The Prison

by Stefano Pastor

  It’s a small tireless spider, always on the move. The web spreads, it completely covers the desk, it’s now heading to the blackboard, spreading even more.

  It’s amazing. The most complicated spider web the captain has ever seen. He has always been looking for order and perfection, and spider webs are perfect. Unique, special and precise pieces of art. But, never before he has seen something similar to what this itsy-bitsy spider is creating for him. No one has ever seen those amazing, tridimensional drawings; absolute perfection.

  Completely astonished, the captain follows attentive its work.

  Suddenly, the tiny spider jumps to the next desk and scampers on the web keeping its work going.

  It’s been hours, maybe all night.

  The captain is still seating on that chair, he has never moved. Surrounded by a huge spider web that spreads in every way through the whole classroom. It touches every wall, the ceiling and even the floor.

  It’s something unbelievable that no one has never seen before. And the little spider never stops, restless. Now it’s right in the middle of the room, half way between the ceiling and the floor. The geometric shape it is creating is something new, something that can’t be found in nature.

  But the whole spider web itself is unique.

  The captain knows what that is: it’s the whole universe. The creation. Oh, the formula of creation. The life itself. The essence of everything. And that itsy-bitsy spider is just revealing it to him. The mystery of existence, all he has always wanted to know. Now the drawings of the spider web start to make sense to the captain. Absolute perfection. Nothing is wrong in it, nothing reminds of chaos, everything is absolutely perfect and at the right place. Everything has its scope, its duty.

  It’s the center, the whole everything and it’s amazing.

  He still can’t take his eyes away from the work of the spider: it represents the meaning of life. He can’t believe some sort of eye-opening action is manifesting in front of him: that’s what he has always been looking for, he couldn’t ask for more.

  “Excuse me Sir…I knocked but nobody answered, so…”

  The captain stops the lieutenant from moving further.

  “Can you see that?”, the captain asked. “Can you see how amazing this is? Do you understand what it is?”

  The lieutenant answers embarrassed: “It’s a spider web, Sir.”

  Then, worried: “It wasn’t there yesterday. There were not so many spider webs in here.”

  “He created all of this!”, the captain said, pointing at the center of the room. But there the web is so thick that the lieutenant can’t see through. The captain insists: “Isn’t it amazing? Isn’t it the best thing you have ever seen?”

  The lieutenant turns his eyes around, worried. Where did this kind of spider web come from? It covers the entire classroom, which now looks like a place that haven’t been visited in ages. But a particular shape is identifiable, there’s a drawing. He just has to find its meaning, this is not a simple spider web. But his mind can’t reach further.

  “Unusual”, he comments.

  The captain sighs: “What do you want?”

  “It’s morning, Sir. We need to execute the prisoners.” Then he adds: “If you agree, Sir.”

  “Do it!” the captain answers. “Do whatever it’s fair.”

  “Don’t you want to assist?”

  The captain sends him away. “Just leave me alone!”

  The lieutenant walks away.

  The itsy-bitsy spider keeps working at his masterpiece, faster and faster. The room is now filled in with webs connected to each other.

  A geometric shape finally glimpses: extremely complex and simple at the same time. The essence of everything.

  The captain, moved, starts crying, how beautiful the universe is. How perfect the creation is. It is amazing to know that everything that every action we fulfill, for how horrible it can be, it will always take place under the rules of the supreme order of everything.

  From that moment on, the captain realizes he actually belongs to something, he’s not alone anymore.

  The center of the room becomes alive, like a beating heart.

  A gun shot.

  Everything is perfect, everything is at the right place.

  A second gun shot.

  No one ever reached the meaning of this, no philosophers or religion. The meaning of everything!

  A third gun shot.

  Hurry up little spider! Hurry up! Show me everything! It’s amazing!

  A fourth gun shot.

  The little spider fells on the floor.

  The captain feels like dying inside. He can see the little spider standing still.

  He stands up from his chair, moves towards the center of the room, carefully avoiding touching the spider web. He crawls to the spider, and finally reaches it.

  It’s dead. Like all the spiders usually die, upside down, with its legs curled up. It’s just a miserable little spider; you can find many. He takes t in his hand and crawls back to the desk. He stares at him, crying. It’s not over, the creation Is not over; it didn’t make it to the end. The captain will never have the chance to see it completed. He will never know why.

  He sighs. Maybe that men are not supposed to know. Maybe he just didn’t deserve it. After all, for him it’s enough to know that the order exists and that he almost revealed it.

  He sighs again.

  Suddenly the window slams and the room is invaded by a cold, freezing wind that, by destroying the spider web, brings chaos within all that perfection.

  The captain screams and run to shut the window. He leans on the glass, devastated. Outside it’s dark.

  Now the drawings have changed, the chaos dominates and he can’t recognize that perfection anymore.

  He keeps crying.

  The door opens and the lieutenant, breathless, comes in. He doesn’t stop, crushes the spider web and takes it off angrily.

  “Sir, you need to come with me! You need to see what is going on!”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  The lieutenant looks shocked. “You need to see this with your own eyes, come!”

  The captain is doubtful. The thick spider web is impeding his way out; he suddenly fells like an idiot, an old idiot. He makes is way through by ripping apart the spider web. At this point, the lieutenant grabs him by his arms and pull him forward. “Come on! Let’s go!”

  He leads him outside p, through the main door. Outside it’s dark and freezing cold. He shivers. “What should I see?”

  “It’s gone!”, the lieutenant screams desperately. “It’s disappeared!”

  The captain looks outside again. “What has disappeared? I can’t see anything, it’ all dark!”

  The lieutenant pushes him outside and turns on his torch. “The sun! It’s gone! It has suddenly disappeared!” The captain stares at him astonished. “It’s not there anymore! It was there, it was daylight! It’s not as it exploded or imploded, it just disappeared!”

  The captain keeps shivering. “It’s cold out here…”

  “The temperature is falling! We already lost fifteen degrees in few minutes!”

  The lieutenant is terrified and starts shaking his torch. The captain grabs it form his hand. He moves forward and after a few steps he can see the fountain, the center of the square. It’s…weird. It looks like the plants are moving, curling on themselves and have changed color. Even the statue has changed, it now looks like glass.

  He then points his torch at the floor. It has changed too. He makes light towards the wall of the church, which has now become transparent.

  What’s going on? Where’s the sun? Why everything has changed? The consistency of everything has changed? Why is everything so messed up? Where are all those things that used to be familiar to the captain?

  It almost fell on them. He illuminates the floor and sees the four kids, surrounded by so much blood. And the blood it’s still red. Three of them fell on their face, all in different positi
ons. The fourth, the oldest one, he’s still on his knees. His torso his leaned towards the floor, with his head on the pavement.

  There’s a big hole in his head.

  The captain stares at that little corpse and screams: “Who are you?”

  Then, suddenly, he comes to grasp with the meaning of his horrendous actions and he finally understands the meaning of everything. He screams even louder, desperate: “Who were you?”

  September 2009

  THE CROW

  Translation by Alessandro

  Is that all that’s left? Dust to dust.

  A handful of dust over a coffin? How many times had he already asked it itself, how many times he went to look for answer.

  The afterlife was real, the peace was real, blessing? Edgar didn’t believe that. No, not the blessing, not the peace, not the cessation of the pain. Maybe there was just nothing. Maybe everything ceased to exist.

  What was left, then? A body left in a cage? To a slow decomposition, to rot? Was that why we born? Was that where all his poems would have ended up?

  “How sad, Mr. Poe, how sad. A gentleman, father of four children. A role model husband. Who wonders why the good Lord wanted to have him back to him.”

  They were lowering the coffin, it was the saddest moment.

  The widow was hiccupping, hugging even more her sons, the priest gave his benediction. She could have seen sweat impearling the undertaker’s forehead, while they were holding the strings. The gentleman must have exceeded in gluttony’s pleasures. Maybe that’s also a cause of his death.

  Edgar had already grabbed a handful of dirt, ready for his final move. That annoyer was really unneeded. He knew him just by sight, a slimy person, too fat and with a feminine voice. “I didn’t know him.”

  “What? What’s that?”

  “I don’t who’s this is, the corpse. And I don’t care.”

  The amazement left place for something more. Concern, maybe, or curiosity. “Ah I see, you’re a writer.”

  What does that mean? Was everything allowed to him? What would have disqualified everyone else was allowed to him, only because he was a writer?

  “Look for inspiration”, said the man.

  What kind of inspiration was there in a gravestone? Could it be that he wasn’t able to understand, that no one could? There was no time to answer, they already began. First the sons, then the closest relatives. Edgar went forward, without hiding his excitement.

  He lent over the ditch, he watched thoroughly. The robust coffin, the flowers all over it, the handfuls of dirt that already had been thrown, dirting it. He imagined the man in the inside, he tried to figure him out, to put himself in his shoes. He imagined the anguish of that flesh, his prison, the horror. He imagined to be inside there and to see. To understand.

  “Sorry.”

  He was loitering, others were waiting to give the last greeting.

  Edgar escaped, way too agitated to talk with them. His heavy breathing, the vacuous look. In his mind, he still was in that coffin.

  He escaped mainly from that fat man, because he didn’t want to give him explanations. Inspiration? No, that wasn’t what he was looking for. He didn’t need that. He needed answers. Something that could justify everything.

  How was Elena now? How many years had passed, twenty? How was her body ended up being? Was there still flesh over her bones? Was it dust? It would have happened to Virginia too, soon, very soon. The one that she had was a harm that doesn’t bless.

  Her daughter. Her fragile, delicate child bride. She always had been, a flower, a lily. Never to bloom was her destiny, never to open to life, to feel the harassments of fate. Her too would have been brought away from him, as it already had happened with Elena and with Sarah. He couldn’t accept it.

  Lenore, Berenice, Ligeia, Eleonora, Irene. All were there, the women that he wrote about. Beauties ripped from life before time, sweet stem cut by the ferocious fate. No, he never met them: they were only paintings over a grave. That’s how he imagined them, yes, because that was his only power: to imagine.

  Inspiration, was that it? Were gravestones the ones that gave him it? No, it was what was inside of them. Marvelous women that had ceased to exist, small flowers cut that he could bring them back to life. That he could recreate at his own pleasure, to which he could talk to.

  But that wasn’t enough. Death, dissolution, were everywhere. The same way their body were worms’ food, even those odes dedicated to them were wrong, rotten. They were obscene. And that was his guilt, he couldn’t not think about it, that he had corrupted even their memory, the desire of taking them back to life was immense.

  Everything was there, in that graveyard, his poetical source. The big Usher’s mausoleum, abandoned from over a century, to which he gave justice, making it immortal. The candid Berenice’s smile, that showed teeth so perfect that never could he forgot about them. Mr. Valdemar’s grave, dead at the late age of a hundred and ten years old, almost an eternity, just like he tried to go against the inevitable.

  From them he took life, art. But an ill art, putrid, stolen. Those tombs were his nightmare, his obsession. Both captured and terrorized.

  “Hello mother.”

  Edgar tried to calm down and he looked around. It was a young girl’s voice the one that he heard. He got further away from the engraving place, he got into the poor place of the graveyard, between the tombs of the less rich. Plain graves, lots of crosses, some made just of wood.

  He leaned over a tree and peaked with the head to see.

  There was a little girl, yes. An eight or nine years old child, with a dress full of stitches and arms covered in dirt. Her face wasn’t in plain sight, her hair was very curly and a pink bow was attached to them.

  “I do really miss you, mom. Come back home.”

  The tomb in front of her was recent, the munch of dirt wasn’t still totally set in place. Edgar was an expert in those kinds of things. That women might had been buried around three or months before, six at least. A grave was inside the ground, a simple marble block.

  “He punches me, mom. Now that you’re not here he kicks me. He tells me horrible things. Why do you let him do that?”

  Edgar thought to go away silently, as she didn’t notice him, but he didn’t.

  “He says you’ll never be back. That I have to forget you. I don’t believe him.”

  He felt wrong, anxious, he should have talked to that child, however the most appealing desire was to just watch, keep on spying her.

  “He makes me work, the whole day. He says that’s your fault, that you shouldn’t have died. That someone has to continue it. But he just keeps on drinking.”

  Almost caught in its flight, Edgar bounced back. An ugly black bird flew silently and lied over a grave.

  A crow. His eyes seemed like shining.

  “Go! Go away!” screamed the girl, but he wasn’t intentioned to move.

  The crow placed himself better just like he was on a perch. Then he turned to look at them. Edgar too felt spied by him.

  The girl tried to ignore it.

  “When are coming back home, mom?”

  The crow crooked. An intense voice, almost humanoid, that would have scared easily a person.

  “You’d better shut up!”, screamed the girl. “That’s not true!”

  The crow crooked again.

  Edgar felt a shiver. It was just an impression, but its voice felt like a word.

  Ne-ver-mo-re. Nevermore.

  “I don’t want to listen to you! Go away! Leave me alone!”

  The crow crooked. Nevermore.

  “Mom, could you come here and talk to it? Tell him… that he doesn’t have to do it?”

  The crow crooked. Nevermore.

  “It’s not true”, shouted the girl, and again: “In paradise, mom? We will see each other in paradise?”

  Why was she doing it? Why she continued? She already knew the answer; the crow couldn’t give any different. And if she knew it then why all those questions?


  The crow crooked. Nevermore.

  The girl started crying. “What about me? How is my life going to be? I can’t handle it without you. Will I ever be happy?”

  The crow crooked. Nevermore.

  The questions continued, becoming obsessive, while Edgar kept feeling worse.

  “Will I be able to free myself by him?”

  The crow crooked. Nevermore.

  “Am I ever going to have an husband, an house and some sons?”

  The crow crooked. Nevermore.

  “Will I survive?”

  The crow crooked. Nevermore.

  What does that meant, what madness was she living? Didn’t she understand that it was nothing more than a crow?

  The fact that it was its natural animal voice, and not a human speaker. That it wasn’t an answer to her questions?

  Why was she behaving like that?

  “I don’t believe it! You’re a liar! Leave me alone!”

  Before Edgar had the chance to intervene she threw a rock at the crow. Nevermore.

  She grabbed some more stones, before the bird could flew away and threw them at it. The crew fell from the grave.

  The girl didn’t stop, she kept on throwing. She hit it again, more and more times. Edgar saw blood rushing.

  “You’re a liar!” shouted the girl, in front of the dead corpse of the crow. Then she turned and escaped.

  She didn’t even notice Edgar or even if she did, she didn’t give much importance to him.

  Edgar stepped forward and reached the animal. The poor crow was dead, wings teared, the cranium broken. He stared at it for a long time without touching it.

  After all it was just an animal, a slimy beast, however that scenario stuck up in his mind. There was something in that girl, the desire to suffer, to be punished, that in some ways resembled him. Was she accusing herself for the death of her mother, was that the secret? How could she had believed that the poor crow was answering her questions?

  Edgar stumbled and moved back. In that moment, the cemetery felt way more oppressive than usual. He felt the desire to escape too.

  Virginia got sick again. She had spitted blood. Her skin was transparent, Edgar could see her veins scar her. He kissed her on the forehead, before leaving her.