VI PREMIO INTERNACIONAL DE CUENTO “LAS DALIAS” THE VI “LAS DALIAS” INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD THE INTERVAL

Translation: Ben Clark

He then felt a small breeze brush his face, like a caress. After that, he felt pins a needles in his feet, and his hands began to move like two shy doves. His whole body felt numb. He was awakening from a deep sleep, a sleep that had lasted twenty years. He removed the plastic piece that covered his mouth and realized it was a ventilator, he then detached the IV drip from his arm. Still unsteady, he managed to stand, and he walked to the window. His street, the same street he had always lived in. It seemed as sleepy as he was: no noise, no flying shouts, no fleeting birds. A row of invisible pedestrians mingled with his memory, confusing their clothes and rhythms with a mental photograph.

Twenty years in a serum that now dripped down his back. Beside him, the altar of tubes that had been connected to him until today. He wondered if he had been dead. Perhaps the question was: why the hell was he alive again, after all this time? He realized many years had passed by staring at his reflection in the mirror, his skin hung down, he was now standing in front of an old, pale man, bloated like an overly ripe fruit. The young man that lived inside him touched the yellow cheeks, sunken by time. He shrieked in horror.

A baffled brunette appeared at the door. It was his wife, twenty years older. She felt like a stranger, but her eyes were familiar, her eyes had kept the tragic deepness they had always possessed; like those of a penniless princess.

She said it’s a miracle, and he remembered the last day, the day that ended in tragedy, the day that left him sleeping forever on a bed. A car accident: he was driving as he argued with the brunette about the possibility of having children; she wanted to, her tragic deepness notwithstanding. He did not, even though his general outlook on life was far more optimistic. The other car was red, he remembered that. It came out of nowhere on a crossing. They both flew through the windshield, expelled suddenly by the crash or by fate written down on some unreliable book. She was light: some cuts and a brief loss of consciousness. He had a solid body and it fell hard on the tarmac. Then came the long interval, trapped withing the border that separates the living from the dead, a land he hardly remembers.

«We are in the midst of a global pandemic, Antonio; we had a daughter, Julita», his suddenly old wife told him. A young woman is lurking behind her, the is also a brunette and she has a solid body, she is painted with her mothers’ colours, but her dimensions are all his. He sees himself in that athletic body.