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The most terrible. The most brave. The most fatale. Seven tales about seven women, reifications of a feminine archetype. Terrible, brave, fatale, visionary... gothic women. The meaning of gothic is in the hidden shadow inside us. A shadow that marks a thin thread, an almost invisible border between decorum and indecentia. A thread on which, in equilibrium, the main women of this collection run. "SHE KILLED!" is a term coined by the author to honor them and it means "SHE IS BLOODY COOL!". Each of those women faces a life experience meant to turn her different from what she was before. And she will unconsciously be guided by a beast symbol, a mythological beast. Terrible, brave and fatale itself. *** Vol. I: PERSEPHONE With her bare hands, the young and beautiful Zelda Zei pulls out of the grave her beloved husband, Noah Napnei, victim of an apparent death phenomenon. The people around them no longer seem to recognize him, so devitalized and disrupted, to the point that Zelda herself wonders if his soul is irreparably broken or if she has invoked a demon, raised from the grave a dangerous creature who is no longer the man she knew and because of whom he begins to fear for her own life. Is a metaphor for a love crisis. Zelda, thriving and vital like Persephone, is observed from outside, with the eyes of ordinary people, linked to this sad figure, so different from her, the "God that everyone receives". Is also a metaphor for inner transformation and spiritual awakening. Zelda sought, desired this experience. And now, like a serpent, she is going to mutate and dress a new skin. *** Noah sat on the edge of the bed, his broad back slightly bent, in a pose so rigid and dignified that he seemed motionless, but so motionless, to the point that I wondered if he was breathing. I took a breath, realizing that, while looking at him, I was the one who forgot to breathe. "Do you think they are right, Zelda?" he spoke, without turning to me. "Do you, too, think I am dead?" My heart was squeezing in pain, unable to bear see him like that any longer. "I am sorry." I whispered. "For what?" He said, as a matter of fact tone. "For what you are sorry, since you are the victim here." Like a metal pincer, Noah's fingers pushed mine to grab his jaw and in a slow outburst, like a desire to be possessed if not the spasmodic need to belong to someone, my hand closed on his neck. "If indeed you think you called me back from the eternal rest, my wife" he said like singing a sinister melody "Perhaps you have every right to kill me again. Do you agree?" Smoothly and slowly, he lay down his back on the bed, making sure I followed his movement, holding my grip tightly to his throat. In the action, the blackish vines on his face opened a little, and between them two cold and lascivious eyes appeared staring at me, the eyelids at half mast.
Umbrarum hic locus est
Virgilio, Eneide
***
I woke up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. My heart, gripped in a fierce vise, desperately cried out its conviction: that he was alive.
My hand still held the object that rocked my cry before I fell exhausted, its spare inhaler, which I used to keep with me when we were apart. From the day he was pronounced dead, I had held it tight like a lifeline, drowning, drunk with sorrow, in those indistinct and indistinguishable days that had been the funeral and all the seemingly inexplicable events connected with the death of a young person. Because my husband was too young to die.
I put it in my pocket and got out of bed. I couldn't ignore that blind certainty inside of me, that alarming feeling. Whether it was love that dictated the terms, or rather the devotion that is reserved to a saint or a pagan god, something pushed my steps with frenzy as the most faithful of the handmaids so that I left home and went to the cemetery.
***
Noah Napnei
13th January 1990-7th March 2019
"Sunset.
Nothing is lost.
In the nowhere I leap."
I fixed the headstone for a few seconds, in an attempt to reconcile that deafening silence with the deaf beat of my heart.
I tried to imagine myself from the outside.
A hooded figure, completely in black.
Elbow-deep gloves and boots up to the calf. The backpack full of possible or improbable tools, picked up at random, that would have served me to dig and break the welding of the cover of the coffin, if I had ever managed to reach it. Although at that moment there was nothing that seemed more distant.
I inhaled.
I knelt down and brought one ear to the ground. The void and then a blow. Gasping. I waited, my eyes wide open. Another blow. Out of my mind, with my bare hands, I began to dig. After what seemed like a few thousand hours, I arrived at the coffin.
He was there, white as a sheet, thin and in the throes of a terrible asthma crisis. With all my strength, I tried to get him out of the box and to bring his face beyond the cloud of dust in which we were immersed and which I had created with the hustle and bustle of blows and kicks and shakes, out of the hole, where the fresh air was.
But the task was far from easy. He was a tall, heavy, muscular man, and completely powerless. The hole was at least three meters deep and every time I thought I could pull it up, the earth fell under my feet and we fell back into the coffin.
The man's breath was getting shorter and shorter. His heartbeats more and more throbbing.
***
Noah closed his eyes, trying to protect himself, in vain, from all that dust, completely inert, feeling he didn't even have the strength to lift an arm. When was the last time he had eaten? He didn't know. He didn't know where he was. He didn't remember anything.
The only grip with reality was that thick, strong urgency of air. When Zelda could push him a little higher, almost with his hair he could feel a fresh and pure breeze fluttering, but it was too far away for his mouth to welcome salvation, just a little bit of that fresh clean air.
He could feel the stars on his head. He couldn't wait. He couldn't breathe anymore.
Suddenly he heard her gasp, mutter something and rummage in her pocket.
She brought something to his mouth.
He recognized its shape.
The inhaler.
A big, deep breath, accompanied by a gasp.
Then the dark.
