There is a playground next to my house, where the children play incessantly. I fear them, for their screams are as sharp as seagulls’. Sometimes I’m afraid they’ll fly through my open window and tear me apart with their bony beaks. A swing hangs empty like a Sunday afternoon… You shouldn’t have come on a day that tastes of abandonment. There is an abattoir down the street, and the blood-flavored clouds float through my window and spread around the room. I can taste them, and I’m sure you, too, tasted them on my skin moments ago, but you never say a word. In the evening, to flush out the thick stench that surrounds us all, the peasants light big fires close to the road. Later on, they’ll burn the fields, the abattoir with its beats, they’ll burn their houses, and in the end, they’ll burn themselves, too. There is a lovely place in the opposite direction. Please sit for a minute on the stone bench and wait until the old lady comes out. She’ll grab the railing with uncertain hands, and a piece of scorched paint will prick her skin. She’s always dressed in white, always has been. She used to be a seamstress. Every afternoon, she stands on her balcony to listen to the wheat field rustling. Her eyes, troubled like two cloudy mirrors, still search for someone in the distance, someone who forgot to come or who never existed. There is a beach in our village and there also used to be a pier, but the peasants burned it before they burned themselves. The blackened beams look as desolated as an abandoned church after the war. A cloth hangs on a nail and even the seagulls are scared, but not the little girl who is playing with her doll. Can you see how much she loves it? She keeps smelling her knotty hair and her delicate clothes, impregnated with the smell of her own dirty hands. She loves it so much that, little by little, she sipped its tiny, sweet soul right from its lips. Now, if you take another look through the burned beams, you’ll see the doll hanging from a girder, swinging back and forth, like a chandelier in the forgotten church. There is a wheat field close by, and you are walking in circles in the middle of it. It must be your feet that lead you that way. You should know that I visit the church from the neighboring village from time to time. It’s a small, quiet church surrounded by lovely violets And it smells of old clothes, especially old scarves. I don’t know anyone there, and no one knows me, and that’s why I go there to confess. There’s a wooden lattice in the confessional separating me from the priest, and I always make sure to hide my face with my scarf and to look down. I would have never known who you were if I hadn’t seen your feet in the confessional. Two left feet are not easy to forget. 〰️