Sunday afternoons are trying to get ahead of us. What ever that means.
Sparks are seen flying all over the town, like little wings of butterflies cuddled up in mid-air.
Lana was arranging her hair with her fingers, a little bit stumpy, but with long nails and one little ring on her middle one. From time to time, the clock on the wall accompanied the silence in the room.
On the bed, with flowery sheets and pillows, Lana could be seen lying on her back, gazing at the ceiling. The Sundays were lazy, and so was she.
Distant sounds, like distant planets, were making her jumpy, but only for a little while. After that, Lana came back to herself, lying and playing with her hair.
“Oh, look what the cat brought in.”
As if it had a silencer, a grey cat with blue eyes and a very slim tail entered the room, looking at everything in here suspiciously and cautiously.
Lana stood up; wanting to go and pet the cat, but it had already flown away at the sound of her rising.
“The sound of her rising… Ha ha ha!”
I swear, sometimes it feels like Lana can hear thoughts.
The afternoons are passing by slowly, dragging onto time as if today would never end. And in the bad days, you could only hope that today would end, because bad things always bring more bad things.
“Why do I always think of bad things?”
Lana had no answer to that question.
—
Mondays, at school, everything seemed to fit perfectly into one perfect little piece. From her school uniform, that resembled a Catholic school girl’s uniform, to her tight ponytail and her black backpack, everything went according to the plan.
What plan could she have? Was she a mastermind of planning, like Machiavelli or other people of that sort?
Lana started laughing. She liked Monday mornings, because she could lie in bed, thinking about nothing, rolling from one side to another, without a care in the world.
Who was she kidding? She had no school, she had no job, and she had nothing else to do but take a shower and feed the cat.
Thinking about the cat, it was there. And her blue eyes were checking her up, while stretching under the cozy blanket. Then the cat jumped on Lana, trying to make some kind of a nest between the blanket and the flowery sheets. This made Lana giggle with all her awake powers.
She threw the cat away, and stretched a little bit more. Then, when she got out of the bed, the cat could observe that Lana was naked under all that blankets and sheets and what-not.
“Oh, dear God!” the cat thought, and it could feel itself blushing under all the fur.
“Oh, dear God what?!”
The cat had forgotten that Lana could hear its thoughts and turn away quickly, with a little smirk on its face.
“You don’t even give me a name, I have no identity in this house and yet you are appalled at my appallence…”
“Is that even a word?!”
Lana started laughing, her breasts moving up and down along with her. The cat sighed internally and left the room.
—
Tuesdays were a day of headache. On Tuesday mornings, everything seemed foggy and autumnal, like all the sun in the world disappeared.
If Mondays were still reminiscent of the weekends and the laziness that comes with them, Tuesdays were a drag.
Lana usually woke up at 11, without setting her alarm clock, without the cat that usually woke her up, without the sun that usually bathed her in the morning.
Tuesdays would find her fully dressed under her blanket, sporting her jeans and socks and an old T-shirt, all of them thrown on her since Monday night.
She made a habit out of sleeping like this, thinking that it would made her more efficient. Efficient for God knows what!
Only one good thing on Tuesdays: the cat seemed to get in the ground, as if it was never there. And that calmed Lana more than she could admit to herself.
Oh, no. Tuesdays had two good things: the missing cat and coffee.
It was the day that Lana drank so much coffee, almost like if she was thinking in bathing in it.
She started each morning with a big cup of coffee, black of course. And by the end of the day, she had in her all the cappuccinos and moccacinos and frappucinos and whatever-cinos were available in the town, mostly over 20-30 cups of something caffeinated in one day.
And at the end, she was still nervous and still tired, so she would fall asleep in her jeans and T-shirt.
—
Wednesdays were a delight. So close to the end and so close to the beginning, you never knew if you wanted to start something or end it.
Lana took her time on Wednesday to read a little, white riding a bike, and during a football match live on TV. She used to order pizza, while drinking champagne, and try her hand at Chinese cooking, while cutting one of her favorite pair of jeans short.
Wednesdays were amazing, all the stuff that could be done in a weeks worth of time should be done Wednesdays.
—
Thursdays were the best time to catch up with a story. So Lana would stay up in bed, with cookies beside her and a hot chocolate, and read with her eyes closed.
The cat would often enter the room and silently watch her master (or is it mistress?)…
“I heard that!”
Lana’s eyes would open wide in a second, at the first sign of disobedience and pierce through the poor cat as if it was thin air.
After that, she would return to her reading, eyes closed and cookie crumbles all over her flowery sheets.
—
Ah, the long awaited Fridays!
They started as a party and ended in party.
Lana would get out of bed, naked again, but the cat was nowhere in sight.
She would start her morning exercise, lying on her pink mat, stretching and doing some sort of yoga that some people call Pilates. After all that, she would fill her bath tub with hot-hot water and bubbles of vanilla and she would lie in there for ages.
It was only after the bathing ritual that she would start trying on different clothes and outfits and trying her hand at smokey eyes make-up.
After all the preparations, she would jump into a tight dress, or maybe a black skirt with a white top, put on some heels and jump into a taxi.
Friday just ended for Lana…
—
But I can’t say the same for Saturday.
This was the day when Lana never woke up in her bed. The day when the cat was king and Lana was just a party girl with too much alcohol.
But Lana never drank, so why did she stay up so late? She made a habit of coming home on Saturday morning, at 12 pm.
Everything on her looked as glossy as it did last night; the only exception was that her smile was wider.
This was the day when Lana managed to clean the house a bit, maybe cook a little meal for herself and eventually feed the poor cat.
She used to stay indoors, waiting for the next day to come, with its sun and laziness and all the butterflies…
—
“So, do you like it?”
The girl’s height was medium, 1.65 meters at best (and I don’t know what is that in the imperial system), and her hair was a weird color of grey. Her fingers were not long, but her nails were, and they were painted red. A little ring, with a red stone, was sitting on her middle finger. Her skin was white, but not so white, and it looked as if it was smooth.
She was surrounded by two other girls, a freckled redhead in a summer dress and a tall brunette, with shorts. They were examining a piece of paper, each looking at a different page.
“Well, the writing seems to indicate that more than one person wrote this…”
The brunette was holding the first page, as far as I can tell, and she was chewing on her index finger. I always thought she was the brightest one.
“Hmm…”
“What?”
The red head looked up, as if she was scared, and her eyes moved from one girl to the other.
“What?”
Lana was beginning to lose her patience, I could tell that.
“No-no-nothing!”
The little freckled girl was almost about to cry, when the brunette took her under her arm.
“Hey, calm down! Why are you so scared?”
“I thought you were asking me, but since I can’t even read this whole thing properly-“
“Yeah, we know. You don’t have your glasses with you. You never do!”
The brunette and Lana both started laughing, which only made things worse.
“You two are so mean and always have been mean!”
She ran out of the room, throwing her piece of paper on the floor. I stepped out a little, just so she wouldn’t trip.
“So what do you think?” Lana asked.
“Well, I think nothing. I still believe you woke up from some kind of sleep and wrote this and then went to bed and totally forgot about it. This, or maybe you sleep-wrote it. I can’t think of anything else-“
“But that’s so absurd! How can I forget what I do at night?! Do you hear yourself?!”
“Yes, I do. But since I am not Sherlock Holmes or some other detective, I can’t help you with that…”
“But how do you explain different hand writings? And look here – here everything is written with a type writer or a computer at best. How can you explain that? I don’t have a type writer!”
Lana was almost screaming. I could hear the ginger crying silently in the bathroom and I knew it was because she thought they think she’s stupid. Well, she was. But that was not the point.
The brunette looked at Lana with her small, brown eyes.
“Need I remind you that you were the best prankster there is?”
“But this is not a prank! I swear to you!”
“Lana, please. You fooled so many people into thinking ridiculous stuff, that I can’t even remember all of it! And now you come up with THIS?!”
She folded the papers carelessly and threw them in Lana’s face. One of the pieces hit her in the eye and she instantly put her hand around it.
“Oh, you! You shut up! You were always jealous that people used to listen to me and not you! So what you were smarter than me in physics? Nothing you said outside of school ever mattered!”
“Get over yourself! You think you are so important, but you’re not! How come we are the only friends you have? If you are so good and mighty, how come people always end up running away from you?”
“Why didn’t you run away? Huh? Loser!”
The brunette started laughing.
“Yeah, I am a loser. But so are you, and stop pretending you were ever something else!”
“Stop fighting!”
Lana and the brunette turned around in under a second. In the doorway, the red head was all cried out and her clothes were wrinkly.
“I don’t know who wrote this stupid story, I can’t even read it! I am sick of you two fighting and of all the cries and all the stories and the backstabbing! I wish you could just stop doing that!”
The red head was crying and throwing her fists at Lana and the brunette, while both of them were trying to calm her down. And while her fists were hitting them harder and harder, everything started to go black and gloomy and the time seemed to stop, until…
The last punch was, surprisingly, a knife. The red head had, instead of her little hands, some sharp tools, that pierced into Lana’s body and into the brunette’s body. She stabbed and stabbed until her eyes were dry. And after she stabbed and everything stopped, she saw what she was doing, and the fear came rushing down on her.
She looked at Lana’s bloody body and then she looked at the brunette’s bloody body. She looked at her tiny hands, covered in her friends’ blood and she got so scared. She started panicking and ran to the bathroom.
After a few noises, I could tell she locked herself in there. She was still crying and I heard how she was looking through the cabinets, searching for something. She cried for a half an hour or so, and after all that, the crying and the noises stopped.
—
I waited for a few hours, to see if there is still motion in the house. Nothing but the phone, but since no one could answer that, I figured I could step in and look at stuff.
In Lana’s room, the girls were on the floor, bathed in blood. They were still facing each other, even in after life. Their smiles were cruel and their bodies were stiff, as far as I could smell them. In my defense, they smelled pretty bad.
I got out of the window and entered the bathroom, where the red head was, from outside. She was indeed stupid, since she left that window open.
All around her I could see spilled shampoos and shower gels and lotions of all sorts, even alcohol. All the pill cases were empty, so I suppose she ingested them all. Oh, no. There are a few blue ones and a few pink ones on the floor.
I think this is somewhat funny. She was so stupid to drink shampoo, and only after that she could think of trying the pills.
—
Why did I do that?
Why did I write the stupid letter?
Well, it wasn’t a letter. It was an accurate depiction of my life with Lana. I was sick of her and her games, and she never bothered to care about me.
She never fed me or gave me water. She didn’t play with me. I didn’t have a name.
And every morning, when I looked at her, she was staring back at me, looking right through me. As if I never existed.
He was so good to her! He would hold her and love her, and always cook her breakfast. I could hear her how she never loved him. Oh, I wish she knew what I really thought about her! Then she would’ve been so afraid, so scared of what might happen, that she would love him and be the girlfriend he always needed.
I never understood why he gave me to her. She was mean and idiotic at some times, she never deserved him.
But I’m glad he gave me to her, that’s the way I got to have him.
He always petted me and fed me, and he even gave me a name. Grey. That’s what he called me.
Oh, shit! He’s home!
—
“Honey, I’m home!”
“Honey? Lana?”
“Grey? What’s with all the blood on your fur?”
“Lana?”
—
I’m glad I wrote that. Now we can be together…