dinsdag 26 maart 2013


The Mattress

Laying there, at dawn, he stroke the wall next to his bed and felt the drooling cold of spring floating through. Every time when looking down, towards his feet, he recalled the sheer joy that had shimmered in her eyes, one that had dissolved all too soon. They had been together in bed for weeks. In the damp factory where parts of ships still lingered around, with the heater on, clutching on to each other. The men had come, from the car rental, and had climbed on top of the rubble to reach up high and get them out of the container. It hadn’t happened. They hid in between the mattress, which was made of multiple soft sheets coloured like the Mediterranean sea at night, bound together with yellow ropes. And so the comet had switched off. They were reading, jumping on the bed, drawing with the candlelight, caressing, drinking the red wine. They had successfully escaped the pressure and taken all the worthiness with them inside, to the old warehouse where the bugs were living. But the moments had grown weary. The dirt had been piling up inside the container, slowly driving the optimism out. Eventually, the cold surrounded them and the girl fled to the sea where she had originally come out of, leaving him alone with the now emotion-inflated mattress. Sobbing for days on it, he became sick of this thing. It randomly threw recent memories at him, without any mercy for present time and the man’s existence in it. At night he would sink dreaming. So, as time progressed, he decided to get rid of the mattress. He didn’t burn it - for then all of the memories would be destroyed, and some of them he still cherished - but he threw it outside, next to the garbage bins. The next day, before the nightmen came, an artist living on the other side of the street, found the mattress. While picking it up, he could sense the remnants it was imbued with, almost smell the earnest of the thing. And so, realising this, he became fascinated by the mattress and used it for one of his artworks. This work, coincidentally, later got exhibited by the gallery that was situated right next to the old shipbuilding factory.



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