/lit/ - Literature

I opened my eyes and reached my arm to the other side of the bed. She was gone, so I rolled around. Her side was still warm, she must’ve left just before I woke up… the bitch. The silk drape, suspended over the door, was dancing joyfully in the rhythm of the breeze. A few mosquitos were flying aimlessly around the room, sometimes butting their heads against the drape, unable to go out. I despised mosquitos with a burning passion; how did they always manage to enter even from the most miniscule of openings but could never find their way out even from a door wide open. In any case, the best thing about having Selma sleep with me is that the little bastards seemed to be more attracted to her, so they mostly left me alone and I could sleep in peace. Okay, maybe not the best thing, but it was up there. She never complained about the mosquitos, either, even when she’d wake up with dozens of red spots, horribly swollen and itchy, she would just rub some alcohol and some native ointment on them and carry on. She once told me a story about how she and her sister were walking around in the rice fields and a snake came out from somewhere and bit her just under the ankle. Her sister panicked and ran to the village to get the medic. In the meantime, Selma remained calm and squeezed the poison out of the wound. After the sister and the medic came back, they found Selma perfectly fine and smiling, and the snake laying dead in the grass not far from where the incident happened. I didn’t believe her. I always say never trust a woman, but I especially say never trust Selma. Selma was full of shit.
I stretched in bed but couldn’t muster the energy to get up, so I buried my face in the pillow. It must have been very early in the morning because the temperature outside was comfortable and the breeze – refreshing. In the afternoons, sitting outside was hell itself and my shack was a furnace, so there was nowhere to hide from the sun. I kept rolling around in bed; there was a piece of bread with some sausages left from last night on a little plate on the bedside table. The sausages were cold and stiff, and the bread was hard. I ate everything as breadcrumbs and some pieces of sausage fell on the bed, getting tangled up in my sheets. I fell asleep again.
I awoke from a gentle shake on my shoulder; one of the labourers – Marco – was hanging over me like an imposed shadow.
“Sorry to wake you up, Mr. Fuentes, but your father called for you.”
“What time is it?” I asked as I was rubbing my eyes.
“Just past eleven.”