Quesadillas by Neel Mukherjee Rosalind Harvey Juan Pablo Villalobos

instantly set my mother off crying because we weren’t even worthy of having the door slammed in our faces properly. She made use of the ten-metre walk to our front door to go from indignant weeping to hysterical hiccups. She managed to repeat six times, ‘Never have I felt so humiliated.’
    It was not, however, the time to feel sorry about my mother’s hurt feelings. There were more important things to do. She would have to stop distracting herself by suffering over my minor faults and start suffering due to sorrows that were actually worth it. Weren’t three of her children still missing? I had to take advantage of the opportunity destiny had awarded me on becoming the eldest brother.
    For my reign of terror I chose a hard-hitting slogan intended to stifle any possible rebellion by my younger siblings: ‘You guys don’t know anything, arseholes.’
    The slogan allowed for a few variations, depending on the circumstances: ‘You guys haven’t seen anything, arseholes’ and also ‘You guys haven’t lived, arseholes.’
    Callimachus was the most curious to discover what the world was like beyond La Chona. Archilochus was too busy channelling his frustration at no longer being the second eldest, and Electra was too small to be interested in anything other than working out why her dolly and her little classmates’ dollies were so different.
    ‘Tell me!’ Callimachus begged me.
    ‘Pegueros is imposing,’ I told him. ‘There are some really tall buildings, a hundred storeys high, and all the houses have swimming pools. The problem is the crocodiles.’
    ‘Crocodiles?’
    ‘Yeah, there are crocodiles everywhere.’
    In exchange I made him my slave. He fetched me things that were far away; I demanded he address me formally – sir, yes, sir – and he did the chores I was meant to do around the house, which weren’t many, or particularly difficult, due to my mother’s compulsive cleaning, but I had to keep my slave busy all the time, so he didn’t have a moment to think and rebel. Archilochus bided his time, exuding an exaggerated indifference stripped of any idleness; it was a most interested indifference. When it was time for the quesadillas, he would try to expose me as soon as he got the chance, in the relative tranquillity we’d achieved with the deduction of thirty fingers from the teatime machinations.
    ‘Dad, did you know that in Pegueros there are crocodiles in all the swimming pools?’
    ‘There aren’t any crocodiles in Pegueros,’ I said quickly, taking advantage of my father’s delayed reaction due to the astonishment the news was still causing him – it was almost as if he was a foreigner and didn’t yet understand what sort of country he lived in, although, in his defence, it had to be said that the politicians really were displaying extremely high levels of ingenuity when it came to screwing people over. And he still didn’t know how badly Salinas was going to take the piss!
    ‘The place where I said I saw crocodiles was Guadalajara Zoo.’
    The commotion caused by my mention of the zoo gave me a chance to look my father straight in the eye, so the fucker would finally understand the nature of my rebellion. Even though I’d come home, for reasons of convenience, I wasn’t the same any more. I’d changed; my world view had broadened beyond the confines of our town and was now a state-wide vision. If he said that the whole world was the same, I would argue that acacia trees didn’t even exist.
    The average number of quesadillas per person and their weight per unit had increased because of the reduction in the family, it’s true, but not in the way I had hoped. On the news they were forever talking about pacts: growth pacts, solidarity pacts. It was the current government’s method of choice for fulfilling its mission of screwing up our lives. My father remained loyal to his healthy habit of insulting all politicians, applying a level of hostility in direct proportion to the