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2021
A short tale from the rotten peripheries of Weird Italia, as a special Schizzmas gift to readers awaiting the full horror of the Gruppo di Nun grimoire…
The ocean, the desert, the suburbs; there are only three flat places in this world.
Vivian’s shadow sprints behind me. The rumble of her feet soon follows and her run bursts into a jump. The skirt, white, in mid-air. Oily black hair hangs motionless on bare shoulders. Her ass flashes in front of me. A crude cut at the end of her spinal staircase. As her feet leave the ground, I picture the other side of her skull, manifesting before my eyes her eyes exploring the world ahead. She glows lividly, as if her body could burst out of her skin. I’m happy. I am warm and whatever.
We walk through the quaint interregnum that lets one little town bleed into another. There’s only one sidewalk, on the right side of the road. The road is wide. It glows with the mirage of the rush hour, filled with cars speeding right beside us. But under the vertical noon sun, only a couple pass by. The sides of the road are under siege—tamed tall grass that oozes white flowers so bright they seem about to pop. Little pulsing cysts. In the distance, copses dot the skies. In the air, the stabs of a drill track from a house we left behind.
Vivian’s feet touch the ground, emitting a deadbeat stomp on the heated cement.
She turns around, her eyes crushed to tiny slits, searching me for something.
She takes a few steps backwards, grinding the sole of her shoes further away.
She dashes back towards me, her arms twisting near her body like a frog’s corpse under electrical wires. In a split second her sweat squirts in my mouth. Her hands dash behind me. They wrestle with my backpack and reappear with a water bottle.
“You said you’d follow me wherever I’d go. That you’d never stop for any reason whatsoever. Move it!”, she orbits away from me again. I keep up. I wouldn’t betray her for the world.
The new town dawns with every step. The tall grasses dim and the white flowers sink. We are near a roundabout, where the wide road dies in two smaller streets. A really tiny one on the right. Small vein. A large one right in front of us. Main artery. The sun above loses its bite, going limp on us. As we get near the roundabout, an even tamer vegetation appears. Domesticated trees casting long shadows, snuffing the vastness of the white flower field.
We are not where we want to be yet. Just like the previous town and the one before that, this is not our destination. We are probably not even halfway there.
No cars around. We cut through the heart of the roundabout.
Vivian is before me, down the main artery. The geography of the road abruptly loses its shape as we enter. The white flower field disappears completely. Lines of brown bars, fencing off private gardens, take its place, the sun finally dead under the quiet shade of polite house trees. The road and the sidewalk are divided by a narrow strip of parking spots. A few cars rest here.
We walk by the sleeping vehicles, Vivian in front of me, and I caress one of them. A middle-class station wagon—electric blue, domestic blue. My throat clogs like it did in my mum’s new car when she made me sit still. I didn’t want to. Her new car smelled, like every new car, suffocating. My muscles remember the clenching safety belt right on my chest as I forced myself to breath with my mouth wide open, trying to ingest the stench as little as humanly possible. My mouth drools as it used to drool trying to breath without really breathing. I keep walking crippled by the uncomfortable memory shaking my body.
Beside me, something thunders down the garden. A new kind of vertigo grips me. I stand still.
A heavy dog, I believe, or something like that. I got too close to its kingdom, as often happens in places like these. It should be a normal occurrence, but it really isn’t. The animal shakes the ground with every step. THUMPTHUMPTHUMP on my right side as the heavy beast descends. It sounds black as rain. Tears spontaneously glaze my eyes. Vivian is so far ahead she probably won’t hear a thing.
In a second, a swollen skull lands on deaf metal bars. It crashes into the brown fence, emitting a last, loudest THUMP. The sonic boom of bones about to snap clips my stomach shut. I can’t really make out what the thing is, but now it bleeds frantically and shakes.
As the blur in my eyes subsides, I make out the silhouette of the animal. It’s a not a dog. Not at all.
It has the body of a muscular ten-year-old. Or a tiny, built man. An asymmetrical mandible carves the face’s edge. Canines covered in sallow saliva spring forth to the world’s jugular. His shoulders are hunched forward. Its arms protrude in front, as if its upper limbs cascade from a set of dislocated joints. It can’t be human. There’s no discipline capable of imparting that form to a human body. It stands comfortably on his bended knuckles. Its abdomen is tense. A bramble of nerves and muscles interrupted at the base by a hard-on.
He stares right at me, his head split open. Beneath the blood, a tapestry of scars. Scanning each one I can imagine the face of every stranger he chased down the sidewalk.
He screeches, RRRAAAARRRRRAAAAAAARRRRRRAAAAAAARRRRRAAAARRRRAAAARRRRRRRAAAA. Bangs his head against the bars. I can’t see Vivian anymore. He bangs and bangs and bangs and blood splatters on the metal bars and the sidewalk and my shoes.
Visibly in pain, he turns around and digs his snout in the ground. He pushes his ass up. A black morning star pulsing.
“HEY WHAT’S THAT WHAT ARE YOU DOING DON’T STOP PLEASE YOU KNOW YOU SHOULDN’T” echoes across the sidewalk.
The dogboy looks back at me. He’s all blood now. I take some steps forward.
I stick my head in the metal bars.
He cracks his mouth open. Smells like shit and dirt.