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The sky is too dark (prose - short fiction)
Family Dinner
She wore a black dress and red lipstick. Her eyes were like stormy seas. Dark and erratic, full of fire and ashes. He was sitting outside trading silence and cigarettes with himself. I must have fallen asleep beside the dinner table. I was awaken by the smell of burning cake and coffee. There were apples scattered all over the table and half-empty wine glasses. The ashtrays were full and the butter had melted on the bread.
She took one of the knives and started cutting the apples for me. Her hand moved like a hyena, but she was soft somehow, soft like the white bread I filled my small mouth with. My stomach was filled with the vanilla and spiced melancholy of that room. The thick air that tasted like whisky and rain. The white walls tightly kept inside of them all our abandoned dreams and broken tomorrows. And unlike a family, but more like lone winter blooms, we sat watching the walls in silence, waiting and fading.
Slowly fading...
Ένα άψυχο τραγούδι
Οι άνθρωποι φοβισμένοι, βουβοί. Τα πουλιά με τα ματωμένα μάτια βυθίζονται στη σιωπή. Πνιγμένες φωνές και άδεια βλέμματα. Φώτα σπασμένα, μικρά παιδιά που τριγυρίζουν χαμένα. Η σκέψη κλεισμένη σε μια άθλια φυλακή. Και ο Ιούδας στέκεται προδωμένος. Δυο χιλιάδες χρόνια πνιγμένοι σε ψέματα, δίχως διαφυγή. Τα τρένα εκτροχιασμένα. Λάθος στροφή, λάθος γραμμή. Χωρίς νερό ο ήλιος ματώνει. Ένα άψυχο τραγούδι, μια μαραμένη ελπίδα.
Ο Ζητιάνος
Θλιμμένη, μίζερη σιωπή σε ένα δωμάτιο αδειανό δίχως ζωή. Σπασμένα γυαλιά εδώ κι εκεί. Το παράθυρο ανοιχτό. Το φως ψεύτικο, αχνό. Κι απ’ έξω παραμιλάει ένας τρελός. Με μάτια μεθυσμένα από πόνο, με ρούχα κουρελιασμένα από το χρόνο. Στραβώνει τα χέρια και ζητιανεύει ένα όνειρο, χρόνια τώρα χαμένο.
The Sky is too dark
They came one day with guns and told us our country didn't belong to us. They took our houses and our lands. They shot those who resisted. They captured the moon and tortured it until it bled silver. Friends and relatives fell like tree leaves in the autumn. We grew up with an invisible, yet impenetrable wall that wouldn't let us stand in the ground that was ours. I saw the soldiers. I saw their guns. I felt the pain and their hate. Time didn't bring relief. It didn't bring peace. Only oblivion. For less people care now. They've accepted thing as they are. It is easier for them. But there is still a hollow place inside of us. Still a black spot where the moon used to be.
Capture the moon
You plucked flowers, so you could touch my face. I let them float on lake waters; slowly watched them drown. Your eyes fluttered. My lips shivered. And when our glasses were empty we opened our palms, and with hungry eyes, rose to capture the moon and pocket the stars.
She could not love me, for I could not be perfect
Apr. 19th, 2007
She smelled like cigarettes. With crushed pills inside her palms and poison in a crystal glass. In the floor around her laid broken porcelain dolls with blue dresses. I could see the tears on their faces. Almost smell their sadness. There was sorrow in that room. The room with the white walls and the symmetrically arranged furniture. Almost perfect. But the white paint covered a child's drawings on the wall. It covered the suns and hearts I drew with colour pencils.
Inside her eyes I could see a wasteland of abandoned dreams. I could see her replacing my lollipops with plastic strawberries that smelled like whisky and vodka. I have seen her crying moments ago, so I drew her a card with pink hearts. But she didn't look at the girl of nine with the hungry eyes. She didn't talk to me. The hearts dropped from her hands and she traded them with a cigarette. She wiped her tears and slowly made her way out of the room.
She had glued my eyes open so I could watch her leave. I called for her. But she didn't come back.
I was not her daughter. I was nothing.
White Kingdom
--The Wolf--
This wolf is lost inside the rivers of the night
It's calling for the moon. Lonely, with two immortal stars trapped in its eyes. It breathes
the night dew of the wind and dances alone.
The secret of the other world in its heart it keeps.
Forever.
--The Raven--
Feathers made of gloom's thread
My lost raven - messenger of the dead
Eyes made of ebony gleams
Bird of darkness, thief of dreams
--The Jasmines--
The jasmines bloom underneath the white castles of the changeless in-between. They paint white the echoes of the moon. They sing of dreams.
--My Dream--
In this world I'm lost; enthralled in grey forests of stars that shine with a light that longs
for innocence.
Therein I dance in a frozen lake.
In the twilight mist I'm almost drowning.
Alone I shall be.
Raven, speak to me.
I know there're walls I cannot see.
Places outside the mirrors - I can never reach.
I'm fated to be in a reality that is but a dream; away from Time's kingdom of life.
Here, in the in-betweens, time is frozen.
A world only real for us.
Raven, hear me.
Don't let the ice break. Save me.
Forget me.
Time won't reach us. And no one else will.
-------------
It's the curse of the secret beyond the dreams. Wolves, ravens, jasmines. We are the children of the night. The keepers of the secret of the White Kingdom. We carry the blackness of the night and the colours of the dreams in our hearts. And forever we shall be alone.
{ΟΥΚ ΕΓΝΩΣ}
Julian, last of the Pagans said "I read, I understood, I condemned"
And the Alexandrian Poet said "Ridiculous man, had you understood, you wouldn't have condemned".
But Poet don't you see? No one has ever understood.
"Forgive" was written "kill" we read. "Love" it said "hate" we understood.
And we condemned ourselves.
The green black line that divides the sun
I remember once, Holy Saturday it was. We were around the church with candles in
our hands. Only half a step away from the border. I turned my head and I saw the
gun. The hands looked so friendly. So familiar. But you held a gun, not a
candle. And it was pointed at my heart. Unbending, life consuming hate wrapped
in metal. So cruel.
What a job you have my brother. Did you choose to be there dividing us eternally
or where you chosen and trained to hate us? We learn to hate you too. We were
chosen... when the stars were refused a place in their sky, when our homes were
taken so violently thirty-something years ago.
Have you been standing there since? How much longer will you stay?
You won't let us cross, let us go home. You blow our candles, outside the
church. Frozen I stare at you. And maybe I don't believe in God, but the light
was real and now it's gone.
My brothers how could you?
Fate Sorrowful Echoes of what was meant to be
Just as ever it was, as the sea nymphs dreamed, as the angels have foreseen, so it will be. Snow will fall, flowers will bloom, the winds will sing. But always, always the melancholy singed melodies will reach my dreams. I dance within the silver-purple whirlwind of misted tomorrows and I cannot stop twirling behind my crystalline walls. In-between of worlds, inside a sea of light-blue diamonds. In-between of the worlds. There is no dawn here. Time stands still. And always the sorrowful echoes of the moon's tears will fill my dreams. Just as ever it was, so it shall always be.
Before a thousand storms
She stares at her mirror with her still wet dyed hair and black circles around her shadowed green eyes. Something broke.
Something so violently was ripped out of her. Stolen. She trusted you to lead her to the light and you took her stars and ripped them into
pieces in front of her eyes, laughing. Laughing. And she stared at you destroying everything that belonged to her.
And she couldn't move. She knew you could snap her into pieces with just one move. But for the most part, she couldn't believe what you were doing. She was too young to understand, too
innocent to feel your hate.
But you took care of that.
