The story
begins with a person waking up, all he knows is that he has a daughter. He's in
a dark place somewhere he is quite sure he hasn't been in before. It's like a
disfigured landscape, like shreds of memory onto hills made in faded ink. The
whole picture is bleeding dark, almost black, green ink. It's sickening, the
man is sick of this and he knows this. He wanders around until he starts
recognising some of the things shredded in the ground. He starts recognising
his life, his apartment, his daughter, his kitchen. He runs and chases for
fragments of her in the pieces of memories and eventually gets into one.
And it's
darker than before. He's in his apartment, he’s guessing that this is some
important moment, but can’t quite place it, it’s… long ago. It’s a sad moment,
one he’s not sure he wants to remember. He walks around, half trying to find
his daughter, half trying to figure out who she is, or even, who he is. There
is the living room, the picture is falling to the left, dissolving as someone
spilled bleach all over it.
He knows that
his is where it happened, whatever that was. He feels like something was said
here. The walls were painted in angry strokes with dry, dense ink; those were
yelling manifested in canvas, angry, disappointed ones.
She wanted
more, he thinks without knowing what he’s referring to.
He moves a
chair, ink staining his hand, it isn’t solid. He sits, his body melting into
the chair. Then he sees it: a long shadow in the corner of his eye. He turns
around. His heart beating as hard as it could without stopping. Of course there
was nothing when he turned around, but he felt.
He felt
something with that shadow, and it haunted him. He was exited, he was afraid.
He wanted to run, but he wasn’t sure if away of it or towards it.
He needed to
find his daughter, she was the only thing he knew, so he goes wander again. In
one of the bedrooms, or what it resembles a bedroom, he finds another shred of
memory: the tiniest of the locks, a baby’s lock, hair brown as his own. He
follows the memory and he finds another landscape: a hospital, he knows this is
where his baby was born, back when nothing wrong had happened at all; but he
couldn’t remember what was that.
He finds his
footprints in the hospital’s blank and clean tides, stains on the canvas of his
memory, only growing darker as he approaches. He was the one that tainted that
memory. As he followed his own steps of the past, the floor followed right
below the sole of his shoes.
And he sinks.
He falls into
darkness.
He flies.
It is an
airplane. This was the first moment he realized he had done something wrong. He
now felt as it was wrong, at the moment he was happy. It was another happy
memory tainted by his current self. He was the wrong.
Inside the
plane, he was sitting beside his daughter. She was small and chubby, about
three years, her hair long and framing her little face. But she had nothing for
a face, nothing or a blur, or maybe it was something incompressible. He feels
guilty because there is a person on his other side. And he wanted to hold that
person’s hand. It was wrong.
This was
supposed to be a family trip to fix things before she cancelled, so then it was
only the both of them. It wasn’t supposed to meet Him there. They should never
had meet again, even after near a decade, because it still hurt, it still was
felt, even when he had his family.
He approaches
the figure right next to the him on the plane, it was nothing more than a
cluster of stains with the smell of algae of Japanese ink; even when the man
couldn’t remember the face of that person, it still smelled like Him.
He gets
closer. He wants to touch the figure but he’s afraid, afraid and guilty, but
the temptation and the wanting on his fingertips is by far stronger. He cups
the figure’s face and it faced him. It starts dripping ink. All goes black in a
second. The figure became the shadow in his face and engulfed him whole.
The black in
his vision went deeper in fear. The smell of algae intoxicated him as the knot
of guilt closed his throat.
He regains
his sight a moment later, still unable to breath. Now he’s at the beach. This a
different trip, the feeling of time indicated it was more than two years ago.
The memory, disfigured and deformed as the previous, makes him fell different.
No guilt, no fear, not even the mixed want and despair he felt when the shadow
came for him. He stares and his empty face as he remembers the feeling of
nothing he felt in that moment, watching as his daughter, merely an infant, and
her mom play on the wet sand. In the
memory, he stares at the woman and he feels nothing. They hadn’t talked in a
week, she was busy and he was unemployed at the time, he took care of his
daughter as good as he could. There were moments the woman needed more of him
than he could give, his was one of those; she had asked too much, she had put
his daughter in between and stopped the fight before it began.
He backs from
his blank memory face and keeps receding. He knows what memory will follow this
one, because he remembers what he thought at that time.
If the issue
is the money, maybe his daughter would be better off without him.
The moment he
pronounces the last word in his thought, the ink beach dies around him.
He is dying
in this memory, and that’s not the worst of it.
This memory is in his own flesh, because he needed to experience this
again; a part of him says that he deserves to suffer this again. The bathroom
floor is black with dark red ink. His wrist are wide open while he laughs that
his insurance was expensive enough to not to deny money in case of suicide.
As little laugh comes out of his throat, he sees
through the opening of the door the light pouring in. He left the light on. His
daughter can’t sleep with the light on. She cries. He waits a minute or two.
The woman hasn’t arrived, she always arrived at this time. This time she didn’t.
He needs to go to his daughter. She’s only two, what the fuck was he thinking?
Fuck the money. What was his daughter was going to do without him? The woman
was never home. The woman was never for him neither.
It was
painful. More now that he was doing this a second time. He would never know
how, but he got up, wrapped his writs on towels and went to soothe his
daughter.
Then he
waited for the woman to come home.
She wanted
the money, and he couldn’t give it.
Eventually
they had to sell the car. Then the furniture.
Then, as he
sat to wait for the woman, he feels like he was dying again. Not from the loss
of blood but from the emptiness he felt.
So his
current self realizes: he fears the emptiness, not the ink shadow.
He sees the
blood soak the towels, he seeks warmth.
He finds it
among ink, as everything before. Only lighter shadows let him recognize the
scene watered in front of him. Warm hotel sheets, the smell of ink, long dark
hair and broad shoulders. A smile he was glad to see again, dreams and a future
he thought forgotten, alive again. But that was at night.
When the sun
comes out, bleaching the ink of reality, all he feels is guilt. His daughter
was sleeping in the next room, alone. He still wore the wedding ring while he
lies in bed with another person, but then the ring meant nothing more than
malleable metal and harsh words.
He walks into
his daughter room. Her ink image sleeps, and the shadow looks over her. He
doesn’t feel fear anymore, the guilt was still there but the shadow cares about
her, that makes it better.
He could try,
he thinks.
He wakes up.
There is long
black hair brushing over his face, everything smells like ink, there is a real
celling on top of him. Something moves beside him.
- Sorry I
woke up – He says – I had to get those pages done for tomorrow.
The man is
still somewhat disoriented, but he stares at His hands, ink stained.
- No, don’t
worry. Better that you woke me.
- Having a
nightmare? – He says, taking his hair out of the way, to lay at eye-level with
the man.
- Yeah… - the
man breathes. – Is she…?
- She’s five,
don’t worry. You wake up at night more than her. C’mere. – He reassures, moving
closer to the man.
He feels His
arms wrapping around him. He’s still scared, but this is better. This is so
much better.