The Prison

by Stefano Pastor

  One in front of the other, it looked as if it was the reflexion of a mirror.

  Eva poured some drink for both, then she said it. “I’ve got cancer, Jessica. The last stage of cancer. There’s nothing more that can be done.”

  “Oh, my god!”

  “Don’t be hypocrite, please. We don’t love each other, we are not even friends, we are too similar to fake.”

  “This doesn’t matter. I’m still sorry.”

  Eva emptied the glass and filled it again. She also poured it for Jessica.

  “Are you scared?”

  “For you? Of course,.”

  “No, not for me. Are you scared of what you will feel when I die?”

  Jessica was gobsmacked

  “When you broke a leg, when we were kids, I was really bad, I couldn’t move. And when you had the appendix removed it was horrible, I screamed all night.”

  “It’s different”, Jessica whispered, but she was scared.

  “Have you ever asked yourself what awaits after? If there is anything there? Isn’t it horrible not knowing?”

  Jessica started to feel more uneasy. “I don’t think about it.”

  “Until now nobody has been able to come back to tell the story. This could be the first time.”

  “What are you saying?” shouted.

  “When I die, you will see it. You will see what’s in the other side. You will know what I’m going through.”

  “It’s absurd!”

  “I’ve been thinking it for a while you know? to know what’s on the other side, what awaits me. I’m not afraid. It’s terrible not to know. To die and not to know.”

  “Maybe it’s better, don’t you think?”

  “Well I’m not made like that, I don’t like surprises. I hate going in this way.”

  Jessica sighed. “What do you want me to do? Because I know you, you always want something. And stop about these stupid things of the beyond, tell me what you need.”

  “Oh, what I need you to do, you are already doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think it’s the only solution. The only way to know. You must tell me. You have to go before me.”

  Jessica was horrified. She tried to get up but her head started to spin. She tried to sit down, dazed. “What did you give to me?”

  “I have killed you, I’m afraid, I had no other choice.”

  “You are crazy!”

  “When you are over there, I will know. I will know what awaits me.”

  “You can’t! You can’t!”

  “Don’t worry, it won’t be painful. In a few minutes, it will all be over.”

  “Why?”

  Eva stretched her arm and caressed her hand.

  “Don’t be afraid, I won’t leave you alone.”

  Only three minutes was needed to reach death. Three minutes without being able to move or talk because the poison paralyzed her. Only her eyes where alive filled with terror. Then they were not.

  Eva’s eyes also stopped working for a long never-ending minute.

  Then they came back to live, and they were shining more than ever.

  A smile appeared on her face. A triumph smile. She started laughing, while getting the revolver from the bag.

  “I’m coming Jessica, don’t worry. I’m coming.”

  Then she pointed to her head and shot.

  January 2011

  LITTLE

  Translation by Chiara Perfetti

  Damn, was he little!

  I was the first one to speak of it. I poked Silvia and whispered not too low: “What do you say, is he a kid?”

  Giulia answered in her place: “Oh come on, can’t you see? He’s a dwarf.”

  He might have been, yes, and the one standing beside him surely was, but he still looked like a kid to me.

  That night we all were at least tipsy, not to say utterly drunk. It was our usual Friday night out, no restraints, no rules. I was able to pass them up for a while, but now that I didn’t have a boyfriend anymore I relapsed in that sad habit.

  We went on the hunt, that’s how they used to say, though we rarely caught prey. At most, I was the only one to succeed, for I’m not bad at all. The others, poor souls, had to make do with sighing.

  Not that Silvia and Giulia were horribly ugly girls, but they simply didn’t know how to dress up to show what mother nature gifted them with. Silvia wore those hideous Coke-bottles looking glasses, and Giulia with her sad stringy hair split up in two small braids like a little girl. So pathetic!

  But then why did I hang out with them? Well, because we were friends since forever and because… ok, I’ll admit it, among them I stood out. Damn it, I was a looker! Screw modesty.

  I couldn’t even recall how we ended up in that amusement park. Perhaps we were curious of the novelty, or maybe because it could have been a nice boy-hunting territory. Then Silvia wanted to buy an envelope and we got there.

  It was and old game but it still held its charm. They sold envelopes to the crowd, sealed envelopes. Then some were drawn and the negotiations began. The barker made them offers to buy the envelopes. You could never know what prize was inside them, so it was all a gamble.

  Silvia’s was yet to be drew so our attention to the game dwindled. We stood watching the others negotiate and we grew increasingly bored. What was before us was a simple bandwagon, packed with all sorts of prizes, and in front of its opened back-door was a little stage. The barker was a dwarf and his voice was so incredibly stentorian that he had no need for a microphone.

  Except he wasn’t the one we were interested in. That would be his assistant.

  Clearly, he was the barker’s son, but was he a kid or a dwarf like him?

  “Let’s ask him”, I proposed.

  The chicks started giggling, which only strengthened my curiosity.

  “I’ll do it”, I said, and waited not for an answer. I pushed through the crowd and shoved my way to the makeshift stage.

  “Hey you, little man!” I shouted.

  The little man knew right away that I was talking to him and gave me a rather uninviting look.

  I kept going, unwavering: “Are you a kid or what?”

  He pretended to ignore me.

  By now I was on a roll, blame the alcohol for that. I chugged three beers in a row and my alcohol tolerance was also low. “Oh, come on, don’t make me beg. How old are you?”

  He probably only answered to avoid trouble. A squawking drunk like me could compromise the whole game. So, he left his father and walked up to me. “Nineteen”, he answered.

  I was flabbergasted: that little fellow was my same age. Yet he looked like a child, just a child. His body did not appear to be affected by any kind of deformity, only its proportions where reduced.

  Since I kept silent, he ignored me and went back to his father. I let myself get lost in the crowd once again and I was back with my friends, who had been following that quick exchange.

  “You believe him?” Silvia asked.

  “Why shouldn’t it be true?” Giulia argued. “That’s how they are.”

  “Do you think that…will it work? Can he do it like everybody else?”

  The two burst out laughing.

  “My gosh, that should also be to scale!” Giulia added. “It’s nasty to even just think about it. I would feel like I were doing it with a kid!”

  “I would like to see him naked”, continued Silvia, undeterred. “To see what he’s like.”

  “Such a perv! How can you even think something like that?”

  “He’s cute.”

  The chicks squawked and I couldn’t take my eyes off the small man. He looked efficient, almost like he could anticipate his father’s commands. Perhaps he had been doing that job for so long that he always knew what to expect.

  I don’t know why I said what I said. At that time, I blamed it on the alcohol. “I’ll do it.”

  “You’ll do what?” Silvia asked me.

  “I’ll fuck him. Then I’ll have you
r answers.”

  Once more, they burst out laughing. “Are you crazy?”

  I shrugged. “What does it matter? If he can’t get hard then I’ll get nothing. If, on the other hand, he gets hard… then it can’t be that bad!”

  “But he’s like a child!”

  “He is our age, haven’t you heard him?”

  “Yes but…”

  “I wonder if he has ever done it.”

  “Wait, are you serious? Do you realize what you want to do?”

  Truth be told, the little man didn’t turn me on at all, I was simply curious. It was the appeal of the forbidden, of the impossible, that turned me on.

  “You think I can’t do that? That he would reject me?”

  “You are nuts!”, Giulia rebated in a tone that implied she had more than enough with this matter.

  It ended there. We talked about other topics, all of them more or less petty, and kept on exploring what was left of the amusement park.

  Still, the idea lingered. We hung out for another hour or so amidst the different attractions, then the clock struck midnight and we had to start heading home.

  “You go first”, I said. “I’m staying a little bit more.”

  Giulia figured it out right away. “You really want to do that!”

  “Just go!” I snapped. “If something happens, you’ll be the first to know tomorrow morning.”

  At first it wasn’t easy to persuade them, but after a few minutes they left me. They were still giggling.

  I went back to the dwarfs’ bandwagon.

  The show was over and the little man was dismantling the stage. His father was nowhere to be seen. “You got it?” I asked. “Do you need some help?”

  He shot me an enraged look, but still he answered politely. “No thank you.”

  “My name is Chiara”, I introduced myself.

  He mumbled something, maybe a name, but I couldn’t understand it.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “What?”

  “I mean now that you’re done with work. The show’s over, isn’t it? What are you up to? You’ll go have fun?”

  I didn’t give much thought to the fact that it was well past midnight. I imagined they had different kinds of schedules.

  “What do you want?”, he straight up asked me.

  I shrugged. “I imagine you’re new around here. Maybe you don’t know anybody. I could show you the city.”

  I was proud of that nice speech, it sounded irreproachable to me. Again, he mumbled something gibberish.

  “What? Speak louder, I can’t hear you!”

  “Is this a joke? Are you mocking me?”

  “Huh? Why does it have to be a joke? What are you saying?”

  “You truly would like to be seen hanging out with me?”

  No, I didn’t want that. The thought that someone could see me hanging out with that shrimp was unbearable to me. I just wanted to fuck and get it over with!

  “Of course! What’s the matter with that? You never hung out with a girl before?”

  “Not with a girl like you.”

  I suspected he wasn’t referencing to my beauty and maybe I should have felt insulted, but I was still drunk with my boldness and I felt like a genius.

  “Do they let you go out?”

  That was a misstep. I treated him like a kid. It wasn’t easy to forget about his looks.

  He simply sighed. “Where do you want to go?”

  I was impressed by the fact that it went so smoothly, no prey ever fell in my net with such ingenuity before.

  “There’s a club near here. It’s not bad, we could drink something. They play good music, too.”

  I couldn’t keep a straight face. The thought of dancing with him was the most absurd thing I could ever imagine.

  “You already had way too much to drink”, said the little man.

  Still I took no offence. It was, after all, the truth.

  “Where are your friends?”

  I shrugged.

  He concluded. “I’m taking you home. You don’t look like you can manage to go by yourself.”

  Nonetheless, I took that as a victory.

  “Yes, go on, take me home!”

  So that was it. I had to wait a bit for him to finish his work and speak with his father, and after a few minutes he came to me. His father glanced at us from the window – and he didn’t look very pleased.

  By then I felt quite tired and did nothing but giggle, sitting on a crate.

  The little one took my hand in his. “Come on, let’s go”, he said, and the fact that he treated me like a child only made me laugh even harder.

  Surprisingly I was still able to stand on my feet and then, still holding hands, we exited the amusement park. I was reliving that scene in my mind as if I could pull myself away from my body and look at it from above… and it was so incredibly funny.

  He was very patient, maybe even too much.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” I asked him. “Do you have… do you have sex?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “There’s nothing wrong with talking about it, you can tell me.”

  The amusement park was in a field in the suburbs, so to get to the city you had to walk almost half a mile.

  “Do you remember where you live?” the little man asked.

  I swallowed a snarky comeback and kept piling on. “What’s your girlfriend like? Is she like you? Have you ever had sex with normal girls?”

  Finally, he understood. “You want to fuck? You want me to fuck you?”

  He didn’t look very surprised.

  “What? No, why would you say something like that? I’m just curious!”

  He tugged at me. “Come on, hurry up.”

  “Didn’t you want to stop by the club? It’s right there.”

  “What club? You need to go to sleep!”

  I kept on giggling like an idiot.

  As soon as the first houses started to appear on the road, the catastrophe struck: a car stopped abruptly right in front of us.

  I was aware of the trouble I was in even before they got out of the car, and there was nothing in the world I wouldn’t give to not be there. The thought of being seen hanging out with the little man horrified me and I promptly let go of his hand.

  “Chiara! What are you doing on the street at such an hour? What happened?”

  Shit, shit, shit! It was that fucker Tony, and he wasn’t alone. His two jerk friends were with him, grinning like idiots.

  They were all checking me out, but above all they were glancing at the little man beside me, who should have been looking like a child to them.

  “What is it, Chiara?”

  I was trying not to look at him, trying to hide. Tony, that asshole, had been my boyfriend – for almost two months – before discovering that faithfulness wasn’t his thing and ending our relationship very badly with insults and threats.

  “Who is this kid? Your brother?”

  My brother was fourteen years old and much bigger than the little one. He was almost as tall as me. Except Tony never met my brother, so I decided to let him believe that.

  “No, he isn’t!” one of Tony’s friends whose name I never could recall interrupted. “He works at the amusement park, I’ve seen him. He’s a dwarf!”

  I wanted to crawl into a hole. By contrast, the little one didn’t look worried. “What do you guys want?”, he confronted them.

  Tony was unbelieving. “A dwarf? You hang out with a dwarf? In the middle of the night?”

  The little man grabbed me by the arm, pulling me. “Come, let’s go away.”

  How could he not realize the shitty situation I had got myself into?

  “Let her go!” Tony stepped in. “She’s coming with us!”

  “Not at all!” rebutted the little man.

  He didn’t understand. He was feeling responsible for me, drunk as I was, and he wasn’t going to let me go with those thugs. At a different time, I would have found it flattering,
but at that moment all I wanted was for him to disappear, for all of them to disappear.

  Tony came forward and his friends came swiftly to back him up. “Who the fuck are you? What do you want? What are you doing here? Go back from wherever you came from!”

  Before anyone could step in, Tony grabbed the little man by the waist and lifted him up like some toy. Suddenly, I was free.

  “Did you hear me?”, Tony shouted in his face.

  Then he stared at me – a disgusted look that felt like a whip. “Look what you’ve become! You should be ashamed of what you’re doing!”

  I was ashamed, I was so ashamed. I was also too drunk to see things in the right perspective. I backed off.

  “Go home!”, Tony shouted. “Get lost!”

  It sounded like an insult, and I didn’t wait for him to repeat that. I started running. I took off and I didn’t look back. Not even once.

  The morning after, the headache was unbearable. On top of that, I sadly remembered every detail of what occurred the night before. My awful behaviour and Tony’s assault.

  I was so angry at myself for how I let him boss me around and interfere with my life, and I lost all sense of proportions once again. I even insulted my brother, who didn’t do anything wrong but was simply guilty of being a male.

  Then came the inevitable guilt over how I acted towards the little man. I hoped that Tony hadn’t tormented him too much, and then I concluded that I was supposed to apologize to him.

  So that day I skipped school, I hid my backpack and books and I went back to the amusement park.

  That early in the morning the park was still closed, but I hoped the little man would be up already. I plucked up my courage and knocked on the bandwagon.

  The door opened immediately and a little fellow towered over me from above the stairs. It was his father, and he looked pretty mad. He didn’t let me say a word.

  “Where the hell is my son? What have you done to him?”

  It wasn’t what I expected to hear and that question left me gaping at him.

  “He left with you!” he was screaming. “I saw you! Where is he now?”

  Like an idiot, I asked him: “He didn’t come back?”

  “No, he didn’t!”

  What could Tony have done to him? I knew quite well what an asshole he was, but I didn’t think him capable of hurting someone. But did I truly know him that well?