The job of a souls’ dealer
What a job!
“Why did you choose the oddest job, between all jobs?”
They call it a job! You have a job when you knead the bread, make sausages, produce some cheese, or sell and buy something. Working has a sense only if you wake up angry and tired.
Weighting some goods and using tools is what working should be like, a synonym for pain, anxiety, and sweat from the forehead. Having a job means having a constant fear of losing it and failing all you have with it.
Only when you finally lay your head on your pillow at night, you are entitled to smile, be content, and be ready to listen to what seems to be the sounds of the sea. The bed, oh, it’s always the bed’s fault at the end.
All the conjectures, lies, and corruption of this world seem to turn around this non-problem. People suddenly recollect shrivelled memories, tell lies and give gifts to achieve a quiet night in a bed.
All that work is meant to plant our roots deep in the ground, or if we want to be less romantic and more pragmatic, to build a roof over our heads.
“A bead and a job, a roof over your head at least!”
This message was valid, fixed and rewrote thousands of times as a nursery rhyme. His cerebral cortex gets soaked with this advice and it was pretty unlikely he would ever get rid of it. It was like a spider, nestled in the dark of his conscience, ready to consume seeds of dreams, a flicker of fantasies and lights, sprouts of divergence.
A job is really so important?
It’s always unfortunate to see somebody mislead by the value of his soul. It’s easy to get confused from the perspective of an expensive attic, watching the silent rank of artists, dreamers, and people who decide to live above the clouds.
I realize this is precisely the world where I walk, or they let me walk in every day. They said shoes are still free to dream, as my only task is to keep my soles attached and never lose my laces.
Soles and souls, what assonance.
Anyhow, people almost forget about shoes in summer. They replace us by wearing reversed Y devices (I guess they called them flip-flops) that make you lose balance. On one side, steadiness seems to be the best method if you want to walk without soles.
However, on the other side, the irrationality is what makes people still shiver, with some fresh air passing through the toes while wearing flip-flops.
I hope you can excuse a grumpy pair of shoes as you keep reading.
A shoe point of view
From a shoe point of view, you got to see the world from a different perspective, with old-fashioned underwear, unmatched pairs of socks and smiles with coffee stains. You need to experience being a pair of shoes to fully appreciate all those points of view.
“Do you really believe this is a real job? I know the problem; it’s that cursed soul of yours!”
In a governor’s eyes, artists are just out of the equation in an acceptable society. Artists are the kind of people that make your eyebrows raise, but only if you are bored enough or still curious.
Eventually, some people need laws and important axioms, an index to read all the chapters of their existence. In a world where you have to sell your soul even to find an easy job in a post office, it’s essential to be following those axioms if you want to survive.
“Tell me why such a brilliant young man as yourself must mix with this… rubbish. Artists? They’re nothing else than an idiotic group of people who didn’t even learn how to wear a shirt on the right side. That’s what they are.”
This was the monologue S.’s grandpa used to repeat repeatedly.
“The souls market has never been so favourable as it is right now.”
That was S.’s father that stepped in when the grandpa took a break.
“Why should you waste all of your good cards just to play to be… an actor?”
He spat out the last word as if that was the ultimate insult. At that point, S. was ready to do anything to stop that constant preaching.
“Who would ever want to have an actor’s soul? Someone ready to sell everything, even his emotions, for mere applause! Applause!”
Continued the grandpa, forgetting to mention that precisely from an actor arrived the pure soul they trapped inside his nephew’s body.
Slow as a drop falling over a stone, this preaching got through S.’s head one day after another. Then, one fine day, he decided to cut his hair, swept away by an old broom in a barber shop, altogether with his dreams.
S. got in the brigade of ‘head on the shoulders‘, ready to lock his plans in a drawer together with some plot he would never perform.
He was part of the new generation of rubber smiles, with endless roads to beat up. Eventually, he would learn new techniques to unpick some fabric from puppets- customers, instead of the applause he always dreamt of.
He backpacked, prepared to give his soul away. His soul needed not to finish too far from there and he knew it. Better to find a newborn, preferably poor, to leave his soul. It would be easier to have that soul back whenever the poor guy would reach legal age one day.
One step at a time, S. had to choose his new soul, a soul perfect for his new job: the soul of a dealer.
You don’t need anything fancy if you want to be a successful dealer of souls. In fact, it’s better to have something average or mediocre for the job. Half of this soul would be locked down inside a case the size of a pencil sharpener.
It was an ordinary Friday evening. Outside was a dirty rain, splashing in light grey shadows from the feet. Puffs of cold and warm air joined for a second, appearing and disappearing as if they were a lighthouse in the dark.
Between the first and the last step, you couldn’t count more than two kilometres and shortly after that, he stopped in front of an entrance. The store sign made clear he had arrived at his destination, stating, ‘
O. And sons_we buy souls’.
Even though a dealer of souls and a souls shop seem to be two completely different concepts, they’re pretty similar. If one sets the price of the most valuable souls, the souls’ shop does something analogous.
Like a pawn shop, poor people would leave their souls here. With them, prisoners and losers of any kind you can find in every society are displayed all together for the customer to decide.
This was the perfect place for someone who wanted to start a job as a professional dealer. The ideal place to find a grey soul.
And S. decided he would be a souls’ dealer. The best one, in fact.
If you’re curious about what will happen next and want to enter in a souls’ shop for the first time, continue to read.
If you read this post, but you didn’t read the previous part, The dealer of souls, please do so. And tell us what do you think about it. Your feedback is always really important.
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