I could hear footsteps. Footsteps like whispers, whispers like curses uttered in fear. The silence in the apartment building was bouncing between walls, ears were frozen in silence. Only the footsteps were heaving their cadence from time to time. Without echo. Laying on the hard hostel bed she was trying to figure out if she had already crossed the threshold of the dream world. The ceiling seemed real enough though, it hadn’t the translucent texture that’s so common to dreams. However her body felt especially heavy, surreal and even painful, like the residual sensation of a hot bath.
The day had been uneventful, the day before it as well. The hot summer college days share nothing of the brightness of the childhood ones. They’re vapid, dusty, stained by errant thoughts, alcohol and small time pseudo dramas. The nights are almost the same, except for those when everything seems to murmur and spur the spirit into reveries or heated debates with oneself. The eyes seem to measure the ceiling throughout, slides towards the edge, looking for cracks and crushed mosquitos, and stop. And now again, along the width, the cracks, the footprints that had once crushed the insects, the spider webs. Eyes continue to glide along the ceiling and down along the wall, wide to the left, downwards, until they run into the door frame. They measure it, sweep along, they stop.
She can hear the footsteps again. Closer now, then too far, then much closer again. They sound like the same footsteps from before, the dream goes on, her body is moving idly, turning on the side. There are no stars; there is only an infinite silence of the spheres, like a pact of nothingness, a deep and solemn cessation, like an ancient water pond. There are moments when time cannot be measured, and one can’t help but feel left out of its flow, like in a grey and endless hallway without doors. At the confine of her field of view, the limbs of the silent clock tremble indecisively: one second forward, another second backwards; the doors of the wardrobe slowly slide open, as if pushed by a shy and insecure occupant. The clothes start skulking one by one, slow and wrinkled, slithering over the carpet, stumbling against the feet of the table and chairs. The hangers clatter, now free from the weight of the clothes, they clash dangle and slowly come to a halt one by one. The rustling of the trousers and shirts spreads towards the edges of the room like an unstoppable tidal wave, looking for an absent shore.
The body tries to move, the bed creaks slowly under the effort of the tense muscles, eyes are unable to blink and the mirror of their retina records the gliding image of the clothes, their ragtime movement. The fine dust covering the walls is floating around filling the room, stirred into dizziness by the trousers, unsettled by the shirts and socks that slowly crawl up the walls and cram into each other on the ceiling. The footsteps begin their pace again: closer, further, now very close. Stop. However the clothes continue to rustle endlessly on the ceiling and on the walls, the sleeves blindly grab socks and start stuffing them into pockets in trousers or even throwing them down on the floor. The legs of the trousers start pushing against the walls, hanging on to the lustre and start unscrewing the light bulbs, crushing them into a fine powder that falls over the still body, over the table and the carpet.
The ceiling is soon swarming with clothes, bustling with increasing restlessness, until all clothes find their place, filling the tiniest of gaps. The latch is shaking on the wooden flesh of the door with a metallic clicking noise; slowly – unbearably slowly – the small iron lever slides out of its place, cracking and clanging. The footsteps begin their dance anew, very close this time, stamping a stifled waltz on the carpet and causing the rustle of the clothes to cease. They stop very close to the bed and the waltz begins again around its frame, towards the window, leaving dark footprints on the carpet, squashing a stray fallen sock every now and again, stamping it onto the carpet’s texture. Her body ceases any effort to move, the hearing sharpens in an attempt to determine the exact position of the footsteps, but now, slowly, the bed sheet becomes stained with their pressure, the cotton is shoved into the mattress, eyes catch a passing movement of sleeves on the ceiling, stretching down into an upside-down worship of the footprints but everything starts moving in complete silence and much too fast for the eyes to comprehend. All clothes fall down from the ceiling onto the motionless body, they cover it, they drown it in their fabric, the footsteps are trampling around the room, up on the table, the chairs tumble and fall, the clothes start wrapping themselves around the torso, the sleeves start feeling around the throat, the socks crawl their way towards the mouth, they stuff it, they fill it, the violent shaking of the body stirs the whole bed, the bed starts rattling against the walls, the clothes keep folding their tissue, pulse throbs wildly, the limb knuckles turn white, eyes burst in their sockets, their white juice dribbling onto the socks that couldn’t fit in the mouth. In their mad dash, the footsteps trample everything: the bed, the body, the bones that contort and break, flesh is ripped and torn inside out by sharp bone splinters from beneath. One, two, three seconds and silence covers everything around. Then, one by one, the trouser legs relinquish their grasp and begin to drag the body towards the edge of the bed: the corpse topples heavily, shapeless. With a deep thud the mass of flesh and bone crashes on the carpet, blood dripping from the clothes still tightly wrapped around what barely resembles a torso and limbs. The trousers start pulling the body towards the wall, they push it against it and, somehow latching onto the ceiling like giant leeches, they begin lifting it off the floor, little by little.
The body now hovers above the furniture, slowly being dragged up towards the ceiling. From the threshold of the room the window looks like a lop-sided sky, painted with falling stars that cast their dying light over the scattered bed. The footsteps now stick to the window glass, stepping on the sky, over stars. Their faint light stings the hanging body and finds its reflection in the tiny fragments of the light bulbs, multiplying its presence and unveiling the starry night into the empty eye sockets. Inside the dream.
