turquoise

I met her in a train headed for the seaside. By an odd missbooking, we shared a booth in the sleeping wagon. One could say she was beautiful, but her beauty struck me as a bit crude. She looked like once a well-shaped country girl losing too much weight: she wore jeans that had probably fitted her a few years back, but now appeared too loose and I could see there was little flesh on her tough bones. Hers was a face that had felt both the happiness and the pain. The smile-lines cut through her cheeks flanking her thin lips. I wish I could have seen her laugh, though, for all I saw were her sad, wet eyes. Eyes that captivated me as soon as I came through the door. She was sitting on the bottom bed looking through the window: her light brown hair appeared golden under the sun. We just stared at each other for an eternity. “Nice day” – I finally ended the silence. “Could be better” – she replied.

“It’s only dusk: there is still time for it to improve”

“I doubt it”

In a train headed for the seaside, one seldom finds a person this fraught. She appeared so desolate and I felt like there was nothing I could say or do to ease her anguish. And I wanted to do something. I had to. I needed to drown in her pool of sorrow. In a trance-like state, I sat beside her and slowly put my hands on her shoulders; we gazed at each other; I rubbed her arms; she gaped at me; I fondled her long neck. We closed our eyes. I stroke her thin hair, I caressed her translucent skin. We embraced; she needed to be embraced. An embrace lasted for hours, and then we made love.

The day was long over and nothing had improved. We made love all night: no lust involved. No passion, either. Just love, stripped of all the colloquial mess; or a peculiar infatuation, perhaps. I had to love her, I had to care for her. She loved me for caring. At dawn I was hugging her fragile body; it seemed like happiness. At dawn she told me she had cancer. She didn’t need to.

The train came to a station for a brief rest. We came out to a concrete platform along with the other passengers. I thought I had caught a glimpse of her smile as the bright morning sun made her squint. She sat on a bench and waited for me to buy some juice. As I was returning with two bottles in my hands, I heard a cell phone play Beethoven’s “For Elise”. She might have smiled when she saw me coming. And then, a loud bang behind me; I drop the bottles. I turn to see a dead woman still clutching her cell phone and a young man with a pistol and an unbeliavable odium on his face. I throw myself over my girl as the man begins to randomly shoot at the screaming bystanders. I look at her: she was scared but she was alright. Raising my head up to the window of a parked car I see the killer approaching. I push the girl under the car just as he is coming around it, jump and put my hands up, then yell: “Stop!”. And he does: he glares at me behind the gun. I say something. A moment after his mouth stretched into a vague smile, another loud bang and his skull burst. His body came down with a thump revealing a cop behind it. The cop was petrified; he was staring at the corpse, smoke still coming out of his gun. I kneel to look for my girl, but she isn’t under the car anymore. I dash around it, but there is no sign of her anywhere. I notice a faint turquoise trail stretching between the car and the station’s ambulance: as I look more attentively, I notice a small puddle of turquoise liquid beneath the car. The trail was of the same liquid and it seemed as if made by a pair of odd, small hands. I rush to the ambulance where I bump into a stout nurse. I ask her about the girl and she leads me to an exam room: “I must warn you that she is in a very poor condition. In fact, she had reduced to a vial of turquoise-colored fluid. She’s in the box.” The nurse is smiling and she’s tapping a small cardboard box stained in turquoise. “Don’t do that!”- I cry.

music: "Until The End Of The World" - O.S.T.
movie: "Eyes Wide Shut" - Stanley Kubrick