Every Thing

It was one of those ordinary afternoons on an ordinary Wednesday after one ordinary frugal lunch, when we appeared into the monochromatically whitty-walled bedroom where everything happened. 

The bedroom, his bunker. A single bed always made with a quilt on it, knitted in painstaking shades of grey (his favorite...color?) on the left side wall, under the indiscreet big double pane window forever opened to the attractive void. A woody scent from the secretaire full of papers, fountain pens and memories, made of deep and intense brown oak. Rough carob-tree bookshelves, upholstering the also whitish wall opposite to the door, crammed with books of every kind, shape and origin, even comics and fancines.

Life, on the flamboyant spine of the books. 

And on the greyed-quilted bed, with the evocative scent of roses from my soft skin.  

And nowhere else.

I sat, crossed legs, on the fragrant cedar-made floor. My splashy clothes, my reddy-blond hair and my amethyst wet lips painting the room. He used to stare at me and whisper with a suspicious voice: “you are a Bansky’s street art”; never knowing if he was also referring to the subversive place I took in his chromophobic room. I glanced at him, letting him know I was there, ready for him. As every single day since the beginning.

Bansky's street paint in Moscow

He took his place in the smelling-like-tanned-leather swivel chair. In his hands, the worn out book he discovered in his latest tour to the book bargain sales in the plaza. “JG Ballard - Crash” written in thin white letters on the cover, outside. Characters practicing car-crashed sexual fetishism, inside. Dystopia and utopia, converging. Everybody using everything. 

I was never sure where he enjoyed placing me.

Among everybody or everything?

But I was definitely sure of one thing: that day was not going to be like the ordinary day it was originally meant to be.

We’ve been dedicating the whole last three early Spring afternoons to submerge into the alienated transgression and eroticism of the author’s twisted mind, with such fascination that we didn’t notice the heavy storm breaking out. I smelled a whiff of wet soil mixed with the smoke coming out from the cup of freshly brewed and tangy coffee in my right hand. Suddenly, a sensuous tickling energy bristled my neck. I never knew how to proceed at this ever astonishing and annoying point of the day. But he always did.

Every single darnned time.

The setting of the gamy wrecked car merged with her, the female character, aroused him. He never denoted annoyance when dread and excitement mixed in an acidic sadistic scene. That should have been a clear pulsating signal for me, but it used to take me an eternal moment to realize what he was made of.

Or how I was made of.

And knocking on wood was not an alternative for me. 

Although I was surrounded by it.

With diffuse interruptions and not knowing how we got to this point, we were on the bed; my skin, oozing a syrupy bouquet over the tangy quilt; my mouth, tasting spicy. The lilting sound of the watery raindrops, plaintively hitting from the falling-down heavy-dark-grey sky, sketched a formless salty drawing on his back. Now, he himself has become an abstract-expressive painting contrasting with my colorful canvas and my seasoned sweat. Everything (including myself?) seemed to be in the right place, at the right time. 

As every single evening of every single Wednesday for the last twenty four months. 

Only this time I sensed my guts howling. 

He looked into my eyes with a freezing glance. Right away, he closed his eyes tight while breathing in my peachy neck. He started muttering something I wasn’t able to distinguish at all.

His gnarled mind, where I was created two years ago, became a blasting chaos, full of chinks, clanks and clinks. My mind, fused with his, turned confused. The storm was babbling in my ears, making me dream of my so-long awaited deliverance from his holographic world where I was thought up to be his toy. I was praying for him to shut out all his thoughts about me, to annihilate my fantastic and impossible appearance, to revoke my existence. 

All of a sudden, a new sports car was figured out in his mind. He transformed me into the main character of that horrifying story and crashed me against his inventiveness. I crackled and ripened and perfumed the air with my essence of fragrant breath, bright colors, and roaring sounds. I became a smoky presence, full of chocolate smells and creamy flavors. I flew through the bedroom, that bedroom, his bunker, and landed at the corner of his wildest dreams of cars, women and crashes. I turned voluptuously bittersweet and evocative and intoxicating. I became flesh and blood and bones. 

I became real. 

By the door, standing up naked in front of him, I sentenced:

“I’m a Bansky’s street art. I’m alive. I’m colorful. I don’t belong here”. 

And I left.

Forever.

Cyndi Viscellino Huergo 2020© Todos los derechos reservados

Reality sucks

"One hundred and sixty-nine", she wakes up counting the days, first thing on her mind before even opening her eyes. Her daily routine since the beginning of this nightmare. 

She gets up and switches on the fully automatic coffee maker. It is bright, trendy, silver-plated with some futuristic matt black lines. Her eyes stare at the device; she remembers buying it the day before the improbable yet feasible outcome in which the world turned around. So many months saving money to get this perfect morning mate! It was undoubtedly the best choice for a companion since Bryce died away from her life. And it was, clearly, a whole lot easier to understand. 

It has only two buttons: the classic "on-off" button and another that has to be used "only for resetting", a little round prominence in the rear with an unreadable inscription; the brochure stating it in a bafflingly warning way. She only used it once the very first day, just to try it, when she connected the electric pot. "There is nothing to reset, anyway", she told herself out loud checking its functionality that very first time.

While looking at the grains being crushed and pulverized, smelling the first drops of intense delicious scent falling off the beak, her mind starts to dazzle. Literally. A bright blue light stains everything all of a sudden, startling her and making her waver. 

 ("WTF...?")

 The light disappears as lively as it showed up.

She remembers having that same sensation one hundred and seventy days ago when going to bed that night. The day after, the inapprehensible waited for her and the rest of the planet outside.

Ever since, her life became a humdrum sequence of boredom. Unable to leave her house due to the deadly atmosphere derived from the gigantic meteor that impacted in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, alone and with no friends or acquaintances nearby, she had to get used to keeping on existing, online: buying, making errands, meeting, working, studying, dating, surviving. Unexpectedly fast, she got used to wearing slippers and sports clothes all day long except when some business meetings are scheduled. By the way, those meetings? They are turning into social gatherings where everybody brings up their nervousness, undue personal problems, and apocalyptic terrors on the table without taking care of what she or somebody else may need. Or want. Or wish. 

She still supposes that this catastrophic event would change people, but only a few began to behave more empathetically. Almost six months passed by and mankind still thinks everything is going to get back to normal, whatever that means. 

As for her, she has a terrible rash from time to time in the middle of her chest. She thinks it is due to the meteoritic dust, spread in every corner of every place on earth. Or it may be because of Bryce and his cowardly manner of leaving behind her humanity, not even asking if she was still alive. Days and nights have no other meaning than pursuing an endless loop of nonsense, awaiting for a strange newness to shake her existence in some way. In any way.

The last drop of aromatic coffee sinks in her cup and takes her out of the trance. The coffee machine spits some other unexpected little drops but they are weirdly light blue, not black. A minute later, it makes the distinguishable sound of fulfilling its duty. 

She unfolds her arm, takes the cupful, and smells the hot steamy infusion. Something is not right. She gingerly wets her lips and, while sipping an unflavored coffee, she thinks: "Well, maybe it's time to use that little button at the back, for real." 

She turns the device, touches the surface at the bottom to detect the tiny protuberance. "Was it so hard for the manufacturer to put a clear and legible sign here to show where the button is?", she moans to herself. "Oh, what the hell, I can't find it!" She keeps on caressing the coffee machine with the same attention she used to toy with Bryce. "Finally! Here you are, little bastard". 

Smoothly, she pushes the button. A bold sound thunders the air but...nothing else happens.

One hundred and sixty-nine days. Boring, chaotic, uncertain everyday life. Resigned, she throws away the liquid of her cup in the sink, prepares the machine for a new round and takes a magnifying glass to read the condemned miniaturized letters at the back of the coffee pot.

 They consigned in italics: "Reset only if reality sucks."

 (What the heck...!?)

Cyndi Viscellino Huergo 2020©Todos los derechos reservados