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Of Walls & Beasts

Of all the things she could have said to him she chose the one that made less noise of all. That short, lousy combination of words rushed out of her mouth, through dry lips that he would never kiss again; for all the beautiful things in his life were cruelly destined to disappear.

“I think you should…” she started in a broken thin voice.

The air around them froze, so the rest of her words had no way of reaching his ears. There was no use for it anyway, as he had already lost the will to listen when he saw what her eyes were saying. He turned his gaze away –the ice around them cutting every single inch of his skin –as the world fell apart without him expecting it.

As he slowly walked towards the wall, he could barely hear her remaining words; she sounded like an echo of the person she once  had been, her voice alienated by the unbearable look in her eyes. He reached the cold surface with the palm of his right hand, before leaning his head towards the whiteness, until his right ear was flat against the wall.

He heard nothing. There was no last advice, no comforting song coming from the heart of the bricks, not a single wise whisper to be heard. He trembled as he grasped the first handful of gypsum and brick out of the wall. He did the same with his left hand, tearing apart another piece of the white cold wall. His fingers would come first, penetrating the wall as a knife stabbing meat, followed by tense hands that would easily tear off chunks of debris. By clinching his fists, he turned the pieces of brick into dust, following an almost mechanical ritual.

During all this time she had been looking past him, her eyes aiming at a point beyond his figure, apart from the things he had always known; somewhere too far away for him to reach. Only once she dared to look at the huge hole in the wall, just in time to see his silhouette disappearing through it. The rest of the time she just kept on looking at someplace beyond that room.

That is why she could not see the beasts coming.