The Enemy

by James Miraflor


Number 32. Jackson Pollock. 1950. Enamel on Canvas.

Hector gazed at his friend for what is to be a long long moment. He gasped, trying to expel the room's carcinogenic air from his enervated lungs.

"I realized something," Hector told him. "I have an enemy."

Victor put out his cigarette. He nodded in agreement.

"There is no room of doubt about it. He is my enemy, flesh and blood, not the abstraction we had been deluded to fight against. He is all that I could have achieved, had he not came. He is everything that I won't be, just because he had been there first. He owned things I wanted to have, taken things I was about to get. He is on top of me on the manner that would have commanded surrender to all his other enemies, but there is no surrender for me."

"There is no surrender for me", Hector whisphered.

Victor knew, as anyone would have, that at that moment, destiny already decided.

One of them is meant to destroy the other.