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Fragments of existence

Valter F. Machado

    I don’t know if I should tell you this story of mine or just simply ignore it, wait for it to rest in my subconscious and, one day, it’ll be nothing more than a memory that over the years will become diffused and overcast; my sanity remains unchanged, so do I speculate. The events took place during this one night and I doubt they’re over, but just in case, I leave my testimony to posterity since you also can be part of this suppressed world that we neglect. Don’t consider the word of ignobly appeasers who react “Do not be afraid, it can’t hurt you!”, or even, “Doesn’t matter, you’ll get over it!”... I warn you that all these are condescending lies... Your life and of those whom you love are in a severe and imminent danger. Let there be no illusions, it isn’t the danger of life, itself, that must be feared, but the way and the duration until death comes to get you.
    All my life I’ve always been comfortable as part of a “duo”, a normal condition for me since I had a twin, but for example, before I had the opportunity to meet my loving partner, I would develop a true complicity with my Cleo, a kitten that complemented some of the gaps I concealed, and evidenced the benevolent beneficence of my withdrawn personality by reluctance to be accepted by others. I would say that our relationship would transcend complicity, for better understanding, we would be the equivalent of partners in crime, she would be the prevaricator while I would fall under the responsibility and condition of concealing the crimes, alibis mastermind. Each one of us would always do our best to make this friendship thrive until an unexpected and overwhelming change shaped our bond: I would find the love of my life, my boyfriend, Ty; the duo Chloe - Cleo was now molested by the inclusion of a new element, but by jealousy Cleo would always maintain a healthy distance, in precaution, so it didn’t turn into a trio.
    When I was away from Ty, I would maintain my loyalty to Cleo, giving her all the attention she needed and pampering her way too much, I would like to stress out, therefore, and irreducible as retribution, she guaranteed my safety (every night when we went to bed at my grandfather’s house she would run around checking every division), at mealtimes she would guarantee that my food wasn’t sour or poisoned by sampling and tasting it directly from my plate, and by keeping my nightly routines constant in relation to when was time to wake up.
    I loved her.
    I would spend long minutes on the street, glimpsing her on the porch under the warm sunshine, her hair always very neat reflecting sun’s light as she dozed serenely, or staring at the horizon with a dreamy expression.
    These were the monotonous banalities that made up my life and, satisfied with it, I never thought that something significant would happen to our team Chloe - Cleo, but I couldn’t be more wrong: misfortune is wise and master in disguise, it swallows us at the specific moment when we are most unsuspected, crunching us and spits our carcasses out, only to give us the glimpse of the possibility of hope that worldliness can return to normal. If you have doubts, I understand, but you can always vouch for the veracity of these words.
    Everything would change on this grim night when my family (mother, brother and sister) decided to have fun in the fair of our village, but I would choose to stay at home waiting for my boyfriend because he had told me that he had a surprise for me and I was anxious about it, consequently I had organized a party for us that included horror films from the ‘80s, colorful popcorns that were especially sweet and that we adore, and lit some incense that smoked releasing a fragrance of roses through all the rooms. Since my mother’s house was on the opposite side of the yard, I brought Cleo with me to make us company, which, after chewing some of her food had gone to sleep. Sam, which was a large white-breasted cat would walk on his explorations around the house, but as I would expect, soon I found him loosening himself in the continuation of the drift but, now, through the adjoining roofs, and the last one in our company, but not least, the guard dog, just another hairball, his name was Rocky, which I decided if he had a good behavior I would, exceptionally tonight, let him stay with us since he respected our agreements: to restrict himself to the entrance hall, and if possible, only and exclusively to the sofa that had become two-in-one, the rest area and nap place for my grandfather in his intermittent entrances and exits, and secretly, the territorial zone of Rocky that was regularly marked by pissing on it, just in case that were others dogs in the area.
    My cell phone would ring with the indication that my visit had arrive, as we talked this would be the signal that he was waiting for me at the gate and I would go to his encounter. I would walk the yard to which would enter the garage and on the other side of the mass of cast iron painted in green he was waiting. We would kiss with sexual anxiety, and then follow our destiny through the chilling night that haunted us at the end of September. I would point out that I am especially chilly, so I should suffer a little more from these seasonal differences than most of you.
    Arriving in my room, he would reveal the gift, curious and excited I would open it, and to my astonishment was a dream-catcher. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of that piece that with the arrangement of the feathers, the perfectly multi-colored linen lines crossed, the wood duly worked and waxed, the symbolic pieces of peace, serenity and good fortune perfectly suspended, without never having contact with another copy of these in my possession I would consider this ornamentation especially dazzling. And for being mine and having a memory of my beloved. It was inevitable, I would have to expose it on the wall next to the bedroom door. I would thank him effusively, for that by nature I have the taste and pretense that it is me who gives presents not so much the inverse, but this time I had been caught totally unprepared, and I loved it. However I noticed that my partner Cleo had awakened from her sleep that was usually long, but now she was staring at the object that I had added to the room’s decoration. I would provoke her modestly but without reciprocity.
    We’d hear the loud knocking at the front door, «What the hell are the brats doing, shouldn’t all the people be in the town fair?» I was thinking while watching Ty dissolve into the darkness of the hall until he was again visible with the door open, simply to show the unknown of who would have been the perpetrator because no one had waited for our answer, as well as the street were completely extinct of animal life measured in silence broken only by the music comming from the event. He would close the door behind him and follow the corridor, consequently and still had not advanced in his third step when we would hear the chilling sound of sharp and solid nails scratching the fiber door that would echo throughout the room, injuring our ears. In an instinctive and immediate movement, he would turn and reopen the door only to confirm what we knew: no one; along the length of the door there were visible two deep marks that extended across it, like if someone with a pair of scissors or a compass for glass had ripped them into that structure. «And now how am I going to explain to my grandfather the damaged door?», a solution I would work later on, but it would not be that night, since we orchestrated plans that excluded concerns ...
    The bewildering violence that brutalized the door had petrified us, the fiber of which it was composed shuddered and twisted with throbbing scratches ... That assault on our integrity and sanity would not be solved by inspection from the outside or even with vain threats to nothingness , we needed to call the police. We had to quickly get my cell phone that I had left at my mother’s house when I went to get Ty, since we didn’t want fleeting interruptions. He would volunteer knowing he would find it on the kitchen counter.
    The cacophony of fierce nails would suspend, only to confer on us the inevitability of our tragic fate... The door handle would open slowly to our astonishment... Whatever it was, it lost its interest in our dread, now focuses on our perdition... In our death...
    The darkness of the corridor would then be violated by the brightness of the penetrating street lights at the address which had hitherto been a reference to family safety, but which in that lugubrious gauntlet had become a boundary dungeon of our doom, under the guise of a motionless figure staring at us.
    – What is this? What are you guys doing? – and with these words the light of the hall would be turned on revealing my grandfather, with a smile on his face admired by our presence there that night, – I thought you were all at the party, for the farewell with hope that next year there will be more – With the inherent courtesy of his character, he would hold that pertinent smile framed on the face with the certainty that he was interrupting something with his arrival, the «one moment» of privacy. But our perplexity would transcend these considerations, such enlightenment would occur in a next moment of exasperating terror, in which we saw the inevitability of our impotence... A huge claw would give him a nagging blow on the neck, carving in the flesh the threatening nails we had heard... In such an abominable way that the body had no reaction to fall, inclusive would have the impression that lifted his feet from the ground leaving him suspended... Petrified without reaction at the glimpse of that smiling face covered by the very blood that had been blown out of his veins... His arms outstretched in irreproachable suffering... The other claw in a descending movement would then burrow into the other side of his neck, eliminating any shred of doubt that that beloved family member had levitated before my incredulous eyes, only for mere moments because the partially covered head in coat would be severed from the trunk by a harsh and savage movement. The inanimate and mutilated body would fall into a muffled sound at the impact with the tiles releasing a continuous stream of scarlet blood into a pool of squeezed life from his insides.
    The light would go out, the body drawn inwards as the head was picked up by our attacker, until the door would close and then be locked by Ty, who intervened as much as possible through the scenario that had unfolded. He would quickly move towards me to comfort me in my grief, but the liquid on the floor would be an embarrassing obstacle that had therefore left the pavement slippery and in a rapid oscillation he was lying on the ground and stew of that goo that accumulated. To our inert amazement the key with which he locked the door would jump in his hand towards me, notwithstanding the recovery of the witnessed tragedy I would be indifferent in disagreement with Rocky who had remained motionless behind me urinating with fear.
    The dog that had no use and little meaning to our «safety» would snatch up the key holder in which the keys had been inserted, went to the yard door and opened it, only to be absorbed by the moonlit darkness.
    Over our heads we would hear an intense run over the tiles, cracking some and breaking others, so that we could see the dust falling slowly from the roof spreading over the floor. Whatever it was, it was in a sneaky way... It would be in a savage hunt... We were preys... His degenerate trophies to hunt down...
    We would approach the door and, in a supplication, we would call the elusive canid with the impressive «Here Rocky, take it!», an infallible condition for its gluttony... An exception that confirmed the rule, he wouldn’t return to join us to simply return what had been released for him to pick up and bring it back, as he had done countless times with balls and lemons... His doom... His whine would be interwoven with a defensive growl, followed by a sighing murmur... The contours of his silhouette would gradually reveal himself in the dim light of the kitchen... The sight of that exhausted animal was deplorable... The left side of the muzzle had been torn apart exposing the row axial skeleton teeth with the little ripped flesh left hanging, the adjacent ear and scalp removed together with fat and muscle in evidence to the bloody skull... The belly and flank untied with an incisive perforation exposing some organs... The left thigh attached to the appendicular skeleton had been torn and would be dragged along the floor, hanging by a strip of flesh with hair leaving in the passage the vestiges of the arrogance of certain death... And among his fangs was the key-ring... At that moment we knew from the heart that there would be no hope, neither for him nor for us, was purely and simply survival restricted to the pending horror that closed before our existence.
    The suffering animal would climb the steps to the interior, its security within the four walls would give him the confidence to calm down and for us thus extract the keys that clumsily enclosed in the jaws. Our escape was an arm’s length away... Rocky had never thought he would be so fundamental... And in a sudden movement he would disappear from our world... We would advance to see the silhouette fade before our eyes... He would cry, bark, howl, in an apotheosis of incessant rattle... Dragged by the yard... His dying body would hit the metal steps to the terrace... And finally, his last and tumultuous silence would ensue.
    We closed the door on our backs and ran to the bedroom, I would sit in the bed dazed with all this calamity that had plagued us in the face of our quiet life. None of that made sense. If it was an animal, or whatever it could be, it was transcendent; I would think of some paranormal creature, but it would surely be as much or more supernatural as it was fanciful. None of that made sense. Consequently Ty had developed a plan with which we would feed the fleeting flame of our hope: we would release Sam to the outer garden and we would expect it, immutable in its habits, to rise to the roof, removing from us the attention of our predator who would pursue him, Ty would run to my mother’s house and bring the cell phone, the digital salvation that had been confined to the single and final stronghold of our perseverance.
    He would stuff his clothes, the sneakers properly tied without being loose, we would reconsider the plan a number of times in search of failures or counter-parts, the disposal of all objects of interest, whether on the way or inside the house, timing of variables. I would be expected to open and close the door, and I would guarantee that if that abomination intervened on our way, I would throw him a mix of olive oil, cooking oil and car oil and butter that we had boiled on the stove while we where in that time of reflection and review. I was bidding farewell to Cleo as if in a final goodbye, in which we would never again cross our destinies, but she would not show the slightest interest in me, only fixed in the dream-catcher, or with the attention focused for that which on the outside was ambitious to devour us. «Or maybe she saw a ghost, don’t people say that cats can see these things?» And I gave her a slight, irrelevant smile and then I fixed myself on what terrified us and what was not such an absurdity... «You never know, as this world is corrupted, the abnormal has become normal, the abominable simply a distraction.»
    After so many years without using the bell in the collar, again Sam would encounter that irritating object rattling, that’s when I remembered why we had removed that accessory, we both hated that and the ceaseless noise produced by its movement, but the effect of putting it on him was immediately, energetic and frightening in a rampage all over the kitchen. Ty would catch him in intense debate, and then, first and foremost, scratch his face and arms, but quickly unleashing the cat to the adjoining roof, where Sam barely touched with all four legs and then begun an audible frenzy of liberation.
    «Five, nine, seven...» A ludicrous countdown that always found a friendly smile on me, except this time.
    – I love you very much, everything will be ok. Two, one! – And he would begin his journey by the unknown and by the dark design we had devised. I remained static at the door with the pot in my hands, the bubbling viscous liquid. I had never felt this sense of relief as that the instant he entered the house, both for his safety and for the possibility of our rescue to be possible. He would leave immediately and instinctively I contemplated the blinking notifying light of the mobile phone. He had achieved our goal inclusively hitting the times we had hoped for. It was at that moment that I climbed the small steps of the yard, next to the lemon tree, just to witness a sight which soon dissolve into an amalgam of hallucinations that my brain, even now, can hardly process. The sound of Sams bell didn’t cease and at that moment I was peculiarly snatched by the friction of the lemon tree’s foliage. Something moved through the unfathomable. Suddenly, right at Ty’s feet, my grandfather’s decapitated head would fall, the eyes and the tongue exposed. Horrified, without reaction we looked at each other intensely, with a sudden electric love between us, for we understood the outcome of that premonition. I felt the bitterness build up in my throat accompanied by an intense need to expel the vomit my insides refused to contain, as if the demonstration of my love were that intrinsic projection that demanded to be excreted. In a moment the tears would flow, and in the other, the two hairy paws would grab him by the neck and take him forever of this life. Of my life.
    The mixture didn’t had any use since I was petrifed just because I didn’t understood what was happening. I was trembleling uncontrollably. Terror had reached levels of wickedness and sadism that I had never thought humanly possible, or merely imaginable.
    I ran back closing the door behind me without peering back at the exterior of the house, I was drowning in implicit and explicit suffering, I needed a moment of peace, otherwise, I could feel it in myself, I would collapse through the night horrors so overwhelming that would redefine my life. I reached my room and closed the wooden door sitting on the bed waiting for the agonizing silence that had infested my world and that had plunged me into a delirious abyss of my unconscious immersed in ignorance, a sense assimilated only to what Cleo had preserved during those endless hours of pandemonium, immobile and abstracted from reality. She was worshiping the dream-catcher with an unnatural concentration of hers and her nature, but I could feel a pulsating static electricity from her, almost plausible. For my part, the object little interest had at that moment, excepting the embedded connotation of my beloved Ty...
    The crash from the burst of the kitchen door was notorious and foreshadowed the continuing imposition of slaughter. I could hear his nails spilling the tiles, then the door to the hall... I felt the walls tremble at the heavy paws that sank his nails into the bricks and cement. That thing, whatever it was, moved through the vertical wall that separated us. I held my breath in frustrated uneasines.
    An uncontrollable bang on the bedroom door would make the wood crawl revealing the long, sharp nails that had been pinned... Another rumble of such proportions would reveal the second set of death devices. In an unexpected move the door was simply shattered. The room invaded by an intense odor of body fluids, wet fur and... death. At this moment I didn’t know what my eyes were seeing, what I understood or simply what happened, yet I would swear, the revelation emerging from the dark hall would resemble that of a feline, with simple human physiognomy traits adapted to the head in an austere body and bearing with the anatomy of a tiger. The thick, dense hair, covered with blood and viscera, shone in the faintly shimmering light of the suspended lamp, which, by the violence of the crash, balanced on an erratic trajectory, a projector of uncertain shadows which by the bad contact of the bushing kept the room more often in darkness than illuminated. That threatening figure was advancing towards me... Now from the ceiling, inverted from its «natural condition» like a wild being, if anything in it were natural or normal. But it would stout progress by the presence of Cleo, who for the first time throughout this outbreak of madness shifted her focus from the abstraction from the fictitious to the reality: our lives were severely endangered.
    Without hesitation, Cleo would throw herself on the aberration that had tormented and shattered our peaceful lives. I feared for my integrity and that of my partner-in-crime for the impetus in the contest against that monstrosity fifteen or twenty times bigger, more muscular, heavy and wild than the poor kitten, who, indifferent to the odds, was not intimidated and brought it the fight in a fearless confrontation against the evil that could inadvertently end the duel with a single bite. So I feared and closed my eyes so that I didn’t have the slightest memory of battle.
    Silence. Total and absolute silence. If I were alive or dead, I would not know it, my intuition did little or nothing to place myself, and this easly could be the «state» of death when we ignore our destiny. I opened my eyes, and it was at this exact moment that I saw a miracle: Cleo sitting on the ground in front of me staring into my eyes as, throughout the room, petals of sakuras rained as if the horrifying being had been crushed in this beautiful illusory conception.
    I would cling to my kitten with a sense of pride never felt before, as if my life had never been in danger few seconds ago, yet it was in that contact between my hand and the shaggy body that I felt an electric current consume my body and the epiphany would spread to my knowledge: the long hours she had spent on the porch all these years, dreaming with long and extensive races in the savanna, seeing herself projected in the water of the rivers where she could delight the thirst like a the tiger that preyed upon its prey, nights asleep beneath the starry sky and consumed by the intoxicating bliss of freedom and savage ascension which, fettered to the human will, had always been repressed. The small, hairy body she had always wielded was nothing more than the mere shell that had imprisoned the intrinsically nature of her existence. The dream-catcher was the impulse that affected all intentions and a strenuous perception snated the magnificence of her being.

    «It all made sense», thus having this ability to understand and assume a posteriori the events that took place.

    She would run on the floor, I would follow her on our way to the backyard where she would climb the metal stairs leading to the terrace, and with the moon in the rear would look into my eyes one last time just before following her «dreams» of being free on the wild as she had always desired. I knew it in my heart, even if it was an unimaginable loss, that it was the best fate for the one that had always been my «other half». I cried, from her departure, the suffering from losing those I loved, for an unrecognizable life that would unfold before me. I climbed the stairs, at cost, to get a last glimpse of her jumping silhouette between walls and roofs. When I reached the top, I would never see my Cleo again, that was certain. For certain I would prefer that I had not seen anything and been blind before. On the terrace I would witness the decadence of my family... Dismembered, chewed, crushed, disfigured and barbarously mutilated... Unrecognizable body parts... The delay of my relatives wasn’t arbitrary since it had never happened before, however they had been hunted by the beast who had terrified us all night. One by one they all had been harvested from this life by those abominable claws. I felt the strength of my legs weakening. I would throw myself into a hypnotic race until I finally came to bed where I would lie down and weep incessantly, all the bitterness in the form of tears, distress condensed in sobs and suffered convulsions.

    I speak of this experience of mine as that by collateral and that beware of what the indigenous spirits of the animal-gods manifested by the dream-catchers may contain... And project... I have now awakened from the nightmare of the concealed nightmare experienced.... It’s still night, I know that... Beside me on the bed, I see the other two kittens of the family who must have escaped when TY when to the other house. They seem mesmerized seeking their freedom...
    I woke up from the comforting nightmare of the nightmare in which I had remained confused, but now more enlightened, this wasn’t a dream and now I hear terrified nails scraping the tiles as they break under the excessive weight of the abyssal beasts who seek for me... Their prey!

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