The Blind Executioner

Word count: 1272

“The messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after
his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.”

- Franz Kafka

I longed for the old days, but I did not want them back. I looked distantly at the window and in
the corner of my eye, I saw a naked woman I would like to fornicate with. For a man who sleeps
as little as I do, I sure dream awfully a lot. I wouldn't complain if I knew how to break down
dreams from what really happened to me.

That night, the heavens fell. The emptiness embraced me with all its horror, trying to stifle all the
screams that I would not have let out anyway. I didn't care, because it was a dream. Who cares,
let them fall. I didn't care the next night when I had the same dream again - that I was dying and
that the sky was swallowing me. But at the end of the dream, I would always see that I am not
the one dying, it was the people around me. I would triumph alive over the wreckage of a
collapsed world.

Alive and alone.

Father would say that a man must be awfully insane to be indifferent to such a sight, even in a
dream, but that again does not matter. It doesn't matter because my father is very dead, both in
his sleep and in his waking hours. If I had that dream of a post-apocalyptic state again in which
few people are being chased by the "undead", my father would be so dead that he couldn't even
be that zombie that wouldn't kill me anyway. And while he was alive, he behaved the same way
as he did dead, if not worse. I prefer him dead.

I remember well the day they found him hanging in the attic. I remember the night less because
by accident it just happened so that I ended up in a bar, and a little less quickly, my mother ended
up there as well. I could hear the hint of impending despair in her voice as she was telling me:
"They haven't even taken your father's body off of the attic yet, what are you doing?"

I guess I was too drunk because the first thing that came to my mind was that it was terribly
weird to leave a dead man hanging there like a lantern. In the morning, I realized that my mother
probably exaggerated the matter and that my father had to be taken off immediately. I checked
the attic anyway. It was strange to me that my father had the will to even climb to the attic.

But after my father decided to make a couple of circular flights attached to a rope, I began to
endure different dreams. I am not used to dreaming about memories, because rarely does anyone
remember the apocalypse, nor did I expect that the end of the world could interrupt my
memories. I was in the kitchen trying to peel an apple with a broken finger. My father was sitting
at the table and surely watching some nonsense on television because my father (apart from the
rope-swinging incident) never did anything smart. I dropped the apple for a moment and went to
get a plate, then from the background, I heard my father going on about just how wrong my
technique of peeling an apple was. It seemed as if he had been explaining the mistake I had made
for centuries, linking it to everything I had done wrong from the anaerobic period of planet Earth
to the present day. I reached for the knife and told him I would peel him if he didn't shut up, but
then I realized the knife was in the apple and I had broken the index finger of my left hand. If I
tried to take it out, I would certainly further injure my finger by killing my father, so all that
work led to bigger problems.

But since this was not a memory; but a dream of a memory, before I ate the red apple and killed
my father, I was interrupted by the apocalypse.

The biggest lie of my life was told soon after - at my father's funeral, when a speech was
delivered by his only son who tried to suppress laughter and put a mask of sadness on his face,
saying the first sentence:

"My father was a good man."

I didn’t know what could make me sad, so I tried to think about that girl I didn't have a chance
to shag. When I mentioned her and the apocalypse, I forgot to add that this girl is about as dead
as my father. That's when I remembered some weird documentary about necrophilia I watched
once, but thankfully the smile caused by that phenomenon escaped me on the part that described
the mother-father relationship. This is not to say that their real relationship did not elicit laughter,
but it was because it was primarily a picture of tragicomic embarrassment. I didn't know how
else to end the speech, so I broke the silence with: "Voltaire once said, 'If God didn't exist, he
would have to be invented,' and I firmly claim, 'If it weren't for my father, he would have to be
invented.'

Quietly, in my chin, I muttered, " so that I may experience his death again."

My mother often used to say that life was never difficult for me; at least not as much as it was for
the people who have to be around me. I would not agree, because it caused me eternal suffering
to observe their dull impersonality.

However, shortly after my father's death, the apocalypse stopped coming. I remember just
fidgeting in bed, fearing both sleep and consciousness, now moving in jerks, now stiff; listening
to different voices from the background. At that moment, I would agree to anything in promise
for deliverance, I would drink from the source of untruth, and I would extend my hand under the
guillotine of the blind executioner.

To my amazement, I went somewhere. I left, but I stayed on the familiar ground of my ideas
about the end of all worlds and spotted the contours of a face I had to have seen a hundred times
in my dreams. There really was no such woman, but I must have slept with hundreds of such
women. In no way special, neither in beauty nor in speech, almost dumb and mortally ill.
Whenever her almond-shaped eyes filled with puddles of blood, I would close the iron door
behind her and run to my rescue. I could only escape to my consciousness, and then I would be
confused whether I wanted to stay there or go back to bed. This time I looked at her and tried to
remember every time I did the same. She was my companion through this dream, through every
dream, almost like a loyal dog, and each time I could choose whether to stay or leave. I fired
bullets at a rabid dog every time I closed that door behind her. This time I waited for three
seconds, wrapped my arms around her rotten face and pressed my lips onto hers.

Closing that same iron door for the last time, the first and only time behind myself as well, again
quietly and again in my chin, I muttered: "Father, why did you kill me?"

Author: Ajla Šarić