Toxic effects

To Tijuana, border city, most traversed in the world.

The afternoon gave out a strange light for that particular hour of the day. It was infuriatingly red. The clouds carried a strange blue hue and the winds had a distinct smell of protuding carcasses. The nearby factories exuded more than their usual output of smoke. Jane observed all of this while walking towards her house, a scant mile from the factories. She looked on pensevily at the strange combination of natural and unnatural phenomena and she suddenly could not breathe with ease. A slight cough cleared her throat but only temporarily. The fumes in the air became stronger and stronger as her eyes faintly made out some twirling blue lights and dust clouds forming behind them. She continued walking not making notice of her health and just an earshot away some siren sounds were heard. Her steps carried her homewards. The small shack were she made her home was impregnated with a stench so familiar to her that it made no difference to her nostrils anymore.

She turned on the light. It was a bulb attached to a live wire from a nearby electrical post. Like everyone else, she stole electricity which was meant for the factories too. She undressed herself. Having worked all day at the recycling center, she frecuently came home more dirty than she would want to and started the gas stove she had for a kitchen. She boiled her water and a took a shower the only way she could, by placing the water in a plastic bucket. The nearby factories usually dumped them and the local folk used them for everything possible, even to grow plants and wash their clothes. She doused herself with a casserole and quickly shampood herself. Her long black hair ran to her shoulders and as the water ran down her hair, she felt alive and clean again. The tattoo from her local barrio became particularly aglow with colors as the vanilla colored skin that constituted her body gave way to the colors of her Virgin Mary tattoo on her back. I sat there, watching her very wide shoulders become wet with the water as it let steam rise as soon as the water ran down her vertebra.

-How’d it go today honey?

No answer. The water kept running, splashing on the only piece of concrete of the house, down a funnel that made its way to the other side of the plywood wall. It let out its contents on the dirt, were previous waters had made a course. The small stream of water made its way down the hill were greenish like algue formed its way along colorful oily bubbles the never seemed to pop. I stared at her breasts, awashed with steaming vapors, hard nipples aroused. She walked towards me, to grab a towel, her long brown legs were shining the bulbs light, and every step brought her closer to me.

-Dry my back, she said to me as she threw the towel on my face.

I did, as I passed the towel to dry off the remaining water drops on her back I got excited. She knew I got turned on. Forget it was what I heard as my hand passed her wet buttocks. She was afraid. She had just lost her baby, prematurely and without a brain. Such things happen in this city, and the experience had left her numb. I could understand but to the local government these factories meant revenues and the people only a nuisance, so when she delivered her baby, it was only one more statistical number piling up until international pressure built up. Only then would the municipal burocracy heed the environmentalist warnings, but until then, the factories kept spewing its toxic waste and we couldn’t do much about it.