Next station

 

The postmodern Little Match Girl, with the agility of a fawn, runs down the last steps of the metro station and, with a stately leap, finds herself inside the departing car.

A chorus of Theban elders glares at her and warns her, forcing her to try to escape. But it's too late; the doors refuse to open, cruelly trapping her in a steel box that traverses the underground city. Lured by her beauty, the metro passengers begin to distort their animal faces with desire. Their reign begins, they realize this, and they immediately proceed to uncurl their whips and revel in her fear.

The first to attack are two gray-haired old women, one of whom wears dusty glasses. She probably can't see anything through them, but she instinctively senses a threat to her female power that has appeared at the last station. A threat to power, but ridiculed the next moment, as they scrutinize her closely. She doesn't know the machine...

The postmodern Little Match Girl does everything she can to ignore them. She bites her lip, shifts her gaze, and uses expressions that evoke pity. She even tries to close her eyes, but even in her imagination she sees her monstrous expression, like a Greek actor with a burnt mask. Yes, we're all actors, we're all playing roles, think about it, it has a deeper meaning, and stop thinking about those old women.

She can't. She can't, the old women are everywhere, taking over her mind. The hisses, the grunts, the groans, and imagine how she groans as she climbs to the top floor. Please, no, I really can't handle it anymore, I'll never take the subway again, never again on this devilish wheel.

With a sudden twist of her body, she changes perspective, and instead of witches, she sees three young girls, not much younger than her, their legs beautifully accentuated by their dresses. And just when she thinks she's found a safe haven for her racing thoughts, their hair begins to float, and then all three of them burst into laughter, the wild laughter of a snake feeding her fear.

The postmodern Match Girl is horrified to see the attention of these three dragons directed specifically at her. It takes her only a second to realize they're mocking her pink-tinted handbag and her nineteenth-century shoes, which she seems to have forgotten to change after her refreshing bath.

They criticize her virginal way of holding her legs, her innocent rubbing of her thighs against each other. They themselves stand erect on their hulks, licked clean by most of the neighborhood, clumsily adorned by months spent in the solarium. They begin to rub their buttocks against the train car doors, the movements of eager cats, eager to be fucked, preferably in a subway crowded with people. To be fucked and then whisper devilish names, smear their naked bodies with blood, and then murder young foals along with them.

They are witches too, stronger witches, full of vitality, ready to breed, filled with ecstasy and lust. Writhing in a twirling motion around the pipe, their breasts rustling and their buttocks clattering. Howling in a voice that shatters eardrums, a voice calling her to the machine.

The postmodern Little Match Girl is already being lulled into a trance by them, yearning to escape, yearning to at least glimpse something that will help her escape. But it's too late; they're already pulling her into the machine, slowly forcing her to learn to utter words of apology and thanks. She turns, searching for an element of ordinariness amidst this magical place, suffused with evil forces.

The sight of two beer can-bearers calms her for a moment. People like them once burned witches, people like them will help her. But a moment passes, and one of them begins to look her in the face, with a look one wouldn't give a girl. He speaks to her incomprehensible words, reeking of alcohol and mint gum, his tone like that of a village head scolding a dog. He speaks to her this way because he knows she doesn't understand the machine. With a confident move, the move of someone who knows what she deserves, she reaches under her skirt, delves deep...

Breaking free with a loud scream, the postmodern match girl bumps into a poodle standing next to her owner, and in that moment sees the stroller containing the baby, rocked by the poodle mother. A stroller with new life, screaming life, screaming so loudly that one cannot think, louder than the poodle's bark, than the braking subway car.

Either she will jump among their fragments of this enormous machine, or they will destroy it in every subway car. She will become a witch, visit a tanning salon three times a month, sign up for a makeup course, and learn to drive. Or she can let shaved thugs grab her buttocks, hoping that they will decide to keep such a wonderful piece of meat at home and rape it daily, showing it its proper place. Hoping that this will protect her from the sharp arms of the machine that decapitates everyone standing on the sidelines. Hoping that one of them will shoot enough sperm into her reproductive organs and make her, like that poodle owner, carry a stroller filled with a crying baby.

And this crying child, this one creature in the world who shares the fear stemming from the boundless emptiness of the universe, this boundless zero, will not remain completely untainted. In the next few years, witches and peasants will throw him into the machine, telling him how things are. In a few years, this little child will slip his hand under her skirt, wanting to see if it's soft, and then boast in the sandbox about driving her to despair.

The postmodern Little Match Girl runs out crying loudly at the next subway station, washing with her tears the stone floor, disgusted by the filthy shoes of the cleaners.