The store of souls

Posted On December 15, 2018

Have you ever been in a store like that?

You can find anything you like for a low price in a store of souls. Some souls appear clumsy, rolling around the dust of their own existence.

It’s that kind of remissive, invisible, grey soul which cannot switch on/off anything. They tend to be right exclusively for the category of dealer of souls.

 When half of S.’s nose was inside the shop, the store manager knew already everything about him.

He immediately got what he represented, the last ring of a long chain, a part of a group that changed the face and, therefore, the entire neighbourhood’s soul.

That, before they got their hands over the whole metropolis. That chain got so tense, with time, to seem more like a tight wire, almost invisible. We must add that almost everything changed since grandpa started his career as a dealer of souls.

It all started with the Animae, ready to stretch its tentacles in every area of society.

Once a kaleidoscope of store windows, even the streets became blind mirrors. You wouldn’t hear trumpets or crazy piano notes inside the bars but the sound of coloured, flashy slots. And the reflexes of all those mirrors were on the net, together with gasping mute fishes.

Shoemakers, greengrocers, and tailors all disappeared, leaving a path of new shops behind them. Nightmares’ shops were simply parts of lives lived or wished to be lived.

It was then an entire pulsating organism of smiley second-third hand electronics.

Inside the store

 “How may I assist you?”

 Suddenly asked the store manager, startling S. in the middle of a thought.

 “If you need help choosing the furniture or the souls, I’m here.”

 Added the store manager mechanically, without taking his eyes off the newspaper. The Friday crime news it’s the most interesting to read.

In the meantime, S. tried to figure out which soul to choose. They seemed all the same, even though the labels were different. Some of them were simply horrific.

 ‘Child, never used’, or ‘Bride, burned’, or again right after, ‘Groom, burned’. One after the other, death after death.

 In the suicide section, you could find the strangest inscriptions. ‘Inventor, car, smog’, or ‘Mathematician, cyanide, apple’.

 Nothing would be sadder than the suicide collection, which must be displayed in every soul’s shop following the law. It’s a circle, after all, because most of the time, the first buyer of those same cheap cases are the suicides themselves.

Every soul had its unique bar code, either sold in a shop or on the Internet. The difference is that you lose the mystery part in the net. It’s love for a picture; it’s pornography. You read:

 ‘Rockefeller, billionaire.’

And you immediately feel that erotic impulse, that craving, that arousing. Your own soul it’s nothing if compared to it. The next step it’s you in your living room sipping your coffee and thinking:

 “How could it possibly be my life if I possessed a soul like that?”

Choosing a soul isn’t easy now and certainly, it wasn’t for S. Without a soul, it’s impossible to survive, so S. started having spasms and felt sick, ill as anybody would without a soul. He had to pinch himself to recover. When he closed his eyes, he could feel a sensation of dizziness, a sweet fall into two bosoms of shadow.

 ‘Geologist, greengrocer, rat poison’, again ‘Puppeteer, painter, electric shock’. He was getting close. ‘Grey soul, good for dealers, unknown cause of death’.

Right, that’s it, the soul S. was looking for. A simple soul, perfect to remain silent in a shadow of mud. A light, suspended between past and future, that soul was rolling around in the present, apathetic and dirty.

 ‘Soul grey in colour, with cucumber-green and Himalayas-salt-pink streaks. Coming from the eastern Pacific, it appears old and lacking the typical blue streaks usually found in the souls coming from the Caucasus area’.

Just unbelievable how many words they need to describe a soul. And it wasn’t just that. There was more:

‘Soul extracted with Fechner method, following the death of the patient. Death probably due to a heart attack.’

 ‘Name of the body before the extraction: A.B.’

 ‘Occupation: Dealer of heart pills’.

How ironic, a dealer of heart pills died of a heart attack. S. smiled without thinking that that would happen to him as well. A dealer of souls doesn’t have a soul, yet he spends his whole existence buying and selling them.

Nevertheless, S. was sure about his choice and from the pocket took the two coins to buy his first soul. Left the shop in a hurry, his head covered by the hood. The vendor didn’t even say goodbye. All his attention led to an article about the accident of Mrs V. during a hunting trip.

Once in his apartment, he immediately showed the case to his father. In return, he received what seemed to be a smile. Right after he laid down on the bed, he felt as if he would faint.

He took the death pill with a gulp of water and waited. Half of those pink and green streaks left the case and started passing through his hands and then to the rest of his sleeping body. When the case was half empty, his father cut the rest of the soul inside a small box the size of a pencil sharpener.

 Then, his story as a dealer starts in a store and then in a room, with his eyes closed. The dealers’ foxhole got wider from the grandfather to the father and then to the son.

We hope you enjoyed this souls’ store, and you’re ready for the next part, the Sales lesson at Animae University.

If you read this post but didn’t read the last part about the job of a souls dealer, please do so. And tell us what you think about it. Your feedback is always essential.

If you landed on this page, but you don’t have any clue of what this is all about, please read what is this story about. And remember that this is a bilingual project, so you can read it in English and Italian.

If you want to contribute on our growth, please buy our book, Anime vive.

All the graphics are handmade and designed with different techniques by Gabriele Manca, DMQ productions, who reserves all rights.

Why is reading so important?

Reading is crucial because it improves the way you focus, your memory and your communication skills. Here at Flyingstories, we like to write free stories that can entertain you and help you learn Italian or English.

You can change the website’s language any time you want, just by clicking on the flag. In this way, you can read stories for free in Italian and English.