The InkWell Writing Challenge | DARK WONDER

The man is at the hotel reception, waiting, sitting with his back to the front door. A geometrical painting, perhaps cubist, hanging on the wall reminds him of the strange nightmare that last night did not allow him to rest comfortably.

The receptionist hands him the keys. And as he walks into the room, he tries to reconstruct the dream. At first it's a bit confusing. But when he lies down on the bed, looking lost in the solitary space, he remembers that he dreamt he was a fly unable to fly, trapped, paralyzed by a spider. A confusing sound was intermingled with the image of the spider: the whispering of its name that was repeated tirelessly.

The dream was like a passage from one life to another, he thought that the spider's web symbolized the time that shelters and consumes us day by day. Although he didn't see the spider's haunting, he thought it was a representation of the demons inside him, which had burned again, but, curiously, they would be undone again in the flames from which they had emerged.

His disturbance had not disappeared with the awakening, but it had no form anymore, and in its ubiquitous report it had spread all over his body; and, in the same way as his blood and chromosomes, it flooded even the very fluids that kept him alive.

Then the knock on the door returns him from dreaming. A young woman enters the room with boldness and modesty in equal parts. The absence of voices is filled with repeated kisses, while insistent fingers pretend to encompass the whole space of the other.

Beneath the woman's sparkling eyes, a white-skinned scream erupts, slightly darkened in the space of her breasts and hips. The barefoot of the other foot steps on her heel. The skirt falls to the ground. The stockings, wrapped around her ankles like black cream, mark a delicate trail in the fuzz of her legs. The purple of her lips leaves its trace on the lips of other. The small handkerchief that hides the triangle of the pubis, gets smaller and finally disappears on the floor. The belly hides and announces itself among palpitations.

The man feels that all his senses have been taken away and, as if he profanes an infinite darkness, jumps over the woman to possess her. Rhythmic contractions, caresses on the nape of the neck; breasts that are agitated and dispersed, come back and go away. Sweat like cold water. Moaning. The man hits the woman with perseverance, with depth of knife. Thin and agile legs, pointing of ribs that were inflame pressing the skin to every contortion of the torso. And the nails, like sharp fragments stuck in the flesh of the back with a delicious and extreme damage. She turns. The silky indentation of the buttocks extends and rises, deepening between the double molding of the back. She writhes and her tremors are disordered; then she stops and with a ductile gesture, on her knees, licks the glans as salvation in the desert, blooming from a niche the drowned one, thick with a white that shines on her frightened face, and feels the need of opening her eyes to eat the sweet bread.

Then, only a few images remain. The woman on the man's chest. The sensation of well-being folded to the heart. The conversation about the importance of love. The meaning of the husband in the girl, which he justifies in an ancient knowledge: the time passes like filtering its waters by our fingers; so, with the custom, the desire is extinguished; although he prefers to think that only a part of the desire has been extinguished like the vision of an object in the distance. Love, in her house, would become something like a chick, that in spite of beating its wings does not take flight: sharp thought that describes loves without hope, its unfinished end or rather endless, of work without final act.

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The man comments the dream with the spider.

–The spider is important for women–, says the girl. –When I was little, my mother used to put me on spider bracelets. It's the only thing I know about spiders–, she finishes.

The infinite desire that man has to extend space and stop time to stay with the girl in the infinite continuum does not interrupt the denunciation of the clock or the stalking of the minutes. Then, in the rush to return the clothes to the bodies, to find the lost clothes, the man felt unable to get up. The woman spoke with a strange metallic voice referring to the ritual to which her mother submitted her when she was a child: in the forest, from an oak tree she extracted a spider that makes a yarn like small wool. That wool was tied to her body until it got into her skin to make her a good worker.

It was then that the man noticed the white ribbon that seemed to wrap him. He thought it was a joke as he felt the fine cloth that was wrapped around him. He wanted to wrap himself up in strength to continue. He was filled with hope to resist, while the woman, who had already transformed herself into a strange insect, was slowly weaving his body, as if embroidering from whim and desire and not from the need to annihilate it and feed of him.

–Can you imagine a river with an abundance of fish–, asked the woman.

The yes with which he affirms seems to lose its monosyllabic form to become an immense train of letters that go from his mouth to space, and in their width and extension they break his whole being that dilutes in the infinite.

Later he heard that the woman her call for his name, and heard with hatred in the beginning and later with resignation a drowned out familiar, protective rumor that wakes him up.

He observes the girl who is looking for something in the room. She gets the garment. She zippers up his skirt. Button up the bra. She puts shoes. The palm of your hand shakes the blouse at the bottom of your left breast. Shake her hair. Perfumes her body.

He looks at himself, ungainly, cordoned off to the bed, with his body seemingly undone. He tries to scream but nothing. His voice seems to be retained, nailed. Then he feels the cold that blows from a tiny breeze and a rumor like water breaking stones. The woman continues, unperturbed, in her routine act: The bag over her shoulder. The glasses over her head. The kiss with a broken pomegranate mouth to the lover before repainting her lips. And she walks happily, as if were sheltered in times of fresh rain. And although it was a quarter to twelve in the morning, for him the night was about to happen.