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DOS MICROCUENTOS

BY JIMMY CALDERON

Lose yourself

Imagine that you wake up one day and everything around you is the same
except for one thing, one particular item, a singularity that changed overnight.

You look around your room, under your bed, inside your closet and your drawers
but you soon realize everything is the same, everything in the same order and
place you left them the night before. You go down to the kitchen but every dish
and every cup is on its place, not having moved an inch. The living room is intact
from the night of scion movies and pizza you had by yourself last night; that one
last movie having freaked you out.

As you walk to the garage, images of the body snatcher creatures circulate in
your head as you hear the lyrics of a song in the radio disseminate-Frente a frente
/ bajamos la mirada / oues ya no queda nada de que hablar. You turn the garage
light on, but before you step in to investigate you check yourself, thinking that it's
perhaps you, perhaps you're the singularity. But it's not you, you tell yourself. The
car and the bike are in the same place you left them last night when you arrived
from work. You go out to the garden and notice that one flower is missing from a
pot of beautiful daisies your boyfriend brought you last week for no given reason.
Now that you've found the singularity, you are free to continue life as normal.

As you walk to the bathroom, you take a last look at the kitchen, directing your
stare at the middle table for a second, but you keep moving. The ominous feeling
returns and you are now sprinting to the bathroom. You open the door and look
at your reflection in the mirror. You realize you were wrong. The flower wasn't the
singularity. On your way to the bathroom you observed a single daisy in a vase at
the kitchen table, and now you remember you picked it up yesterday afternoon, for
no reason, thinking it would lighten up the mood in the house.

Now you stand in front of the mirror and realize that you are the singularity.
You don't know what exactly it is, but something is different about you. Perhaps
it's your eyes. Is it your hair, or your mouth? You don't truly know, but the longer
you stare at the blank eyes in the mirror, the more you believe that the reflection
in front of you is not really you.

When cicadas go silent

Remember those summer evenings when you and your friends would go to the
pastures? When you rolled down the grassy hills, bathed in the warm waters of the
rivers that fed the land? Remember when, after a long evening of frolicking around,
you went back home for a glass of fresh and cool lemonade Aunt Martie would
prepare especially for you? I do.

Now, do you remember those cold summer nights, the nights where you
thought that, because of the heat of the afternoon, you wouldn't need your
blankets, but come the night you regretted not bringing them to your room? The
cold was not the biggest of your worries. You wanted the blankets not to