A TRAGEDY OF CHICKENS
The day the small town of Dumaguet ran out of chicken, Pedro Murillo was feeling particularly cocky, like the cliché of a man walking on air. Those who saw him that morning—an old, bent woman who was almost blind from cataracts; a feline street boy smoking a thin cigarette while ogling the purse of a fat, heavily made-up woman whom he was certain to steal from; and a handsome policeman whose kittenish wife of six months had left him only the previous day for a professional sabongero—noted a lightness in the way the man strode towards the center of town.
The man, they also quickly noticed, was dressed not too immaculately in a red silken collar shirt and a black pair of pantaloons, the hems of which fluttered slightly in the soft but sudden breeze. He did not strike
