Marlene wakes up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.
She dreamt that she was dead.
She sits up on her tired bones, still dazed.
She rubs her dry hands together and sighs.
“I’m old, that’s all,” she reflects, as she tries to catch her breath.
Loneliness and the gnawing notion of death have become her companions.
She contemplates the moonlight streaming cleanly through her bedroom window. She turns her head towards the distant dressing table mirror and observes the moonlight shining on it, although due to the angle she cannot yet see her own reflection. She is overcome with overwhelming anxiety: there lies the ultimate verification or refutation she needs to assess her condition.
She leaps energetically from her bed, like a gazelle. Despite her age, her small body is still capable of such feats. She has placed her skinny, bare feet on the tiled floor. The cold contact with the old, worn tiles both shivers and soothes her: dead people have no sensibility.
She walks slowly on tiptoe to the mirror and peers into it, fearful. A thousand myths about ghosts, vampires, and beings from beyond the grave that are refractory to mirrors come to mind. Immediately, she sees her wavering figure triumphantly reflected. There she is, Marlene, in her usual solitary room, in one piece, alive and kicking, though a little frightened.
“I’m an old fool,” she says to herself. “I have too prodigious an imagination.”
She stands for a few moments, observing her gaunt figure, her pale face with deep wrinkles, her dark circles that never leave her. She tells herself it could be even worse. Having a worn-out body means you’ve lived. The most important thing is to have a young spirit.
She glances at the photo in a silver frame of her in her prime, singing Mozart’s The Magic Flute as the Queen of the Night at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Her most memorable performance.
Relieved by the discovery of her concrete humanity, she begins to exercise her old lyric soprano vocal cords in a series of glissandos and flourishes. It is probably not her most outstanding performance, but she is immensely happy to prove to herself that she has not yet crossed the threshold into the beyond.
Then she smiles with her faded lips and returns to bed.
She needs to dream that she is alive.
Marcelo Medone (1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominee fiction writer, poet, essayist, journalist, playwright and screenwriter. He received numerous awards and was published in multiple languages in more than 50 countries around the world, including the US. He currently lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Modern Flash Fiction 