KALI YUGA
David Crauley
Kali Yuga: that was the name of the century and the name of the city. It was also known as the Great Whore, but nobody called it that, they just used to say: that’s life, what the hell can we do?
Yes, what the hell could we do? Trying to get laid in a doorway. Pretending to be cool guys and hoping they didn’t realise we were all just wasted corpses on the side of the road from a war we hadn’t even fought. Because we thought they were something different. But they were stuck in the same swamp as us. Dreaming of being thinner, cuter, more giggly, more real than the newspaper clippings they painstakingly collected.
It was the Kali Yuga and nobody quite understood what was in their heads. Everything came and went without you noticing. It smelled bad, it tasted bad, it was bad for you, but you wanted more just so you wouldn’t feel so fucking lonely. There, halfway that I hadn’t explained how you had gotten there, or whether there was any point in going on. It was up to you to resolve the question, to do it without fear and without making a mistake. But it was difficult.
I remember that, despite everything, they were magical. They were beautiful, even, without being beautiful at all, sometimes. They were everything where there was everything, but nothing that would make you dance on the tip of a needle without losing the balance. They were magical. They held you in the middle of the fall for an instant which was the time that was and the time yet to come and, meanwhile, you wondered how the hell you managed to get between their legs. You didn’t understand it at first, because they seemed stronger, more real, faster. And without a doubt, they were perfectly aware that you were just a piece of something broken, sinking into a well without desires, dreams, or hopes.
But they were broken too. And the moment you realised that they were as trapped as you were, you felt that God had betrayed you. The son of a bitch had ruined everything. Life was even more tragic because the magic was aching and broken inside. And it spun, pointlessly, inside a doll’s house that had become too narrow, like a trench to peer into the other side of life with bitterness.
I remember that I became interested in women at the very moment when I began to detest my mother. Although it wasn’t animosity, it was more than that: it was an inverted hierogamy and a thousand other dramas of the flesh and the spirit, as archaic and incomprehensible as they were true.
It had to happen, it was what I told myself, at some point, I would have to hate her, banish her, and murder her. My very survival, my very sanity, was at stake, hanging by a thread. As if I were held captive between her womb and the world below that was voraciously engulfing me. A world below that stank and hurt, no matter how much I adorned my wings with the privileged lights of the highest vaults of that strange crossroads where madness was the most reasonable and creative company. I could wander whole nights and days on the ceilings of the primordial and elegant chaos of thunderous and cruel deities, like a newborn spider, always hungry for new colours, voices, minutes, smells, thoughts, refrains, mirages, and yet I was always divided, rooted in my mother’s guts and projecting myself, at the same time, into the tortuous jaws of a diabolical creation, prostrate below, that was tarnishing me from within.
And the more the rage grew, the more I descended steps and steps of purity and spirit, in that detestable maelstrom of pains and horrors, the more I longed to annihilate my own mother. And the more I fantasised about destroying my progenitor, the more I distanced myself from her, and the closer I drew to the other women.
It was the Kali Yuga and I certainly didn’t understand what was in my head. Like everyone else, without even consciously trying, I guess I also ended up learning to say: that’s life, what the hell can I do?
David Crauley is from Seville (Spain). He is a Graduate in Political Science. By profession a Graphic Designer. He has published several of his short stories in various literary publications in Spain and Latin America.
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