The Accident

I saw your eyes fixing on my answer. “YES”. It came out of a dark and unsuspected part inside me.
I remembered exactly that sensation and the need to breathe pure air. To sweat and feel the speed, an extreme pulse. I pressed my legs against the grayish and thick sweat of the horse’s white coat. “Imperious”, I remembered. I felt, through the reins and my hands, the iron of the bit wrapped in foam, I heard its sound, its suffering and even so, I dug in the spurs demanding fury.

I lifted my eyes from my gloves to look ahead and swallow everything that fit in that afternoon so cold and, immediately, I saw the arm of that holm oak turned into a lance. I suppose it knocked me down as in those affronts of medieval knights, of shields, princesses and crossbows.

I opened my eyes, I checked the angle in which I found myself, the horizontal. My right eye, more flattened, sensed at its immediate distance, a mass of woody thyme and an anthill; the right eye, more able to calculate the distance, reported a narrow path almost at the distance of my hand, the surface of a puddle of recent rain and a thick forest on the other side. My gaze only reached up to the middle of the treetops. I concentrated on feeling something more, some response from my body. I felt the intense pain in the arm crushed by my ribs and, my cold hand. I felt nothing more. Except the very hot temperature from my chest up to my head and the sensation of an impossible weight. Also my cheek crushed against a stone, I noticed its relief, its hollows and its cold adapted to my skin. I breathed, very superficially, a smell of dampness and moss. Then I noticed how an ant began to climb up my forehead, so simple and absolutely powerful over my immobility. I remembered the afternoons reading Gulliver to the girls. And I tried to shout your name, to call for help, but a ball of blood filled my mouth and seemed to flood my nose. Then I became conscious of death. I wanted to close myself even more inside me, to adopt the form of a shell, I was not afraid, I sought intimacy, I concentrated on recovering your smile, on that YES and on the illusion of a whole new life ahead. And I limited myself to noticing the pain. The almost red pressure in the eyes.

Time lost its measure. And everything turned dark.
Without knowing to which world I belonged, I ended up noticing a rough hand that opened one of my eyes. A warm breath of a dirty man and of a bar.

I heard, “He’s got the pupils dilated and a thread of blood coming out of his nose”.