Batsceba Hardy - The-Apartment

ey became my obsession. ey replaced e Yellow-eyed Girl in my
mind. I only wanted to be with them on that bed. Invisible. Teaching them
how to take off their first skin. And making that love last forever.
I feared something bad could happen to them. at they somehow would
get caught. at someone could take them away from me. I couldn’t bear the
thought of not having them before me anymore, of not breathing the same
air they did. I began thinking that the only solution would have be to make
them invisible. Or, at least, to make them invisible in that house.To make that
house invisible.
I started looking for an invisibility spell in all the esoteric books. But no
text mentioned one. Perhaps the legend of the Nibelungs, with the Tarnkappe
(magic mantle) of the dwarf Alberich, had confused my memories. It was my
mother’s favorite tale. She used to tell me the story in different episodes every
night that she stayed home with me.inking about my childhood prompted
my memory. I began to search all the magic tales my curandera grandmother
used to tell us, and go through that small trunk she had sent me right before
she died, containing her two drums, her notes, some dry leaves and a card
written in shuar, the antique language of her people.
She taught it to me when I was little, during the long vacations I spent
alone with her in Guayaquil, while my mother and father traveled around the
world. She called me her little jeecham: bat. I never understood why. My
grandfather had taken her away from her village on the mountains, he was a
handsome German musician, from Berlin – it’s funny that I forgot all about
it – she had probably cast one of her spells on him.
I couldn’t even recall that the card existed:
– Always remember that the door to the other reality is inside you. And the
magic place will do the rest – I read it out loud after getting the suitcase from
under the bed.
ey had to be the ones to go beyond that door; only I could help them
find it.
erefore I waited for a night that was just right, as Snoopy would have
said, a dark and stormy night, to knock on their door holding my two drums
and my hallucinogenic tea in my thermoskanne.
e Apartment / 29