Persephone and Hades
The excited steps down the stairs made him smile. From their rhythm and weight he could draw a diagram of how much the owner of those feet was pissed off. With curiosity he noticed the irregular instantaneous acceleration and calculated, therefore, the impatience rate in relation to foul mood. Of course he could have recognised those steps even in the wind, in the rain, in the underground. He was so attached to their sound in the endless hours
spent in hospital, every time he waited, with his eyes closed, that she was granted permission to enter the room and stay with him for a while. Noah decided to answer that
small emotional and passionate typhoon advancing in the trumpet of the stairs and rose to let her find the door open, calculating that she was about 9 steps missing.
He put his hand in the pocket and took two tickets. He then turned and looked unwillingly at the mirror place in the entrance.
A white and bony face, framed by a little too grown up black hair, and among which, with difficulty, full of sadness, two dark ebony eyes made their way. The black and elegant suit he wore had on him the appearance of a dead suit for the funeral. The sleeves seemed almost too long and the shoulders too abundant. He certainly had lost weight. The peachy pink scarf, instead of bringing joy, gave the whole a macabre and grotesque tone.
He looked away from himself, scoffing, and tried to soften that harshness he read in his gaze before turning around to look at the woman who had just peeped on the door.
The cheeks were a little reddened and the chest went up and down for the slight effort to climb the stairs; the curly hair ruffled and
loosened on her shoulders as a luxurious fur; a few drops of sweat on the forehead like dew beads on a flower; the eyes full of light, like the reflection of the sun on the clear water. It was the portrait of life, the effigy of health, the supporting ring of the biological cycle. Opulent floridity and fertility transhipped from her cornucopia, whose phenotype seemed inherited from Persephone herself.
Noah felt almost out of place in front of that abundance of vitality.
He spread the tickets so she could read them. A peculiar shadow danced in those very clear irises, to the second when she read the details, frightened and amused by the dangerous game to which he meant to play that night:
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
2 x Zelda Zei - Noah Napnei.
***
The darkness in the theatre did not hide him nor protect him from the sharp glances that as arrows were coming from all sides. As the light from the stage bathed a little the faces of all the bystanders, Noah could clearly see their pupils leaning towards him and then return to a central position, like the balls of a freaked out pinball machine in which he had been placed at the bottom, in range.
His wife was fuming in anger, and her aristocratic appearance was so in contrast to the vulgarity of the situation. On the stage, Victor raised his arms to the sky and invoked the Demon. The assembled body of the Creature suddenly moved, coming to life. The audience was startled, that night particularly affected and suggestible.
Noah elegantly crossed his long leg on the other and tried to hide in the chair to escape the expectations of others, as if by any moment he could jump up and declare his true identity. He didn't even know what the truth was, but all those doubts were so insidious that for a moment he wished
just be that thing lying on Victor Frankenstein's bed.
A thing thrashing and just learning how to breathe.
He looked Zelda furtively. A tear was burning her cheek, her eyes were wide open, a hand to the mouth, as if to want to hide a reaction that wished to manifest itself. He was tired of seeing her suffer like that. It was because of him.
He whispered in her ear to join him later at home, and then he raised up. Everybody gasped. His black coat swayed, for a moment, in the darkness, like the cloak of Hades. The audience of faces that he had to cross reminded him some evangelical words "Guess, Prophet. Who has you beaten?".
He leaped.
In the darkness.
In the nowhere.