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 “a Stretch of Highway”
Down in the Dirt, v179
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A Sacrifice

Reggie Gilliard

    The image is this:
    A slender white man stands atop the Bull in Bowling Green. He is clad in red, white, and blue. But he is mostly red; drenched in it. It runs over his palms and spills through the slits separating his fingers. It has turned the blue streaks of his outfit purple, the white streaks of his outfit pink. It pools under his feet on the back of the Bull and runs down those bronze haunches, cascades to the floor, and finally congeals among the entrails that surround the two.
    The stench is unbearable and so the men and women (though mostly men) who ring the statue wear gas masks — black, to match their suits and ties and skirts and dresses and buckles and suitcases. They utter, in chorus, a chant or a prayer to the Bull. The man on the Bull’s back draws power from their chant, slips into a trance. The monks part, acolytes — these without the suits, but the ambition to someday wear them — surge through the lacuna that has opened and hoist a body, lifeless, away from the feet of the Bull. And that body, its coffee bean skin, its dense and curly locks, surfs over a sea of white and is gone.
    At the statue’s rear the acolytes usher an old woman, supported by her walker, skin the color of the moon, to the man on the statue. He does not look at her, but over her to those who wait: brown skinned, low-income, hardworking, patriotic. He smiles. He extends a hand to the old woman, gently. She resists, she has seen what has happened to those before her. But there are the acolytes, and she is only one woman, and she is old, and there is the man on the Bull’s back still smiling sweetly. She struggles to the top.
    The chant of the monks is deafening now, for they can feel that the Bull is pleased. The man on the Bull’s back raises his dagger to the heavens, lets loose a feral scream, and guts the woman before him. The monks subside, the acolytes cart away the body, the next sacrifice is brought.



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