Chapter 23: Death in arms

She hit the part of the rocky wall that was not yet invaded by flames. Then, she fell down a slide of earth. It splashed more on her every second of the way down.

However, some of these splashes of earth stuck to her skin. On her neck an itching irritated her, on her abdomen they seemed to stimulate the sound of flatulence; but on her chest, they caused such pain that it seemed as if they were digging their way to her heart.

The wall of blue butterflies (which allowed the wind to be trapped on the maid's forehead) was replaced by a mob of fire-made pussies that grabbed each other by the paws. They formed a kind of hot air balloon that, when they reached the end of the slide, wanted to take her away.

It was a choice between the pain of the floor with white tiles in the shape of a diamond, or discovering the mystery of the fire pussies. Although, Luz believed that the little cats had won because she saw in front of her something that could only be a fantasy: a castle of regular size made only of books.

She didn't know where that room ended, as high as that castle, and she couldn't see the ceiling. The walls seemed to be made of glass. However, Luz had to touch it to find out what it was telling her. She learned that appearances can be deceiving.

If it were not so, why did her father have a certain character at home and with a strange person he had another attitude?

"No!"

Someone shouted inside the castle and Luz stood still staring at the reflection of the books on the mirrored walls.

Why wasn't her reflection there?

Anyway, Luz recognized the high-pitched voice of a child in that scream.

"Are you the boy genius?"

Everything went silent, even the meowing of the kittens who still wanted to take her. They held on to her standing hair because it was no longer wet.

Maybe it was because of fear, but Luz's hair stood up more than usual and the boy behind the castle laughed.

"And you are the sunshine girl?"

The boy laughed in a very mocking tone, and Luz had had enough of even a stranger laughing at how fidgety the strands of her hair were. These were the yellow rays of the sun.

He wasn't the first to call her Sunshine Girl and, like everyone else, it wasn't flattery.

"Are you the child who has no past?"

The laughter ended and again silence invaded the space.

"The maid is a gossip. I guess she's hiding behind your skirt."

Luz felt very offended. It didn't seem fair to her. All because of her curiosity. This one always got her in trouble, and she always ran away, but something tells her this isn't school.

"And you behind a castle of books?

Why don't you go out?

I'm 8, but I'll be 9, I'm not turning a double-digit number of years yet; so you have nothing to worry about…"

The answer was instantaneous.

"What are you talking about?

Do you think I'm afraid of you?"

Luz didn't think twice about it, either.

"Not me, but all of us who have the age consisting of one digit are afraid of those with two digits. They are closer to adults and they are scary. Whether they have wrinkles or not."

She thought she heard the sound of kittens humming a tune she had never heard before.

"What if I were 10 or 20 years old?"

Luz shook her head as if he could see her. Maybe she sensed that she was.

" You would have invited me in right away. Adults never treat children badly in strange foreign houses like this. They assess the situation and attitude.

Only we children treat each other badly anywhere and in front of anyone"

Luz promised herself she would not lie because the boy's harsh voice reflected back to her that his life was full of lies. Being defensive was a clear symptom that he and she were alike.

Two different kinds of fantasies, but they were still fantasies.

"Do you realize this is your last year with a single-digit age?"

Asks the boy intrigued by Luz's strange answers. He doubted she was an 8-year-old.

"I'm looking for a way to save myself from adulthood."

The boy laughs bitterly and tells her that this was impossible, but Luz did not know the meaning of that word. Her mother prevented her from knowing.

"No, not only adults men and women possess each other through what they call romance.

I have seen that adults can be possessed by a child. What I don't know is how to make that effect last longer than just a few brief minutes."

Luz told him what happened in an argument she saw between her parents. The mother is jaded with the father insulting her. So, she took the frying pan to give him a beating.

The father covered his face with his hands and hunched his posture. It was the first time Luz had seen her mother so aggressive. The father's words were equivalent to the mother's aggressive purpose with the frying pan.

Luz saw that her father took the attitude of a frightened child. He begged her with his eyes not to hit him.

He looked like Luz when she begged him not to make those strange noises and sudden movements with Mary on the bed where the five of them slept.

"Why didn't you ask your mother?"

Luz wasn't expecting that question. She wasn't sure of her answer, but she answered without hesitation.

"Because I didn't want her to yell at me."

The boy wanted to probe further because he was always a mystery to everyone. He wanted a mystery that was real and completely alien to him, one that was flesh and blood.

His mystery was her.

"And is it worse to put up with the yelling than the sudden movements?

You're lying. That's no reason to endure the same torture every damn day."

He spoke with such fury that no doubt she expected him to know the answer.

That answer neither of them wanted to hear.

"Do you want to tell me?"

Luz believed that maybe he just wanted to be heard, just as she did.

"I doubt anything other than your life would be interesting to you. I'd better go feed your curiosity, shall I?"

She didn't understand until she saw on the mirrored walls project another room where Marisa and the priest were.

"What do you see?

What do you hear?

Speak!"

Luz felt as if her mom was yelling at her, but he wasn't her mom.

However, she was going to answer him as if he was her mother. Like, Luz wants to answer her mom when she yells at him.

"What do you have?

Who are you yelling at?

Go yell at your mother's ghost…"

The mother was as fond of other people's tragic stories as she was of her own. Luz didn't even know how many times (when she had no more laundry to do) she had told her about her tragic family life. The part Mary focused on most was the scene where her mother tried to perform an abortion herself.

Mary was only 6 years old when her mother bled to death.

She had not seen the abortion but was told later that her mother performed abortions clandestinely. Mary has since started looking for educational videos on the subject. For some strange reason, she had a compelling need to know in detail what happened in that small room where the sheets stained red.

Luz thought that Mary had planned one day to tell her all about it. That's why she wanted so many stark details.

After an eerie silence, he caused the tiles to pop off the floor and crack between them. A shower of shards of tile emerged and impacted against her.

The pieces cut and left marks on Luz's skin. She tried to cover her face with her hands. Although she screamed, the boy's genius showed no signs of compassion.

Was this child genius a robot?

By running, Luz crashed against one of the mirrored walls and heard the voices of Marisa and the priest; but each one was singing a different song.

Luz recognized both songs, one was from the 70s and the other from the 90s.

Even though they were melodies from different eras, listening to them both sounded to Luz like a talk sung in an opera or musical theater.

Each verse of his song was complemented by the verse of the song with which Marisa responded.

The songs in the dialogue created a single song with a melody that fused disco and grunge. For the priest it was disco and for Marisa, grunge.

The bad thing was that Luz listened half-heartedly. That's why I, even as a narrator, can't share the verses or the song with the reader.

In spite of that, there is something good about it all.

For the first time in the story, Luz and I agree on something outside of lucubration about life based on her family experience.

We both want to know what Marisa and the priest are talking about. This, added to the stabbing pain that hinders my descriptions, gives me hope that everything is the product of the cunning of my little rats.

It has to be because of the good lessons I gave to the souls of my little rats in each of my adventures.

I taught them not to focus on the problem, but on the possibilities for resolution.

Lucifer produces pain in the part of us that is connected to our loved ones.

I love, live, and live for the souls of my little rats.

They do the same for me, I knew.

This agreement between Luz and I would not have happened if she did not come to this room.

Evidently, it is not a coincidence. The destiny of this girl lies in each of the lines that the cat wrote in that house. It did not finish, it preferred to enter Luz's mind and set her mental paradise on fire.

According to him, he is jealous of Alexis, but Alexis is himself. It's obvious, isn't it?

I don't care anyway.

Those lines he wrote with fire and were left stranded on the walls; now they are the property of the wind and that makes this story as much Lucifer's like the wind's.

For that fit of jealousy is that who knows what kind of punishment the demon in love will be facing. In fact, he has already lost the story.

He must be slowly turning into a dead fire, without consciousness.

That is only the known part of the punishment.

Before the wind could only be one type of character in the story, perhaps one that enjoys certain freedom, unlike the others. The wind would decide his fate, but it could not affect the lives of the other characters.

How could the wind have slowly become a strong influence on her?

The wind was supposed to have her impossible dream and all that. He made an alliance with Lucifer, but to have as much power over this story as the wind is because he had an "ace up his sleeve".

Only now I can hear the wind blowing against the hairs of my soulless body. I hear that almost inaudible, delicate sound that an animal's hairs make when they are caressed by the wind. It is a clear clue to the place where my motionless body lies.

Thank you souls of my little rats.

I think I'm being a bit of a loose mouth, I'm just too happy. It ruins the telling of the story, but it soothes my pain and…. I am so hysterically happy.

Ultimately, this help is from the souls of my little rats. The proof is that just the coincidence between Luz and me is given by these disco and grunge songs.

Did you know that rats are the second animals with the best sense of hearing?

Believe me, for Luz to hear, even if only half-hearing, through those mirrored walls is because she has a special gift.

She will never know that she owes it to the souls of my little rats who, in giving me the possibility of saving me, have just endowed her with excellent hearing.

Luz may possess the ability to have prophetic hearing dreams before my little rats (if you can call them that), but that does not in any sense make her have unstoppable hearing.

Or maybe Luz and my little rats met when my little rats were still alive. That might have generated, until now, a kind of unbreakable bond. That would explain why she doesn't like to bathe until she's forced to. Either because of a visit home or because she has to go to school.

I don't know, but what I do know is that to go after my body, I have to keep the boy genius from getting his way.

That rain of tile pieces left marks on Luz's skin. No, she didn't bleed at all. Immediately, countless scars formed on her arms.

However, these scars moved in the direction of the left. At this moment, Luz feels as much or more pain than I do. The scars are thin lines that want to force Luz to go against the glass.

"If you are so curious, so far sure only for what is convenient for you, I invite you to know why they call me the boy with no past.

Do you want to?"

He spoke sarcastically. That was not a question, it was a sentence she was not going to accept.

Luz was not interested in that child's life at that moment. She wanted to know what the conversation between the priest and Marisa was about.

How much of that conversation was she missing?

"The power of my imagination is stronger than any harsh reality.", Luz thought to herself. What her father told her must be true. The fault of being affected by certain actions around her was not the fault of the action.

No, it was the fault of her mind not trying hard enough to make her imagination conquer all her senses. The same ones that described to her those actions she considered unpleasant.

"Do you consider yourself a genius because they call you a genius?", Luz asks him, making a great effort to articulate the words, "I think genius is the one who found a way to lock you in that past. The one who made you believe you were a genius".

One of the pieces cut Luz's chest with a slash.

She found his pain unbearable. It was a mixture of feelings of hopelessness, indignation, hatred, resignation, and desolation.

Desolation and indignation were the most intense feelings they shared. It was clear that he wished to drag her into that memory that would cause her mind to conjure up a memory of her own…a memory of her that complimented his.

Something similar to what happens with disco and grunge songs.

Her heart was no longer racing with fear, on the contrary, her heartbeat was slowing down, barely audible to herself.

It was not the first time it happened to her, every time she imagined she did not even feel the floor under her feet. But this time the descent of her heartbeat was too dizzying and sudden.

He provokes it with that sorrow that lies in his past.

Luz doubted that this child did not have a more traumatic past than hers.

Did he want her to feel sorry for him?

Just as her mother felt so sorry for Luz's father that she kept telling her about the tragic life of her progenitor?

That thought gave her incredible mental strength. Unfortunately, Luz already hit her head against the glass. That glass is going to take her to another part of this reality.

That glass wall was a portal blessed by another magnanimous being (despite whomever it may concern, like me): Water.

Surely that bad memory has to do with water. It wouldn't surprise me at all. The fact that it can reflect everything mortal of any species makes it special among wind, earth, or fire.

The boy genius moves his fingers in the air and, without touching the wall, makes it move as if he were touching it. The glass moves like water directed by a certain pair of fingers that want to turn left.

Luz felt herself suffocating and, if she remembered her mother, it was because she went halfway through the glass wall. In that instant, she visualized the bubbles and her mother with her head down.

That is her posture when she tells the tragic experiences of her daughter's father.

Luz believed that that vision was a motivation that her mind gave her not to leave that child or any other.

How could she imagine that her mother was in that enchanted sea when for the first and last time she separated from Luz's father?

How was she to know that I had linked that memory of her mother to her childish mind?

And if I tell you now it is because Lucifer forces me to make up for the little description I did during the whole story (according to him).

It hurts me more if I am more precise with my descriptions, but now the pain is still in the same intensity.

How will the lack of descriptions affect Lucifer?

I mean, he picked a poor narrator and novice at the craft.

What did he expect?

And why does it seem to impact him now and not before?

It seemed to benefit him before.

Anyway, the point is that Luz struggles with the descending beats of his heart. She was sure that they were going to knock her down to an alien hell she was not going to endure.

Suddenly, the wall of blue butterflies covers her vision again. Between two adjacent pairs of butterflies, two spaces formed, each in the shape of a diamond.

Between these spaces, Luz observes a rather considerable approach to her mother's eyes and a seldom sweet look. Luz noticed in that look a lively, laughing, dreamy child.

A vision of her mother so distant that it seemed to come from a dream.

Luz always dreamed of the day when her mother and she would have the same look full of hopeful dreams.

Her imagination was so compassionate with Luz.

Did her imagination feel sorry for her?

Then she hears the bitter cries of the child genius. It is as if rain is also falling on him.

A rain of sweetness.

In the other rhomboid spaces between each pair of butterflies, she hears the 80s songs that always seemed to connect her to her mother.

Without words, the diverse and candid melodies were enough.

However, the cries of the child genius did not allow her to be seduced by her fantasies. Reality surpassed fiction. If so, she must have stepped on the ground at that moment because her whole body had just passed through the glass wall.

Luz decided that she would step on a present reality because the past was dominated by the boy's genius. However, it would not be her present.

What would be going on in the boy genius' house?

And his cat-killer father?

His presence would be dominated by her.

In the water, the wall of blue butterflies faded from her vision and she did what she always did to be present: Dance and try to sing.

Luz believed that seeing his mother and that sea was the product of some kind of magic the boy genius possessed. But, she also believed that magic would never do anything to hurt any child.

It wasn't going to kill her just a few hours shy of her 9th birthday.

So, even though she felt her heartbeat drop lower than ever, she began to swim as if she were a mermaid following the rhythm of a song under the sea.

She thought of grunge and disco. Grunge was like a collision with reality.

While her mother didn't listen to 90s music, Luz's neighbor, the one who almost ran Alexis over, took advantage of the large space in his backyard to drink and listen to grunge.

Perhaps it was his favorite genre, but he stopped listening to it when people in town complained about the sacrilege of this type of rock as well as heavy rock.

An absolute rebellion.

That's why Luz listened to heavy rock-like grunge, but for a short time. She was more used to the dosed rock, to call it somehow.

Disco music, on the other hand, she liked it because it was about having fun and laughing in a group.

Disco was about creating a tangible fantasy.

There was also pop rock, soft rock, and other rock derivatives that were relatively well accepted. But, anyway, this information is just to let you know the musical context in which Luz lived until she was a little over 9 years old.

To be honest, talking about music, I feel better and the pain diminishes.

Just like little Luz who tries to sing, even if she drowns in the attempt.

Singing and dancing was the only thing that kept her in this world. The only thing with which her conscience stepped on solid ground and saw how beautiful life could be.

If she insisted on staying in the present, even at the danger of suffocating, his magic would have to give way because no amount of magic would annihilate an innocent girl.

"Magic creates dreams not destroys them, that's what consciousness does."

That thought of hers caused the boy genius a detriment to his strange power.

Luz thought that if magic needed magic words to execute; then there would also be certain words that could weaken them.

Luz thought that if magic needed magic words to perform; then there would also be certain words that could weaken magic.

Words that would intimidate magic.

That reasoning was a whole thread of thoughts created by the souls of my little rats. I hear their squeaks and I translate them into Luz's mind.

I'm dying to know how they did it.

If I could imagine their little tails joined together, just like their ears, I would be so happy. Even though I don't have my brain to call upon my memory, I remember exactly the lesson I taught my little rabbits' little souls.

My ears remember the words my mother said to me when she taught me that lesson: "All our organs have a memory of their own. You just have to find the connection between each of them. This will create a circuit that allows all your senses to establish an uninterrupted communication. That would make you almost immortal because magic would have no reason to fear…"

My mother was a self-taught witch, she always told me that it was better to seek one's own knowledge. Of course, since she was my mother I could trust that her knowledge was fully tested.

She searched so long for her own wisdom that I was almost not born.

Anyway, that train of thought is the circuit my mother was telling me about, and I didn't understand it at all.

I was about the same age as Luz at the time, so Luz, hearing this lesson in her mind, though she was remembering the time she ran away from school for the first and last time.

The night before she couldn't sleep because of her drunken neighbors' party. The next day she dozed off in class and was sent to the detention room.

One way or another she always ran away. This time was no exception.

However, she never expected that when she got to the forest, she would find a doe hiding in a hollow log.

Luz considered the forest the perfect home for a soul who hated to be lonely. That was her case. She knew almost every animal. None were dangerous, all were herbivores.

That insult from the adults further confirmed that they were very liars.

Or was someone protecting her from a distance?

"You fool!

Don't cry, or I'll give you real reasons to cry. With tears, you don't hurt anyone. You'd better concentrate.

Concentrate!"

Luz heard the sound of what would be the sound of an adult slapping a child.

"I don't want to!

Mom wouldn't approve!

I'm a prince!"

She saw through a small gap in the log that the child tried to run away, but the adult grabbed him by the wrist and lifted him up as if he weighed nothing.

"A prince or a princess?

Maybe you would hunt better as a princess?"

Luz could barely see that the man was wearing a black hood and carrying a long briefcase. Of the boy she saw nothing, only heard his frustrated tone. She was impressed to find not a hint of terror in his voice.

Luz would be crying by now.

The man lowered him to the ground again, but something told Luz that things were only going to get worse.

"Sing like Snow White and lure prey."

The boy refused, but the man's voice was the scariest she had ever heard in her life.

"What don't you do what your mother tells you?

Your mother is not the only one who exists, I am your father too.

Obey!"

Luz heard him sing with sadness more hurtful than her own. She even felt bad to be said about her relationship with her parents. It was a blessing if she compared it to this one.

A few seconds passed, and she heard the footsteps of an antelope approaching.

"You just have to connect all your senses. You're hearing, your lips, your smell, your sight, and your touch desire that antelope.

The magic of the gift of knowing how to use a weapon will not tremble if all your senses understand each other.

This is a circuit of power, isn't breathtaking the gift of the prince?

Do the magic and take away the breath."

Even if the man whispers it in the boy's ear, you know my little rats' hearing is unbeatable. Luz was not going to let that innocent antelope fall into the trap. So, she hugged the deer tight and screamed at the same time the boy pulled the trigger.

Luz's scream was so piercing that for a second the man thought the boy had hit the antelope. The man knew that with the boy's position the shot could not be missed.

The doubt only lasted a second because the doe screamed with fright. Both from the sound of the bullet and from the feeling of suffocation in Luz's arms.

She saw the man's eye see hers through the small hole. Immediately, Luz recoiled so far back that the trunk slid backward.

She did not remember in her panic that the hollow log was a foot from a slope.

Her heart was beating a thousand per hour and…. Her consciousness no longer remembered anything until she woke up after the log hit a colossal tree.

Luz noticed that the doe was motionless in her arms; so she pulled her so that they could both get out of the strong trunk.

Trying to listen to the doe's pulse, she knew.

The doe was dead.

Luz noticed its broken neck, so she couldn't deny it was her fault.

She hugged it as tightly as she hugged the stuffed animals her mother sometimes bought her.

Stuffed animals that never lasted because she took the stuffing out of them.

She didn't know why she did it.

She didn't have time to sing a song to the doe's soul. The man was running right at her.

Luz ran without delay, as tears rolled down her cheeks, as the doe's life rolled to death.

She heard the man say: "Even a little girl has more of a man in her than you. You must be prepared because women have for a weapon something unseen that they call love."