A DESPAIRING ACT
by
Oliver Frances
Smashwords Edition
*****
DESPAIRING ACT
Published by Marco A Diaz at Smashwords
Edited by Sheila Steiger
Cover Art by Carla Prat
Copyright 2011 Marco A Diaz
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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*****
It's the early hours. Darkness, like an enormous beast, crawls over and squeezes down and around the upper lights of the billboards. One dead sound hangs on the city. Anyway, from time to time, sirens are heard wailing along the high street. The people whose flats are located here are used to such noise that it does not wake them. In one of the boxes atop, a woman anxiously rises, soaked in big drops of sweat. The woman looks around and everything is soundless; she then realizes she has just woken up from a nightmare. After making it to the edge of the bed, her feet land over the flat part of her slippers and, she leaps into them. She grabs a robe from the end of the bed, puts it on and leaves the room. Entering the kitchen, she turns on her dodgy coffee machine. Once it is ready, she pours it in a cup. While sipping it, she mulls on her nightmare. She dreamt of being on an airplane which strangely vanished and left her hanging in the air, in the middle of nowhere. It is creepy, and the dreadfulness isn’t the dream, it is the fact that she is hours away from taking a flight. Somehow, a care is not taken, as her sight is lost on watching the outside blackness through the window. After finishing her coffee, she goes back into the bedroom.
Even in the slums of the city, the dread of night lies down. Several men, in black bisht with white dishdasha underneath and white keffiyeh on top, go into a long-corridor-like den. Meanwhile, dwellers, in long white robes, who have been waiting for them, sneak out of their packed bedrooms on the side of the passage. Rebels with curly beards speak, hissing about to-do plan to others with eyes popping out of their heads. Rushing, they quietly squeeze themselves out of the den.