Anamnesis by Zorina Alliata (red queen free ebook TXT) 📖

tried everything, and I failed. It was just meant to be, they are supposed to be together. It's God's hand."

"There is no God and you know it!" Costin said furiously. "Every time you fail, you blame God. Every time you succeed, you say it was your merit. Don't you see he's just a word for you? One thing you inherited from old senile Catrina."

There was more there; I sensed my grandmother's secret, deeply buried – one secret that she didn't even tell her own son she adored.

"What is my destiny now?" Costin continued, oblivious to his mother's silence. "You promised her to me!"

"I'll find you a good wife", she said. "Don't worry. I'll get you someone healthy who can have children, I promise."

Months later, he married a nice country girl named Flora. She was submissive and humble, not very bright at all. Her youthful beauty wore off fast and in just a couple of years she looked tired and old. She never got pregnant. My grandmother blamed it on God.

When Costin was forty, he learned that my mother was pregnant with me. He came home and coldly poured poison in his wife's food, then watched her die after two hours of suffering.

But it was not her fault. Of all the hundreds of women he dated all his life, none of them ever carried his child. However, he had never stopped trying.

"Why?" he asked my grandmother. "Why?"

"It's on to us," my grandmother answered. "Don't you see the patterns changing when you breathe? It knows… we are not free anymore. Mother Earth is on to us… We're a cancer, we'll be exterminated. The whole family is in a circle of death."

"But my brother had a child," he hissed.

"That child came from God," she answered. "That child was not meant to be alive, but God gave it to us. Maybe that child is our savior. She will fight the curse, she will see through the numbers; she will lead us in the dark. She will bring a new magic alive, a more powerful and true one. If you want to live, you better take care of that child."

"What's so special about her?" he asked.

"She is not human," my grandmother answered. "She is stolen from Mother Earth herself; she is fertile and healthy and hears the cries of the wind."

"Of course she's human," my uncle scoffed. "She came from her mother's womb."

"So did Jesus," my grandmother said.

My uncle did protect me the best he could, as far as I can remember. He did not believe my grandmother's stories about God, but it was obvious to him that I had an ability to cast spells and a capacity to survive unfortunate incidents. In time, he came to believe that I was simply the vehicle through which the genes of the family would survive – in the anamnesis, and in flesh and blood. I was the keeper of the family's knowledge, and that seemed important enough to him to defend me. I was his second chance at immortality.

I lay back in my bed, thinking. Lou had fallen asleep, looking like a pale angel. When I was a little girl, my grandmother would whisper stories to me. We'd be sitting in the dark, the flames from the chimney throwing dancing shadows on the walls. My grandmother talked about the lives of the saints; about Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit; about miracles and tragedies. I knew what God looked like; he is painted on every church ceiling in the north of Romania. He was old, kind and patient. He had blue eyes, a white beard and a red-and-blue robe. He was holding out his hand, reaching to everyone who was looking up. But why did He send me into this world?

*-*-*

In a freezing dorm, Dante wondered desperately how nobody missed him. He had no friends, except for Eric and Anna at the office, and no one ever stopped by his apartment to see how he was doing. His mom was used to hearing from him on Saturday afternoons only. It was Tuesday night and not a soul in the world gave a damn where he was.

When Vicky was living with him, a period he remembered mostly as a blinding white light of sheer happiness, they checked on each other and protected each other. She was sweet and shy, and none of them talked much; but they both liked Dante's chicken cacciatore above anything and they both ate dinner in the same tempo, with their feet underneath them on the high chairs. Dante realized painfully how much he still missed her; how he was still hoping she would be back; how he had never let her go from his heart.

He was suddenly hit by the misery of his life – the bad job, the loneliness; the unresponsive, confusing mother who never had clear answers to anything; the missing father, who threw Dante's life upside down with stock options and corporate meetings nobody prepared him for; that freak, Valois, who wanted to kill him for no reason. And all that lead to this moment when Dante lay naked under a cold blanket in a bungalow, on a field in West Virginia, sleeping near men who seemed ready to beat him up all day long. Near his bed, in his shoe, carefully packed in his socks, was the precious egg.

Getting over his sadness with a deep sigh, Dante decided to try and sleep for a while. The next day could be much worse. It was hard to fall asleep when he had no dinner at all – all they provided was a pile of walnuts and water, and Dante was not able to get any. He watched the other men cracking walnuts in their spectacular fists or between their teeth. Dante tried several methods but could not crack open even one walnut before Hardy yelled at them to get out of the dining room.

They stepped outside into a sordid court that looked like the deserted scene of a village hanging ceremony. Hardy yelled for a while about different things, trying to teach them to be tough men. Dante had a hard time being tough, considering that he had to hold an egg in his palm. Hardy then went around with a hat with some tickets in it; they all picked one. Dante's said "Purple". Hardy made them all say their colors loudly; there were four color teams: Red, White, Green, and Purple. As far as he could tell, Dante was the only one in his team.

"Tomorrow," Hardy had yelled, "we'll learn how to be a team. We'll learn how to fight the enemy – whoever is not on your team. Survival is the name of the game. Now move to your dorms. Move!"

At least there were showers, with cold water, it's true, but Dante could wash before slipping into bed. Hardy insisted they all slept in the nude.. He said some cliché about men living naturally. He took their clothes and left only the shoes and socks. The other men didn't seem to mind. They all looked amazingly big and muscular, and comfortable in their skins. However, Dante went to bed slightly worried about the team fights the next day, given that he was the sole Purple combatant. That just meant that he was everybody else's enemy.

Turning from one side to another, Dante could hear his stomach grumbling in revolt. He thought longingly about the precious egg in his shoe. He could maybe sneak back to the dining room and look for a stove, and boil the egg and eat it; maybe there were even more eggs there; maybe there were piles of food nobody knew about. Dante swallowed hard; his feverish brain imagined a glazed ham waiting for him at the other end of the campus; it was pink and crusted with coarse pepper and brown sugar; it called his name lovingly.

He got up carefully, picked up his egg (just in case there was no ham), and found his way out; a dim light was throwing dancing shadows across the court; the stars were numerous and close, like he had never seen them before. He entered the dining hall and blinked a few times, to get his eyes used to the dark; in the back, he saw a door and happily skipped to it. Sure enough, there was a kitchen and a stove, and a fridge, and even a sink.

Suddenly filled with hope, Dante carefully opened the fridge; to his surprise, there was no ham; actually, there was nothing in there except for a pack of baking soda. Dante sighed and returned to his egg; opening the stove, he found a small pot and filled it with water. He dropped the egg in the water and waited impatiently for it to boil. The fear of facing Hardy without his egg in the morning had been overcome by his hunger; Dante didn't care anymore.

"What's up, man?" he heard a familiar voice, and turned around to see Eric. "Whatcha doing?"

"Eric," Dante whispered. "Thank God I see a sane person around. Did they bring you to this training thing too?"

"Yep," Eric confirmed slowly. "Found any booze in here? I need a damn beer, man."

"No, there's nothing in the fridge," Dante answered. "I am boiling an egg 'cause I'm starving."

"I saw some ham somewhere around here, if you’re hungry," Eric announced casually. "I think it was in the dining room."

"Show me, dude," Dante rejoiced. "I am buying you a carload of beer when we get out of here."

Dante followed Eric back to the dining room, smacking his lips. Eric stumbled across in the dark and fell against the wall several times. "Whoa…" he admonished himself.

"Where is it?" Dante asked, feeling the dining table.

"Come this way, man," Eric called. Dante followed him to the door and outside the building.

"Oh, come on," Dante sighed. "Is this one of your drunken jokes? Where's the frigging ham?"

In the next second, the building exploded in a noisy, shocking bright light that brought Dante face down in the mud. The fire illuminated the whole campus and soon the court was swarming with naked men throwing buckets of water at the dining room. Dante raised his eyes but Eric could not be seen anywhere.

"Are you trying to kill me, Alighieri?" Hardy yelled in Dante's ear, poking him to get up. "What did you do, you moron?"

"Nothing," Dante sworn innocently. "I was just boiling my egg…"

"You did what?" Hardy screamed even louder, pushing Dante back with such force that he ended up back in the mud. "What did I tell you about the egg, you son of a bitch?"

"I was hungry, okay?" Dante screamed back, revolted. "So what, I was going to eat your stupid egg. Fine, I failed the test or whatever. I'll never be a senior manager like these other guys. So what? Nobody was going to promote me anyway."

"It wasn't an egg, you filthy idiot," Hardy yelled. "It was a tracking device. You boiled a $100,000 microchip, you bastard."

Dante shut up. "Oh…" he said softly."Well, I'm sorry."

"You'll have to pay that back, asshole. I'm not gonna take the heat for this one from Valois. I ain't got that kinda money. You have the fancy office job, you pay. You hear me?"

"OK, OK, whatever," Dante said, just so he didn't have to argue anymore. "Can I go home now? Tell Valois that I failed, okay?