The rope

Hector Keres' family never had much of a lifespan. Actually, given their tendency to die within less than a quarter of a century, it almost seemed like a miracle that they had managed to keep their bloodline until our days. Although, if you think about it, flies also manage to survive and they hardly have a few days to procreate.

Furthermore, deaths in Hector's family were rarely accidental. There was no war in which a Keres hadn't died, no tribunal which hadn't sentenced them to the capital punishment. Burned alive by the inquisition, guillotined during the french revolution, hanged in texas. Their obituaries could as well be used by a historian as a catalogue of violent deaths.

Thus, being barely twenty years old, Hector was the last survivor of a doomed saga, and he was painfully aware of it. When he was a little kid, his father had been murdered by his downstair neighbour, who went crazy because of a water leakage nobody could find. About twenty five years earlier, his grandfather had left this world in similar circumstances, after a slightly overprotective general found out his daughter was pregnant. Just as his great-grandfather had ended up in a common grave, after not-so-pleasant transgressions.

All of this, Hector had known since he was a child, becoming a timid lad who feared breaking any rule, with an almost servile kindness with which he tried to avoid at all cost being disliked by anyone, thus triggering any unexpected chain of events that could make him reunite with the rest of his predecessors. Every risk was thoroughly calculated, every social interaction meticulously planned.

Maybe that's the reason Hector studied Psichology, and maybe also why, when his classmate insisted, for the third time, in inviting him to dinner, he was afraid of turning her down again. Only when he found himself naked at her side, did he thought that maybe he was taking more risks than he had thought.

"So, what does your family do?" asked Hector, remembering the tale about his grandfather. Damage control was important.

"Don't freak out, but they have owned a funeral parlor for generations"

"It's a pity they can't meet mine" Hector smiled. "I think our families would have got along just fine".

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Photo & text by Aitor Villafranca

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After Sex

We were lying naked on the bed, sheets still warm. His body was slightly apart from mine, as he always did after sex, and he had been gazing at the ceiling for some time, lost in his thoughts.

-You know, I’ve always heard that you can almost read a mountain’s story -he said- that it’s somehow etched in each one of its rocks. Centuries of rain and snow, of the tiniest movements shifting whole mountains by sheer patience. But what will happen with our story when it ends? When you wake up one day in someone else’s bed, or when life drags us apart and I end up doing who knows what in just the opposite edge of the world. What will everything add up to then?

I looked at him and reflected for a few moments. I had never seen him talking like that.

-Maybe our athoms will remember -I answered-. Maybe not only after our story ends, but even after we’re dead, and we turn to bones and dust, and our dust becomes part of a rock in the middle of a mountain. Maybe they’ll remember that they were once part of that curve of your jaw that I couldn’t stop caressing, or that they once healed my lips after you bit me so hard that you made them bleed.

As if he was suddenly embarrassed by the conversation, he changed the subject and started talking about an old black and white movie he had just watched. His body, however, was now resting on mine.

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Princesses

Since Leonor was a little girl, she had been living in the same old tower, thick stone walls separating her from the world beyond her room. Some mornings, the nostalgia of the wheat fields of her childhood home flooded her mind, but most of the times she just resigned herself and waited by the window, daydreaming about the shiny knight that would free her one day. After all, that was what a princess was suppossed to do. Just sit in her prison awaiting for the arrival of her bright, victorious, curse-breaking prince, who would take her to a kingdom of happiness and prosperity. Or even to a not-so-prosperous kingdom, one with a few bloodthirsty dragons, or an annual plague or two. Anything was bound to be better than that a half-ruined tower.

Of course, Leonor wasn’t too optimistic. Her dowry wasn’t half bad, but that wasn’t enough to make a knight willing to travel to the frozen mountains beyond the end of the world to battle the seven-headed semigod of despair (which actually was the mission that had to be accomplished to earn her hand in marriage). When the princess gazette announced that due to a shortage of towers some of the most undemanded princesses would have to share their dwellings, she wasn’t surprised to be one of the chosen.

Esmeralda was the name of the princess assigned to Leonor’s tower. She was a sleeping beauty, whose value had somehow decreased due to a sudden overpopulation of princesses with such condition, and when Leonor first saw her, she almost stopped breathing. Her green eyes shone like emeralds, and her hair was jet black, falling in perfect waves up to her waist. Until she saw her blushing, she didn’t believe she was human.

Soon, Leonor and Esmeralda became inseparable. Not only did they share the tower, but also their hopes and dreams. They talked about their memories, and played games with made-up rules. In comparison, their earlier life in solitude seemed now a waste of time, and they started dreading the day a knight would declare her love to Esmeralda, thus tossing her in a deep sleep that would only end when said knight had defeated the corresponding evil witches and had come back to kiss her.

However, that day finally came, and a handsome lad from a neighbour kingdom rode his horse to the tower to declare his intentions of battling his way into Esmeralda’s heart. She felt asleep instantly. After the warrior had gone to fulfill his errand, Leonor tried to wake her, but it was useless. She tried calling her name, shaking her with all her strength and even throwing buckets of water at her face. Nothing worked.

And thus, Leonor went back to her previous lonesome life. She spent hours taking care of Esmeralda, combing her hair and fixing her clothes so she would be perfect when her prince came back. Leonor tried to go back to waiting and daydreaming, but everything seemed more painful without Esmeralda.

One day, Leonor couldn’t take it anymore. Tears started flowing from her eyes and nothing she could do stopped them. Hopeless, she threw hershelf on the bed by Esmeralda, and leting denied feelings run free, she kissed her. Suddenly, all her body turned back to life, and before Leonor could wrap her mind around this miracle, Esmeralda’s lips were chasing her own. As they hungrily explored their new discovery, the rest of the world seemed to vanish.

When they were out of breath, they simply got up and left the tower. No one had bothered to lock the doors. Outside, colors seemed brighter, and the dawning sun talked about far away paradises and broken destinies.

…

New Sheets

Rain in that forsaken city seemed somehow dirtier. Or maybe it was just his state of mind.

In any case, it felt like each drop had been stained with the soot of all the dreams he had burnt to warm up the long winters, darkened with the shadows of all the people he hadn't become.

There had been a time, long ago, when rain had the texture of purity and nostalgia, as if it was a natural catalyst for that particular state of clarity in which he felt like he could grab that elusive masterpiece and tie it to his notebook. Of course, that might have also been a delusion, as the master piece never left the limbo of his imagination.

As the storm passed, he looked through the window and saw his sheets still hanging from the clothes-line, now drenched in a black and dense filth. He wrote down a note to buy new ones, and wondered if maybe he had given up more dreams than he thought.


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Love is Noise

Love is noise. The noise of pleasure and wounded flesh, the sounds of the impacient belly where your head rests, and the murmur of bus conversations over a long distance call. The hammering of blood in your brain trying to scream ‘always’ and ‘never’ at the same time.

And if love is noise, the opposite to love has to be silence. Maybe that is why, since Hector gave me that last kiss on the forehead, like a child who deserves no explanations, I hadn’t been able to unplug my earphones. Before that, I had never found much joy in listening to music, defending with the conviction of a visionary that my brain worked better without distractions, like if my usual thoughts deserved anything more than a basic level of conciousness.

What I did not say then, not even to myself, was that distractions were already there, in the shape of a constant buzz made of doubts and fears. During the years I shared with Hector, I had always coexisted with hesitation. There wasn’t a single day I didn’t live with the possibility of leaving, weighing the pros and cons of solitude.

Smothered by my own arrogance, I had always assumed that I was the only one hearing that noise. Now that the innocent click of a closing door had eradicated all other sound, silence was unbearable.

For the tenth time tonight, I turned the volume a little louder and tried again to sleep.


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13 Months

On February 15, a common acquaintance introduced them in some random party. When she saw him, Julia thought that he looked kind of ordinary, and Carlos found her gestures slightly phony. After a short and polite chat, each one went back to their dates.

A month later, Carlos was leaving the print of his hands in Julia’s skin, amazed by the way her neck curved when she was having an orgasm.

On June 15, a storm bent trees, damaged roofs and covered the city with a thick layer of mud. Carlos and Julia barely noticed all that. Their eyes were locked to the wall, exhausted after arguing over and over about the same silly details. They were sure that their story ended in that room.

That same day, three months later, Julia fell when running down some stairs. While Carlos was cleaning her wound as it was the most delicate operation, she told him that she loved him.

On November 15, Carlos met Julia’s family. Her sister blinked at him when she thought nobody was watching, and her father made a couple of racist jokes. Julia choked with the dessert.

On their anniversary, they talked about the whole year and toasted with champagne. Neither of them mentioned the boy for whom Julia almost left Carlos during Christmas.

Exactly thirteen months after they met, Carlos and Julia sat down on a bench at the park. Their fingers touched lightly, and they smiled.

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