One day I sang all sorts of words with my mouth open as if to utter “ah”. Shyly, at first, then louder and louder, I let the sounds out of my throat, my lungs, my entire body and I felt an exhausting relief, which, still, seemed all right. I climbed up and down, quickly, with the sound on my lips. Or I descended slowly and suddenly, I entered a corridor that seemed to have never been walked by a human voice before. At those times I didn’t hear myself anymore. And you entered the house. You didn’t hear me either. How good! It seemed to me you were even smiling. I had shut up anyhow. No, you weren’t. At that moment, the phone could have rung. But we didn’t have a phone. That way, I would have heard how you talk.

Inside, the damp descends licking the walls. It’s a lot of life in here. In one corner, the salt, in another, the grass, the third cannot be counted and, in the forth one, it continuously rains. From above, from the ceiling, which is the sky. It rains to feed the yellow flower in the fourth corner. The house has been built around it, turns after the sun with it, and it has only one room, whose corners change places between themselves at every important moment of the day. From a distance, it looks like a house as those drawn by children – it lacks perspective. It looks like a postcard. But it has a life of its own, a rhythm that you feel just as you’re inside. If you live here, you discover its dimensions in the most startling places. In the corners, for instance. You discover how easily it unwraps and grows into a shape, yet from outside it still looks like a photograph.

It was I who upholstered that chair. It had been stained for a long time, I found an old dress, of a colour close to it own, in which I dressed it up. Since then, it has been my chair.

Before I sat down, a noise disturbed my thoughts. A stain appeared on the chair, which I noticed only the second day. I didn’t sit on the chair anymore, I took it out to the sun. The third day, instead of drying off, and only a simple vague outline to be left of it, the stain started to stand out in relief. I didn’t watch the chair for two days. The sixth day, I looked at it by chance and I noticed the spot moving slowly, as if in a viscous liquid, and it had a clearly outlined profile. And in the seventh day, the stain was whimpering.

A flapper, suffering from gigantism, with long, thin bones, bending her back to fill inside the room, her fingers heavy with the phalanxes, knots of water just spun out of dust, with her lips petrified into a large smile, from one wall to the other, and with lots of other body parts endlessly lengthened—that’s how it was, the first morning that caught us together.

Around it, on stools, sat our aunts. I noticed them, through the flapper’s grass-like eyelashes, exchanging looks and turning faces, while we were singing so loud that the flapper’s teeth chattered. And we started to dance around the aunts, who were stiff in their chairs. They couldn’t turn their heads, couldn’t stretch their hands, rigid on their laps. They could only move their faces. A snowflake, floating close to an aunt’s mouth, suddenly disappeared.

As the morning lengthened, a people of aunts were dying. From the beanpole’s skin, grass was growing.

Your beard, wiry and brown, reminds me of the white, grumpy, taciturn tomcat. I can even imagine: if you had become friends, you and the tomcat would have shared many, in the cool mornings. You would have talked about my caressing, or about how you’ve become so grumpy.

Once, some unknown insects nestled in your beard. You grew more and more pale, almost transparent, until the tomcat lured the insects into its fur. You lay in bed for a while. Then, one morning, you opened your eyes and the tomcat licked them with its last drops of saliva.

You told me how you slept innumerable sleeps in a female’s abdomen. You enjoyed yourself in there, but you were also afraid: outside, the female’s fellow creatures were on the look out for you, incredibly nervous that you mixed into their species.

Shortly after this event, one night, between our bed-sheets, I heard a heart beating.

As it had disappeared while sleeping, I draw with the tip of my finger another undershirt on your body. I pushed hard, until the nail became white, transparent, and through it I saw the trail left on the warm skin, a road. Your insects should pass this way. If they get to the end of the road, which looks like a creak in a wood, you can feel it with the tip of your fingers, they’ll lay down there, whole and sleepy, your soul.

Adela Greceanu
Translated by Adrian Urmanov