The Remedy for Suffering
When the school bell rang, Mirador had already stained the kitchen towel with small, frantic, red spots. She had killed no more, no less, than 35 cockroaches that had foolishly ventured into the hallway and made their way into the girls' bathroom, where they liked to hide among the torn and crumpled pieces of toilet paper. During class hours, when no one flushed the toilets, the cockroaches came out in search of prey, racing in zigzags across the tiles. Only Mirador could hear their feet. Ctzctzctzctzctzctzctz – she tried to mimic the sound in her head like a broken tape, waiting for the moment she could tell Ania and Linca everything about the way she saw the world.
She took a deep breath, as if she were about to ask her mother for money for wafers again, and parted the pocket of her grey and white pinafore with her index finger. Inside, her little bottle, as small as three twisted rose petals, still had a quarter left of a black, sticky potion. Mirador parted her lips and squinted her eyes as if struggling to laugh at a good joke, one that she had understood a bit too late. The glue slid down her throat, and the stains on the cloth began to turn yellow, then white. It was almost time, and Mirador felt that her life was, at last, about to begin.
Mirador felt the world like no one else ever had: she felt others' pain unwillingly. It started on a Sunday in November when Clar, the neighbour from the ground floor, slipped on the last step to the laundry room and broke her neck in two. Her scream, unheard by anyone else in the building, struck Mirador's eardrums with such speed that the girl saw black for a few minutes. In total darkness, Mirador became her mouth. A large mouth, like the full moon that howls at the moon, something terribly understandable for someone who had never seen greater suffering than a scraped knee during gym class. The mourners were envious of her gift, but mother Luna was finished – there was no morning when her daughter didn't drown her omelette in salty tears, tears so large they wet her socks and fell heavily in the middle of any normal human conversation, be it about school, doughnuts, or the weather.
With a dark nose and black curls like tar under moonlight, Mirador was a 7-year-old girl who believed the freckles on her cheeks appeared when she mimicked the same spots on the face of a pregnant woman. Mira didn't believe in magic, but she knew she could do harm and good with the power of her mind, and that turned her whole life upside down, twisting the insides until her classmates no longer led her to
Mirador, the 7-year-old girl who feels a lot of pain, her own and those around her, knows everything people suffering think but is completely clueless about joy. In the end, Mirador breaks the bottle of black potion and
Since entering college, Mirador lived beyond the tram line that cut the city in two. It was usually the part where it rained more often, and metallic clouds gathered faster, thundering a storm just when you wore suede clogs.
In the village where no one drank water, summers were known dryness. People waited for the long rains, placing large buckets under walnut and oak trees, enough to pour everything into them and rinse their mouths until winter.
Manole's skin was the only one that didn't beat into the earth. In markets, fairs, or at the council, skin flakes settled like leaves. People kicked them around not out of nostalgia but because sometimes, especially when the wind blew, they gathered in piles so large that someone shorter could get lost in them - last week Mirador heard about a Pekingese that jumped into a pile of skin flakes and never returned.
January
January was the worst month of the year. Not devilishly bad, but darkly bad, with closed doors and drawn shutters, bad enough to chill your soul.
Darkness fell suddenly between the two hills guarding the Valley of Night, like when you pull the board over the stove's head. A black velvet that mathematically fell and left boredom and darkness over the 365 inhabitants groping, talking, and dozing in the village forgotten by the world. With small, searching eyes, fireflies caught in jars, the villagers closed their eyes evening after evening, thinking that spring would crack their bones less and that Petru and Manola would, this time, have a child - who would become the only heir besides Mirador.
Petru and Manola were the last young people left in the Valley. Manola arranged by her mother from morning till night, then stretched out next to Petru who read to her from books he had brought from the cities he had travelled to - Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Sintra, Perth, Dublin, Bucharest... Petru was an engineer - he extracted oil from the ground with thousands of yellow, serrated excavators stubbornly stuck in. Beneath the black sap, he always found treasures - from lovers in a thousand colours who tempted his desires to fortunes and gratitudes from distant princes. Yet, every journey around the world stopped at Manola's threshold - with his nose in her hair, oiled and freshly untied from satin ribbons.
Their story was a beautiful one. Or rather, beautiful enough to keep the 364 old people in the village alive. Mirador wasn't interested, for the potion bottle was running out, and she was already consuming too many resources on the old mouths in the village.
They had met in the village at a Sunday dance in the cultural centre. A more sprightly old lady had dislocated her hip trying to dance a Bossanova after tasting Popă's plum brandy. And as the dance floor was now also drowned in pain from Aunt Nina's accident, Petru stood up, coughed into his chest, then smiled more beautifully than he ever had, inviting Manola to dance - his hand was extended and white, and the lifeline longer than she had ever seen.
It's said that the dance, although it was at the end of January, lasted 2 months. People left, people came, and they never tired of watching them. Manola became a woman, her skin brightened, her curls wrapped around their shoulders, and their joy lifted them when they sincerely touched hands.
They didn't know, but outside the cultural centre, flowers bloomed in the field for the first time. The stone cherries teemed with juice, and Mirador slept without migraines. The valley walls were so steep that even the trees grew glued to the mountain as if holding on not to fall backwards.