I didn’t describe the passionate lovemaking scene that followed my dad joke, but it’s enough to know that it involved the violin and my face, with the violin being the dominant one. Coincidentally, just after the act, my nose’s period came in. Some would say one of the events caused the other, but no, it was merely correlation. You cannot prove causation in a situation with such a low replicability.
When my world stopped fiddling around, we discussed the remaining details of the job. I’d write the lyrics and hand them to her, and grant enough wiggle room to make adjustments for it to fit the rhythm.
With the business finished, I went back to my room, and like a vampire, I enclosed myself in the dark and humid space, ready to sleep. Sleep, a task that resulted impossible because Mariana had not had her eighteen meals that day, and she cried and desperately called for the two last ones.
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I could not tell you what dreams are made of, but that one certainly had the thick layer of sepia effects, that were probably close relatives to the ones that turn any film set into Mexico. I was dressed with a gaucho outfit, chewing tobacco in a corner while a group of Narcos shot a man and introducer his girlfriend to the marvelous world of robbery and abuse, halfway down the block.
“¡Buenos días, don Walter!” said the Narco that was using the girl’s back as a chair while he softly tapped her segmental plates.
That’s when I realized something was off. A second later, I realized we all being giant isopods was, definitively, a little bit weird and out of place.
“¿Cuándo decretaron que nos iban a Kafkear a todos?”
“Ayer, el nuevo presi.” He pointed up, into the sky…
I followed his articulated leg, and there was no sun. We were being illuminated by the sparkling blond mane of a being whose face was hidden behind a mask of the Sol de Mayo. Following towards the horizon, I could see his neck and torso, the later covered by a poncho designed like the Argentinean Selection jersey. His arm, a succession of titanic capybaras, maned wolves, jaguars, giant armadillos and maras, among other animals, culminated with a hand made of severed human hands that held an iron grip over a world-spanning metallic mate straw.
“Demiurge.” The word left my lips commanded by an external force. That was my tongue, those were my lips—if dream isopods ever had lips—, but it wasn’t my word.
“The one and last,” he spoke, and his voice was that of a thousand vuvuzelas, and the melancholy of every tango I ever heard, the patriotism of the national hymn and the March of San Lorenzo, the happiness of a milliard cumbias and cuartetos, the singsong of every bird that ever spread its wings over my homeland.
“Are you the one I need to kill for this to end?”
“No, there will always be a Demiurge,” he sentenced, raising the mate straw. His breath came down from heaven, bathing me in the mixed scent of jacarandas, silkfloss trees, dandelions and any other number you can imagine of flowers, along with the hunger-inducing smell of choripan, locro, empanadas and grilled meat.
Stolen novel; please report.
“Why… why are you a bad caricature of my country?” I managed to stutter.
“Our country is a bad caricature of a country.”
He lowered the straw, striking the land, wounding it asunder, beyond repair.
The earth cracked and rose, a fat cat that slept in the middle of the street also fissured at the middle and divided. He threw his tail around while he patiently watched his lower body drift away at the other side of the cleft. The end of the world was not worth interrupting his relaxation time.
I raised my foremost legs. They were cracking too, luminous fractures taking over my exoskeleton. I was transitioning from isopod to wasopod. I tried to scream, but, and I realized this too late, isopods have no vocal chords.
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I escaped from the nightmare and found myself back in my bed, with skin, covered in sweat and hair. The hair wasn’t mine, Mariana had simply decided that my human rights did not include the ability to consent to being a mattress, and therefore, using me as one was fair game. And what was the hairy mass? Was it one of her ears? No. Was it the underside of her belly? No. It was the backside of her thigh. Waking her up risked getting my face violently dusted by her fluffy tail.
When I saw the first hint of movement I grasped the beast-tail and tried to choke it into submission with just my left hand —the stupid hand, the clumsy hand— because my right was held prisoner between Mariana’s weight and my torso. The struggle was titanic, man versus tail, an unstoppable force against an unmovable will to live.
My veins were about to pop, containing the creature made my fingers feel like glass about to break. My whole arm trembled, and I could see the tendrils, the long hairs of the hydra, almost reaching for my exposed pupils. The leg came to aid the tail, and finding myself defenseless, I had to resort to my teeth. I bit the underside of her foot (just beneath the heel) as her fingers wiggled, the claws that had survived battles with a million scissors and the dirtiest black pads no man had ever seen closer to my face than I’d like to admit.
The head soon came to the aid of foot and tail. I took advantage of her weight shifting to release my right hand, and with it, I managed to stop the incoming snout and its licks of appeasement. The tongue slipped between my fingers once and again, wetting the spaces between them.
“Stop biting me, I am a good girl,” Mariana pleaded, still tangled up in our legendary conflict.
I refused to hear her pleas. It was a cutthroat, one to one brawl. Man against varmint, civilization against barbarism.
“Please, stop biting me, I will be good!” she kept on saying, her snout becoming harder and harder to contain.
My left hand gave up first, and, closing my eyes, I felt the onslaught of the fluff on my face. Soon enough, the monster’s struggles beat my jaw, and I let the foot go, receiving a couple quicks on the face. This afforded my enemy, my reason to keep on living and keep on hating, the freedom to reposition her body. Now I had to battle her forepaws If I wanted my visage to remain unlicked.
Her strength was unmatched. Centimeter to centimeter her maws of doom and tongue of doom and nose of doom and whiskers of doom approached doomfully, with the muscles of my arms finding themselves too weak to keep damnation away.
This, dear reader, was the moment of my fall. Too tired to fight anymore, too oppressed by the fiend lapping at my face, too jaded to think of a third element for this list, I left myself for dead.
“Hey, wake up, give me food. Food. Food. Food. Sustenance,” demanded the Golden Scourge.
After half an hour of Mariana drenching my face in drool and pawing at my cheeks, nose and eyes, I called my belts, took her from the loose skin of the neck and tossed the bitch against the wall. She got nailed into the masonry, and started wagging her tail.
“Again! Again!” her voice reverberated on the walls, like in a bad horror short story inspired by Poe.
I grabbed her from the tail and dragged my burden to the kitchen.