KNOW OF ME
Relja Antonić (Serbia)
There
was once a girl.
No, I wasn’t in love. I was ten. I knew her the way none of you
people knew your wives: her heart, and, if this accursed world was different, I
could say we were friends. But we were not, as we met only a few times – enough
to cry about each other’s suffering, not enough for friendship.
I am writing this because I know I’ll die soon. I find Myself
tired, toothless and having a job I’ve never asked for. As my final hour nears,
I ask myself why I not hung myself the same day I turned eleven. All because of
her!
My bucktooth ginger father was a slave trader. The slave trader –
the chief! His red hair bestowed upon us new names – the Red Devils. But I was
born a Devil on the warm shores of the new lands, and I have never seen the Old
Country until I turned eighteen. He got married there, sired Me, and decided
about My horrible destiny.
I knew their native tongues. They spoke to me.
She said they learned, because the Red Devils were coming once a
week, for four decades. I asked: “Who are the Red Devils?” For ten years, I
have never seen fellow child wine veloured skin – only adults: angry,
humiliated and savagely looking.
We played. We were happy. I thought of her as of a puppy I never
had – just now, as I am old and about to die, I think of her as of an actual
human being.
Her uncle sold her five days before My birthday. We cried, hugged,
I held her hand, and she asked me:
“Red Devils know how to write, right? Please, write about Me. I want people to know I’ve lived.”
CONFESSION
Armando Azeglio (Argentina)
“Truth is a necessary impossibility, my son,”
the priest pronounced, carving each word into the air. The scene caught my
attention. It seemed to allude far more to the world of the Greek Fates (those
who spin, wind, and cut) than to a Christian epiphany. Not only because he was
handling a rope in his hands (as if it were a spinner’s serpent), but also
because the phrase sounded more like Zeno of Elea than Aristotle.
Suddenly, the priest jumped onto a cubicle whose surface was polished
like a mirror. “Be careful with parts when they cannot be integrated into a
whole; one can fall into something like a cosmic embarrassment.” Having said
this, he ran the rope over a beam that crossed the room lengthwise. Night fell.
His body remained suspended by the neck.
I did not wish to probe into his story. Nor did I wait for absolution.
He took her in his arms and savored her as if
she were ice cream.
“What are you doing, doctor?” shouted the guard from the right side
outside the glass-walled cell.
The doctor quickly let go of the creature. He hurried toward the exit.
“Nothing, I was just doing a bit more research. These
extraterrestrials…”
“No one is supposed to be here after 7:00. I’m required to log the
incident.”
“Don’t do that, wait… You could have one just like it,” said the doctor,
showing him the car keys.
“But you promise that—”
“It’s late. See you tomorrow.”
“We’re alone. I’m next,” said the guard.
The creature turned red and orange.
“Yes,” she replied.
The colossus bound to the Chair of
Interrogation could barely hear the voice of the Grand Inquisitor, who
mercilessly demanded his confession.
“Wretched sorcerer, you have told lies so fantastical that even an
infamous sinner would have kept them to himself! Know this: we have captured
your accomplice while she was trying to throw a bag of strange greenish stones
into the river.”
Panic seized the accused. Luisa had failed! That was how they had been
able to capture him and torture him savagely.
The inquisitor displayed the sack containing that dangerous radioactive
mineral, whose destruction had been entrusted to his beloved. Everything was
lost…
“What are these stones? An infernal offering? Answer!”
But the prisoner had fainted.
A cleric approached gently: Tomás de Torquemada was in a foul mood.
“He will confess eventually! Many have seen the sorcerer perform
physical feats: floating through the air, freezing the waters of the lake with
his breath, and shooting fire from his eyes. Read the Confession Record, Friar
Gilbertus!”
“He confesses that he came from a planet on the verge of exploding, that
his parents placed him aboard a flying vessel that crashed in the countryside,
where he was raised by a pair of peasants. He insists that a cosmic accident,
or a miscalculation, must have hurled him into the wrong century, and that his
powers come from the sun…”
“They come from Hell! What more proof do we need? Burn him at once, as a
warning: the Church will not tolerate pagan supermen!”
Friar Gilbertus blessed the fallen giant. Bad times for heroes,
he thought.
Children playing at Calvary. They have
everything ready: the two beams, the hammer; the nails are scattered on the
grass. They wonder which one of them will be Jesus. None of them agree. A few
crowd together and ran toward one of the younger children. The boy chosen to be
Jesus jumps up, wants to run, but the others grab him and throw him to the
ground; he writhes in fear, confused, as he is dragged to the crossbeams. They
argue for a while about where to drive the nails: into his palm or his wrist?
They decide on his palm, and the hammer strikes. Jesus screams. One of the
older boys kicks him.
"Stop screaming! You'll be resurrected in three days anyway."
He writhes, drenched in sweat, among damp
sheets that cling to his body; he and they intertwine, coiling into a tight
embrace of serpents. Delirium has finally triumphed over dreams, and idiotic,
unnecessary hope disappears. Six hundred and sixty-six threads of Egyptian
cotton soak up his fertile fever, transmuting into flesh, skin, and that hair
like a breeze. Once again, the pressure against her firm warmth, and the
perfume that tastes like everything. With the painful grunt with which beasts
cry, he sinks into her. And after the desperate fire comes a cool April
drizzle.
Now he dives peacefully into the black waters of the cenote, among
jellyfish like lemon gelatin.
Here and there, greenish phosphorescent skulls surface from the sediment
covering the dolomite bed.
Out of time, he emerges, without awakening.
THE
DOGFATE
Krzysztof
Dąbrowski (Polonia)
Fafik
comes to his owner with his tail wagging. His owner does not notice him. As
usual. He used to be a good person; he played with him but not anymore.
Fafik
hears his name. The man holds something to his ear, he says to the air:
“I
miss Fafik,” he says to himself. “You're right, the end of mourning. It's time
for a new pet”. He goes to the shelter.
Fafik
enters the body of a shelter dog and greets his former owner.
“I'll
take this one.”
Returning,
the man said to the new dog:
“You
know, you really remind me of someone.”
(Traducción al inglés: Julia Mraczny)
We saw him rise slowly. Agitated, he walked
around the table and let out a coarse obscenity, while a strange sensation hung
in the air, foretelling tragedy. All of us taking part in the game thought
about where we might take shelter: under the tables, or beneath the doorframes;
so said those who always claimed to know in such situations. Of course, that
did not apply to us.
Suddenly the floor shook, and everything turned into chaos and
confusion. The first to fall were the rooks; queens and a bishop flew over the
knights, which rolled away crushing the pawns. The black king and the white
king, clinging to each other and trembling with fear, lost their crowns.
After losing his fifth consecutive game, Master Soria kicked the board.
I never dream about Mom. I don’t know why. I
was about to ask the psychologist during one of those many beginnings of
therapy; but then he went off in another direction and the explanation got
lost. Cancer took Mom a long time ago, but today I saw her in the kitchen,
preparing mate. I swore I was awake, and she was not a ghost.
“But…” I wanted to ask for an explanation.
“The old ladies at the cemetery bore me,” she said, handing me a sweet. “Besides, I was cold, so I came back to the houses for a bit. I’ll go back later.”
Boris Glikman (Bielorrusia/Australia)
Where exactly the giant
egg was found is no longer remembered clearly.
What is certain is that an egg of such a size
had never been observed before and it dwarfed the sightseers who gathered to
gawk at it. The immediate instinctive reaction was to attempt to crack it open
right where it lay to see what was within,
but a voice screamed out above the din of the excited crowd that something
rotten, perhaps even a half-decayed gigantic monstrosity, could be inside.
It was
therefore decided to drag the giant egg to a nearby beach so the sand could
absorb any putrid liquids that might leak out once the shell was broken, and
the ocean could then be used as a trash can to dispose of every trace of this
aberration’s existence.
Engineers
arrived on the scene to draw plans for the most effective way of breaking the
shell. Scaffolding was erected all around the egg, upon which an army of
labourers hammered relentlessly at the egg's thick, concrete-like shell.
No one can
recall how much time it took for the workers to make even the slightest dent in
the shell or how long it was before the first visible cracks appeared on the
surface of the mysterious egg.
An awed hush swept over the crowded beach as the inner contents slowly came into view. Some could not bear the stress of the suspense and turned their backs; others even ran away. But those who stayed to watch are unanimous in their recollections of the wonder of the moment when a golden star, bathing the surroundings in soft light, drifted calmly out of the broken shell and settled cosily upon the horizon, as though it had always belonged there.
BETWEEN SHADOWS
Betina Goransky (Argentina)
I am curled up in my bed, in the darkness,
covered up to my head. I hear the sounds growing louder and louder, so
intensely I can feel pain; a sound that pierces my eardrums. Are my ears
bleeding? Yes, something slid down my neck, soft and sticky. I already know it;
they are coming to take me away in their spaceships, but if I repeat the word
“greg” many times, I am sure they won’t be able to take me. I must not forget
it; I also must rub my knees in a circular motion—that is the protective
barrier. I remain in this position for long hours; I am safe.
Suddenly, I hear footsteps. Someone pulls away all the covers, leaves me
naked, exposed; I start to tremble. They saw me! They are taking me. Desperate,
I reach for the pillow to cover myself. There are three of them, surrounding
me, dressed in green; they grab me by force, inject a liquid into my arm—it is
thick. It burns.
I turn my head to focus on my gaze, but I can’t. A numbness spreads
throughout my body. Before my eyes close, I see my mother with her face in her
hands, sobbing silently. She would have liked to gently stroke my back, but it
is too late; they are taking me; I know I will never return.
THE PACKAGE
J. J. Haas (Estados Unidos)
The package must have arrived during the night because it was resting on
Jacob Osbourne's welcome mat early in the morning. The lightest of sleepers,
Jacob was up with the sun and could see a small box wrapped in coarse brown
paper sitting on his front porch. He twisted his head to get a better look
through the front door window, but all he saw was the thick string holding the
package together.
He didn't
know what to do.
After ten
minutes of indecision, he went to the garage and grabbed his extended pruning
shears, then put on his Kevlar vest and gloves. Turning off the security alarm
and unlocking three deadbolts, he cracked the front door and peeked out.
So far so
good.
Standing
back from the door, he angled the pruning shears through the opening and nudged
the package with the tip, then nudged it a little further. When he had pushed
the package several inches without incident, he was relieved. At least
temporarily.
Now he had
to pick the damned thing up.
Setting the
shears down in the foyer, Jacob opened the front door wider, stuck his head
through the opening, and looked down at the package. His name and location were
correct, but there was no return address. He knew it was risky, but before he
could stop himself he swung the door wide open and picked up the package.
To his
amazement, nothing happened.
Gaining
confidence, he carried the package into the kitchen and set it down on the
island. He carefully removed the string, slowly unwrapped the package, and
pulled the paper away from a slick white box. Written prominently on top of the
box was the name of a familiar company.
Thank God,
it was only his medicine.
Yesterday I became a citizen of Wireless space.
The last face I saw was Juliette Binoche’s, who slammed the door in my face,
murmuring something like good night, good death. Binoche? Binoche, of course. La
Binoche. It was my final wish: to choose the face of the person who would close
the door for me. I chose her the way one might choose an assistant for seppuku.
They got the face right, the movements, the voice. I could have sworn it was
the original. Dear thing.
Wireless. No physical connection to anyone. Not even a tiny wire, there…
Back when I was just an aspirant to Wireless citizenship, I danced on wires
too, like everyone else. With everyone else. Now…
I don’t know whether the world will die when we can no longer touch
those we love. I don’t know.
Once, I was a wire dancer. Emails, chats, that sort of thing. Now I am a
Wireless citizen. Nothing binds me anymore. I am alone and free. I took almost
nothing with me. A few memories, a few unrealized plans, a few obsessions, all
my love.
I know, I know that since then nothing is the way it used to be, that I
no longer have smell, touch, taste, hearing—and sight… useless, useless.
But this was my choice.
Wireless. Alone and free.
And once again La Binoche appears before my eyes, with that smile
of hers, just before closing the door on me:
“Come now, sweetheart, don’t be sad. Don’t you know that the end of any
world is the beginning of another?”
Rhys Hughes (Gales)
I took my life into my own hands.
But my life was contained in my
entire body, so I took my entire body into my own hands.
My own hands are part of my entire
body.
So I took my own hands into my own
hands.
But my own hands were already
holding my entire body, including my own hands, which were holding my entire
body, including my own hands, which were holding my entire body, including my
own hands, and so on forever, so there simply wasn’t any room.
Damn those figures of speech!
GARGAX
Marcela Iglesias (El Salvador/Ecuador)
Gargax turned his head. He was still dizzy. He
was lying on that strange thing that made him tremble. He couldn’t move. He had
no idea what was happening. There was a lot of darkness, and that sound—like
whispers and whistles—accompanied those little things that spun around him and
swirled over his face, intensifying the sensation of continued trembling. He
had never felt anything like it. Nothing he had been taught had prepared him
for this.
In the distance he saw a group of… What were they? They looked a bit
like him, yet at the same time they were very different. They carried those
lights, pointing them at different things. They were getting closer and closer.
They communicated with each other in a strange way.
Finally, they reached him. He couldn’t understand what they were
communicating; in those strange faces he saw something opening and closing,
from which odd sounds emerged.
He closed his eyes. He was too frightened.
The trembling of his body intensified until it became a violent
vibration that shook him, producing an unbearable sound and finally a flash and
something like an implosion. The others, bewildered, ran away.
Gargax stopped feeling afraid. His body stopped vibrating. Gradually,
his molecules settled down.
When he opened his eyes, he was in his station.
He didn’t understand—had he failed, or had he completed his mission?
MUTATIONS
UNNOTICED BY SCIENCE
Víctor
Lowenstein (Argentina)
Mr. Iñíguez woke up shortly after midnight,
annoyed, as he felt the urge to urinate and the elastic waistband of his
underwear was exerting an unpleasant pressure on his lower abdomen.
His feet probed the cold floor without finding his slippers. Snorting,
he turned on the bedside lamp, whose light hurt his retinas. He blinked for a
few moments until he finally spotted the slippers beneath the wardrobe. Heaven
knows how they had ended up there.
Slippers on and wrapped in his night robe, he left the bedroom and
walked down the long hallway leading to the water closet. With his thumbs
pushing the bothersome elastic outward, he could not help noticing, on the
frames of every door—the service room, the maid’s room, the room with his toys,
and the guest room—conspicuous webs of cobwebbing crossing the jambs or hanging
lightly from the lintels. He vowed to reprimand the maid, forgetting that he no
longer had one.
Hurrying now, as his bladder was reaching the point of no longer
answering for its actions, Iñíguez pushed open the bathroom door and stepped
inside. However, an unthinkable obstacle thwarted his plans.
Something—something hard and thin like a wire or a taut fishing line—slashed
his legs at calf height, causing Iñíguez to collapse heavily, striking his chin
against the toilet bowl.
Dazed, the man clutched the fixture as best he could in order to turn
himself around and discover the cause of the accident. Indeed, a silvery thread
stretched horizontally from one side of the doorframe to the other, as part of
a weave of skillfully assembled strands. It resembled a spider web but, even in
his bewilderment, Iñíguez reasoned out the impossibility: there were no spider
webs that robust, nor spiders capable of weaving them.
At that moment, an arachnid descended from the ceiling, hanging from its
silken thread, to land squarely between his eyebrows, where it drove in its
stinger. His urge to urinate vanished; then all sensation left him; finally,
his consciousness. A few seconds earlier, the insect’s ocelli settled upon his
eyes, and Iñíguez understood that humans were no longer the masters of the
planet.
THE TOWN
DRUNK
Laura Irene
Ludueña (Argentina)
“I can assure you that I knew Santiago, the
drunk who was run over by a car and died shortly afterward.”
“Those who live badly end badly. There are more important things to
worry about,” Sara replied as she went on washing the bar’s dishes. She was
referring to the news that the planet was dying. Ruth looked at her, about to
respond, but thought better of it and remained silent.
“See you tomorrow, Sara.”
As she walked home, she remembered the time when, late at the bar,
Santiago had told her his story. She believed him because drunks, like
children, do not lie. He had been born in the town, but had gone to university,
intending never to return.
He became a brilliant geologist. Devoted to studying the Earth, he
specialized in how internal processes affect the surface. According to him, the
planet had little life left. He presented his findings together with a
colleague with whom he had had a brief affair. When he shared the results with
his wife, he also confessed the infidelity. As expected, it was the affair that
affected her the most. She stormed out of the house in a rage; a car struck
her, and she died.
From then on, Santiago sank into an abyss of pain and despair that
deepened when his studies were discredited. He persisted, but no one believed
him. That was when he abandoned everything, returned to the town, but no one
there knew him anymore, and he sought refuge in alcohol to escape reality.
Today, the news proved him right after years of denial. But fate still had one
last card to play.
As he wandered the streets, lost in his thoughts and drunk on alcohol, a
car ran him over. His final words faded into the air: “I told you—the planet is
coming to an end.”
POSSIBILITIES
INSIDE A BOX
Cristian
Mitelman (Argentina)
I found a cardboard box. I open it. There is a
sparrow inside. Then I think of everything that might have happened.
Perhaps the sparrow appeared in the yard of a pious woman (these are
women’s things), and she decided to take care of it. The bird did not survive
its agony. The woman placed it in this little box to serve as a tomb.
Or perhaps some madman devotes himself to killing sparrows (these are
men’s things) and placed it there as a dark offering, thinking of the eyes of
whoever, upon lifting the lid, would come upon the small body in the early
stages of decomposition.
Many more alternatives may exist between the first possibility and the
second.
It makes no difference. They all end up in my hand and in this
invincible sensation of abandonment, of an inevitable end of the world.
SEVEN
DEAD HEDGEHOGS IN TAR
Achim Stößer (Alemania)
Antti Hämäläinen peered through the windshield.
"Did you see that? Was that a shooting star?" Apart from raindrops in
the headlights and road reflectors, nothing was visible.
"I saw it. No natural object moves like that, impossible."
Heikki Mustapää gripped the steering wheel tightly.
"Oh, of course." Antti laughed. "A UFO, huh?"
They sped on along the road toward Jyväskylä.
Blue-green-pink-orange-red-red-turquoise-red removed the protective suit
and left the capsule. (Of course, this is only an imperfect rendering of the
name; the blue corresponded to light with a wavelength of 412 to 414 nm, with a
slight hint around 544 nm, the green was avocado green, the pink a vibrant
dusty rose, and the three shades of red were distinctly different.) The capsule
burrowed into the Earth.
He had done it. (More precisely: two-thirds He, one-quarter It, the
rest—one-twelfth—She, only approximately, of course, because he-it-she was
currently in the transformation phase.) Hard to believe: the sole survivor of
the devastating catastrophe on his home planet, and now, after approximately
196 sunmarks —14 perhaps— in hibernation, he had landed on the only reachable
planet that possessed a life-sustaining environment. Melted snow was falling
from the sky.
Blue-green-pink-orange-red-red-turquoise-red. His forehead oscillated in
cheerful sequences of light, and he ran a joyful run.
A loud bang against the fender. Heikki braked sharply and pulled over to
the shoulder. He cursed. "What was that? A deer?"
He grabbed his flashlight; they got out and walked back a few steps in
the rain. Jelly-like mass oozed from the calf-sized carcass.
Heikki grimaced. "Looks like a beaver."
"That big? Here? With two tails? And the head of a moose and a
lightbulb nose?"
"A mutation. This damn radioactivity."
"Maybe one of your Martians lost his lap dog?"
"Very strange." They went back to the car.
"I bet you won't find a single living extraterrestrial being within
a hundred light-years."
And Antti was absolutely right.
HYPNOSIS,
A METAPHOR FOR HUMAN LIFE
João Ventura
(Portugal)
The ceremony organized by the ISEM —the
International Society of Esoteric Medicine— to award the Golden Scalpel to
Doctor Guillermo Gómez began. The status of those in attendance was evident
from the brands of the cars parked in the park.
What had made the honoree famous was his use of hypnosis to cure a wide
range of ailments, from purely physical ones to mental disorders.
Doctor Gómez took the stage and began to describe, in a calm voice, the
nature of his work. The lighting gave the hall the appearance of a watercolor
by an expressionist painter. The physician’s voice was like a low-toned
arpeggio, undulating through the silence that enveloped the space.
The first to succumb to the effect of the speaker’s voice was a lawyer
in the front row. He became rigid, eyes wide open, fixed on infinity. Then
other members of the audience followed, falling into a trance.
An unexpected effect occurred when the speaker himself, influenced by
the audience’s calm, rhythmic breathing, entered a trance as well, remaining
suspended in the middle of a sentence.
For the past fifteen days, there have been some two hundred rigid bodies
in the ISEM auditorium. Some of them already stink.
WHICH IS
WORSE
José Luis
Zárate (México)
Sometimes, after school, a greeting full of
smiles from his father, always fleeting. At times he shows up unexpectedly at a
school event, gives him hugs, talks with him for a few minutes. Some weekends
he can see him lingering behind, out in the street, with the look of wanting to
play with him and not being able to. That is what saddens him the most.
When he tries to talk about it with his mother, there is her crying, the
angry looks, the sense that silence is better.
But children cannot be shielded from things. That is why his mother
comes to his bed, nervously looking at her hands as she searches for the words,
begins to speak.
The boy is afraid. He does not know what his mother is going to say; he
imagines it, but imagining is different from knowing. Knowing it is final,
there is no going back. He listens, trembling. He does not know what will be
worse: for his mother to tell him about a divorce, or that his father is a
ghost.
DIALOGUE
ABOARD A TAXI
Sergio Gaut vel
Hartman (Argentina)
“I have a curiosity, my dear friend Borges,”
said Franz Kafka. “Now that everything is over, I allow myself to ask you the
following question—impertinent, perhaps even inappropriate.”
“Ask away; I’m all ears.”
“In your fruitful career, have you ever ventured into the treacherous
marshes of metamicrofiction?”
“Although I am entirely unfamiliar with the term, I suspect what you
mean by that neologism,” replied the author of ‘The Aleph’. “But I must
answer no; to enter such territories one would need a boldness I do not
possess.”
“Nevertheless, someone told me that during a chimerical soirée, attended
by Augusto Monterroso, Ambrose Bierce, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, and Ernest
Hemingway, among many other great microfiction writers, there took place a sort
of competition in which you managed to…”
“Excuse me,” the taxi driver interrupted. “We’re in front of Gregor
Samsa 1915. Is this the address you wanted or not?” He paused, making the
writers uncomfortable, and went on. “Can you pay, get out of my vehicle, and
continue your conversation on the sidewalk? I don’t have all the time in the
world, like you do, and I have to get back to work because I haven’t yet paid
the rent the car owner is charging me.”
