Yesterday, when the lights suddenly went out, and the thick, suffocating air made me sweat, I just couldn't take it. There was nothing I could do but wait, drowsy, in the kitchen. Time stopped at 11:30 p.m.
Paranoia took over. The night was oppressive in that infernal heat. I'd quickly shut the doors and windows, but fearing it wasn't enough, I grabbed the only knife I had in the apartment.
For hours, I heard noises in the walls, believing the neighbors were throwing slabs and junk from the roof at their paranormal pets. Even dead, they kept bellowing back at me until dawn.
Maybe it was something I'd lived through in a dream, one of those that harms your memory irreparably. There's no qualified person to fix it, and certainly no individual who can fully recover in this fantastical world.
But I knew myself too well to think that way. Because I'd come to believe everyone around me thought I was crazy, and that being crazy made me worthless in society.
Then, I saw a photo on the counter. It showed a cabin and three figures smiling in front of it. It was my parents and me. Suddenly, I fell to the floor, considering the possibility that I was living in a nightmare. No, maybe I was some kind of prisoner, endlessly trying to escape through elaborate mental puzzles I'd never be able to solve, not even by studying day and night like my college classmates.
I remember yesterday like I'll never remember today. The night will be eternal as long as this story is eternal to me. I don't know if I've suffered the same troubles in an infinite loop. I truly don't know my own existence, above all the things happening behind other things.
Am I trying to mythologize something I find stupid, and what does that make me?
No, the time I woke up was April 28th, in my parents' cabin, on a night of thick mist. A child in an adult's body, abandoning her hiding spot to turn on the lights from the kitchen panel, without success.
For some strange reason, my parents weren't home. The darkness, and only that, led me with a knife in my hands to wander like the restless ghosts in stories.
In the living room, to make matters worse, the moonlight streamed through the huge window onto the floor, and scattered across it were countless withered carnations. The typical flowers that adorn porches and cemeteries, or homes that happen to be near a cemetery.
No well-known cemetery was built nearby! Anyone who intended to die did so silently and internally; the worms of oblivion took over. Their body would be found after several months of searching and then taken to the city, very… very far from what was hidden there.
I wasn't a ghost, nor did I want to be one. I was real as long as I didn't give up those habits that make the living proud. The sweat pouring from my pores was nothing but the sweat of a living dead woman. I was okay with that. Even if I kept hearing the strange noises getting louder, and that foul, putrid smell that, dense, gave my palate sadness, hunger, and immense rage.
On a night like this, I had to invoke the mystery with a word, if I intended to escape this confinement, because when I dared to unlock a door, it soon resisted, unmovable, as if it would take an axe to break it into a thousand pieces.
It was then that the word my heart prayed was: "Go through it!"
Just as I was about to grip the bread knife tightly and risk it all, a frank little voice broke through the silence, wanting me to stop my insane attempt to escape. That clear voice silenced the other echoes: it resembled a child's, perhaps an angel's, dressed in black, eluding my eyes.
More and more colorful flowers, but with their own light, shiny and subdued, like fallen spotlights from the ceiling, whispered to me the arrival of a living creature, walking towards me with an annihilating glare.
Ignoring the child's strange behavior, I leaned in to warn her how dangerous my kind can be if we're talking about enemies.
— Get away, you ugly thing! This is my house, you hear me? You don't want me to kick you out the hard way, you silly kid.
With a hard blow, she disarmed me, and with another equally unerring strike, she kicked my chin, sending me backward, crashing onto the leather sofa. Her speed was incredible, an innate elegance. I suppose she hoped not to overdo it with a warrior's initial contacts.
At least that would make it seem like the twisted game that had just begun would forever provide good company that desires you, even if you suffer, to tell the truths your soul holds as a terrible secret.
— You're weak, —the child said in her beautiful voice—. You're born and you die in weakness. Why don't you just give up?
— You… you couldn't understand. Besides, who are you, you evil ugly thing?
— Eat flowers, yeah? You wanna eat flowers? —she replied bluntly, somewhat undecided between tormenting me or blessing me with the languid gaze of an executioner.
Having fallen onto the sofa, a whitish ceramic piece with fatuous letters fell from above us. She imperatively saved it, and with an amused expression, threw it at me without hesitation. Reclining on the sofa, the object impacted my hands, which barely managed to catch it as it neared my face.
In possession of that piece, if you looked closely, you could read: GOD bless my home.
— Don't get carried away, you crazy person, —I said, slowly puffing out my chest, challenging her—. Even if you kill me, I'll be reborn, and you'll know for as long as it lasts how hard it is to deal with the daughter of GOD.
And a moment before the child decided to attack, she winked at me on a whim.
— You wish you were somebody's daughter.
Violence, loving violence in pieces, because it shatters your life, is a lesson not just anyone embraces when you start making friends. (…)