Beings That Were Once Human
1.
It started out as an audible, bassy laugh between little playful phrases. The door slammed too hard and the steps on the stairs sounded heavy. Closer and closer, the voice entered. His weighty paws kept stomping on the wooden aisle, pushing his body against the furniture, splattering glass and toppling books and totems. The body appeared on the door jamb. It was enormous; huge on all sides. A sagging stomach of oil and alcohol, and legs deformed by a never remedied shaky gait. His black hair, caught back with a few loose strands from which sweat dripped, matched the glazed look gazing at the infinity of his treacherous ideas. He looked around for food. The plants withered and the paintings faded.
2.
At times, the ugly enter our lives and we only realize it after a considerable period. They arrive as transparencies and settle as minimal, tiny details. But after a while the details are many, and gain a body, and are already in our form. Our form is now with those extraneous details. And what was alien is now ours.
3.
— It's you who are ugly! – she answered promptly.
There was nothing pleasant about that figure. The thick, discontinuous crackling of his breath betrayed an unsuccessful rhinoplasty, or birth defect. The exhaled air was vibrating in the window, waving the curtain, obstructing his own windpipe, resounding on the wall, making him remember the hammer, the extension of his arm, his fat arm, heavy, hammering, hammering, hammering armies of cherry pits.
— Let me go, you mean bastard.
She found herself too frightened to defend herself from the creature's enormous hands.
4.
The layers of information, facts, and memories merge and form a density of images constructed of images, written on writings. Juxtapositions of innocents who have become criminals. Physical deformations that correspond to psychological disorders.
5.
He grabbed my clothes and disappeared. I had to hide my naked body behind a pillar while expressing my discomfort to someone on the other side, who was turning around to see me as I was turming around to hide. So many people on this bare ground, plus the hills up and down and the roads, flanked by herbs, with car marks. That's where I parked my car. In the end, I could not find it. Twists and turns, and so many cars like mine passing, and I didn't know where I'd stopped. Nor where to turn. I felt an enormous anguish of being lost with so many strangers around me who seemed to know me but whom I did not know. I got Maria's jewels in exchange for my nakedness. Shortly afterwards, when all that red and brown faded away and the area was emptied of cars and people walking in line, we remembered the wave that was coming and looked for a rock that would shelter us from it. If the wave caught me I could die crushed against the rock that I thought would defend me.
6.
I saw a tall, handsome, hefty man. His charm was in being dark, curly haired, slightly cross-eyed.
After a few minutes of watching and listening, I realise he leads a strange and troubled life. And again I wonder: — it is so easy to get to that place — where you have nothing — you do not work, you straggle between tales, intrigues and delusions — a bourgeois life without the palaces.
Her — And tomorrow? Shall we go to the soup!?
Him — Oh man... Leave tomorrow alone... tomorrow is tomorrow — I don't even know what I'm going to do today, let alone tomorrow.
7.
It was full moon, werewolf, storm. I was scared. I shrank under the robe and took refuge in the colours, and they dictated the direction of the images. I don't t know who they are. Better not to know - the risk of them becoming real is less.
8.
— Twisted glances, oily hair
— We seem them all over the place
— Worn out and rotten clothes, misshapen lips
— They swarm about
— Creatures with double noses
— Banal monstrosity
— What if the monster is me?
— Beings that were once human
— I'm a sick man
— Subterranean