the smile

Off and on, like a false frequency, Zerta approaches me from behind as a form of surprise, which doesn’t need to be explained as much to you anymore. In this era, I put all my effort into cleaning up my forgotten tools, trying to revive an old new desire, even if the disagreement I had yesterday with you is still flying around my head. Inevitably and incompetently, the man who is talking right now - a man threatened with extinction- agreed to take part in a back-to-back rehearsal testing the grounds of different types of men and imagining a recital of that magnitude, such as a mob pouring their flaming selves onto the streets without law or order As if the scenario was of an action genre, or there was a backstage to slip away, but even that sounds incredibly absurd. All these nonsense thoughts keep me like a cocked gun in the corner, shielded with a devotion unexplainable. Nevertheless, these things are of secondary importance. At the moment, the floodlights draw attention to Zerta’s entrance, which is constantly working as the signal for the engine to start or for the pendulum hanging from the ceiling to begin swinging left and right left and right nonstop, then the pain surrounds me like a ring made of steel in the living room with absolute force pressing against my chest with no other course of action but get the necessary things for the evening ritual.

Transcending everything, I have to punish that crazy man for the unfulfilled desire of his youth, showing him the dump near the one-story cottage, which you couldn’t see with the naked eye so easily; instead, sometimes you could smell it -the reason I refrained from opening the windows in summer. The cottage is a silent paint stroke, standing like a makeshift prison or safe house on that quiet, heavy cluster of trees in the countryside next to the big road, accepting nothing but the morning breeze of the dump or the night resignation that wakes me up constantly. There were many middays I was sent on that floor touching its warmth as if to feel anything for it; my body had to react by grounding my breath on that very space with the blue silk curtains and that familiarity that felt like blackmail more than anything else or like a steel engine never-ending being turned on with its humming taking over the days and moments the hours the minutes of every centimeter in that knot connecting the stem with the oxygen bottle. Zerta stood up from that ditch that forbade water from entering the front door and gestured to approach and help her take out the leftovers of the water. While working on it dispassionately, I told her about the blue man, not that I had a real need to take out on her that anger I held in for a week, but I needed something that connected me back to her, as her presence keeps on giving fuel to that engine that doesn’t fucking shut up at all. She shook her head and opened her eyes wide, asking me about the restaurant. Was she ever before? I turned on my heels and headed for the bathroom, where I kept rehearsing my story, staring at a flushed face full of doubt; how could I safely tell her about the restaurant without slipping in the pending loot? She never discussed the details of my evenings with me, as I requested, leaving some parts of my twenty-four hours personal. But that moment that day, for some reason I couldn’t explain, I opened the door to a conversation about the blue man. It happened to be in that restaurant - where we sat and ate that weird grass salad with bread, with the gurgling sound of the soup being shallowed like a chorus accompanying the blue man’s staccato sentences. By the time I decided to follow a safe version of what happened that evening, Zerta was nowhere to be found. Her car was missing from the front where she always parks, but her purse- a big red slouchy bag- was left behind.