Everything seemed to quietly die in that eerie instant before the roosters began their twilight crying. It was as if all the tiny creatures of the darkness were expecting the faraway flying communicado. It was a peculiar phenomenon. A sudden plunging hush like the quivering silence of a just-beaten drum. A strange hush that saturated the darkness and had no reasonable explanation. A hush to prick ears up and wonder about. Perhaps the message that stifled the forest’s humming pulse of tiny voices was important. Important enough for the insects to wait silently and let it pass like a lost bird in the night. The ghostly call began in smoldering Guácimo, a good hour’s walk down the polished railroad tracks. But it was plainly audible form the start. All the more so for its quiet prelude.

A stumbling man came home somewhere. He felt a swelling tension under his woven belt and stopped. He pissed fully and freely a warm beery stream on the gravel of the street outside the hotel and then went on, swaying with the half-random regularity of a flickering candle flame.

The moon was full and brilliant, but restless cane spirits in sore bellies rendered it useless for anything save a weird vision of tall banana plants and rusty metal walls in a fantasy of monochromatic light. This was enough for blurred eyes when the pattern of dim forms meant the way back home.

A pearly stream of spittle flashed and died in the dusty road. The man botched a clumsy step and caught himself. A heavy black rubber boot with rubber sole, rubber laces untied, sent a dusty chunk of gravel into a heap of aging rubbish. The missile struck a thin sheet of corrugated metal, rotted brown in the caustic citrus air. It sang a sorry note into the steaming tropical night.