23/6/2025
Devil’s Chill Out
by Zulfikar Ahmetovic
Granite stone mountains, inextricable woods around me, still the breeze from the sea to be perceived. Never away enough to be allowed to forget it.
Half asleep. Tired. Myself a gravestone.
Don’t pretend to be awake.
The deadly challenge not over yet, inside my skipping heartbeats, my aching muscles.
Darkness around me. Silence. Not a movement in the room. Still air.
Don’t even dare to open my eyes.
Strange feeling inside.
I’m not alone in this stone room.
Seconds minutes hours maybe.
Not Brinks. Not the Corsican mobs turned shepherds.
My lips sticked tight.
My clenched jaws.
I forced myself to open my lips.
Almost a hiss.
“Lucie.”
She didn’t move.
Maybe she wasn’t breathing, even.
But I could sense her.
And she was not hostile.
“Sshht” she made a silencing sound.
I felt the sea, all around.
I felt the waves on me.
I felt my legs of stone relaxing.
My fists declenching.
My shoulders dropping.
“Don’t fall asleep, my friend,” she said. “Your dreams are not safe yet."
I fought hardly not to sink in the deadlike sleep again. Fragments of thought, images. Not a single logical string. Vampires, waves of the darkened seas surging around, erasing, Rocks, grey rocks, granite - almost certain. Bright red spots all over them. Blood.
I tried to remember the old songs the elderly used so chant around bonfires, some stinging motes from a gusle. Older women closing in in circles, dancing, chanting different stories. Criss cross of sounds and stories, names to be kept, names to be forgotten forever. And with their names, the faces, the stories, the whole lives of longtime forgotten people to be lost now and forever.
I remembered the gusts of wind on the sea, while traveling from Sardinia to here, the droplets of salty water all over my face and my head.
Gray water, gray skies.
The dinghy, a grain in the vastness.
Wind above us.
Our lives to be forgotten in the blink of an eye,
No emotions, no single epic moment, no flashing by instant of joy.
Nothing of what we were, of what we did, to be remembered, nor chanted by a bonfire on the dysarmonic notes of a gusle.
I thought - all of a sudden: La Brise de Mer,,,