lunes, 22 de febrero de 2010

Short story (Angkor)

*Please consider this is translated from spanish.

A woman sits in a lotus in a plain flat field. She meditates with her eyes closed, it's so silent she can even hear her ideas. Suddently a mountain falls from the skies with a blue-ish skin toned six-armed hindu deity standing on top. This doesn't distract her, she doesn't open her eyes, until she takes a deep sigh and thinks about the way... everything stops. She opens her eyes in a rush and she is sitting in fornt of a desk in an upper west side New York appartment. She finally finishes writting her novel on an indian adventure and she puts the manuscript in a manila envelope she then proceeds to seal by licking the edge. She takes the envelope and goes to Brooklyn, gives it to her editor and finally she is able to forget all about the stress it has caused.

A couple of moths later she walks by Barnes and Noble and a picture of the same deity she saw in her mind while writting catches her eye, it's the cover of her book. In a week it jumped up to become a best-seller and everyone in the streets carries a copy... literally.

Her dream of going to India comes true after getting several awards for her novel and once she is there she finds out it is just as she pictured it: a whole country that suddently froze in time. Seeking inspiration for a parallel novel she adventures into a series of expeditions through the Indian jungle and not being able to find inspiration in the tourist agency hikes she had been taking she decides to leave India and pursue the Eastern Asian experience that would -as she tought- fill her expectations a little more. She flies to eastern Myanmar and travels through Thailand, it has been two years since she has been living in Asia, and it's not until she reaches Cambodia she doesn't feel like home anymore.

She is wisely advised by several townspeople coming from different parts of the country to visit Angkor. She is a professional hiker by now so she decides to walk all the way there. Through the jungle she is mesmerized by the vegetation, scared by some of the fawn living in there but specially traumatized by the human voices she heard. They spoke in recognizable, yet never understandable, dialects and whenever she looked thowards where the voices came form nothing was to be seen. She gets paranoid after a while and starts running frenetically, this only makes more voices appear and more complication to run through her mind. Once the voices finaly stop gentle bells, that sound because of their swaying in the wind, are heard at a rather close distance. She walks thowards them, more calm but still scared. She reaches the bells (that had red ribbons tied reaching the ground). And finds an abbandoned temple similar to what people had described to her as Angkor, but in a much smaller scale and with no possible track of tourism ever existing there.

She is mesmerized by the beauty of the inhabited structure that had a sense of virginity and a sudden aura of calmness. As she thinks on this she hears a couple of little girls inside and decides to explore, and maybe chat with them. Somehow knowing she would understand whatever tongue they spoke to her in. She enters the temple and to her surprise a beautiful Indian looking woman with nothing on her but a bright red sari and several pieces of jewelry is standing in there as if waiting for her. She loses notion, balance and sight. This makes her fall into an abyss of blue darkness where just tears of sound are to be seen. As this happens the Indian witch stares unsurprised.

The bautiful witch can't get over herslef. The voices in her head won't stop arguing about how to proceed with her guest's unconcious body. She keeps her floating in the center of the room while she tries to decide the next step to take and as she attemps to do this the rain strikes the temple and she knows what is the correct answer to her dilemma.

The cobra snakes she kept in the pit over which the soaring woman now was where hypnotized by the rain's sound and smell and so they were to obey all their mistress told them to do. As she rises her arms each of the snakes rise slowly and start to crawl on top of the stranger. The guest was now to become a host. They surround her entire body and the tangibility of it starts to dematerilize under the vile reptile's scales, leaving nothing but the spirit.

Her spirit is now condensed for the first time in thousands of years and the rage she feels for the sorceress is unacountable. She materializes into her true being, a deity in intense blue skin with several arms. She never stops soaring. She sends the snakes away into the jungle and grabs the witch by the waist with one of her powerful arms. She yells at her. She is furious. She still doesn't believe she is now dead. Her only wish is to kill this treacherous woman and as she is about to do so she stares directly into the eyes of this exotic woman only to find out she has more reasons to be grateful than angry.

She leaves the liar. And as she goes back to New York (by many means) her deity spirit starts to fade. She is sending it to her beloved friend back in Cambodia. For it is her spirit that should be elevated.

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