The Crickets Of The Dark
For a moment the woman fell asleep, but hunger prevented her from falling asleep. Lying on the floor, she heard an insistent noise inside the walls: it was crickets. The woman sat up and in the middle of the darkness she put her finger into the slots in the walls. There was nothing there. She kept digging for a long time, but nothing. She realized that the sound of the crickets was coming from somewhere else. He kept silent and tried to hear where they were coming from. He looked at the wood that were stacked in a corner. He went to them and listened: the crickets were there. As he could, he began to move the wood. They were very heavy and she was very thin. Her bony, dirty hands had hardened and insensitive skin, so she did not feel the splinters burying and making them bleed.
After a while she got tired from the effort she was making, so she sat down with her eyes open in the dark. There, she moved her tangled hair and scratched her arms again. Outside there was a breeze blowing on the windows, and inside there was the sound of crickets. The woman put her hand up her nose and what she took out she put in her mouth. In the darkness, the drool that came out of her mouth was imperceptible, invisible and non-existent. She continued to pick her nose, forgetting the sound of the crickets at times. When he cleared his nostrils, he was alert again in the darkness. Crawling, he went to where the wood were.
The square room was damp and smelled of all the unpleasant smells in the world. Remaining food, dust, and feces lay on the cold, rough floor. The man did not arrive and hunger was an animal that lurked in the night. The woman moved the last of the wood and groped the walls in the dark. She felt something move under her hands. How could she catch the moving body. With a closed fist and feeling a tickling movement, she held her hand to her ear. There he heard the cricket singing and in the middle of the darkness, the woman laughed foolishly, with drool coming out of her mouth. So, close to her ear, she kept her fist closed for a long time, listening to the cricket's song as if she were hypnotized.
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With her eyes closed, the woman remembered a past life, where she was a bride and wanted to get married. She remembered that she stopped loving the man one day and wanted to leave, but she couldn't. She remembered that the man locked her up, that she never saw the sun or other people again. She remembered that the man kissed her hands and feet, fed her and slept beside her every night. She remembered that one day she stopped screaming, talking, because no one heard her. In the darkness and with the sound of the cricket coming from her hand, the woman began to clench her fist. Hard, strong, she clenched her fist and the cricket stopped singing. There, in the darkness, the woman opened her hand and what was in it she took to her mouth. She chewed, again and again, and then swallowed.
Suddenly she heard the sound of another cricket again, and as if she were already an expert in hunting, she stuck her hand on the wall and felt another bug being caught. She took it back to her ear and remembered again: that one day she was the man's girlfriend and wanted to get married, that she stopped loving him, that one day she wanted to leave him and couldn't...
I hope you enjoyed the reading. I remind you that you can join the discord of @adsactly. Until the next smile. ;)
Written by: @nancybriti