered by fan­fares of fist respon­der-themed buzzes and loud police sirens, with their spec­tac­u­lar­ly com­mon­place ÚLTI­MA HORA logos that would tog­gle around against a red back­drop and were simul­ta­ne­ous­ly redun­dant in the CGC tick­ers that ran from left to right on most Nicaraguans’ TVs at home.

Since long before this round of riots began at last, after years of silence and res­ig­na­tion. No one can pos­si­bly know what the hell is going on, but it’s game time, time to put Nicaragua back on the map and to lib­er­ate our peo­ple from the dic­ta­tor! You get your pic­ture tak­en, maybe move around aes­thet­i­cal­ly on some b‑roll for the for­eign press, and let some­one in polit­i­cal sci­ence burn their mouth off in the foreground—or per­haps a jour­nal­ism stu­dent. Tidy up around here, we need to look hero­ic. Some­one please pick up these rub­bers, throw away those bro­ken bot­tles and the crushed crack pipes, and those emp­ty lit­tle [cocaine] bags, too. Hur­ry the fuck up! CNN is sup­posed to be here soon.

There was a dead body just off the side­walk to build­ing E. A drunk girl in sec­ond year of graph­ic design got ner­vous when she saw some­one she doesn’t know jump­ing the fence and she shot them in the head, by mis­take. The girl’s fin­ger clenched on the Makarov trig­ger when she was try­ing to open her trem­bling mouth to yell. And some mean ass­hole dragged it in to make every­one feel like shit, or go psycho.