Stories need a roof over their heads too
It was just another night in Eden. Too dull. Plenty patrons, few thrills. Lots of souls milling about, but not enough bite.
Another night that announced itself woefully too short.
That’s what Eve thought, anyway, but she’s been a jaded barkeep for too long.
To anyone else, the place was buzzing. The dancefloor was packed, the techno beats pulsating. Strobes were drowning out the darkness. The cash registers were having a fucking ball.
The man and woman are sitting in a garden on a late summer morning, having breakfast. Life is still. The table is laden with fruits, home-made jams, divine-smelling crostata, and bread fresh from the oven. The smell of coffee is the promise of orderly things and new sparks. It’s a tranquil moment, untroubled.
To the woman, everything is novel. From the gentle breeze to the heat emanating from the coffee cup. Her senses are overloaded, so many tiny alarms blaring inside. She stays mute, immobile. Silently but diligently parsing reality.
“Who am I?” they ask, staring into the mirror.
A distinctly human set of green-blue eyes is staring back, face framed with long hair the color of sun-bleached straw, alabaster skin undershot with blue veins, the gleaming, cold, metallic jaw at odds with the otherwise precisely sculpted visage.
He leans back, the leather chair upholstery softly creaking as he shifts his weight. Chin rested on his fist, elbow leaning on the armrest – the 21st century 8-bit-spawned equivalent of Rodin’s thinker – he scrutinises his beauties, one by one, the nine big panels arranged in a 3×3 grille. There’s nothing else in his field of vision. He has painstakingly sanitised the space to eliminate distractions so he can concentrate on who he’s watching. Obsessions have a process too.
There is something else about having a smoke all the way up here, amid the stars. A special kind of enjoyment. A treat for the senses right at the edge of words properly making it justice. I watch the nebula we’re sailing by eyes wide open. You’ve maybe seen a thousand different nebulae of unimaginable colors and shapes, but the thousand-and-first is no less jaw-dropping. With my butt comfortably seated in my commander’s chair and legs kicked out in front of me, a tumbler of scotch lodged in the other hand, this is my own personal theatre. Living the life. Inhaling death one short, slow lungful at a time to the backdrop of Guns n’ Roses’ Sweet Child of Mine braying in the loudspeakers, while watching a big-ass asteroid sail within a hairbreadth of the cruiser.
We’ve lost so much.
I’m not sure what’s worse. Whether us not remembering what good was in the world. Or choosing to forget there actually was some good in it. Mankind retreated to some preternatural state, where violence is the one universally accepted currency. I feel ashamed to admit I have dealt in it too.