Stay Woke

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Ruth didn't want to get up; she was wrapped in her soft duvet, pulled up to her chin, her face buried in the fluffy pillows, her mind drowsy, dozing off with the image of a dream. She was beautiful, blonde, with legs as long as stilts, bony and graceful, naked with determined yet elegant knees, supple but nervous ankles. Small feet, long fingers, nails lacquered with ruby red polish, a golden ankle bracelet, rings on her toes, a small ruby worn on the pinky toe of her right foot. She was gorgeous. She looked at her body; she was naked. Blonde hair on her pubic area, an embarrassing line defined the border of her sexuality, childishly masked by a soft fuzz. Narrow hips, a flat abdomen, almost excavated like a valley leading to her round, large navel, pierced by a golden jewel. Her gaze rose to her swollen, enormous, shameful breasts with livid areolas and nipples swollen with milk. The milk dripped from the nipples, running down her abdomen. She quickly wiped it away with her hand, lifted one breast, and sucked its content. It was sweetish and irreversibly disgusting. Ruth opened one eye; it was morning. The sun pierced through the dull and dingy curtains of her room, stopping just a few inches from her face, instead hitting her chubby, white fingers that stuck out from the pink duvet. "Ruth, my dear? Are you awake? It's time to go to schooool!" Her mother knew how to modulate vowels like an everlasting and distorted song, making "school" always sound like "schooool," as if it were a long day of melodic agony. She threw off the duvet; her mother would come up shortly, open the door, and discover that Ruth had slept in her clothes, that Ruth had been sleeping in the same dress for several days, now emanating an unpleasant smell of urine and sweat. It was November. School had just started, a date of unavoidable and distinct inequality. There were students, and then there was Ruth. There were attractive girls, and then there was Ruth. There were boys, and then there was Ruth. Ruth was fat, with pimples, greasy, curly hair tied in a messy ponytail. She was plain, dirty, and stupid. What any normal boy would avoid or mock or feed with perpetual insults reserved only for useless losers who would live their lives until they died. Ruth didn't want to die. However, she was fascinated by the agony that preceded the act of dying. She had studied cats before the liberating death arrived. She studied them in her father's garage while locking them in the microwave oven. She studied them while inserting long dressmaker's pins into their eyelids; their meows were acute and vibrant. It was a question.

Why do you do it, Ruth?

Ruth didn't know she was doing it.

Ruth was schizophrenic.

Their soft fur was relaxing; she shaved it off and gently ran her fingertip over the pink, fresh skin, sometimes scratched by the rusty blades of the razor.

They meowed, meowed until their agony ended, and death set them free. Then their bodies became heavy, as if they had only just realized gravity. Heavy and large, liquids oozed from their bodies, they emptied to become even heavier. It was truly a paradox that she couldn't explain.

Yet, afterward, they seemed static.

Static, heavy, emptied.

What did the dead see?

They were flesh and blood, humors to be concealed under the ground, buried under the decomposing humus, transforming. But, truly, what did the dead see within themselves? Ruth was searching for it. She was searching for THE VISION. The vision of death, of the afterlife, of what could embrace and lift the cat's body to lead it to a dimension that wasn't here, that wasn't earthly. To a dimension where Ruth was absent or transparent, or simply human and alive. What did the cat see before crossing the threshold of this dimension?

Not coincidentally, the thought flashed in Ruth's primal mind, a school explanation of history, of war, of the dead fighting for their country, for honor, and a phrase that remained in her unconscious, "...and they would return to the earth in the body and the soul in the heavens..."