In Spanish class the teacher made us pick up a card from a pack. They weren't normal cards, they were illustrated by some graffiti painter, and he told us to write a 300-500-word story using the painting from the card, and so I wrote this thing (in Spanish, of course). Don't you love recycling homework?
It's a mix of the card's picture (the girl on the bench), the song I was listening to when I got the idea: “Pinta de Tarao” by “Los Punsetes” (LOL at that), and a nightmare I had a few nights ago.
*
It would happen that night, he could tell, he could feel it in his seething blood. That night he'd go hunting.
He was wandering around his favourite club area, looking for something that would make him react while imagining and remembering other hunting nights. No matter how they started, they would always end the same way: slim arms tied up behind their backs, eyes full of fright, blood sliding down the curves of their bodies... it was the best medicine to calm that burning, that restlessness that would chase him on nights like that one.
At last, he saw someone in the distance that made him stop searching: it was a girl seated in a bench alone with the light of a streetlight shaping and sharping her features and hiding her eyes under the shadow her brow casted. She was giving off a feeling of aggressiveness and strong character that attracted him greatly, and she was wearing some informal jeans and a short-sleeve t-shirt with a suggestive “sex” written across her chest.
He walked to where she was and asked her why she was alone at night. She raised an eyebrow, showing all her disdain in that single action. Then, she put on some sunglasses, even if it was already dark, and looked up at him, but the man still couldn't see her eyes.
“I'm waiting till morning. My neighbourhood is kind of dangerous at night.”
He offered, in a way that left her no choice but to accept, to walk her home, assuring her that he knew martial arts and self-defence, which was a lie, but it didn't matter, they would never make it to her neighbourhood.
While they were walking, she started talking about how bad things were in the world lately, with the increase of murders and kidnappings and the new war that was starting in the East, although never losing that feeling of disdain she showed him earlier. She said that the world was losing its balance. He thought it was a strange comment but didn't say anything. He couldn't care less.
Just before going into a deserted alley, after telling her it was a shortcut, she asked him:
“Do you know which is Newton's third law?” The man shook his head, getting a bit impatient. There was something in the way she talked that unnerved him. “That to every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction.”
Then, they went into the alley and he took out his penknife, turned to face the girl and saw her smirking. After a few seconds, the young girl took off her sunglasses and he screamed out of horror: they were just empty sockets, but filled with terrifyingly intense shadows.
“Wh-who...? WHAT ARE YOU?” he screamed, trying to walk away, but his feet were glued to the ground.
“The opposite reaction,” she whispered in a satisfied purr.
The last thing he saw was the glint of sharp teeth and bottomless sockets, full of darkness and nightmares, that trapped him.
“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.” - Leonard Cohen
