When the end of the world began, Héctor was intertwined with Cyrille, Bartolomé with Amaury, and Celeste with Ananda and Idelisa. I, on the other hand, thought of Jack Veneno. I had first seen him wandering about El Conde in yellow spandex, with his eyes sparkling and his blood turned to rum, when he rushed over me like a sting. Jack Veneno sniffed my hair and smeared my fingers in orange-scented saliva as he killed the mosquitoes that danced over his head.

This time, the memory of Jack Veneno was not condemned by the overwhelming melancholy that usually accompanied it: an Amazon with cinnamon tits and cotton fingers reminded me that the world was made of fog and color, that the sea would always howl in the distance, and that the night was androgynous by its own right.

The island shrank around us, opening up to the cadence of tropical rain. I felt my body get lost in the embrace of the cinnamon tits, which lit me up like a lightbulb and echoed in the orbit of her hips, as the whole world turned to steam. Then we saw, we felt, in the distance, the wave.