Fifteen severed heads were found in Mexico City during the week I spent there visiting my father. We sat in front of the television watching the news like so many years ago we\u2019d watched World Cups and Sylvester Stallone movies.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have no comment,\u201d he said. What had once been my father\u2019s charming belly was now an enormous dome, a big brother to his bald head. \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s because at this age a man loses his ability to think clearly or if it\u2019s just too absurd to get a response from me, but I have absolutely nothing to say about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s just evil,\u201d I said, sounding and feeling stupid, not believing the words even as they came out of my mouth.<\/p>\n
We watched footage of a head hanging from a pedestrian bridge; a head impaled on a flagpole, the red, white and green flowing underneath it; two incinerated heads\u2014hard, wrinkled, unrecognizable as human\u2014outside a police station. We saw the severed head of a young woman that week.<\/p>\n
\u201cWould you like chorizo and bread?\u201d my father would say during the commercial. \u201cCan I interest you in some fruit?\u201d Once omnipotent in our relationship, my father now felt like all he could do for his son was feed him. \u201cI bought some herring today. The expensive kind.\u201d<\/p>\n
The only time he gasped and turned away during the coverage was when they found a head in the amusement park. It was a man with a mustache. The head was stuck in the rim of the Ferris wheel, looking out at the city. The ride turned and turned, the head getting dizzier, losing perspective.<\/p>\n
As a child I went to that amusement park plenty of times, mostly with my father, just the two of us. I worshipped him and during some time we\u2019d been each other\u2019s only friend.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like I\u2019m<\/em> losing my<\/em> head,\u201d he said at one point during the week. It was meant as a joke. A half-joke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Once omnipotent in our relationship, my father now felt like all he could do for his son was feed him<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11274,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27],"class_list":["post-10365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-fathers","writer-pablo-pinero-stillmann"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10365"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12053,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10365\/revisions\/12053"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}