Los relatos de Maurice Sparks

© Ernesto G., 2013

She was guilty, yes, guilty of strange desires that kept her up at night and diluted her sense of reality. She should have suppressed them, they all keep saying. She should have talked to someone about it. Her dad, maybe. He would have understood. He was a strange man himself and had seen all sorts of atrocities when he enlisted in the army and was sent overseas to kill other men whose language he did not even understand. How can you kill a man and not understand his last words? How can you put a bullet in his heart and not know what his last thoughts were? Because that’s why we have language, to tell the world what we feel, what we think. She should have done it. She should have talked to him.

The desire to kill was one of them. She wanted kill people slowly, watching their agonizing last moments with pleasure, seeing them cry for help and gasp for air; yes, she wanted to suffocate them, take every bit of oxygen out of their bodies with a special machine that she had created in her mind. The idea to invent the peculiar contraption came to her one day when she saw her mother deflate one of these inflatable mattresses. She enjoyed every minute of it and wondered what it would be like to invent a something similar to deflate humans. No, it was not a metaphor. It wasn´t their souls she was after. She wanted to suck life out of them. She wasn’t the artistic type. It wasn’t literature. It wasn’t art that motivated her. She had no artistic inclinations. It was pure evil. But it was evil that was never realized. It stayed locked up in her mind. It didn’t fight to get out. It enjoyed being there.

Looking back now, I realize that maybe she should have acted on some of these thoughts. Knowing what I now know, it seems like this would have been preferable. I am not suggesting she should have killed someone. No. What I am saying is she should have asked her dad to help her make the machine. This would have helped. I’m not a psychologist but I believe that spending time to actually put the parts together (it would have probably taken her months to finish it) would have prevented what happened later.

But this wasn’t her only desire.