The Inkwell Writing Challenge | SEPELIUM

Greetings. With this short story I assume my participation in Week 3 of Season Two Writing Challenge.

If you never say your name out loud to anyone, they can never ever call you by it.
Regina Spektor

but to those who wander in the direction of home
is who duration meets.

Peter Handke

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SEPELIUM


Outside the window, workers lay rectangular concrete slabs on top of the coffin and shovels begin to spit fresh cement mixture onto the same rectangular slabs. Inside, sadness invades again, harder, more cruel, their tired heart.

From the car she observes to the crowd: they take their whole life to board the cars that will return them to their homes, and continue to arrive cars, from emerge flowers of slowness; also, a frozen crying do not stop sounding from the corners of the cemetery.
The scenes go on longer than necessary, indefinitely.

She thinks that among passers-by someone may hear her story; this may be useful to stop the sadness that becomes more and more intense: if emerge from her chest he will flood the planet. Feel the weight of the oceans on her eyelids. The world spins with her in space and throws all its forces on her. The wobble and rhythm of the planet overtake she and leave behind. But it does not want to decompose in front of others. That is why she does not get out of the car.

The street looks like a refuge that everything awaits. A delicate and strange noise breaks in her ears. She opens the door. She walks upright in spite of her own body's will that has exerted all its strength. Nobody knows her story. She seems a stranger, oblivious to the situation. That is why she does not receive greetings. She kisses and then throws a rose on the fresh cement that covers the coffin with the body. Some wonder if she knows the dead girl, or if she comes because of what was published in the news about the fatal accident in which the young girl died.

Now she fights a gladiatorial battle to cross the place to her car. A cold breeze blows over her face and announces a gentle drizzle. Once in the car, she collapses on the steering wheel. She starts the engine and leaves the place; however, no matter how much she accelerates, she feels that the car remains impassive, as if sleeping a big sleep.

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The asphalt gets confused with the space, it looks like a black snake. She cannot find her way around, so the names of the streets speak like cracks of dry, small branches, reflecting the time of day as clearly as the hollows in the mountain. When she distinguishes her house, a couple of tears gush from her eyes. She holds back her tears, closes her eyes and tries to breathe deeply but realizes that her nose is full of mucus. The handkerchief seems distant but within reach, timeless. She takes a breath of air in which the world seems to breathe, and returns to it in the discharge of her lungs.

She parks on the sidewalk, turns the key inside the car's cylinder and turns off the engine. The legs do not allow for a walk that can be felt like if to be miles. She seems to be dominated by an ancient nightmare. She gets out of the car, tries to activate the alarm and the sound is repeated as a heavy echo. It was still raining fine drops that didn't even wet her clothes.

She walks, hesitant, as if in slow motion, feeling the weight of the world against her. She can hear everything that is happening: high tension wires singing, dogs barking: the noise of the surface of the earth that she did not know she had heard over and over again, but she feels that everything has suddenly stopped. And what was that duration?, a fraction of the time? Or was it a fleeting, unpredictable, ungraspable feeling?

When she finally manages to open the door to her house and close it behind her, things seem to regain their speed. The room is in darkness, she flips the light switch and, as she turns on the desolate light bulbs, she feels that she is setting fire to the lights after a long and fateful battle.

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