4
The Horse

Outside the building, the cold breeze of the end of fall swirling around her bare legs welcomed her. She raised her head to the night sky, the moon was going to hide behind some scattered clouds. She wished for snow and looked down at her car parked across the street: a red Mustang, old but the silver horse was still shining. The street was dead vacant. She remembered the psychoanalyst,

‘How can you be afraid of the darkness? You belong to the wild nights. That is the time when you can communicate with your real identity in a survival struggle against the circumstances of the dark side of Milwaukee, if they surround you.’ She entered the car, inserted the car key into the ignition and turned it; the engine cranked but didn’t start. She looked at the gas tank gauge, it was full. “My old horse, I have not taken care of you well. I will wait, be calm.”

She removed her hand from the key, “Don’t rush my horse, and let the night get longer.” She unfastened the safety belt, rotated back the car seat to a relaxing position then wiggled her back onto the seat’s ridge to ridge to find a comfortable spot free of protruding springs. She lay back, reclining the seat, and crossed her hands at the back of her head. She watched the sky through the windshield. The clouds were getting thicker, no stars left; they were trying to hide the moon. I hate the sun and the moon; make for me the darkest night.

Outside the window, a man appeared when the building glass doors slid open. She leaned forward; Can I believe my eyes, the old man with a shovel? She smiled, Freedom at last. She straightened up her seat, opened the glove compartment, and took out a piece of paper and a pen. She drew something on the paper and put back the pen. The dress did not have a pocket, so she tucked the paper in the tight cleavage of her breasts.

“My faithful old horse, take off, even if it is going to be your last ride.” She turned the ignition, and the horse whined aloud.

Soon for the second time, she passed the small area of the city that she had been living in for years. The area restricted to a walking distance between her building and the psychiatrist office from one side, and to the convenience store from the other side. Tonight’s destination, the botanist’s store, was about one hour or so driving distance. Although she had driven there in confusion only once, she could find her way with no problem. She rolled the window down an inch, the cold air guided her with the familiar scents of the streets leading to the store.

By the time she had reached an intersection, a combination of pictures and scents informed her of the right direction; she could sense to turn right, left, or go straight. She stopped the car at a stop sign, the last sign before reaching the dirt road in the outskirt of the city. She smelled a dustbin with rats around it before turning onto the last paved street.

She turned left five minutes later and saw the dustbin on the left side, pulled over and parked her car across from it. She let the engine continue revving. She looked through the window to the dustbin. The lid was wide open, suspended at the back of the bin, garbage overflowing, the liquid of the filth running down and stuck to the pavement of the sidewalk and the street. Smelly residues of dried liquid waste, oil and grease accented the permanent stains all around and the rats. They were devouring voraciously, licking the dried streams, their appetizer. They were all over the place, the smaller ones were searching on and into the bin; the big ones, too lazy to jump up had marked their territory on the pavement, busy with the food until a bigger one would notice and invade to capture their territory. The gluttonous sound of their teeth chewing the dirt, and the squeaking of joy were the only sounds of the city of Milwaukee crossing the street, they together with the smell of the dirt and rats passed through the gap in the window, burning her nose and bothering her ears. Thanks for more reasons to hate.

She smiled while visualizing a scene in her mind: rats running and squeaking everywhere, a magnificent festival of glowing fires on the sidewalk and street. A huge fire in the dustbin, the jumping up and down of rats in the fire, the smell of burning dirty grease mixed with skin. The amazing show started by splashing gasoline on them, and then striking a match. The fire was burning them down, like a representation of the city people. The fat rat made a circle of fire, the mayor was burning. All Milwaukee is on fire, the buildings, and the crowd. A gift of the squeaky night to me. Her palm cupped the gear knob, moved the lever gently, and a few minutes later she was driving on the dirt road.

Feeling cold in the car she turned on the heater to full blast. The blow of hot air caressing her legs had a strange effect. It made her take notice again of the lack of her panty. The hot air was coming from the lower heater close to the pedals. The sweat of her feet in her Y-shaped slippers was accumulating, making her feet on the accelerator and clutch slip up and down. The combination of hot air and the dance of her feet on the pedals, and the friction between her massive thighs brought her a lust she had no memory of. The secreted lubricant found it easy to stream down her smooth sweating thighs to her knees, and then lower to her calves. She pushed her foot harder on the gas pedal, and the silver horse whined, throwing back pebbles and stones on the dirt road in the outskirt of the city.

Some piles of soil had been dumped unexpectedly at the end of the dirt road, blocking the entrance to the parking lot. She gradually added weight to her foot on the brake pedal to make a smooth stop before a mound. She stepped out of the car and climbed up the mound in the empty parking lot. At the end of vast concrete pavement, the botanist’s store was still lit. With some urge to urinate on the top of the mound, streams of another wild scent slipped down her legs, and she watched the liquid as part of nature with no shame. The fluid reached her feet and the greedy soil with a hundred thirsty mouths queued along her toes, soles, and arches, guzzling every drop, perfuming its entity with the long-time hope of the wild. The unsatisfied softened soil dragged her feet down, and unable to hold, the thief stole her slippers.

She descended the mount. She found walking on the parking lot pleasant; she looked down and noted she was stepping on the harsh concrete and weeds barefooted. She looked back to the dirt mound, noticing her red slippers were stuck in the soil at the top of the mound. Rough and partly spalled concrete squares were weed-tufted in the gaps between the edges. She enjoyed the scratch of harsh weeds on her bare soles.

The heat in the car and the dance of her legs on the pedals had done the job perfectly. The entirety of her legs from thighs down to feet was soaked with a bizarre combination of sweat and lubricant. As she was walking, the cold breeze was twisting around her calves, circling around her thighs, and shamelessly going up and down before departing from the back with a heavy load of wild scents. The stream of cold breeze was dumping in progression its precious cargo along her way, leaving a tunnel of perfume behind, so intense that it could distract a starved wild beast in chasing its prey.

With a heavy look around, she twisted on her heels in a sudden move. At a distance, behind the mound where she had lost her slippers, were two glimmerings of blue, gazing at her. A human, a beast, or something that I do not know. Should I have the courage to walk there and take back my slippers from it? She turned in the direction of the store, and noticed a car was parked out front. As she was walking closer, she saw it was a pickup truck with a cabin at the back. She looked through the window shield; nobody was behind the wheel. She passed the truck, opened the door of the store, and entered.

5
The Empty Room

The botanist was sitting at the cash register, head down and his index finger was playing with something on the counter top. She walked closer; it was a dead bee. She stood by him, waiting for his attention. The botanist sniffed and raised his head.

“It’s you again, I can call you my regular customer,” he said smilingly.

“This is only my second time,” she said.

“Well, look around at the store, it is vacant.”

“So I deserve a good discount.”

“Of course you do. Especially, since you are wearing a swimsuit, I guess you really deserve a reward. How was the water? I see you are still wet.”

“What can I say? Even to me it’s strange that I have sweated so much on this cold night.”

“The other strange thing is that you were not afraid to come here alone in this appearance. I should tell you something, people in solitude do strange things.”

“Like?”

“I can show you something, if you are not afraid of vaults.”

“It is just a room underground, isn’t it?”

“If I were an engineer, I would affirm this. Nevertheless, there is much more than that. It is where gods live. Have you ever thought of the original meaning of a vault: a chamber beneath a church, or in a graveyard? Vaults were the worship temples of some believers. Alas, the men of truth were chained and imprisoned in their worship place to death, in the vaults. God lives underground, placing him in the sky was the politics of masters, as religion became so popular that the myriads bowed in obedience. You may call it superstition, which means the religion of believers in the past, who were killed in the battle of truth against lies.”

“Within twelve years of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, I was never taught of this conception in the human mind,” she said.

“So you speak with a different language. In that case, the translation is ‘dogs from the cellar.’ Men stayed for long in the isolation underground, and cannot differ illusions from common sense. The only reality would be what they create in their mind. Down there, your deepest recollections of distressed childhood experiences find a way to funnel up and present themselves as current reality.”

“And then?”

“You follow the inexplicable; you don’t dare to think of upstairs.”

“Reveal your vault to me. I am not afraid of nightmares.”

The man stood up and walked through an aisle to the end of the hall where there was a huge freestanding storage shelf covering the hall as an end wall. He went to the right end of the shelf and squeezed himself sideways through a narrow gap between the wall and the shelf. She followed him in the same way. The shelf stretched to the ceiling, only a dim light through the gap could hardly defy the darkness at the back. He switched the light on; it was a large area, quiet and vacant without any windows or doors.

He went straight to the far end corner of the area, stooped to reach a trapdoor cleverly camouflaged on the floor, pulled up the handle’s ring, and opened it. He rotated the trapdoor about the hinges and gently put it on the floor on its back. She went to the opening and looked down; a metal staircase was going down. “Let’s proceed,” he said showing the way down with his hand.

“Should I be afraid?”

“Don’t worry. All you see are legitimate types of criminal horrors.”

He went down the stairs and turned the light on. She followed, him holding the handrail on the shaky metal staircase. There was a long corridor which ran under store hall, and a few doors were located along one side. He opened the first door and went in and she followed into a huge area. The floor was filled with large flowerpots in aisles. She could see the remnants of dried flowers and plants on the pots. The floor of the aisles and all the pots were hidden under a thick carpet of dead bees, in the millions. The empty artificial bee hives were suspended from the ceiling over the pots area, aligned in rows.

As he was looking at the empty hives, said, “Have you ever thought why flowers smell good? The land plants evolved to flowering plants somewhere between 140 and 250 million years ago. The biological function of flowers is reproduction, but it is not possible without the help of pollinators, the bees. The scent, a complex compound, emitted by flowers along with color is to attract pollinators. The problem is that bees had lived before flowers, and they didn’t need flowers. So my question was, and of which I could not free my mind, how flowers affected the evolution of bees to make them their slave workers. I posed a hypothesis: the volatile scent, which is a molecular compound, penetrates DNA and alters the biology of the bees. Down in their DNA had been a need for flowers in some hidden way, and when the scent activated, it deciphered the code. The translation in our language: the bees remembered.”

He pointed to the floor, “The yellow and black carpet of this room displays the practice of trial and error leading to the failure of my hypothesis. The vegetarian bees died of hunger, never changing to honey bees. At the end, tired of one year’s testing, I introduced the red-brown vulture bees for revenge; surely they didn’t care for flowers, they attacked the plant bees and took their flesh out from their eyes. I was watching their feast until they killed them all.”

“There is no horror in dead bees.”