It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.
– J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Letting the words come through my fingers, then through the pen and onto the paper sheet, a permanent scar on an otherwise blank surface – doesn’t that mirror the (other) way (around) we experience life? I have always been blessed (and sometimes cursed) with considerably realistic dreams and the capacity to remember them. Paired with an overactive imagination, I use these memories to create little stories based on my dreams. My aim is to share a little of my weird inner self in the hope others like me will find solace, and those unlike, understanding.
Everyone wants to leave a mark in the world. This instance may not be a deeply-carved, well-designed or particularly competent one, but it is my own.
I was with a few old school colleagues navigating the river by ourselves – floating with our bodies, without the help of any boat, swimming effortlessly and going with the flow as if the water were part of our nature. We didn’t have any cool clothes, so we were wearing animal costumes or were dressed as our favorite Harry Potter characters. The flow became stronger and took us to the bank, which was smooth and vegetated. There we lay down, changed our clothes and basked in the sun, as if we were lizards.
Then I became lost in the city, looking for a familiar address that I knew started from a square where there was a church. I was so used to getting to this place by another way that, when I saw myself in the middle of the square, surrounded by people and alleys that led to the most different directions and to streets with the coolest names I’ve ever seen, I became desperate. Pride prevented me from getting my phone to check Google Maps. I walked in circles and nothing happened. Finally, near the church, I saw a seemingly lost child and went there to ask for information. It was a very nice and smart boy, and he was in fact just poor: he was in the square looking for work. He and his mother decided to help me, and they guided me to a flooded area. From there, we had to walk on improvised wooden bridges; the houses stood up on stilts and the community stayed mostly on their open balconies, observing the coming and going of boats and animals. I asked the mother and the boy to come with me, for I was afraid.
Arriving there, which was not the same place I had intended to go to in the first place, I started to talk to the inhabitants; they were poor, but full of wisdom, liveliness and intelligence. Not even crime, deaths and murders could remove the shine of their eyes and animation from their voices. They taught me how to fish, how to use a boat and live simply. Inspired by that, I became part of a secret organization which fought against crime – especially robberies in the poorest communities. My partner and I were incognito in some sort of old scrap metal yard with boats, which was actually a deposit place for my ex-boss’s company. In fact, I still had some contacts within the company, and I believe the owner didn’t even know what was happening. However, I discovered that one the top-dog manager was stealing precious objects (jewels, vehicle parts, pieces of high technology engines) which he would sell for absurd prices in the black market.
The scheme was known by him (the crook manager) and two more cronies (which were nothing more than stupid thieves but could be astute and dangerous in extreme situations). Infiltrated in the company as an intern, I verified that the thief-manager was hiding these objects (which were actually the company’s property) in a private vault. Just like a magician full of tricks and abilities, he would trade an object without much value (like a flash-drive) for the precious object, would put this last one in a simple wrapping to outwit followers, and would take the object to his personal vault. Then, the object would end up inside one the of old boats in the deposit yard, waiting for transport along with the other boats.
As soon as I discovered how the bandits worked, I established an ambush with my partner. We would disguise ourselves as scrap metal scavengers, verify all the boats, their interior and their contents, and we would also painstakingly verify all the vans and trucks than came and went from the place. These boats had several small secret compartments which could serve as hiding places. One day, we noticed two vagabonds, which weren’t company workers, circulating around the yard: they were the crook-manager’s cronies. The manager hid the precious object in one of the boats, but only his cronies knew which, for the boats looked all the same at first sight. I managed to realize exactly which boat was the hiding place; my intention was to reveal the scheme and call the police. But first I needed to be sure: when there was no one else around, I opened the boat’s secret compartment, and after much toil, I found a box containing a small super rare mineral which was used in the fabrication of engines. I left everything exactly as I had found and came back the following day with my scrap metal scavenger disguise.
However, something went wrong. We were betrayed, or some spy had seen everything I did during that evening and thus found out my true identity. The bandits and company workers initiated the transport of the fateful boat. I was standing there as a guard, and the cronies found me and threw me inside the black van where the boat would be transported. Happily, the van’s occupants weren’t in on the stealing scheme and had no idea about the crime conspiracy going on: they were just company workers and their job was to transport the boat with the precious object inside (which they didn’t know about) until the harbor, where the manager made an inventory of all the objects, falsified documents and sold the precious objects in the black market.
My luck was, then, that these people saw no problem in helping me, deviating from their usual ways. I screamed and they rescued me from the cargo compartment of the truck. By then, I had already stolen the precious metal for myself, for now it would be impossible to prove the functioning of the crime scheme of the company’s manager. In the truck’s booth there was a family of black people: mother, father and daughter, who wore her frizzy hair in a ponytail. The family was moved by my situation and they agreed to take me home. During the drive, I explained to them that they were in great danger for helping me and that they should run away. After all that, I managed to find peace with the duality which tore me between altruistic honest person who did only good and swindler thief who seeks always her own benefit in detriment of the collective good.
I was with a gang from high school in a theater. There were many seats. I was wearing a light beige woolen sweater. Basically all the people I had studied in high school were there, and also Marianne, my only friend and ally in the middle of all those people. As we were in a group, the feeding part was pure torment. There was a kind of diner in front of the theater, but it was also part of it. The theater goers would, inevitably, end up consuming in that place. The problem was that my group had done a deal package with the owner of the diner: US$ 40 for all you can eat. There were pancakes, wraps, muffins and other things of the sort. The thing was that nothing was to my taste and I decided to talk to one of the attendants to know more. The pancake flavor that I wanted was not in stock and I had to content myself with another one that I didn’t really like. Meanwhile, my colleagues were eating a lot and I had been the only one to complain. I felt the disapproving looks of everyone on me as I went in and out of the theater, and walked to my place by the hallway. The movie was almost over when I decided to get a sweet pancake, because I couldn’t decide on a savory one.
I walked to the counter and a tall boy served me. There was another boy behind me in line. The diner attendant served me really ill and made stupid sexist jokes – something about me not knowing how to pick a pancake flavor indicating that as a typical woman, I couldn’t pick anything in life. And then instead of ordering my pancake to the kitchens, he simply forgot about me and served the order of the boy who was behind me in line! I complained and only received more stupid jokes like “wussy pussy” or something of the kind.
In the end, the students were all leaving the place and I had already decided I wouldn’t pay the 40 dollars of the check. I tried to get out very stealthily, along with Marianne, but the people from the diner didn’t let us. They literally locked the door with us inside to prevent me from leaving without paying the bill. I made a scandal and called for the manager. I said the service was terrible, that I hadn’t eaten almost anything, and that I was offended by the sexist attendant. The idiot attendant wasn’t even there anymore, the new ones were much nicer, so I felt a bit bad about it all. But the manager was a man in the molds of a Don Corleone – a tall, large man with intimidating eyes and persuasive talk. I stepped my foot down regarding the service I had received in the diner, but I had to agree with the Godfather that the fact I couldn’t enjoy my 40 dollars in pancakes was my problem, not theirs. Even so, I cried for a discount. In the end I had to pay half of the check value and promise I wouldn’t follow through with my threat of complaining about the place on social media. I was completely defeated and only Marianne stayed by my side.
I was in a small island, which could be crossed on foot in terms of hours or half a day only. There were beaches I wanted to get to know, but my wandering was near its end, for the afternoon advanced and I didn’t know the place well enough to feel safe in it after dark. There was a main road, but no cars circulating, only little narrow streets coming out of the main road, some of them with pavement or tarmac, some without, crisscrossing themselves and confusing my sense of direction. After all, I got to a more crowded area, where an ugly, but imposing construction loomed: a kind of events pavilion full of ramps which led nowhere, didn’t connect to the rest of the walks and sidewalks and narrow streets, but met enormous walls and salons with no way out.
I almost got lost inside, but some people helped me not just to get out, but to find a way back to the north of the island, where I was lodged. It was already night when I arrived, and I was informed of an Olympic competition that would happen in the neighboring island, which was bigger and with better infrastructure to receive such an event. The transport to the matrix island was done. Again, I saw myself in the south of the region, admiring a landscape so beautiful I almost got to doubt it was real – it could be a hallucination induced by the swaying of the boats, or I could have finally gone crazy, after so many ordeals and hardships.
I didn’t want to get out of there, but I ended up being taken away with the crowd, which now directed itself to a modern train station in the middle of the coastal nature. They were surface trains, but looked like underground trains – they seemed extremely modern and fast. I observed through the windows the transition of environments – untouched nature in the south, going through charming villages in the middle, with big and modern houses, until we got to the north of the island: a huge area which stretched itself like a crowded modern metropolis, but that still preserved its traditional architecture and greenery. The contrast with the quiet, peaceful and paradise-like south of the island couldn’t be bigger, if it weren’t for the atmosphere of a small town and the lack of skyscrapers in the metropolis area. There was a beautiful bridge, which resembled a little the bridge in downtown Chicago, with its historical buildings circling the place; but the water that ran under the bridge was absurdly bright and blue. It shone like the water from the Caribbean Sea. It was a glittering turquoise with a touch of green – again, I doubted my eyes.
I thought that water was actually a kind of canal conceived for the passage of sea water – even a few waves could be seen in this river. But it could be fresh water for other reasons, reasons related to the imminent sport competition. I went to my lodgings, which were the same as the ones for the competing athletes. I had, thus, a privileged view of the event, appreciating details about the games that only people directly connected to the competition could know. One of the most popular sports was table tennis. But this was a different kind of table tennis, played in minuscule booths with tiny rackets, and a kind of black rectangular recipient, like a smaller than usual shoebox turned on its side, with the opening facing the front, which the players should hit with the little ball – almost like target shooting or horizontal basketball, in which the target or basket was this little black rectangular box, in a horizontal position, and the weapon was the racket.
After making myself at home at the lodgings, I met a very smart and beautiful girl and made friends with her, and we went touring through the city. We went to the aforementioned bridge, and as she was very nice, she soon became friends with a group of young men who had also travelled there to see the Olympics. They were all good looking and fun, but there was something about them that left me apprehensive and uncomfortable. The conversation seemed innocent enough, but the gait, the tone of voice, the gestures – something told me not to trust them, and even not to trust the girl that was with me in the apartment. Little by little, I noticed the conversation between the girl and the young men was becoming ruder and cruder by the minute, and they started to look dangerous – especially the second boy (because my friend had totally absorbed the attentions of the first one) turned himself to me out of boredom, and he looked drunk or drugged; he put on a cigarette and started to talk about parties, sex, recreational drugs and even about robberies and things of the kind. I was afraid and wanted to go back to the lodging, and I realized the only way was to just scarper from that place. On my way back, I got lost in the city, because it was night and the son of bitch of the guy had robbed my cellphone, and I had no map or any way to call for help, I didn’t know anyone there, and I started to notice the city wasn’t as peaceful as it had looked in the first place. I saw myself in a deserted suburban street, with beautiful and big, modern houses, big cars and rich people having a row in the middle of the street: someone had run over someone else’s pet or child, and it seemed like a serious fight was about to happen. I hid myself and waited, for certainly the police would arrive and I would be able to then go back to my lodgings. I waited for a long time.
I was in an unknown country. There were long avenues full of extremely refined buildings and houses; the streets were larger than life, with carefully planned flowerbeds and gardens. The houses were huge, enormous mansions in modern style – they had straight and geometric architectural traces – though there were no architectural, geographic or historical references which could allow me to discover where I was, after all.
I know “when” I was, however. It was the end of afternoon, but everything was still clearly illuminated by a golden and wet light, as the sunlight behind clouds would look after a soft rain. The smell was also wonderful – flowers and soft herbs that I would like to bottle. I walked so much that the landscape changed. The streets got narrower, without any paving; the houses became shacks. The humidity there took the shape of puddles in the potholes on the streets. I was afraid, for it was getting dark and I still didn’t know where I was and where I was going.
I saw a group of kids playing ball on the street and I noticed they seemed to be speaking Spanish. The father of one of them came to tell them to go home. When this happened, it was already dark. I asked the man, in Spanish, where I was and what time was the next bus getting out of there. Apparently I was in an altered reality: I was in Argentina, but the next bus would take me to Espírito Santo (Vitória) in only four hours. But the bus would only come on the following day, so I went to spend the night in the hotel the stranger had recommended to me.
It was one of those simple, but very comfortable hotels, one of those you don’t want to leave anymore. I had to wait there in order to catch the next bus out of that place. Meanwhile, I called my boyfriend, who was almost like a husband to me. It was an immense comfort talking to someone like that – a husboyfriend, so to speak, someone who was worried about me and made that clear in his speech, someone who loved me and had no scruples hiding it – more than that, someone who wanted to make it obvious how much he cared about me and loved me. At that moment I felt like I didn’t need anything more in the world than that voice.
I was in Japan with my mother. We visited beaches with strange mechanisms – in an area that shrank itself like a funnel, there was a sort of metal net in the shape of an arch – this arch had two extremities made of sieved metal, and it filtered water and sediments at the beach, to prevent the water from advancing over the roads, where there were many cars passing, along the coast. It was as if the water wanted to always get out of the place where it “should” be, the wet area designated by men, and that arch-net contraption was there only to keep the water in its appropriate place.
There were multilevel elevators and staircases and escalators – not only to go up and down, but also to go laterally from one place to the other, and diagonally, and all other possible directions at the same time. I was afraid, for there was a huge agglomeration of people around these means of transportation and I couldn’t find my brown bag, which was with my mother. There were hallways and hallways full of people stuck in lines to enter the multilevel elevators and escalators, so I decided to look for my mother from a high place – surely I would be able to recognize her and my brown bag, where all of our documents were – the local people all dressed in the same black suit, carrying black executive briefcases, the women with the same serious medium-length black haircut and the men all with the same short black hair as well. So my mother with her auburn hair would ideally be easy to find. I found her quickly, but not the bag. I thought we might have been robbed, and that it would have been be typical me to be robbed in one of the safest and allegedly more civilized countries in the world. But then I remembered there were stories about people who had lost their belongings in Japan and returning to the place where they had left them, even days later, the objects were in the same place.
With renewed hope, I returned to the city to look for my bag. Finally I found it, but it was in the middle of a sort of convention of young hairdressers. It was a meeting of young learners and masters in dying, bleaching, highlighting and other hair cosmetic procedures, and the masters were there to teach the students how to do them properly. I knew that, in order to be able to get my bag back inconspicuously, I would have to participate in the workshop. As my guinea pig, I got a woman with very long hair in various shades of blonde, and my task was to make her hair all the same light blonde tone. It was much more difficult than it looked and I failed miserably. I didn’t care much about that, for I was more interested in my brown bag. I got it back and checked it to see if everything was there. There were no documents missing, but my debit and credit cards were all messed up.
I decided then to go to a huge mall full of sweets and candy shops. I entered one of the stores and it was madness, trying to pick just one was so difficult; the sweets all looked extremely tasty and delicious, but I chose a set of cakes in the shape of balls, one on top of the other, each ball a different flavor. I started to eat before seeing the price and I saw that it was super expensive – US$ 6.90 each little ball cake. The whole set had six or seven of them. I decided to throw all caution away once and for all and I ended up buying several cakes and chocolates, some from Swiss or Italian brands, with crunchy wafer and soft chocolate; others with natural fruits and organic chocolate; and countless other bonbons and pralines. In the end, the check was US$ 215.90. I had just withdrawn 300 dollars from an ATM but that was to pay for something else, so I decided to pay with credit card. The problem was that I couldn’t find it in my bag. I searched for it desperately but to no avail. The salesman was very understanding and told me to come back to the store and pay for my purchase as soon as I had found my credit card.
Outside the store I continued to search, asking others for help. When I finally managed to find my card, I went to the store to pay what I owed. The salesman, however, was another one, and he didn’t know the correct value of my purchase. He tried to charge me 350 dollars more than what I owed, but I didn’t pay. I told him to verify the invoice, to check the computer sales record, and to talk to the other salesman who was there before him. He couldn’t find the invoice or any record of the purchase in the computer, so I just stayed there waiting for the nice salesman to come back and solve my problem.
I was participating of a competition among women to try and catch the attention of men and get a boyfriend. We went all to a beautiful house, or giant hotel. We were in pairs and there was only one small bathroom, like an airplane’s, to each pair. The objective was to organize makeup in such a way that we could identify the woman through her makeup products and clothes. Of course, I lost all my makeup and had to borrow it from the other women, but they didn’t want to give it to me, because they wanted themselves to be more beautiful than me, so of course they wanted me to stay without any makeup. My roommate didn’t help me either, but I found many products around the bathrooms I was invading and I used the colors that I found. An Asian woman helped me and gave me a blush case that was like a small sticker for nails in the shape of a heart.
We went to a large sward and there many handsome men went to try to find the right woman and the corresponding makeup: the products were strewn around the land and they had to correctly identify which woman had used which product. The women could help, but they didn’t know where their makeup products were – it was like an Easter egg hunt. I was completely at a loss and was dressed in a way that resembled the actress Rachel McAdams in the movie “The Notebook”. There was a very attractive man looking at me, but we didn’t talk, and the game ended.
I went back to the hotel and as I couldn’t find any proper women’s clothes or makeup, I went to a road on the top of a hill. The road was tarmac but the surroundings were dry and wild, with stores on the side of the road. In one of them there were clothes and makeup, but the store was so big that I couldn’t find the correct part: I could only find the men’s clothing section or women’s clothes that were too ugly to wear. I went back to the competition sward and called my mother. She knew the rules of the competition and what would happen next, and she told me to go straight to her hotel.
There I found a multitude of people participating of the competition/convention – it was like a convention in the sense that it exhibited ways to make women more attractive to men, and I stated to get irritated with all that. There were bikinis and one-pieces from Gigi Hadid’s brand and they costed around 200 dollars each, and of course I didn’t have that kind of money to spend on a swimsuit. I saw a woman wearing a sports sweater that looked comfortable – she wasn’t wearing any makeup and her hair was undone, natural-like, so I thought: I will follow her example. I then passed by two very attractive men talking confidentially, but still loud enough for me to hear. One of them was talking about having “fucked” such and such woman and that she was an idiot; the other man agreed and mocked women’s stupidity of thinking that men actually cared about them for anything other than sex. My mind was then decided: I needed to get out of that place. I entered an enormous room that looked like a temple in a hospital, with a sickly peach light. There were many middle-aged women there and a little stage. I went to the stage and started singing. The famous singer Cher was there and made an ugly expression because of my poor singing abilities, and I decided staying there was also not for me. But then Cher stood up and started singing the song “Ain’t Nobody” from Chaka Khan, and I remained there singing and dancing along with all the other weird women.
I was in the USA and I worked at a University like Ashland University in Ohio, in a sector which joined health and security services. I couldn’t understand very well how it all happened, but there had been a very serious accident with my German boyfriend Lennart. A kind of natural disaster had happened at the same time as a car crash, and my boyfriend was involved right in the middle of it all. I ran like crazy through the rooms and hallways of the university – which seemed more like a public office than a university – trying to find people who could give me news. This accident was a very serious problem, because Lennart didn’t have health insurance and was in the United States illegally. Determined to find a solution, I went to the accident’s location and called the police. The officer that responded my call was a friend from Ashland, and I begged him to put Lennart in an Ambulance and take him to the hospital. I waited with my heart beating in my throat: there was nothing I could do except trust my police officer friend and hope for the best.
Lennart came back from the hospital, but he was different. Cold and embittered, he seemed to have taken the accident as a personal insult from the U.S against him, and he began to direct his anger and frustration towards me. He had severely hurt his leg during the accident, and despite all my efforts, the doctors didn’t do all they could to heal it – there was an internal fracture that demanded an expensive and complicated surgery, but the hospital had only put some plaster on it and left it as it was, sending Lennart home. He could walk with crutches, but he was in a lot of pain, not to mention the future perspective of living with a crippled leg for the rest of his life.
I swore I would stand by him and take care of him the best way I could. I put myself to work and research ways to help him, but the coldness with which he treated me started to really annoy me. I knew he was traumatized with what had happened and was only using me as a punching bag for his frustration, but it was impossible not to take this attitude with melancholy and disappointment. I thought I wouldn’t be able to take that situation for much longer, so I decided to worry more about myself. I started going out with other people and, when Lennart saw that I wasn’t going to be always at his disposal, wallowing in unnecessary guilt, he changed his attitude.
The question was that, now, I wasn’t interest in him anymore either. I met men who were more interesting and I saw that it would be a huge waste if I spent my life taking care of an ungrateful invalid. Lennart would have to make some effort in order to get me back, besides taking responsibility, as the mentally capable adult that he was, for his future. Extremely intelligent, he would, without a doubt, be able to work in his area, despite his broken leg. More than that, he found out that the leg could still be fixed, for it wasn’t a hopeless case but something that needed special care and therapy, and that the surgery could be done later on without any immediate bad consequences. I decided, then, to live my life for myself – what the future reserved for me was another matter.
I made a trip to the interior of the state to visit my friend Marianne in C. Along the way I stopped by many cities before getting there. I don’t know how, but I lost half my baggage: my beloved blue suitcase; I stopped in such an isolated and deserted village that I couldn’t find anyone to ask for help. The bus would only pass there again on the following day, so I went out to explore the place. It had an arid, monotonous natural landscape and I was stricken by a desperate boredom. I finally got out of there and reached the place where Marianne was. But on the way I lost more of my baggage so that now I had almost nothing. There was a sort of convention in the city that was causing chaos. I needed to participate in this convention, because there was going to be an auction of home-made chocolates and I had still many with me; selling them was the only way to recover my fortune and claim my baggage. But there was a pre-selection of the participants of the auction, and I had not qualified: all candidates should have experience in retail sales, and I had none. There were still two days until the auction, so someone suggested to me that I worked at the city’s shopping mall to get the necessary experience.
Marianne herself tried to convince me, but I wanted to walk around and meet people at the convention. There were many women who worked in the healthcare industry, by the way they were dressed. Each group had a different uniform and there were very few men. Among them, were my arch enemies Victor and Voldemort – the devil himself. He managed to defraud the auction so that I couldn’t sell my chocolates. There was a kind of public ritual and I fought alone, with no help from either Marianne or my own mother. Finally I managed to sell my chocolates, for they were exceptional and I would earn a lot of money with them, but with the joint efforts from Victor, Voldemort and even my own mother, they managed to trick me and with false documents they took all my money.
In the worst moment of my life, I was without my luggage, no friends, rejected even by my own mother and without money to eat. And my chocolates had disappeared, and I had no materials to produce more. I found some people who were also travelling and had lost their suitcases – they were my last comfort. These strangers were together and put me under their wings. With all that had happened I was still fighting and surviving, but that could not go on: Victor and Voldemort were determined to destroy me completely, and sabotaged the vehicle I was going to ride in to cause an “accident”. Even more, they legally restricted the kind of assistance I could get in case of an accident, claiming I was so poor that I wouldn’t have the means to pay for any treatment and it would be better if the doctors just left me for dead. They managed to even manipulate my mother so that, when she visited me in the dingy and dirty hospital room I was in, declared herself bothered by the fact that I had survived and complained about the fact that the responsibility to pay for my medical treatment had ended up on her shoulders
When healed, I finally left that horrible place. But back to the city, I still couldn’t find my luggage. I had to find and force the bus driver to stop the bus and open the luggage compartment so that I could look for my blue suitcase. It wasn’t there, but I wouldn’t give up so fast: I kidnapped the bus and put a gun to bus driver’s head to make him look again for my luggage. Finally someone found a blue suitcase, but it was different from the one I had lost and was looking for. So I gave up, left the city, and went to live on the beach without material attachments.
There was a house, and in it were many of my acquaintances. They were making a sort of festive reunion. There was alcohol and games, and the rooms and other areas of the house were large and dark, giving a sensation of loss of direction and vulnerability to me, but offering great opportunities to any of the other guests. An old crush of mine was also there and for a moment I saw myself wishing he would show interest in me and would ask me to get out of there with him.
There were many women in the party. In fact, there were only girls, with one or two exceptions. None of them was, however, my friend. I had nothing in common with any of them, but at first they looked nice and receptive. They insisted that I should drink, eat and stay there the rest of the night with them. I saw myself suddenly uncomfortable, without any apparent reason, except maybe the exaggerated solicitousness with which they treated me. I looked for a way out, but the house was like a labyrinth. There seemed to be no windows. The man I liked vanished from sight, and one of the girls pointed me to a room with the door slightly ajar – I could glimpse a dark, ugly and poorly decorated interior, full of mattresses, couches, blankets and soft pillows, as if left there specifically for the guests that wanted to sleep (or do other things) there.
Despite the mattresses, blankets and all that, the atmosphere in the room was sinister. The girl who indicated the room to me contributed to this sensation, telling me the boy I was interested in was inside the room with the youngest of the women, who wasn’t even 18. That seemed to me like a bad omen, and with that I decided that that environment wasn’t safe for me, though I had felt a strange feeling even before getting there. The only door I found – the same door through which I had come in – was locked, and I then went to ask the woman who owned the house to let me out. In this moment, the women’s evil intentions became clear: they had called me there just for the pleasure of locking me up, insulting, mocking, frightening and psychologically tormenting me. In a tone of mockery, despise and false pity, the owner of the house – a fat, dark woman full of tattoos and dressed like a hippie – started to point out all my most intimate defects, deepest flaws and paralyzing fears, and also to enumerate all of my wrong past actions of which I am most ashamed of. She emotionally undressed me with cruel words, revealed fears of whose existence I hadn’t even been aware until that point, all that while using the words that hurt the most. My stupidity, my foolishness, weakness, hesitation, shyness, and mostly my incapacity to hear my own inner voice of caution, my natural instinct of self-defense and conscience of self-preservation – these inner voices I simply ignored, on innumerable occasions, for meager and invalid reasons: fear of unpleasing others, fear of not being accepted, of being rejected, fear of causing a social deadlock, fear of being alone – she showed it all to my face and laughed at me for it.
Yes, these are fears worthy of attention and consideration. But not to the point of justifying my own downfall, the manifest rejection of the Self, the ignorance of the internal voice that guides me and serves me as a shield against evil. It is always at my service, always bringing me security and self-preservation, avoiding dangers from an outside source – and maybe from the inside too. This inner voice should be heard as if it were my “Knight in Shining Armor”, ready to put itself between me and any source of danger that might show up along the way.
I went to a rock festival with my ex-boyfriend Phillip. The festival was in an enormous area separated from the rest of the city by a great river or lake near the ocean – the only way to access the festival site was by taking a huge turn with the car or, more quickly, taking a boat from the small harbor in the city. The harbor was a kind of pier or wharf for medium to small sized vessels, and it stretched itself for some meters. It was a picturesque and calm place, perfect for spending some hours observing the coming and going of the clear blue waters, the sound of the seabirds, the dim and blurry horizon in shades of orange and pink in the distance, the soft mixture of the urban and coastal landscapes.
Phillip and I went to the festival booth to buy tickets and organize our accommodations. I was pregnant and couldn’t camp locally as most of the festival goers would, for it would be too uncomfortable. Despite the fact that I couldn’t drink or participate in orgies or whatever other crazy thing the festival goes would do, I really wanted to see the concerts, talk and make merry with the participants of the festival – which were a blend of musicians, heavy metal lovers, the maladjusted of various kinds, and beer fanatics. The event would, in fact, combine gigs from famous metal bands (thrash, death, folk) and several local craft breweries.
We bought our tickets and found many old acquaintances already preparing themselves for the festivities, setting up tents at the immense outdoor pavilion that stretched itself in front of the food and drink stands and kiosks. The stages were small, under white awnings and not very elevated. After talking a little to the people who were there, and seeing how drunk and drugged they already were, I wasn’t willing to utilize the facility’s available accommodations anymore, even though I really wanted to see the concerts. That’s when I remembered my mother had an apartment in the city and that it would be much safer and comfortable, though, for us to lodge with her.
Phillip and I went, then, to her apartment. It was small, but very comfortable, and my mother was very happy to see and receive us. The only problem was the distance to the great pavilion where the gigs were held. From my mother’s house, it would take some time to get there in usual circumstances; with the festival and the consecutive rise in traffic, we could already count on a longer period for getting there. We would have to leave even earlier than usual so that we didn’t miss the most awaited gigs.
Finally, we arrived at the festival. It was already dark, but the liveliness and happiness was contagious. A band started to play – it was a classic thrash metal band that would make anyone bang their heads to the rhythm, go off kicking shins and want to start a fight. But I had to think of my baby, and I didn’t do any of that – though I really felt like it. Phillip had gone off to drink with his friends, but as I had found a group of women who seemed nice, I didn’t care much about it. The women were not smoking or drinking in excess, and they hadn’t used drugs, apparently. But one of them was a priestess of Lucifer and she promised to help me find a husband. She had a small figure similar to Saint Antony, but it was in fact an image of a nun holding delicate white and pale pink flowers, like lilies. The priestess ordered the figure that it give me a husband, and to make sure it would obey, she twisted a piece of thread around the neck of the nun, tightened it, and then twisted another one around the image’s feet, hanging it upside down. The nun figure, however, moved and came back to its original position standing up – it was still holding the flowers, while the priestess had ordered it to let the flowers go.
The nun seemed very reluctant in obeying the priestess. I was afraid of the powers we might have unleashed in that moment, but the satanic priestess was not. She, on the contrary, was determined to subjugate the holy nun figure by the powers of the Devil. She started speaking in Latin in a hoarse, deep voice, very unlike her normal one, as if possessed – and with that, the nun figure moved, the white and pale pink flowers became black and withered, the lights went off, the sky closed itself in thunder and lightning, the wind threw over chairs and tables, tents and stands, and I was terrified and screamed and I shrank and hid myself.
As fast as it had begun, the phenomenon stopped. The nun figure went back to normal, but I was still very frightened. Lucifer’s priestess was, however, very calm and composed – she smiled and her face was bright. She guaranteed to me that the Devil was on my side and would help me, and that I didn’t need to be afraid because everything would work out fine. In this moment, Phillip showed up and took me away from there – worried about me and the baby, I thought that maybe he would be the husband Satan had found for me. This perception gave me piece of mind, because I saw that my mother wanted the same thing, and I thought it wasn’t important if God or Lucifer had interceded on my behalf, as long as someone cared about me enough and had the power to cause thunder and lightning like it had happened when the priestess performed her ritual. This power had acted in material reality and it was on my side.
So much so that, with time, Phillip seemed to attach himself more and more to me and my baby, and finally, he made it clear with a formal proposal. The great mystery was, however, the identity of the father of the baby. I never got to find out.
In another space and time, I was travelling with my friend Helen. It was an artistic trip of police investigation – I was an assistant and helper and Helen was the detective. She had infiltrated, undercover, in several criminal organizations along History with the use of a time machine. She was in dire straits, and I didn’t know how I knew this – I only knew I had to infiltrate myself in the same organization in order to save her.
Things got more complicated when I noticed that, with each level of infiltration that Helen reached in an organization, more did she personally involve herself with the criminals. The trip back in time went back even to the Viking Age, and every 100 or 150 years Ellen had a new visit to make to the past, so that she could, at that moment, solve some mystery. Finally, in this great voyage that took about 1000 years, we arrived at the last stage. It was the 30s in an area of the USA completely dominated by Al Capone’s criminal organization. Helen, dedicated to her work, had approached the criminals and involved herself in her undercover life to such a point that she actually ended up pregnant by one of them. The problem was that it was a high risk pregnancy, and she was desperately trying to come back to the future, so that she could have access to modern technology to save her life and the baby’s – but she couldn’t. The time machine didn’t work anymore. So, I was sent to try to solve the problem.
There was a university and I disguised myself as one of the students. There were, however, many artists there producing psychedelic paintings and drawings, and I couldn’t do the same drawings as they could, even though we were taking the same art course, so they almost discovered my real identity. A group of women from the artists group approached me and tried to seduce me and drug me, but I resisted, and I found out Helen was locked up in a hospital wing under the command of the mafia criminals. They had discovered that she was a detective out to get them, but they didn’t want to kill her yet – they were waiting for her to die naturally in childbirth, which would solve all their problems. Helen was wearing one of those blue tunics sick people wear in hospitals, and the nurses were also wearing blue. They were good nurses, but they didn’t know how to help her. There were no doctors in sight. I went to her, crying and desperate – we were both very distressed with the situation. She gave me a CD that contained the key of the mystery of how to return to the future. Helen had no means of accessing that CD at the moment, for we were in the 1930s, but she trusted that I would be able to do something. I was her only hope of getting the time machine fixed, bringing her back to the future and saving her life.
I went to Helen’s real life boyfriend’s house and there I found the necessary equipment. I put on the CD and started to listen. With that, the artist students who had found out I was a fraud caught me and prevented me from fulfilling my mission.
I was at work and I had a relationship with a superior – he was actually the company’s owner. While at work, however, our treatment of each other was strictly professional, and I knew that I owed my position in the company to my own professional merits and not to any personal preference from the part of the boss, which just happened to be my boyfriend.
One day we were in a restaurant where the other company’s workers usually had lunch, and my boss-boyfriend and I were there together. I went to get some salad: lettuce and tomatoes, and I noticed there was something wrong with it. It looked very solid, and as if by magic, tiny forks and knives appeared in it, perfect miniatures of pointy and sharp metal silverware hidden in the middle of my salad. It was very strange and disturbing, because nobody else found these tiny and dangerous silverware items on their plates – it seemed to be only me. At the moment I thought it was probably just a joke, and I started to try and separate the tiny forks and knives from the rest of the salad, so that I could eat my lettuce and tomato. I managed to do it quite well and thought it was safe to eat it; but at the first touch of the salad in my mouth, I felt a horrible taste of pure vinegar and a burning sensation in my mouth – and again, only my salad seemed to be so altered. I reached the conclusion that someone was sabotaging my salad to seriously hurt me.
Seriously hurt me because – and my boss-boyfriend had also noticed – I had almost put the salad in my mouth without looking at it, for the forks and knives were so small and hard to see. Actually, I only saw those tiny killing instruments because the plate was at a strange angle and my boyfriend messed with my food, stirring it as if searching for something suspicious. That is, if I had, as was the intention of my ill-wisher, eaten that salad without delays, I would certainly have choked and died in a terrible way, with the tiny forks and knives perforating my throat. There was no doubt in my mind that the consequences would have been extreme and brutally lethal.
Shocked, but still incapable of believing in such a crude and obvious murder attempt, I turned myself to my boyfriend. He was very serious and worried, and to my deep relief and eternal gratefulness, he seemed to be taking the sabotage of the salad (and murder attempt) seriously. He didn’t find it funny, nor did he find my reaction exaggerated in any way: he saw first-hand how I had almost swallowed those tiny deadly instruments, which would certainly have killed me; he saw that only my portion of the salad was altered, which suggested that someone must have had the specific intention of hurting ME and nobody else, because his salad was ok. He didn’t doubt me either when I said the salad tasted funny, but he decided to taste it himself to see if it was really dangerous. It tasted so acid and sour that, if ingested in large quantities, it would have caused some damage to my esophagus and stomach.
Fantastic and bizarre though my salad sabotage may be, there was no moment where I was afraid of not being heard or believed, or that my boyfriend would laugh at me or said I was exaggerating, or that he would somehow ignore my distress with the whole situation. I asked him to take me away from there. We searched for another restaurant on that same street, but as far away as possible from the one we had previously been in. However, I had lost my appetite, and so had he. Even though we weren’t hungry anymore, we stopped and got out of the car to stretch our legs while he thought about what to do – it was probably some coworker who was jealous of me and my relationship with the boss that had done it, and he was going to find it out. I could only think of the horror of having narrowly avoided a gruesome, painful and bizarre death cause by the tiny forks and knives, or of even having had ulcers or some other consequence from that acid salad dressing that would affect my health seriously and permanently. It was in this moment that I felt so helpless, so forlorn, unprotected and defenseless because of what had happened to me, that I searched for the strong embrace of my companion. And this embrace was the best thing I had ever felt in my life: it conveyed, with his touch, all the love, affection and protection a person can give another, but especially, all the love, affection and protection a woman could want from a man – it was a pure and divine sensation, a feeling of complete security, as if nothing bad could happen to me while that embrace lasted, and I felt like I always wanted to feel and never had before. The embrace felt like a safety net, a seatbelt, and at the same time made me feel free as if flying like a bird, without any connection to the earth; but in case my wings got tired, I could just fall, because the embrace would be there to catch me, protect me and take care of me, no matter what happened.
I was in B. preparing myself for moving – it wasn’t a big move, since all my stuff fit into a small car. This car was being ridden not by me, but by my boyfriend, Ryan. I was very anxious and worrying myself with many things in this moving situation, the most important one was my little dog, Milka, that was with me and would be taken along with the move. But the car was full of things and I wanted a comfortable place for Milka – she was inside her transport box, but everything in the car was so crooked and messy that it was hard to find a flat surface to put her water and food tray. With all that, Ryan helped me: I was anxious because of this and that, but he never got irritated with me nor showed any sign of impatience: he was helpful and for any problem that showed up, he came up with a solution instead of complaining. Even more than that: he simply did what he knew was going to help me, it didn’t need words, I didn’t have to tell him how to help me or what to do. He seemed to read my mind in the sense that he made himself ready and willing to support me and give me unconditional love in my moments of crisis.
For example, Milka had no water and we were still in the neighborhood where I previously lived. Ryan drove to the nearest market and said he would stay in the car waiting for me, in order not to let Milka alone in the car. I became then distressed because of the mess in the backseat of the car, and Ryan didn’t hesitate in bringing Milka to the front seat, where she, from thirst and eagerness, ended up making a mess with the food and water. I know a lot of “nice” people who would have been irritated with that, or would at least make some passive-aggressive comments. Not Ryan – he just smiled and showed love and affection in his looks and gestures.
The sun had already gone down and I remembered I had to pick up my anxiety medication, and right away Ryan started driving back to my old house. I then explained that they were not there, but that I had the prescription and needed to go to the drugstore to pick it up. Ryan didn’t even blink or complain in any way for having driven half the way in the wrong direction – he had compassion and understanding for my mistakes and flaws. We went then straight to the nearest drugstore, but only then did I realize they were new drugs that would be found only in a very specific drugstore and not probable at all to be found at the local pharmacy. I asked Ryan to stop the car, already nervous, so that I could call the drugstores and find out which of them sold that medication. Ryan stopped the car calmly in front of the local drugstore and said that, if they had the medicine, at least we were already there, and told me not to worry about going in the wrong direction: he wanted me to feel good and find my medication; he said we would go together to whatever drugstore that had my medication: regardless of the time or location, we would find my meds. And he said all that unconditionally – not with phrases like “if it is urgent”, or “if you really need it” – no, it was all straight from the heart. The faster I got my medication, the better I would feel, and that was what mattered to him.
Ryan looked at me with such an expression of love, but also of playfulness and good-humor, smiling without showing his teeth, making his eyes wrinkle adorably – such a jaunty expression, but in no way mocking or making ridicule of my anxiety – no, it was a well-intentioned and good-humored consideration of my anxiety and my quirks, neurotic flaws that made me, in his eyes, more loved and special; strange though it may seem, that was the person he loved, me, exactly as I was. He came in my direction inside the car, and kissed me with a mix of desire and acceptance, a kind of love that is, at the same time, carnal, but transcends matter and makes me feel closer to the divine…
In a city full of modern buildings, a clan of vampires hid themselves living in abandoned manors and tenements. In one of these peripheries, a kind of industrial leakage of toxic components threatened people’s lives. Downtown, in a big building, full of hallways, stairways and passages, I was trying to find my running shoes. Somebody had messed with my shoes and that made me desperate. I finally realized the place was a kind of hospital, for there were many people wearing white and people in stretchers, and there were others running and screaming. Some virus was attacking the population and transforming people in aggressive and dangerous zombies.
From there, I went straight to my family to let them know what was going on. The toxic leakage had reached the town’s central park, and as there was a bog there, it contaminated the water from the whole place. So now the danger was not the zombies anymore, but the end of natural resources: the toxic substance contaminated the water, the earth, plants and animals, and due to their modern lifestyle, cloistered in high-rises and apartment buildings, the people had no way to save themselves. According to the government, the solution was for every family to have their own house and land – using natural methods, the soil would be recovered from the contamination and people could plant their own food and keep animals, and environmental balance would be reestablished.
But of course, not everyone had the conditions to do it. I went after Batman at Wayne Tower, in a room full of gadgets and secret functionalities, and I waited for Bruce Wayne to appear, for only he could help the people in need. He was, however, participating in an event with the mayor. I went after him to that event, but not before sneaking around a bit trying to find the secrets of that technological waiting room. I noticed something strange I couldn’t define, a threat hovering in the air; I was sure something terrible was about to happen. When I arrived at the square where Bruce, the mayor, the police chief, and thousands of other innocent people gathered, there was a big explosion at Wayne Tower; several other small ones in different places followed the big one, and chaos reigned.
I was severely hurt and my vampire friends took me to their hiding place, a huge and ancient country house with boarded-up windows near the woods. The vampires bit me to transform me and I felt an excruciating pain – for three days I remained hidden in the house, away from sunlight and the presence of humans. The pain got weaker and Carlisle from Twilight said that by keeping the house dark and cool, my passage into vampire immortality would be less painful: it was easier to become one of them in the shadows.
When the transformation process was over, I initiated my training. The air became heavy as water, because now I could feel it, really feel it and manipulate it, move it with my hands and feet, in a way that to the least effort I could produce an impulse in the air. I felt light as if I were floating in the ocean; I could jump with such lightness that I even hovered. But unlike water, the air was also so light for me that I could leap from one end of the room and land quickly and weightlessly in the other end of the room. I learned to fly, and now that my training was completed, I was ready to go after the terrorist thugs that had planted those bombs all around my city.
I was on vacation in a beautiful place – there were beaches and an enormous, giant bridge. The city was basically just a port city, but it wasn’t only cranes and containers. There was also a spectacular sunset and a welcoming, warm people. It was summer in the city, but there were also snowcapped mountains far away in the horizon, as if you could have two worlds in one. The city reminded me a little of Panama city, for it was a big center surrounded by skyscrapers, ships and other harbor structures; and the mountains were a little piece of the Swiss Alps near all that.
I was there with my mother, but I wanted to go to the mountains. I found a kind of shack up in the mountain, a warm place where the cold outside could be appreciated with comfort. I liked to open a small window on the roof, almost like a trap door, and let the refreshing snowflakes fall over the warm skin of my face. I also started to feel very alone and wish for a male companion. Almost immediately, he showed up. It was the best sensation in the world, being there in that little mountain cottage with him. He hugged me while we were lying down in bed, holding me in his arms, and I was happy.
But something made us get out of there. We returned to the city and were now in an extremely poor area. We lived in a kind of giant tenement, a place that was a town in itself, with its winding stairs and hallways. It was almost impossible to find my way in that labyrinth. My boyfriend, one morning, wanted very much to ear yoghurt for breakfast. I had no more money and he had gone to work, so he gave me the money, in coins, in my hands, kissed me, and asked me to meet him in front of a place in the city in an area I didn’t know too well. I walked for a while in search of a store that sold yoghurt, but there were none. I found my half-sister along the way. She was a teenager, almost a child – she was half my age. I asked her to buy the yoghurt for me, because she had lived in the city longer than me and would certainly know where to find the right place quickly.
But as soon as I gave her the money, I couldn’t find my way home to the tenement anymore. I decided to go ahead to meet my boyfriend, but it was dark. There were stairs after stairs, and I climbed them all, until I noticed: I found the tenement, but it had transformed itself into a whore house decorated in a decaying French XVII style. There were still traces of opulence, but it was in general decrepit and falling apart.
As I walked and entered secret corridors, hidden behind tapestries or camouflaged on the walls among old picture frames and peeling wallpaper, I saw many couples in the middle of the sexual act – some in two, some in trios, some in large groups – hetero, homo and pansexuals. There was a woman busying herself with books: she touched herself and delighted herself sexually to lie down amid a pile of books, her naked body panting with pleasure to the touch of the paper leavers. Another woman had the same experience but with the pictures framed on the wall. Nobody seemed to take any notice of me, and if they did, the seemed to not care that a complete stranger was there witnessing those intimate moments. After meandering through the whore house in search of my boyfriend, I couldn’t find him anymore and the money I gave to my half-sister was gone, so I ended up penniless and with no boyfriend.
In a dystopic alternate reality, I was still in love and together with my ex-boyfriend Paul. There was an authoritarian government that imposed gruesome punishments for things as simple as kissing or holding hands in public, and I wanted to run away with him to somewhere else, hide or somehow try to live without fear of the government. I still wanted to live with him, but away from all the violence and atrocity. He didn’t want to leave his family: he was very close to his mother and brother, and he loved his job. But the terror and the violence of the regime made me really sick, and our relationship reached a crucial point: we wanted different things.
Now this is where things get crazy: we were still together when I got pregnant. Then it became more urgent than ever that I got away from the city and went into hiding. I left Paul and went to a place in the middle of the woods. It was a kind of hippie resistance against the government and its violence, and I started to live there. I made many friends, but even there I lived in fear, for the world was going through a fertility crisis. That meant that I and my unborn child were targets of kidnapping attempts. I was finally captured and taken to a secret facility where tests and experiments were conducted on humans by nameless and faceless doctors. There were there other people with “special powers” as well. Apparently, being able to conceive a healthy fetus was an extremely rare capacity nowadays, and I didn’t know how to protect myself and my baby without causing damage to ourselves, for if I tried to fight to escape, I could hurt the fetus or end up hurting myself and consequently cause damage to the baby.
But I couldn’t just do nothing! I was desperate. Time went by and I was already pretty far along in the pregnancy, which made any attempt of escape even more difficult. One day, locked in my metallic-walled, windowless and cold room, I noticed a noise from the outside: the scientific experimental commission had come for me. I had no way of knowing if they were my allies or not, until I opened the door. It was a risk that I took, because the door was usually locked from the outside, but not today. I sneaked and peeped through the door gap and saw a group of scientists with weapons coming in my direction. I managed to lock the door right away, but they threw the door down. I looked for weapons in my room but couldn’t find any, but there was a pot of hydrating lotion in the bathroom. It was large, and I put it inside a sock and I decided I would shove that up the ass of those evil scientists as revenge, even if I were caught.
But before that, my body and mind separated, or I separated myself into two different persons. I kept holding that improvised weapon behind the bathroom’s door to catch the scientist unawares – that was my point of view. But my body was also standing near the room’s door, with an expression full of hate, and my point of view suddenly changed. I realized then there was some dark magic going on, because the pregnant woman fighting her captors would never be me: I would never have the courage for that, risking two lives. So I realized my most reckless personality traits had been left in the pregnant woman’s body. The other woman (the one near the room’s door and who wasn’t pregnant) was now the real me, but my appearance changed completely. However, the baby was still my daughter, and I never forgot her. I couldn’t do anything to have her back, but I could observe from a distance. Paul’s family didn’t understand a thing, of course. All they saw was me disappearing while pregnant, and another woman (still pregnant) showing up, so they decided to just accept this new woman as Paul’s new girlfriend and assumed I had died.
But I was right there, praying so that everything turned out alright. I didn’t have my belly anymore, because through some scientific procedure (or dark magic) this new woman became a surrogate to finalize the gestation of my daughter. Finally, she was born, very well and healthy. Everything seemed alright between this woman and Paul, and she looked like a good mother. I decided the best thing to do was just observe from afar, because I didn’t want to disturb my daughter’s family life, and they really did look happy.
Meanwhile, I became an investigator for the hippie resistance: I wasn’t afraid of anything, because I knew the people I loved were safe. Time went by and I found a video of many events in the life of my daughter on the internet, like birthdays and other celebrations. But there was nothing very recent and it looked like Paul’s new girlfriend (the surrogate woman) had gone off by herself. I was desperate, because I couldn’t find my daughter: she had also disappeared. My only option was to go after Paul’s family, for they loved the little girl very much and would certainly protect her.
I found Paul’s mother inside a big bank hall – she worked for the new regime, just like Paul. The new regime was extremely authoritarian, but protected children above else. Paul’s mother guaranteed that Isabela (my daughter) was ok. She was hidden in a city called Little Vale on an isolated farm and protected by a special branch of the new government, for there was still a lot of violence and death around, even though the old government had been replaced. Still at the bank, I saw Paul coming straight to me and we hugged like it was the last time we could ever hug each other. I asked him for forgiveness for having disappeared while pregnant and he asked for forgiveness for not having come with me. I asked what had happened with him and his new girlfriend, and he said she didn’t want to stay with him anymore and just left. He said he stayed with her just because he wanted to give our daughter a safe and familiar environment to our daughter.
It was very strange, because he knew the baby was MY daughter with him, not the other woman’s. I was so relieved, but still very anxious about Isabela. It had been Paul who had managed to find a safe place for her through his government contacts. Paul swore me eternal love and we kissed in the bank’s lobby in front of everybody, which was forbidden. Paul’s supervisor saw it and wanted to fine him, with a large amount that would be deduced from his salary. But I didn’t know about this rule and interrupted the supervisor, and said it was my fault and that she should punish me and not him. But she only made the fine smaller, and applied a bigger fine on someone else who was also doing something that was not allowed.
I was desperate to see Isabela. We couldn’t just turn up at that farm house because we could be followed and compromise her safety, so we devised a plan on how to get to her in secret, to visit her at least, and take her away with us somewhere safe, if possible.
I was in my old home in B. It was the same house, but now other people also lived there, people from an extremely arrogant family. The back garden was full of plants and trees and even animals, and I found two or three kittens. One of them was bigger and had grey stripes. The others were small and black. My mother still lived there in the house, but she had no power or influence over the authoritarian family that now lived there and seemed to rule over us all. It was a matter of money and work, and since I had none at the moment, I was allowed to live in my own house as a favor. To make things even worse, the family’s matriarch (obviously not my mother) was very controlling and considered everything I did wrong or bad – all my actions were watched, analyzed, weighted and criticized, from the time I went to sleep and woke up, the time I ate, went to the bathroom, and even the way I took care of my cats.
I put up with all that stoically until the damn old woman told me to hide or get rid of my cats. Of course I would never let them go or kill them, but I couldn’t keep them in the house normally anymore. The big grey tabby, then, stayed in the streets and I left him food every day, though I was very afraid something bad would happen as he wasn’t neutered. The two small black ones I started to keep in secret inside of boxes and drawers. Whenever that damn witch was around I had to close the boxes and drawers, leaving them alone in the dark, and that broke my heart.
Little by little, that authoritarian family became richer and more powerful and moved out to a large property in the country. I went with them and took my cats with me, and they had a good life prowling around the ranch. I started to work at commercial operations in the family business, and through a good and trustworthy work performance I was able to acquire honor and prestige inside the organization. That was how I discovered the creepy and horrible details about the origin of the fortune that supported us: illegal activities like drug trafficking, arms dealing, prostitution and even child exploitation. Several companies, malls, and other buildings like hospitals and universities had been created to facilitate the money laundering from these evil and illegal operations.
Such was the involvement of the family business in the local economy and politics, that police investigations would rarely follow through due to lack of witnesses and evidence – people’s fear was bigger than their will to do good. But of course that I, frightened though I was, would not let that hellish family dominate me. My deep hate for all of them, but especially the bosses – the mother and the father – the infernal couple who oppressed and humiliated me so much inside my own home and who offended and mistreated my animals – made me want to make sure they were going to pay for these offenses, and I would be the one to execute justice.
Through my growing power and influence over the family mafia, I was able to collect evidence that, taken to the police, would imprison the organization’s bosses for a couple of hundreds of years. Among the crimes of “my” family were torture, murder, kidnapping, assault, rape, sexual abuse of minors, not to mention white collar crimes like fraud, money laundering, racketeering, conspiracy, drug trafficking, among many others. Loaded with documents, recordings and other legally allowed forms of record keeping, I filed a report to the authorities. The powerful couple was indicted and arrested and I didn’t feel the need to enter witness protection as a way to prevent attacks from the other members of the family who would want to hurt the informer. I was extremely careful so that I was not a target of suspicion, taking care to delete every piece of evidence that connected me to that case.
But of course, things were not going to end so easily: the powerful couple was in jail, but they were remotely managing the search for the mole with the help of corrupt cops and ruffians who were able to avoid being legally implicated in the gang’s criminal actions just by living completely off-the-grid. Thus, a hunt for the person who had betrayed them began from jail. The betrayer would be made an example of: he would be in such a way hunted, brutalized, violated, tortured, and killed, and his lifeless body would be in such a way desecrated, humiliated, defiled and divided, that not even his own mother, nor the coroner would be able to recognize or identify him.
I was perfectly conscious of what I was doing and I knew that if I were found out, it would be better to kill myself quickly and painlessly, because if captured alive, I would suffer so much pain that my spirit would never rest. I had knowledge about one of the last projects developed by the satanic couple and it was a medical laboratory full of material and human resources, and among them, was a doctor who specialized in keeping alive “patients” in extreme pain and agony through the use of stimulant drugs, which however had no painkilling effect. Another such project was an innovative technique that allowed the brief resuscitation of an individual already dead to interrogate him under torture, and so prevent the so-called famous suicidal strategy of enemies that preferred to die before being used as a source of information to the gang.
Though I had in hand a means to kill myself quickly and without pain, I decided to fight: I knew that if I were captured already dead, they would brutalize and defile my body and would try – probably successfully – to revive me so that, totally controlled and dominated, they could try to extract information from me while causing me unendurable pain. But I preferred to do things the old school way: if I was to be captured, I would be captured alive, then tortured and killed. I was ready for this dreadful possibility.
Many times I was almost caught. I walked around town wearing a disguise, but due to the immense presence of buildings and enterprises owned by the family, it was almost impossible to escape from my enemies: hospitals, train stations, elevators inside buildings and even bathrooms, all these places could at a moment’s notice reveal a secret that would completely end my chances of survival.
Finally, I was caught. There were secret compartments behind the walls of elevators, bathrooms and even staircases in the city. Under one of these layers, the cronies from the organization managed to hide themselves and caught me off guard. I was taken to the shed in the same ranch where I had been living for so long. I waited a lot, for my captors needed to first receive their orders. Firstly they didn’t do anything to me. On a certain night, still in the beginning of my capture, I noticed a convoy arriving noisily at the shed: they had caught another informant and believed that he was the responsible one for the dismantling of their criminal empire. I could never have imagined that other people were also fighting and resisting the pressure, contributing to the moral cleansing of the town. But in reality this man had little knowledge about the commercial transactions of the family. This became evident when, after tortured and killed, they decided to use the man as rat lab for the posthumous interrogation and torture. His mutilated body was put in a morgue tray and revived through electroshocks and injections. Though conscious and sensitive to the pain, he couldn’t scream for help nor run away – his members were tied by thick ropes to the metal table. After unnamable tortures, he hadn’t revealed anything very interesting. However, through this, the cronies realized that the responsible for the betrayal was someone much closer to the top of the family, and the only option left was me. And then they started to torture me. They cut and cauterized the tips of my fingers and toes. I didn’t give in. I endured it with strength all the pain and they got nothing out of me except for cursing.
Meanwhile, the boss woman from the couple was released by the police. I managed to escape temporarily and planned a terrorist attack against her. The idea was to kill her in an explosion as she went to the family’s town deposit. There were long corridors and no windows in the deposit as it was actually underground. I removed the central electricity control so that she would stay in the dark. With all the lights out and wearing a pair of special glasses, I killed all her bodyguards with stealth. The old bitch wet herself with fear, and I laughed.
There was a new law in the whole wide world – almost no place was free of it, only the most isolated ones – and these were also the hardest places to live in. Every year, there would be a day in which people could die suddenly by just stepping out the the house on the street or sidewalks. Literally everybody would have to wear boots or shoes with platforms and high heels, like medieval chopines, to put their feet as far away from the ground as possible to protect their lives. If by any chance their bodies touched the floor of the streets, sidewalks and other public places; if you tripped in your own shoes while out of your own house, and other things considered “transgressions” of the rules, like using the telephone, visiting friends, have sexual relations before marriage, and so on – all these would unleash a modern government-approved mechanism, and suddenly the streets would be full of machine-gun fire, missiles, grenades and invisible guillotines.
The most interesting point is that anyone in the vicinity could be a target of the government fire power: if you left your home to see what was going on, even if you were wearing the tall platform shoes, without tripping or touching the ground in any way, you could be hit by the machine-gun fire and die, while one of the “outlaws”, that is, one who wasn’t wearing the protective shoes, by some chance of fate, could be spared and survive by sheer luck. It was, of course, a rule of terror, fear, persecution and resistance. In a period of only 24 hours, the country turned into a war zone.
There was a revolutionary group of friends with great creativity and some strange powers. They were 3 couples and a friend, and all of them had the ability to adapt the nature of the matter of their own bodies. One example: at being hit by a bullet and dying to all effects and purposes, a young lady belonging to this group could live through the body of someone else, as if possessing the other person, keeping her own personality and spirit. Basically, their spirits were immortal and their bodies extremely malleable and atomically flexible, in a way that when their mortal flesh was damaged beyond repair, they could keep rambling around, either invisible or using the shapes of other beings and even inanimate objects, which nonetheless had unusual properties.
There was a monarchic regime going on in the country during all this: the nobles lived in exuberance and wealth, but the new generations of the royal families, watchful for winds of change, fought to bring better life conditions to the people, while advocating ponderation and caution in place of their noble relatives. One of the young men of the resistance group was a descendant of an important Duke called Hugh, a handsome blond youth, and his cousin Ian, who was dark as the other was fair, and both managed to escape the clutches of their royal families and hide in places belonging to their revolutionary friends. During the popular efforts to save innocents from death, diseases and other war calamities, Hugh met his girlfriend, a talented actress, her brother, his girlfriend (a ballerina), and a tall, strong black young man callled Joe, who was also a policeman, his girlfriend Jessica, a dark-haired talented artist, and Ian, who was by himself.
These seven persons went out on the streets during the massacre day helping innocent people, risking their own lives to administer first-aid and take women, children, and the elderly to safe places, besides lying shamelessly to the government officials that went out questioning and bothering innocent citizens that stayed hidden at home. The terror was such that the movie “Bohemian Rhapsody” was acted out in a public square by musicians who wanted to pay homage to Queen and Freddie Mercury, who in reality were HIV positive and had to such a point relegated their lives, that the Russian Roulette that playing out the story in public on massacre day wasn’t such a risk anymore, and they saw it like a game. Bohemian Rhapsody was acted out then by these men, who were mostly homosexual. The show started always with 10 or more musicians, and the crazy part was that, as the story went on and the actors were dying in the most horrendous ways – their heads exploded due to explosive bullets, were decapitated by the invisible guillotines, their bodies perforated by the random machine guns – in the end, there were only four acting musicians left, just like the real Queen. These remaining four were precisely the most talented and wore the tallest platform shoes.
My group of heroes, however, didn’t make use of the tall platforms: just by being outside on the streets you were already breaking the rules, and even if you stayed home, you could be hit by shrapnel or stray bullets, so they just wore regular shoes and tried to help those in need. Our heroes were not afraid, for they knew their efforts were worth more than their individual lives – the collective, for them, always came first. Besides, they believed their immortal souls would meet beyond the circles of the Earth. They didn’t know, however, that they had mutant powers. That was until Jessica got hit by a missile. Everybody cried for her, but suddenly, everyone noticed that a black drag queen had the same personality and gait of the recently deceased artist. Her boyfriend Joe soon realized it was a reincarnation if his beloved. She had been a lively, highly trained circus artist and her vivacious personality could not be mistaken. The couple had then reunited, even in this new configuration: two men, one tall, strong, masculine and protective; the other, slender and feminine, glamourous and boisterous. Despite other people’s prejudice, they were happy, as long as they were together.
I was a neighbor of the revolutionary mutant group of friends and with time I became a member of the resistance against the government as well. I was every day becoming more attracted to Ian and Hugh, the royal cousins. Their elvish beauty was akin to angels and my devotion was likewise, not carnal: I admired them like a devout admires saints, martyrs and other religious idols. In the meantime, the government had changed from an absolutist monarchy to a repressive autocratic dictatorship in line with the military, the same way the monarchy had been in line with theocracy. Weapons, war, violence and death were the new “luxury, privilege and nobility”. What was bad became worse, became nameless. The situation escalated and every year, and new punishments and ways to kill became the norm on massacre day. I was killed and lost my body as it used to be; I became totally invisible and had neither weight nor matter: if you tried to touch me, your hand wouldn’t feel anything, no resistance but the air. But I had a voice and could speak to people through the wind, and I started to fight against the new massacre laws.
Now, being outside on the street and touching the ground was not the only punishable offense: just living in a residential building was a considered a risk. Every year the missiles would be launched from the rooves of these tall residential buildings. They were modern missiles that didn’t harm the building, but released radiation, heat, chemicals and other noxious substances to human beings. Fortunately, not everyone was affected by this. Most people, the resistance included, gathered on top of the buildings to watch the missiles: they were beautiful like fireworks, but could kill in minutes, days or months. The government’s plan was to do some sort of genetic cleansing, so that only the mutants or people with special powers would survive.
Joe and Jessica were the most in-love couple of the resistance group. In one of these attacks, drag queen-Jessica was killed again, and the soul of the circus artist disappeared for a while. When I met Joe again, Jessica had reincarnated on a colorful rubber hoop that shone and moved by itself. The policeman tried to live with Jessica in this unusual way, but as Jessica had reincarnated on an inanimate object, everything went downhill. On another explosion, Joe was hit and the rubber hoop melted, and I thought that maybe that was the end of Joe and Jessica. But they refused to disappear so easily.
One day I was lurking at the window of my apartment, which was in one of the higher stories of the building. I was invisible at the moment, but I knew I would regain material substance with time. From my window I had a good view of the streets outside and I saw Jessica again, not as the drag queen or as the rubber hoop, but as she used to be. I then realized that the mutation was a phenomenon initiated by the attacks on massacre day: explosions, shots, mutilations and missiles were atomic triggers. The mutation was a defense mechanism and if left alone for a while, the original form of the person would go back to normal.
On another day, I saw Jessica again, and she saw me as well, for I was no longer invisible. I decided then to make a party and invite all the members of the old resistance group. There were only a few left, but I called everyone I could find. I felt that if I put everybody together again, that would be a kind of cosmic ritual that would align the universal forces and bring about world peace. We were mutants, after all.
In the party, Joe arrived accompanied by his new girlfriend, who wasn’t a mutant like us. Jessica was also there, and she looked just like she was before all the massacre days. Joe was speechless and came to talk to me. I made his new girlfriend go away, and forced Jessica to stay at the party, because as she saw Joe with another woman, she cried with disappointment. Joe had seen Jessica melt away back when she was in the form of the colorful rubber hoop, this thinking she had really disappeared for good, and had decided to try to move on with a normal (non-mutant) woman. But as soon as they saw each other at the party, emotions ran high. Jessica told him how she had very recently regained her old body back and was working on a new theater company, and from then on, Joe and Jessica were always together.
The picture was of an alternative reality with a mix of 16th century sailing, steampunk attire, future technology and post-apocalyptic problems. The world had come last in the rat race: due to a great natural (and a bit artificial) catastrophe, the planet’s topography has been completely remade – instead of a blue planet with outcropping continents, the Earth was now a ball of water. People lived in ships in a sort of Noah’s Ark attitude, only without the coupling aimed at repopulating the Earth. A few poor, derelict cities on stacks floated above the surface, always under danger of facing complete destruction at the next storm or sea creature attack.
I was in one of these life-saving ships with some aquaintances and friends from High School – Richard, Evan, Ashleigh, Gillian, Louis, and my old sweetheart, John, who was, by the way, dressed as a handsome 19th century Italian Sea Explorer. He wore a beard and with those clothes looked like a perfect literary hero – it goes without mentioning that I was as much in love with him as I used to be in school. We were on a mission to find rare and sacred “earth-forming” elements. The idea was that uniting these materials would reverse the decaying process to which our planet had been submitted, and thus we would be able to rebuild it and save the world.
John had many years of experience as a navigator and explorer and, as such, he was our captain. We were being chased by enemy vessels, so it was of the utmost importance that our captain steered the ship through the rough, eerie and dangerous waters in safety. For this, we all respected and admired John’s abilities, and I loved and admired him even more. In fear of our pursuers, a group of other determined sailors and I decided to stay close to him. He was busy manouvering the rudder and there was still a lot to do with the cording and sails, so I offered some help, though I wasn’t an official member of the ship’s crew and had but the most basic sailing skills.
During a small break, I approached John and asked him how we would be able to outsmart the pursuing ship. He pulled me to his side and pointing with his hand, said that at the moment we were safe, because we were on the “higher ground”. At first I couldn’t understand it – the water shone like a crystal under the sparkling sun and it was hard to see clearly. Finally, with John’s guidance, I saw it: the portion of sea around which our route was set was higher than the farther surrounding area. It was as if we were on top of a mound made of water, and from this vantage point, all the other uneven gaps and elevations could be observed; far away, the ocan’s surface had ripples and rolling hills, just as the lands used to have. Right around us, there were no waves; the sea was as smooth as a mirror. Apparently, the planet’s collapse had also bent the laws of Physics.
Thereon, we looked back and saw a gigantic ship looming towards us like a cliff, right on our tail: we had left the higher ground and could be destroyed at any moment. Suddenly John was back at the steering wheel, guiding us through the treacherous waters and shouting instructions to his trusted seamen. The ship’s civilian passengers were panicking, but I knew that as long as the captain was with me, there was nothing to fear. Finally, John steered us away from the monstruous ship – we were saved.
The following lull brought John and I closer together, and we talked about our adventure. I felt there was a deeper secret underlying our mission, an element of power that influenced all our doings in that forsaken reality: glass. The true nature of all elements could be seen through a glass door that appeared, evanescent as a ghost, at determined points of the ocean’s surface, according to the convergence of energetic cosmic rays and magnetic forces. The glass door projected a reflection on the water, through which passed only the true essence of matter. As we were sailing over water, I expected to see, when the magical glass door appeared, some blue blubbles or even its chemical structure. But then there was nothing: the reflection simply wasn’t there, though I could still see the glass door. It was like travelling in a blue-tinged, light-splashed vacuum. Were we really sailing through nothing? Could this really be the answer?
It turned out glass was one of the rare earth-forming elements we were seeking on our quest. It wasn’t conspicuous, but something precious and mysterious, whose structure revealed wonderful secrets about the truth of existence. John hadn’t told this to anyone else and after a few minutes I noticed a shining disturbance of the atmosphere which denoted another apperance of the magical door. I observed how the glass reflected, instead of the water around us, an unsubstantial nothingness, a colorless gradient that went from crystalline transparency, through various degrees of opacity, until it found the deepest and darkest black, a complete void whithout light or hope. That was the nature of our environment.
* * *
We stopped by one of those decrepit old cities on poles. The place looked utterly abandoned. There were little lame wood huts and eerie, rusty ship hulls lying creepily about, lurking as sentinels of a graveyard. A special force comprised only of women was entrusted with the next step of the world-saving mission: entering the town, searching the room with an element-sensitive probe, and seize the sacred glass – even if it meant encountering resistance. Scared but determined, our little trail-blazing group set out from the mother-ship in search of the glass. In single file, we stepped out of the gangway and caustioulsy proceeded over the rickety wood rafts that served the purpose of streets. The air was close, foggy and dusty even though it was the middle of the day; it felt as if entering the site of a nuclear disaster futher ravaged by violent fire.
Women could spot not only rare elements better than men, but were also more sensitive to paranormal activities. We had, then, bigger chances of finishing the mission sucessfully – that is, finding the glass and taking it back to the ship – and living to tell the story. But at that moment we needed the guidance of the captain, the only man who had dared to leave the ship and enter that accursed place. We bore no weapons save our own hands, a few knives and a baseball bat. We walked slowly. Our instruments started screaming as we pointed them to several decaying wooden huts from left to right, and guided by intuition, each of us chose one and went ahead. As I mentally prepared myself to go, I noticed that John was missing – he was nowhere to be found. I called some collegues to point out this terrible new misfortune, but they couldn’t listen. It seemed like it was left to me to try and save the captain, as well as the world.
I entered the little hut. It was a gloomy place, but the wooden boards that made up the walls filtered the light outside, projecting bright rectangles onto the creaking wooden floor. It looked like a haunted old shed, complete with cobwebbed ceilings, fey atmosphere and threatening noises. Suddenly, several evil creatures with a solid, corporeal appearance attacked me. Like little devils they looked, flying from all nooks and crannies, right at me. I fought them, kicked them and punched them with all my strength, and they were destroyed. Exhausted, my eyes, now accustomed to the dusky light, observed that other beings were materializing – or rather, appearing – out of nowhere into the room. Resembling transparent shadows, towering over me, as dark and diaphanous as the cosmic void, these hellish specters couldn’t be overcome by means of brute force. Only the truest, purest and most honest of feelings could keep them at bay. I thought of John, and I screamed at them: a high, agonized, powerful wail. I opened my eyes and they were gone.
Finally, free to observe my surroundings and complete the mission, a translucent sheen caught my attention: it came from the half-open doors of an old cupboard in a back corner of the hut. Was that another trick, or was it the magic glass that I saw sparkling? Was it calling me to uncover the ultimate mystery, the answer to everything? I listened to my instincts and approached with caution, my body tense in the expectation of something terrible. I pulled the nearest door towards me and there it was: the skeleton woman, a huge feminine form with exposed bones and rotting flesh, a living-dead corpse who feeds on human bodies and souls.
The other women had now finished their search and had had no luck in finding the sacred elements. The skeleton-woman yelled and slowly moved towards me, but I wasn’t afraid anymore; I just waited for it to be over. The noise attracted my companions to the hut and as they saw the 3 meter high ghostly corpse, their hands went straight to their weapons: they would have stabbed the skeleton-woman to pieces right then and there, but I knew there was more about the monster than meets the eye. I stood between them and told them not to hurt it, but they gave it a good beating all the same. As the creature collapsed to the ground, overthrown, all its feminine, rotten and gigantic appearance gave way to a masculine, tall but normal, tired but definitely alive form: it was John. He had been possessed by that evil entity and would soon have been drained of all life. There, on the bottom shelf of the cursed cupboard, I saw the glass. It wasn’t translucent and illusory as I expected, based on the magical glass doors I had seen before, but strong, thick and brown-tinged, like beer bottles in the shape of assay vials.
Gathering all the glass vials I could find, I gave one to each of the women, my fellow explorers, and kept two: one for me and one for John. The women went back to the ship while I stayed with the captain; he was still very weak, and I nursed him until he recovered his strengths. He thanked me for saving his life with so much sincerity and gratefulness that I thought, maybe, the moment had come. He had never made it clear that he liked me, but I felt he did. And whatever the result, I knew I had to say it in order to move on with my life – with him or without him. I told him then, that I had always loved him, that he had always been the one. It felt like opening my chest, taking my heart in my hands and giving it away – it was cathartic. But he didn’t want it: he put my heart back, inside of me, right in the middle, where it belonged.
The Famous Warrior 