Story - In Memoriam of Human Memory
Benjamín Molpo
Published in "El Gusano de Luz" - "The Lightning Bug"
http://www.elgusanodeluz.com/www/articulos.asp?id=4664
(Extract, Two Short Stories)
A Tsunami
Death is like a tsunami. It pulls back from the shore feinting fear and delicacy,
and allows the bottom to be seen, and lying there are my foundations - at the same time shifting and steady, small pieces of coral I´d forgotten, and millions of grains of sand.
There is some kind of warmth on the bottom, reminds of a home, perhaps a warm hand, or perhaps a womb, a warmth unreapeatable in a lifetime - that forces us into a frenzied search for years, yearning for a repetition of that hot sensation. But on the bottom also lie the bodies of dead fish, forgotten skeletons, half-eaten, hurt fish that are still moving with cadences that would sound like whimpers, the forgotten, the partners of misadventures, of occasional sex and people harmed by my presence. But something is not on the bottom, I search and there´s not a trace - where have my plans gone?
I go over the bottom sands and my life returns in fractions of seconds. I said death is like a tsunami, and the wall of water rises, inevitable, dark, allowing a tunnel of light and water to be seen in its fall and wiping out the shore, erasing it and assembling it into a different shape, a shape that no longer belongs to me.
Benjamín Molpo
Published in "El Gusano de Luz" - "The Lightning Bug"
http://www.elgusanodeluz.com/www/articulos.asp?id=4664
(Extract, Two Short Stories)
A Tsunami
Death is like a tsunami. It pulls back from the shore feinting fear and delicacy,
and allows the bottom to be seen, and lying there are my foundations - at the same time shifting and steady, small pieces of coral I´d forgotten, and millions of grains of sand.
There is some kind of warmth on the bottom, reminds of a home, perhaps a warm hand, or perhaps a womb, a warmth unreapeatable in a lifetime - that forces us into a frenzied search for years, yearning for a repetition of that hot sensation. But on the bottom also lie the bodies of dead fish, forgotten skeletons, half-eaten, hurt fish that are still moving with cadences that would sound like whimpers, the forgotten, the partners of misadventures, of occasional sex and people harmed by my presence. But something is not on the bottom, I search and there´s not a trace - where have my plans gone?
I go over the bottom sands and my life returns in fractions of seconds. I said death is like a tsunami, and the wall of water rises, inevitable, dark, allowing a tunnel of light and water to be seen in its fall and wiping out the shore, erasing it and assembling it into a different shape, a shape that no longer belongs to me.