ppoli61

@ppoli611674629039 · 05 Dec 2020

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Nemesis

#shortstory 

The first was the vacuum cleaner. He spat instead of inhaling.

Then the dishwasher began to break all the dishes. Then a fresh new plate fell off the cutting cabinet above your foot. And the tree has collapsed a suspicious number of times with all the balls that have shattered and you are there to buy them back at half the price that was now only three days before Christmas.

Then there was the robot and you had confirmation. He deliberately detached a piece of skirting board, dragged it onto the newly polished parquet and, with a nail, scratched the entire floor. Conscientiously, clearly intentional. Now the lines are visible, they look like the curlicues of a furious hand.

The parquet… the parquet where it happened. It happened there because it was the brightest place and light was needed to shave the hair, to insert the needle cannula into the vein. It happened there but it shouldn't have happened there, it had to be on the bed, in the crook of your arm, as you had arranged, imagined. But reality amazes us, prevents us, overwhelms us. The hollow of your arm has turned into a wooden floor that is never warm enough. There were, yes, many tears conceived, but there were also inappropriate speeches, pleasantries, half smiles, and that attempt to convince you that this is right. They even had to call you because you went away, because you weren't where you were supposed to be, there with him, holding him, caressing him, you surrendered to the fact that things weren't going the way you wanted. And you didn't hug him until later, when his head was already dangling, when his eyes were wide open, when blood came out of his mouth. But little, not as much as you would have liked and owed, not with that resignation, that exhausted and infinite sweetness that you had with others, rather with a sense of irremediable, cruel, cold action. With the sense of realizing it only when it is over, with the sense of not being at peace with your conscience, of wanting to turn the clock back an hour and do nothing more.

You wondered if you did it because it was already planned, because the vet had driven for half an hour in bad weather, because you could no longer bear the agony of uncertainty, because a selfishness takes over and you want everything to end, because there was a Christmas tree to be done and relatives were coming and you still hadn't bought any gifts.

He died pissed off, growling until the last moment. So, then, he certainly made you pay for it, even if he still loves you, even if you asked him for forgiveness a thousand times. Because he trusted you as much as anyone, because it was you who saved him, who nursed him, because he didn't want to die even if he suffered, because he still wanted to remain hugged with you on that bed and he had put his head in your hand and had also tried to get up, to eat, to it purr.

Here, since then, things have begun to rebel, to take revenge, they have become angry. The sharp point of a door got stuck in your ankle like a needle in a vein, the pc mouse hops and tries to escape like him all over the house as they ran after him with the syringe and, in the end, the robot took charge of raping the floor.

Yes, maybe you had heard some strange noise, maybe there was the alarm sound when an object gets stuck between the wheels and maybe you could even get up and go and see what was happening. But you didn't, you didn't want to notice, you kept your distance there too. And so that nail in the baseboard was no longer between the wheels (paws?) of the robot, but it was as if it were between your fingers, squeezed between your fingertips, scratching and scratching and engraving.

And avenging.