“It’s true that if we don’t catch them as children, we’ll be paying the price years later…”
“I can’t unlock you, honey,” I explain to her calmly. “If I unlock you, the first thing you will do is go on the computer.”
“Unconventional cases call for unconventional methods.”
“I won’t!” she’s crying. “I promise I won’t go online!”
“At that age, you can already tell the type of women these girls are becoming.”
I kiss her on the forehead, always, before I leave for work. “I love you, my darling,” I tell her, every morning when I leave and every evening when I came back home. “However,” I must explain this to her, unfortunately, daily, “darling, despite your own efforts, you are a liar.”
One evening, my love looks a little different from usual. “What have you been up to, my one and only?” I ask her. She says, “Nothing, I have been sitting here in the corner, waiting for you to come home. I haven’t even stood up to use the basin you left me to urinate or defecate. I’ve just done both things in my underwear. Forgive me.”
I touch her cheek gently and I tell her it’s alright. “Let’s get you cleaned up, my love,” I tell her, as she is lifting up her red dress, and I get down on my knees to help take off her sullied underwear.
The last thing I remember is that I am crouching and reaching beneath my wife’s red dress…
When I open my eyes, I can feel right away that my trousers are down, so is my underwear. I am lying on the ground, on my back, that is certain. I try to sit up, but I can’t move my arm or my leg, even my head is pinned. I roll my eyes around and see the children, dirty-faced, holding me down and smiling. When children smile from above, it is very disconcerting. Then a voice erupts from their gaze.
“Missing something?” a girl-voice says. She’s wearing a big red bow on her dark cropped head, the hair jagged around her face, and her pupils are dense and pitch.
She’s standing above me, her eyebrows tilting like knives, and she’s holding something in her right hand. I squint and focus until I can decipher what the object is. It is, indeed, my cock.
“That’s my cock!” I shriek.
“Bingo!” the girl says. “You want it back? Or should I toss it?”
“No, no, don’t!” I plead. “I want it back!”
She wiggles the thing above me.
“Buh bye, buh bye,” she is saying in a high-pitched voice and wiggles the thing away like a fleeting bird.
“Wait! No! Wait, I said I wanted it back!”
She stops the bird’s flight and my cock quivers, then settles into stillness.
“Okay, Mister,” she says, “but you give a little, you get a little, that’s how it works. Plus, you’ve chained your wife to the house. That’s a major red flag, you know.”
All the kids begin to nod.
“But how else am I supposed to monitor her use of the worldwide-web?” I try to explain.
“We understand your concern,” the girl replies. “That’s exactly why we decided to take your dick, Mister. How else are we supposed to monitor what you do with it?”
“What do you mean? I don’t even do much with it. I urinate and I wash it when I wash myself and alright, I also touch myself from time to time, but we don’t even have sex anymore, my wife and I, when I get home and unlock her, she always says that her leg hurts and that she’s not in the mood… What if I give you my word, that I promise not to do anything disrespectful with my member!”
“Words are like dreams,” the kids say in unison. “Dreams are like angels. Angels know when you are lying… even when you don’t know yourself.”
“But I’m not lying!”
“Listen, Mr D, let’s just say I’m Snow White and I just woke up and I’m really pissed off. See what I’m getting at?”
“…No…” I’m looking around and all the kids begin to smile in succession like a circle of budding tulips.
“Hey don’t worry ’bout my friends, Mr D, it’s a whole different ballgame for them. They’re pretty homesick, you know. For me and you, well, this is just a dream. For them, it’s a diaspora. Apples and oranges.”
Then the lanky girl takes my cock and puts it in her blue hoodie pocket and takes out a shiny red apple and hands it over.
“Wanna a bite?” she asks.
“…No… thanks…” I’m trying to tell her, but my voice is shaky. Then the apple is pressed against my lips and her hand’s gripping my head.
“Take a bite, Mr D.”
Now I’m chewing and the kids are giggling around me.
“I have a friend in Paris…” the girl is explaining, “…all you have to say is… I knew your friend, the Malá Narcis… got it?”
I start to nod, but I can feel the apple chunks tickling my throat from the inside. I’m inhaling through my nostrils, trying to cough. The girl is reaching out her hand for me again, holding a sky-blue handkerchief, silky and limp in her fingers.
“Here you go, Mr D, mind that cough…”
The street named Prague
Jana lay face down, her trousers bunched right below the curve of her bare buttocks, her blouse pulled up on her back. White flesh in the darkness.
Although her body was still, her two butt-cheeks began to pull apart. From the crevice, a chatter came. The kids began crawling out, first as voices, then as bodies.
Back on the street, pigeon-toed and shy, low noses and hunched shoulders, they shuffled against each other in front of the Blue Angel bar, then began to draw up their chins, looking around.
They spotted Babička on her sewer grid, walked over to her and crouched at the blankets, rummaging inside to curl in closer.
Then the pile on the sewer grid settled and lay calm. The lump as a whole squeezed together even tighter and tighter, their bodies condensing into each other, until the limbs and blankets began to dissolve into a blue tint, thinning into the evening air.
Janka… it’s me!
PART THREE
Aimée
For the past two years, Aimée had had the sensation that she was being followed. Not by a person, but by a colour. She dropped several cobalt-rimmed dishes, then cut her index finger on the fish-scale-blue knife blade she’d got for her birthday years ago. She’d thrown away her dark blue bathrobe, painted over the brine-tinted hallway of her apartment with an objective grey, and stopped smoking Lucky Strike Blues, then Camel Blues, then Gauloises Bleues, then all cigarettes, as tobacco began to taste blue to her. She began staring at her own bruises, suspicious of their shape and movement within her skin.
But all of this, as her father suggested when she confided in him, could be explained by her own desire to draw meaning from the world around her, reveal structure and repetition to hone her sensation of chaos. She could not disagree. She wavered between apathy and panic. At its excruciating pace, time vexed even the dust. So maybe she did want the company of connotation. But it wasn’t just her eye picking up like-coloured objects, nor was her mind giving her patterns to soothe its agitation. She was definitely being followed by a bright blue cloud.
The first time she saw it was on the plane back from Portugal. Her head kept toppling over between sleep and wakefulness, then she leaned back against the seat and pulled up the window blind. There, among the white clouds was a solid blue one, thicker than the others, almost furry in its colour. She leaned into the window, her nose against the fat glass panel. The blue cloud leaned towards her.