Burning giraffes

 

The burning giraffes decided to begin persecuting Karol right after the first bakeries opened on Coconut Alley.

Waking up on a honey-stained kitchen floor, his nose buried among colorful mugs smeared with post-party mustard, was the prelude to a terrifying concert, the sounds of which tore at the very core of this egotistical carpenter's psyche.

He rose to his feet faster than a falling wardrobe, humiliated by the situation to the very limits of his masculine pride. Mocked by his own dishes. The crucial observation, impatiently reporting that no human had witnessed the entire event, significantly diminished the impact of the catastrophe, but did not completely eliminate it. Still, distinguishing reality from the figments of his imagination was impossible.

The motif of a dead giraffe convulsing in the doorway of the family dressing room recurred in all his dreams that night. It was the only constant among the ever-changing cast of characters from his early childhood, spent in a village near Lublin. A distinct smell from a dream is almost always fleeting, but today's was utterly unique. The stench of decaying flesh overwhelmed Karol, turning the entire night into a whirlwind of terrible screams. All his actions were driven by a search for an unknown antidote to his fears. The enormous weight hanging from his chest made even the smallest steps difficult. It was also impossible to explain his last dream, in which a sawn-off giraffe's head suddenly popped out of an empty grapefruit juice box.

Karol, however, knew perfectly well why, among the thousands of available animal species, this particular cloven-hoofed mammal with a monstrously long neck had appeared to him. His dead body also had its obvious explanation. There must have been hidden remorse lurking in his subconscious, which made the whole night even more poignant. This could only mean that, despite the naive clichés he had told himself, he had made a grave mistake. He'd been wondering about this all along, but until now he'd been deceiving himself into thinking otherwise. This dream had turned everything upside down. The only surprising thing was that it had taken so long for this information to surface.

Once Karol had accustomed himself to the commonly understood reality, he calmed down and walked a few steps toward the living room and sat down on the green sofa. Everything was still in its place. He turned on the television to direct his thoughts along a familiar, positive path. Television can minimize thought processes like nothing else. It's the best of the readily available tranquilizers.

The carpenter glanced blankly at the socket, then pressed the remote control hopefully. He saw a game show on the screen, in which an unemployed nurse with red hair tied in a bun couldn't answer a question about the location of Madagascar.

He then switched to another channel, which was showing a nature documentary about the intimate lives of giraffes and elephants. It was the first time he'd seen these long-necked creatures produce offspring. He'd never thought of it that way before. The sight reminded him of falling pears in Aunt Marta's garden. They clattered to the ground with the same clumsy clatter.

Zoophilia brought only a contemptuous smile to Karol's lips. He wasn't particularly fond of African wildlife either, so after a few seconds, having satisfied the initial curiosity of a mammal seeing something new, he decided to change the program. But then the crushed remote control refused to work. Despite desperately pressing the buttons, the terrified carpenter still saw images of insatiable giraffes, eager for copulation. A frenzied orgy on the grassy savannah. As if this sight would satiate him for life.

Leaping from the couch yielded no results. Furiously pressing every button that offered a chance to change the channel, too. Remote controls and batteries always know when to break down, to thwart their owners' plans as much as possible. This particular duo was merciless. There

was only one solution. If he didn't want to spend the rest of his life watching a troop of mating giraffes, he had to get up from the green sofa and turn off the TV manually. This ordinary situation, occurring daily in thousands of homes, brought on the first symptoms of schizophrenia. His hands began to shake, and his heart pounded as if for the last time.

Still feeling as if he were going to a funeral, he returned to the kitchen, devastated by yesterday's guests. He tuned in a Russian radio, as was his habit at breakfast. He liked it when music filled the kitchen with a harmonious glow while he ate. And Women's voices, raisins in cake. However, he didn't notice that five minutes ago, the grandfather clock had struck nine. Instead of a woman's voice reeking of pink, he heard the gravelly bass of the morning news announcer, informing the public of a giraffe's escape from the zoo.

Although he didn't want to dwell on it, he was drawn into a whirlwind of thoughts against his will. How on earth could a giraffe escape from the zoo? It could leap a fence specially designed for its capabilities, evade the attention of skilled guards, and emerge flawlessly through a gate he himself often couldn't find.

The sight of a giraffe strutting through city streets, dodging pedestrians and leaping across the roofs of cheap cars, so gripped his imagination that even the all-knowing poppy flowers couldn't guess why the sandwich had stopped tasting good. It was as if thinly sliced ​​bread with country ham had, inside, fragments of a gyr's severed head displaced from grapefruit juice.

The logical meaning of this thought was as real as the practice of celibacy, but it appeared in Karol's mind in a split second, as if it were the only appropriate answer. His mind was completely occupied by long-necked females. He learned about the mustaches dipped in mayonnaise the moment he first glanced down.

All the Sarmatian curls were dripping with white goo. It was too much for one morning. Nosy neighbors then heard the clatter of a porcelain plate against the broken refrigerator and hysterical screams proclaiming Salvador Dali to be the most wretched, even the most filthy, woodpecker in Spain.

It was the talented witch, Christina the Giraffe, who took her revenge. One Friday, he didn't call after a meatless dinner, as they had agreed, and he didn't speak for the next twenty-seven months.