into the warehouse, while she crouched down, holding saliva in her mouth, praying her heartbeat wouldn’t betray her. But he roared with laughter when he saw her scared. Then he laughed the way men do when they’re enjoying being men, as though watching a soccer game with friends with a beer in his hand.
“Why don’t you tell me about yourself?” His words were friendly but his tone was authoritarian.
Avellaneda wanted to run away, but the streets weren’t much safer. On the contrary, outside there were those who preyed on the weaker and cooked them in metal containers. So she told him about her secretarial job in that company, and how she had been working overtime when everything began. When she went home, she found her house looted, her mother dead, and her father gone. She took only a few things, a blanket, clean clothes, the little food that was left, and returned to the warehouse. The houses and supermarkets were the most obvious targets, and the most dangerous places. She also brought a small radio that worked until the batteries ran out or the stations ceased broadcasting, which happened at more or less the same time. Since then she had lived there.
“There’s nothing more to add,” she said, forcing a smile. Her throat was dry and her thoughts strayed to the lemonade. Durruti ordered her to take him where she kept the animal feed. Avellaneda stood up and walked, feeling as though her joints were broken. She heard a blade slip out of its sheath. She felt it close behind her. Just as she opened the small door, the knife ripped into her right shoulder blade and tore through her rib cage. Blood and air gushed out of her at the same time. By the time her head hit the floor, she felt nothing. She couldn’t see how he, rummaging inside the tank, found the bottle of pink lemonade. Obeying his instincts, he opened it and gulped it down.
The Return of Night
René Roquet
Translated by Armando García
The world was conceived far away from the sun and the stars, inside a black cloak, where it received energy from a warm and generous ancestral womb. It had neither movement nor universe; it had no time because time was useless. It was an unblemished sphere, still in a single night without a morning to count the days. That is how darkness founded its kingdom, and it kept at bay a shadow that was never upset by the light. Everything belonged to it.
From the moment the planet took its final form, creatures and plants were placed on a vain surface. They were willing to be awoken, at any moment, by life. A starting breath, with their roots buried deep in the earth’s flesh, they waited for the appearance of a sign, of a wind that would unveil their reason for being; to show them a reality different from the unyielding and impossible cocoon they occupied; to give them a beginning out of the automatic rhythm of their motionless volume. Mammals, insects and fish dozed in eternity, in the meaninglessness of things. They were newborn undistinguishable from their mothers breast. They half-dreamt of an accomplished dimension, while their eyes kept virgin a series of outside images. They inhabited a paradise. A planet different from the others that orbited the cosmic systems conducted by God. And in that throbbing space was a tree. A particular tree, enormous, at the foot of a hill. On it hung dozens of bats, waiting expectantly with their senses on edge, but with nothing to perceive. Without a pretext to move.
Until a stone fell.
At the top of the hill, the flapping of a fly, the contact of a body with another, or the exhalation of a feline’s breath, created a wave that crashed on a rock near the shore, from which the stone broke off and rolled downhill, jumping and taking flight until it crossed in front of the tree where the bats hung. They felt it and opened their eyes. Time began for them and the kingdom of nothingness was no longer of the night, but belonged to these black animals with long fangs, who spread their wings for the first time and took flight, penetrating the clear sky.
They headed east. Together they traveled hundreds of fields and dark valleys, until the first bat to sense the stone stopped. There should an alternative, abandon freewheeling and discover if there is something else besides air, he said. They descended and noticed that