The following is from Alejandro Puyana’s Freedom Is a Feast. Puyana, who came to the United States from Venezuela at the age of twenty-six, received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His work has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The American Scholar, and elsewhere, and his story “Hands of Dirty Children” was reprinted in Best American Short Stories. He lives with his wife (the writer Brittani Sonnenberg) and daughter in Austin, Texas.

Eloy felt warm. Like when he rolled himself tight in the blanket and rested his head on his mother’s lap while she read him stories. Like when he ran from third base to home plate and his friends all slapped him on the back. It was like someone had taken all those feelings and compressed them into two red dots, one in his belly, one a couple of inches off his bony spine.

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Everything moved slowly, everything sounded far away. He could see his mom screaming but it was like the noise was lazy and didn’t quite reach him. He couldn’t understand her face, had never seen her move this way: her eyes wet and skipping, like she was looking for something important that was lost; her chest going up and down so fast, like his own after racing his friend Wili up the barrio stairs. When she finally reached him, and hugged him, and picked him up in her arms, he felt her vibrating, like her whole body was a heart. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. An earthquake in each beat.

His mom carried him outside, and his madrina shouted, “Jacinto, the child is shot!”

His neighbor took him from his mom and flipped him around, lifted his shirt. It made a wet sound as it came away from his skin.

“El plomo went out the back,” Jacinto said. “That’s good.”

“Viejo, what do you mean?” his madrina said.

“The bullet isn’t in there — the doctors won’t have to go digging for it — but he’s bleeding a lot. We don’t have much time. Magali, get me some towels from the house.”

His madrina ran into the rancho and Don Jacinto rushed him and his mom to the Honda. Eloy loved that bike so much. He would sit with Don Jacinto after school and help him work on it. It’s where he had learned most of his cusswords. Hija de su gran puta was used for the motorcycle in general, whenever she would not start. But there was also the coño e’ su madre carburetor, the pendejo clutch, the brakes de mierda, and the engine of los cojones. When his mother wasn’t around, Eloy was allowed to jump on the bike and pretend he was driving it. Jacinto would bring his radio and they would listen to the baseball games together as Eloy made vroom sounds from inside the big helmet.

His madrina ran back to them now with the towels. Jacinto, astride the bike, was struggling with the ignition. “Hija de su gran puta,” he muttered.

Eloy’s mother picked him up and squished him between Jacinto’s back and her body.

“Señora Magali,” Jacinto said, “have María put pressure where the bullet went in and out.”

At first it didn’t hurt, he just felt something leaving him, like when he was little and peed the bed.

“Mujer, listen,” Magali told his mom. “Go to Vargas Hospital. That’s the best place for treating bullet wounds. Don’t stop for nothing, you hear?”

Don Jacinto was still struggling with the bike, one kick after the other with no luck.

Magali applied deeper pressure on Eloy now, holding his mother’s hands with hers. “Like this, María. Hold the towels like this.”

Then a sharp pain traveled from Eloy’s belly, half of it down to his toes and the other half up to his head. He screamed, loud and high-pitched, and his mom kissed him on his crown as the pain radiated outward, through his mother and his madrina and Don Jacinto, through la hija de su gran puta, through Don Jacinto’s green ferns, through the million ranchos and the million bullets flying through them, through Cotiza and down the mountain.

At last, the Honda sputtered to life — the mechanical whirr seemed to echo inside him — and his madrina placed the helmet on his mother’s head.

*

María wrapped her arms around Don Jacinto’s waist, squishing Eloy’s thin frame in between them. The blood pooled, soaking the towels held in place against his belly and back. With every bump on the road her shirt squished like a wet mop. The blood was warm, but the rest of Eloy was cold, though she could still feel his small torso expand against her with the effort of his breathing.

In the frantic ride downhill she caught glimpses of the barrio. How as they descended the buildings became more solid. There were actual walls that could stop bullets, colorful paint, barred windows, porches and balconies. There was dignity in every cement block, in every metal door. Still, it was a different barrio today, with businesses shut down, the porches of the houses empty, the plazas and basketball courts lifeless. People were marching down in small groups, dressed for a fight. They carried sticks, bats, the occasional gun. They wore Chavista garb, berets and red shirts, singing and chanting as they made their way down the mountain to protect the president.

María held tight to Don Jacinto, pressing Eloy between them.

Don Jacinto was having trouble navigating through the increasing mass of people making their way to the presidential palace. They were the opposite of those on the TV, who had called for Chávez’s resignation, removal, or death. This was the other side. “¡UH, AH, CHÁVEZ NO SE VA! ¡UH, AH, CHÁVEZ NO SE VA!” they chanted in defiance of the multitudes on the TV screen. María wished for the protesters to vanish, to let them pass unimpeded.

Then the motorcycle squealed, the back wheel skidding back and forth, and somehow, without throwing the three of them off, Don Jacinto managed to halt before a burning barricade. People were tossing things into the fire: rubber tires, pieces of wood. A blue plastic pupitre, the kind Eloy sat on in class, flew into the pyre. A line of men carried items out of a preschool — chairs and desks — and two others pushed a bookcase into the blaze, the books falling from the shelves like teeth from a rotten mouth. A short, hairy man hurled a blackboard still marked with chalk. Everything, sacred or not, was food for the fire. The smoke, thick and black, vomited into the gray sky. Through the rubble, María could see the gathering of men in blue uniform — Metropolitan Police tasked with protecting anti-Chávez marchers — on the other side.

“Get off, Señora María,” Jacinto said. “I can’t get through here. Let me talk to some people…see how we can get to Vargas Hospital.”

On a normal day it would have been only a couple of minutes more, but their path was blocked. María placed Eloy on the ground and applied pressure to his belly. He was unconscious now, but still breathing. With her free hand María gripped her necklace, the black jet carved into a fist that had been her mother’s, had seen them both through so much. Under her breath she asked her mom for help.

Don Jacinto was arguing with some masked men. All of them brandished weapons — bats and lengths of oxidized rebar — and two boys gathered and piled rocks while other masked men, with T-shirts wrapped over their noses and mouths, threw the rocks over the barricade and at the police with the expertise of years of sandlot baseball.

Don Jacinto turned from the men to walk back to the motorcycle and it seemed he moved in slow motion. He wore an old pair of slacks nearly black with oil stains and a white T-shirt now all but crimson. It was as if she had never looked at him, not before he wore Eloy’s very life on his clothes. He was tall, his skin the color of coffee with too much milk in it, and balding, but with enough white hair remaining to comb some long strands over his bald spot. His was a strong old age, a fibrous one, with wiry muscles, scruff on his cheeks, and callused hands. He was kind, she knew. He was a good man. He was trying to protect them.

“Vámonos,” he said. “We’re not going to get through here with the bike. We have to walk.” He lifted Eloy from the pavement gently, like something already dead, and went to an alleyway littered with rubble and debris.

María couldn’t stop coughing. Neither could Don Jacinto, whose cough was deeper, scratchier, tobacco-haunted. Smoke from the barricade mixed with tear gas made her eyes water and itch. But she did not hear Eloy cough as he lay on Jacinto’s shoulder, and it terrified her. She walked behind them clutching the azabache necklace. Emerging from the alley, she saw the police officers on the other side of the barricade. They wore black helmets and carried tall shields, shotguns, and tear-gas launchers, buzzing around each other in unorganized fashion like wasps around a nest. One of the men, his body half-obscured by wisps of rolling tear gas, noticed them.

“Hey. Hey!” he screamed. “Stop right there, coño!” Flanked by two other men, the officer ran at them with his shotgun raised. María and Jacinto froze. For once the only thing that seemed to move was Eloy, his little body coming to life with a squirm.

“What do you have there? Drop it!” the cop screamed at Jacinto.

The glint of the shotgun’s metal hypnotized María.

“I can’t!” Don Jacinto screamed back. “It’s a boy, it’s a boy, it’s a boy!” he cried, sobbing through his words, his left arm up, his right arm still holding Eloy.

The policeman flipped up his visor, then cocked his head, like a curious dog. He lowered his weapon. With his hand he motioned the other officers to do the same. “It’s a kid,” he said, and ran toward them.

“My son’s been shot,” María said. “Please. We need help.”

“Come with me,” the cop said and tried to take Eloy from Jacinto’s shoulder.

Jacinto recoiled.

“Okay,” the man said. “Easy. It’s okay, you can carry him. I have a car two minutes that way. Let’s get your boy to the hospital.”

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From Freedom Is a Feast by Alejandro Puyana. Used with permission of the publisher, Little, Brown and Company. Copyright © 2024 by Alejandro Puyana.