Handle the past with a glove
Maybe it’s confusing, with all those women and men falling down from the future and a Villa from where people in the past are ready to shoot them. A real story becomes unreal, a need changes into a request and propaganda colour in white and black all the shades of grey. A glove is a simple object, and still so important for our story.
In the past
So, let’s start from here, from a grey sky. It was a grey day, as grey as a old grammar book, with grey cars as rules lined up at the traffic lights under the severe look of security cameras. You couldn’t see those shadows falling from the sky yet, those meteorites that soon would hit the news on TV for days, afternoons and nights.
It was a glove, a simple glove
It was a glove to handle the past, not to burn ourselves, sparkling in the future like a torch, a hope free falling. Even though it was still the present time and currently cold as a stone, with people covered with gloves, hats and scarves. The Earth got inclined far from the sun on that hemisphere, bringing a cold wind whistling in the streets, trapping people inside the apartments and offices or rushing on the sidewalks.
On the stairs, women and men rushed, while under the stairs lived numbers with long beards, cold and hungry, covered with cardboard boxes from the supermarkets. There were numbers with no names, wrong choices that worried ordinary people.
That was why the head-of-the-state decided to create the happiness patrols; groups of merry citizens read to help the less fortunate. Maybe they were helping with psychological or material support, do you believe? That would have been judged as a waste of public resources; never mistake numbers with real people. The merry citizens decided then to disguise, covering those people with flowers and colours like bright graffiti.
There was the majority, the good grain to make bread, and on the other side, the bad grains good only to feed the pigs; a zero-sum to add to other zeroes. Compared to the past, though, and thanks to the happiness patrols, those zeroes were way more cheerful.
Anyway, there was a glove.
A woman’s leather glove was left on a railing for a fateful moment, and a fast skinny hand stole it. A man with a long purple beard left his bright yellow cardboard box and stole it. He stole only one glove, but better than nothing. Outside, the weather was getting worse, and the woman took a few minutes to realise that she’d lost a glove.
That you could think it was just a hitch, it was actually the first blow on a long domino of events. It was too late to go back and search for the glove, and we know that the man with the violet beard had disappeared like a shadow. She didn’t want to arrive late at her cubicle, and the wind was too cold for her coat, so she decided to grab a taxi instead of going on foot.
‘I immediately noticed he looked strange’, revealed the woman later to the authorities.
‘He gave me a worried look, like someone hiding something, or maybe he was simply lost, I cannot say. He didn’t speak to me and jumped at every sound, especially at the sound of an ambulance, I recall.’
The journalist of Free People’s guts took notes, anticipating a sensational title: “We discovered how aliens are ready to invade us.”
The taxi stopped suddenly in front of the colossal mirrored entrance doors of the Trustworthy Bank; here, the security camera recorded Maria leaving the cab visibly shaken and giving two notes to the driver.
Two more steps, Maria watched her reflection, and after fixing her coat, she finally walked in. She left the coat to the doorman, exchanged glances with Mauro from accounting and got straight to her cubicle. Here, she prepared herbal tea and didn’t have time to remove the remaining glove.
There was an explosion destined to be famous.
This is the end of the third part, continue to read the rest of Go back to the future, written by Daniele Frau and illustrated by Gabriele Manca, Dmq Productions. All the rights for the story and the illustrations are kept by the respective owners.
Continue to read the next part, The Explosion!
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