Run!
Death
Dying is so easy that no one wants really be next on the list. Or too difficult, perhaps? Maybe it’s just the dread of finding out that we’re alone, without anything to keep us in the world. Sometimes it’s difficult to keep up with that fear when you’re still alive. Buried undead in a nauseating reality, I see everyone jumping on the monocycle of lying with one aim: surviving. Happy? Yes, maybe just for despair, leaving behind whom made despair a style of life.
Despair
M. was obviously not desperate, with a brilliant career in her studies and a steady job, plus a man with whom she could distress her passions. Without paraphrasing, she was just happy. That evening she was even happier, despite for the rain that was falling for days with no stop. The kind of happiness you cannot find in a movie or a comics, but in the elegant pages of a good book.
Love
A bliss completely light- hearted that is just impossible to imagine because M. is still only a name for you. But what is not a name, floating and shining in light and shadows around us? That name in particular was in love with a man smelling hair- gel and strong pine fragrance.
The curly-hair man
Never been a good friend of a comb, the guy was using his curls to reach as many person of female gender as possible. M. was obviously unaware of all those conquers, all too busy studying origami, working at the Old Hospital and attending operas. The last one was moving her to cry for a lady’s man sent to war or a hunchback angry with the world and his curse.
The Opera
Was during one of those silent- crying moment, in the opera in which the clown is regarding himself as it was for the first time at the mirror, that the fate stepped in. Better, a series of fates create a chain of events, a river flowing faster and faster as the rain falling out of the windows of the theatre. What has to be has to be, they say.
And the singer fell to the ground, his face turning red. The tears were still on the Maestro’s face when the doctor and the soul dealer stepped on the stage. The people around, like bees stunned by a smoke, ran up and down, blind and confused. M. didn’t move, instead. She’ve never ever leave an opera without reaching the end, before. She stayed in her seat, waiting in vain for a
Ridi pagliaccio
that inevitably wasn’t going to come. Instead, a sensation of anxiety, started its way through her chest. A cold draft was passing through the lung’s wall, along with a strange sensation. An anxiety crisis or soul crisis as someone calls it. She had to leave that horrendous staging out of the stage. Outside it was still raining, but the air was fresher, easier to breath. No show of those human- bees and the smoke that made her blind and anxious.
Home, home!
The theatre wasn’t so far away from her apartment, behind the street with two buildings, in a fourth floor coloured by her curtains. She was expecting a gas stove to dry up a bit, then read a book and well, probably some cuddles.
Human warmth
As she turned the handle, instead of the stove, she found out two sweating bodies trying their best to heat up the apartment through some human warmth. The guy was the curly hair man we mentioned before, while the girl was just a student with buck teeth.
I know some people which never recover from adolescence, other people that never learn how to grieve and then there is M. For her and people like her, it will be difficult to look in the eye another man without thinking about the gamble people still call love.
E se Arlecchin t’invola Colombina,
ridi, Pagliaccio,
e ognun ti applaudirà
A sense
Countless minutes, hours and years passed since then searching for a sense, with no luck. Countless because I’m a watch and I’m here exactly to make count of every second. She mystified the perfection, she was really thinking to be finally in the right side of the wall. And then, as in a second 1989, the wall fell. Or a house of cards. Someone opens a window and the whole structure collapses. Almost a year later, on the table of doctor M., now coroner in a small town in province of nowhere, someone put the corpse of a doctor with a severed carotid.
And she was as always, as in the last days, still
Hey, wake up!
No signs, from the bed table I cannot really see if she’s sleeping, crying or just praying in silence
Hey, wake up!
The only thing I know is that the one speaking is the severed finger animated.
And suddenly she was as always, but a bit trembling, lost in thoughts of someone else.
A rustle of sheets and finally I can see a figure. The sheets fall to the ground and two hands grab me, avidly. On my clock- face I can see her face, hesitant. Yes, I’m still the one counting the time here around, the only one taking track of the time. Her face get blurred with her warm breath. She gets more and more blurred, while her hands start shaking. I’m certainly not a pair of eyes, but still I’m part of her reality. And her reality is blurred. Sometimes I want to know if I really exist or if I’m a fruit of my own fantasy.
Rise and shine! We need to talk
Again, the voice is coming from the small bloody cloth at the other side of the bed. It’s there because two trembling hands let him fell before. The same hands that now are grabbing me so hard, as I simply was the last link with a lost reality. The last second of the night passes, slow and elegant
Tac
So… your’re not going to talk to me?
The red eyes seem to look far away. That voice, that bloody cloth on the bed seem to be all unreal. Then
What… who are you?
Oh, god! You’re alive!
The soul trapped in the bloody finger in the cloth exclaims. And then continues, more poetically
I’m a soul first stolen, then given as a gift, stolen again but for different purposes. I’m the insane tribute men reserve to beings without any choices. My destiny was clear, coherent even. And now I feel myself just a piece, full of dark blood, lost at the feet of a woman thinking she got mad
Tic
Why did you choose me?
Asks M. in a whisper
Tac
Finally a question I’m able to answer back. In the room, when I woke up, there were only you
Tic
— And next week… That guy, again! —
This story will be published once per week only, with all rights reserved for the story and its translations by Flyingstories.org and in the person of Daniele Frau.
All the graphics are handmade and designed with different techniques by Gabriele Manca, DMQ productions, who reserves all rights.
All English articles published in Souls (alive) proofread by Elisabeth Corcoran
