Look

Look—how beautiful they are. How wonderful they are, the most wonderful, beyond wonderful, beyond perfect, the most beautiful possible. She has blonde curls and is well-dressed. He has black hair. A leather jacket and a cell phone. He has his own style, he has a job and he has it, the perfect her, in pink shoes—no, not tacky ones, not just the same great ones, matching the great jacket, in front of his right and left bum. She also has two handbags, yes two, one floating lightly like a suitcase, almost behind her, the other driving, resembling a Mercedes, but actually hiding beneath it piles of cosmetics, piles of clothes, millions, billions of underwear, false eyelashes, fingernails, and other artificial body parts.

They stop, watch out, or you'll fall out the window! She didn't want to stare so passionately at this perfect couple. The curtains on the windows weren't PVC, and not very clean, because Easter was coming up. They wouldn't cover her pimpled little monster face, her tiny nose wouldn't hide her big complexions. And the cat sitting next to her even had, in a certain millionth of a hundredth of a second, the opportunity and such luck, such a happy desire, to slide down from the already warmed by his fur, the overgrown, worn-out, whitish-black doorframe where he spends his miserable, feline life. He would have jumped, maybe he would have hit a head of perfect curls, maybe he would have hit a mop of raven-black hair. Or maybe it would have crashed into a red fire hydrant, and then a small red car, the last off the assembly line, would have run over it, and its owner, a short law and pedagogy student at the same time, would have wondered, racked her brains, pondered why the piece of tire wasn't as clean as it could have been if it had wanted to, if it had survived the day before.

So she hadn't hidden herself very well, not to say hopelessly inaccurately, and so her perfect eyes were tainted by your ugliness, little lady. Why do you peek out from under that curtain like a street urchin to a soldier condemned to death? Why don't you resemble any pleasant image, not even a pure image from our minds, even those of a train station? As luck would have it, or perhaps someone else's, a black balloon happened to be passing by her window, and when she saw, by the natural law of physics, her face, she wanted to have it, to give herself a new one. She went to the bathroom, washed off the old pimples, peeled off her old hair, donned a new outfit, and glued on new eyes. She looked beautiful. She was beautiful.

- I like couples like that.

Silence. It sounded so sudden that it seemed foolish to break it, foolish to say: Mom, I have a new face today, maybe you'd notice? She sat down in the kitchen, because that's where the action was happening. The perfect couple paused for a moment, walking, perhaps with a greater chance of a diarrhea-stricken pigeon shitting on their heads. They were just passing right by a fire hydrant, the cat shuddered because of the black backs. He was daydreaming rather unnecessarily, his eyes glittering dangerously, his pupils dilated dangerously. No one heard his delight at the event that had unfolded so suddenly and unexpectedly, that he, from the window, had seemingly changed his life, and everything would be different. Maybe after death, someone would bring a 'New Day' newspaper to his grave, that he was the first cat in the world to commit suicide, the first to be so ready for it.

"I really like couples like that," my mother continued, stroking the curtain, wiping away bits of dust [clumped-up particles of human skin], not even noticing that she was enjoying it, that she'd just pressed such a pretty embroidered flower to her fist. One that desperately wants to have colors and is always brown when you eat breakfast in the kitchen, melted Nestle Chokapiks from yesterday, sticking to the roof of your mouth, telling you how you've been lying in the fridge all day, all pain and cold. Today they won't behave as well as before and have no taste at all. Only by the fact that only the empty package remains in the cupboard can you tell what kind of cereal it actually is, although this state, this situation, as far as their identity is concerned, isn't all that certain either—look how they get into the car, how they don't crush it at all. No trash, no babies. They could only be Armani or Dior, wearing designer diapers and designer bottom sprinkles, or maybe even designer bottoms? You never know. Look at their glasses, look at their car doors. I like couples like that. If someone, like them, could be perfect, so clean, so pure, it would be wonderful, there would be beauty in the world.

Mother wasn't much different from a cat. Only in the windows she was glued to. Only in the faces she looked at and addressed her monologues to. And she had a dirtier curtain.

The taste of the chocolate shells stuck to her body spread like iron quickly punched in the ass. Why must perfect people walk so slowly, so that you can't even stick your nose out for long, lest you infect them with ugliness, leprosy of the most devastating kind. Their eyes, green and blue, those two kinds, bought from a shop selling artificial eyes, rot under the influence of the influx of horrors. Don't claim happiness, with a face like that no one does.

But wait. She remembered that this morning, she'd gotten a new face. Just because she hadn't noticed the cat momma window wasn't a reason for nothing. She'd once seen three priests on a tram with backpacks, jeans under their cassocks. You're riding, you don't know where, you don't know how long you waited at the stop, you don't know if there's a tragedy going on back home, because the psycho cat could jump out at any moment. You're riding, and at a certain moment, so you won't remember if it's reality or a dream. You see and look intently at the billboard, you see and see the perfect couple. How they smile at each other, at you, and speak to you in a language written in mysterious symbols: Drink a Coke, you'll be like us. You'll have babies with Armani bottoms and Dior hair. No pigeon will touch your nose, no one will bother you. Wonderful, perfect, wonderful, colorful. She stopped dead in her tracks. The priests in cassocks stood right behind her. The world stood behind her, even though she was usually alone. Although usually no one noticed she had even passed, that she was reflected in the KFC restaurant windows, and no one smiled at her. Usually, no bus would be especially late for her, or especially in a hurry.

He'd known this from the moment he saw her. From the moment he saw her, he saw stars in the blue firmament of his palate of pleasure. He didn't want to interrupt any of his moments, anymore, because every semblance of his life yearned for him to see her, to know it, just one sentence: you're a witch, my love. To say it, before the ends of his hair became his lips, his eyes bulged from his orbs, flowed into his belly, the image would twist, twirl, purely perceptual, creatively cardiac, so that his heart would stop and his brain would bravely push forward, for some unknown reason. I've never been one. I don't know how it works, how it all happens, how many grams of heat spread throughout the body, how much water stagnates between the stomach and the foot, how much of the blue blood, in which millimeter of vein, freezes so that you want to scream, fall, roll in clods of December mud. But you still stand.

Because she looked, looked, looked. And someone had to stick that billboard. Someone had to climb a tall ladder, cover themselves in glue, one by one, glue on the nose, the right nostril, the left nostril, the left pupil, the right pupil, the middle eye, which no one sees because the perfect lady has a good beautician, and since you couldn't genetically change your face, you couldn't make a new one, you could do nothing but blur it, like with concealer. Hair by hair. The key of an atom, a color pixel, one to the other. Today, he was assembling the face of the perfect lady. He had had enough, the monotony of the day, he had had enough of his reflection in the mirror, the musty cold in the refrigerator, the dirty IKEA sofa, the Plus phone, and the only way to answer was through ID. Always the same breakfast, always the same breakfast, the same view from the window, the same benches, the same windowsills, children with the same expressions, the shapes of lollipops in their grimy hands. Conversations that seemed to be addressed to him, yet not to him at all, words that flew too far to chase and catch with one hand, but you do, and it turns out it was all pointless.

Still the same, still the same.

He wanted to do something particularly cool, this time passing by tram, cold streets, cold people with cold gazes, small eyes, small mouths, cold buildings, in cold walls, one pink one and a lawn. He clung to the idea that he would stick it, that he would help, that he would do it.

In an instant, everything resolved itself. Mother's green eyes, grandmother's smile, raspberry lips. The sweet scent of beauty, Nikola's red hair, allowed in films for ages 12 and up. It all got confusing, exploded, stood still.

And once again, remember that look. And once again, wasn't it a bit like St. Teresa of Calcutta? And with delight.

"Excuse me, darling, do you know you're a witch?" I could make you scrambled eggs for breakfast. I'd have bought colorful curtains, or soft-boiled eggs. The sweet smell spreads by the sink between the stove and salted butter, and not just food, mornings with a different view, perhaps with the sun in the background, one of many, perhaps some happiness on the clock, as if time stood still and lasted and was completely ours, and that's all, that's all I'd want.

Don't say you were looking then, don't say, because you were looking for a long moment longer, at the teeth of a perfect girl with curls. And at the green eyes from the knob shop, and the green reflections of screams from the dry cleaners where the sexy white blouse, with its high, wonderfully fashionable ruffle, was washed. And you wondered about so many stupid things, what sandals would go with those, and what miserable thoughts flashed through his head as he stood next to the woman of his life, with whom he shared a Mercedes, a large bed, a Jeep in the garage, and the bottom of an Armani baby.

You became a pillar when you froze for a moment. You were already in the future, a future you could only strive for with your consciousness, and so you were there, as close to it as you could, gingerly touching the ends of your hair, cautiously observing the world around you with your gaze, as if tomorrow were about to unfold.

You smelled burnt scrambled eggs. It was unpleasant, as if you could see, the pot completely black from the bottom, as if you could see, the smoke settling on the kitchen cabinet, so that its color changed to what it was supposed to be when you chose it—not light birch, but dark oak—that's how this fragment did to you in spite of you, because under the influence of a liquid, almost unborn chicken, from some poor country hen that had to save so that its grain would last for a better tomorrow, it tore its structure apart completely, lost its dream of being this way and not another, and its native skin color ended.

You dragged yourself out of bed, perhaps in a pink bathrobe, perhaps in slippers, caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, went to where the stench was unbearable. You went to the kitchen, went and saw what you dreamed of: almost everything blackened, the new furniture, even the windows of the stove, infected with burnt smoke. Everything black, everything. The view from the window, all the clouds, blackened.

You look out the window, a red fire hydrant standing there. You run downstairs, see blood, and you see your own tears on your eyelashes, red. You look as if you'd seen a picture long ago, you look at it, imprinted in a dream sometime ago, one day on the tram, one day, across the street, as if you only knew yourself by sight. A cat, all black. With a red drop on its nose. A black cat, black clouds, black before your eyes. He went out to get the newspaper, didn't notice. He left, he can't walk anymore. Tears drip onto the road, you see the princess from your dreams, you see the knight and the round table. You're no longer normal, you're no longer yourself, you're no longer that same girl.

"Please step aside, a man died here."