MALAKAI

Part 1 : Malakai Falls Asleep.

She slept on the left side of the bed.

If you were to stand in the entrance of that room and look at the bed ahead of you, you’d see her silhouette under the cover on the left side where the alarm clock was set to 9 am. Her head led on the grey pillow, hair splattered around her neck, it made it harder to breathe but she couldn’t bother to tame it. It was too much work to do at 3 am. She stared at the window facing her, for so long, so intensely, that the shadows of the few trees and the parked cars started to reclaim new identities and she could almost find fiction in their presence. Life outside the window was so distant, so surreal as if no one ever walked out there. She wondered what it would be like if she was one of those trees or those cars, if she wasn’t human, if she too was the product of someone else’s imagination, not a full human with a past and a future.

She knew someone was sleeping next to her, but she didn’t know who it was. She doesn’t remember bringing anyone home, and she hadn’t been drinking either, so the feeling of the other body next to her became more and more confusing as time went by. At least, then that the stranger rolled and made a quiet growl, she knew it was “he”, more than what she’d known before anyways. It wasn’t usual for her to have a stranger in her bed. She’d quit drinking years ago after overdosing on a cocktail of drinks and drugs. Ever since then she hasn’t tasted any alcohol, usually that’s what made her sleep with strangers and not remember their names forever, but now, to have this person right next to her, while she laid sober in her bed, on a Tuesday night, it all felt very wrong. She didn’t remember how he ended up in her bed, she didn’t remember ever meeting him or inviting him to join her, as if he simply appeared there with some magical force.

So she gave him a name; “Leigh”, and a striking feature; deep dark eyes, and a favorite food; vanilla ice cream, and a pet; “Tass” the rabbit, and a childhood trauma; witnessing the death of his grandfather. This way she felt like she knew him, she could imagine what his days could look like.

He wakes up at 7 every morning, feeds Tass and says a prayer for his grandfather, then runs to work where he eats breakfast because the office’s coffee is always better than his house’s. Leigh is not very talkative, he accomplishes his job in silence and looks for no compliments, he just does what he has to do for the day to then go home and be with Tass. Leigh likes to cook his food at home, not much of a fast-food eater, watches romantic comedies regularly and needs the background noise of some TV show to fall asleep at night.

What was his first real disappointment like? How did it feel like to shave his facial hair for the first time, was it a powerful experience of claiming his masculinity, or a mundane task he had to simply accomplish? Was he satisfied with where he was in life?

By 4 am, she had way more questions than answers and that was not part of her deal with her imagination. So she tried to sleep, and it worked. Some minutes later, she was falling into a dark unknown of a dream.

Footsteps were approaching the room, at first, it seemed like the light picking of a bird but then got heavier and closer. Her eyes were still closed, but mind on alert, she instantly forgot what was her dream all about and started to follow the rhythm of the steps entering her bedroom.

She wanted to turn around and shake Leigh awake, but something in her told her to stay still, not move, listen, carefully. She stayed quiet, listening to the steps get closer and closer, more numbered, like they were invading her insides, almost like heavy military boots in routine. Her body tensed and she could hear the muffled conversations between the strangers now roaming her bedroom, she tried to shrink away and disappear, pretend to be asleep, maybe they won’t notice her and leave with whatever they came there for, but as soon as she moved her knees up to hug her stomach, all sound went blank.

She knew, that they knew, that she knew they were there.

Eyes still shut, she waited, will they continue moving? Or will they not?

Suddenly she felt a shower of burning objects pierce through her body. She screamed in distress as the bullets run through her skin and the bed. It was like a tragic symphony, the sound of the guns unloading the bullets everywhere around the room, through the glass, through the fabrics, through Malakai’s bones.

Strangely, time didn’t stop.

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