The patient of 8.05 a.m.
A patient certainty
Between one of the few certain things you’d find in your existence, believe me, you must add the 8.05 of every Monday morning. In a red bricks buildings with a noisy neighbourhood, an alarm awaits just for an electric impulse to ring. I should say it awaits to sing, instead. The alarm will start in a metallic voice an old song of an Italian singer, Claudio villa,
Voglio vivere così, I want to live like that
A noisy neighbourhood
As I said before, the block is quite boisterous and I know it better than anyone else around here. A street light must illuminate the streets in the night, but it likes to listen during the day, when no one is looking up. In this way I pass an existence without any high and low, but just high. In general, what I see is a bunch of children first playing football in the street, then giving birth to other fatty children ready to play in the courtyard, this time with a fascinating rectangular thing in their hands.
A patient with beard
This noisy block doesn’t have the power to awake this short- sighted man with an unshaven beard. Mind you, I just said unshaven beard, but not that kind that girls love so much these days. The famous unshaven- beard- which- is- actually- perfect. No, in this case we’re just speaking about a short sighted patient man with a non- cured beard, the kind of beard the girls don’t like at all. Oh, please don’t get confused for the word I just used to describe him. Patient. If you’d know him you’d see he’s not meek nor more calm than the others. He’s not even patient as me, street light having fun describing this humans around. In this case you must go to Latin and see what does patient really mean, coming from the verb to suffer, endure. Nowadays in the common language when you speak about a patient you immaginare a man or a woman sit in a doctor’s waiting room.
Hypochondia, the Millennium disease
So sudden, with a flash of my light, you know now the mystery of the 8.05 patient. A man with beard and a peculiar alarm decides every Monday morning to go to a doctor’s waiting room. Amongst all the diseases that fill a doctor’s waiting room of patients there’s one in particular called hypochondria. That can be described as a greedy disorder, which awakens ancient fears and doesn’t have any cure. Both the doctor and the patient know that for the two of them this is more a psychotherapy session than a real physician- invalid meeting.
Just having some good time
For the Villa- alarm- man it’s a way to drink a caffè with an old friend and feel reassured for another a hundred hours, while for the doctor is a small distraction. A way as another to evade the routine of affected patients without affection.
Another alarm
Every Monday at 8.05 an alarm gets the doctor out of bed. Certainly it doesn’t wake him up before it shake him out of his dreams, but first things first. From here I can easily see him while, awakening in his third- floor apartment, gets a fleeting glimpse into the un mondo. The world, always the same, decide to stay in a line, or run, while the doctor is having some food and read the news sit in his small round table. The ambulatory is just two floors down, so he has all the time to buy some bread at the bakery and go to shave his beardy face.
At the barber shop
In fact, this doctor is one of the few people you will meet which decides to get shaved by a professional. Even though he’s going to meet an old hypochondriac patient, it’s better doing so with a shaved face. It’s a praxis, let’s say, as it is the appointment in the barber shop. He’s the first customer that the sun sends to the barber every Monday.
The trauma
La barber, unlike the two previous example, doesn’t fancy alarms. Every day at 7 sharp in the morning his eyes cut with big scissors the dark of his dreams to open up to the morning light. These alarm- scissors are inside his brain and as it occurred many times, they are the result of a shock. If a trauma can teach us something, it’s that trauma is forever. This trauma is the one that in the newspaper at the time had the title
The deer woman
Let’s start with an habit that this barber had, long time ago. It was the time when the Deputy Chief of the Deputy Chief Superintendent decided to collect the money to change in a bright red the colour of this elegant streetlight which is giving you this story. Before the sun, raising over the mountains, was going to draw a semi- circle on his dark door, the barber used to go hunting with his wife and his dog, P.
Hunting
After a while walking in the forest, the two were silent, trying with the help of P .to find out a fatty prey to put on the hood of the car. As always, the barber’s wife was on the right side of this searching triangle. Something happened, then. An alarm rang crashing the silence as a stone a window. Unlike the previous two alarms we described, this one wasn’t planned.
Just a joke
It was an innocent joke made by the barber’s nephew few days before. The alarm reproduced the deer grunting sound. In a fraction of a second, this alarm changed the barber into the widow barber in the neighbourhood. There aren’t so many widows around, no? Three small men armed with guns, waiting from the early morning for a prey, they don’t wait much before shoot. Something rash and unexpected from hunters, but
Bam
Bam Bam Bam
Wof Wof
Bam bam
Nooooo
This was the succession of sound that lead the barber to his new role of widow, and his alarm- trauma in the morning.
A patient client
So as you can see no alarm disturbed his day, while he let his client sit. Yes, because a doctor is a client here, while the client of a doctor must be patient. It’s something you can learn with time, maybe. Here we are, the barber ready to shave the doctor, that lays with his closed eyes on the leather chair. Trust is important, when you let someone get a sharp blade close to your throat. The watch on the wall is showing that the time is almost ready for the Monday patient. Everything’s going as every Monday has been for years, and then
Waaaaaaamaaaaaamaaaaamaaaaaamaaaaaamaaaaaamaaaaammmmmm
A case in a billion
An alarm from the Second World War, suddenly, decide to work. An alarm muted for years, forgot somewhere in a ruin house, now called historical house. A chain of event let that happened, the same chain that put doctor B. on a leather seat under the careful hands of the widow. And yet that trauma that the widow forgot, explodes now in a slip of the hand
Szak
The Death, the one with the scythe, couldn’t imagine it funnier than that.
Szack
And the blood…
And with a slip of the hand the sangue runs away from the veins for the first time. As the blood was a bird caged for too long, now it’s a red mass flying over the clothes and the face of the shocked barber. On the mirror, an entire life that goes away. The reflection on the mirror, less poetic, is just the image of the dead doctor, with a sort of red moustaches over his open mouth. How ironic is life, he entered to shave his beard and now he will go out with moustaches.
…the blood flows
And the blood drop by drop floods out of him
Plic, Plic, Plic
One drop at the time the former doctor B, living in Beetles and Noses street, 23 passes from a state of alive with soul to one of death with soul.
Plic, Plic, Plic
— And the next week let’s meet M.! —
La storia sarà pubblicata una volta a settimana e tutti i diritti della storia e relative traduzioni sono riservati a Flyingstories.org e nella persona di Daniele Frau.
Tutte le grafiche sono fatte a mano, realizzate con tecniche differenti da Gabriele Manca, DMQproductions, che ne detiene i diritti.
All English articles published in Souls (alive) proofread by Elisabeth Corcoran
