a critical themanachronistic fairy tail

[Aliette Guibert]

A Radical Epidemic



In Europe the summer of 3000 was a polar one. An invasion of vampires coming
from the East had contamined the entire society and made a ghost of any
possibility of autonomy. First the inhabitants of the old metropolises took
fright. Then everyone knowing himself to be a potential victim of vampires
forgot the guilty prohibitions to passionately indulge in vampirical
libations. Work, health, love, intellect, art, money, business, and even the
micro-particles in Nature : everywhere the vampire acted on the other.
Everybody being contaminated, nobody could discern if the screams filling
the open-windowed town when the nights were the least cold were howls of
pleasure or of suffering. There was an implosion, naked scarred bodies were
found lying rigid on the pavements. These lifeless bodies were not
decomposing, as if their flesh itself had become the skeleton because before
death, the fluids had passed into other bodies which had absorbed them. The
departed animation of their souls, this faint remembrance called energy,
that of the various interferences which had encountered each other by
chance, and given a certain form to these bodies, was thus deserting the
planet. It was impossible to bring in these cadavers to be pulverized in
crematoriums. Instead, one resumed the task of burying them. Upon completion
of this fateful destiny, the 'clay' of the earth arrived at its cellular
transmutation.
To whom might the legacy of such a vision henceforth belong ?

The following summer was a scorcher. One morning in July the whole family
jumped in the station-wagon to go down to the coast, as was still said at
the time - as if there were only one on world. It was always the same thing.
Alphonse was car-sick. The car stopped. The others then watered trees and
bushes around. Auntie Emma walked away to pick up herbs near the car and
bring back what she called plants for her balcony. When she saw a cornflower
on the borderline of poppies which were beckoning to her from a cornfield
her joy could be heard from the steeple church on the horizon. Cornflowers
had indeed become a rare sight in what still looked like the countryside.
Precisely the root of the flower resisted and refused being uprooted. Auntie
Emma started to undermine the dry earth, digging with her avid hands when an
awful pain struck her arms. A feeling like torture surged through her
suddenly and rapidly - there was not even time to let out a cry, immediately
her upper members lost all feeling, when Emma, as she drew back, caught
sight of her bloodless stumps in place of her hands. Her hands ! Uncle Paul
was alarmed by the call and by the obvious prostration of his kneeling wife
and as always had the relevant reflex : the hands were to be found
immediately and put in the ice-box and they had to be sewn on again. He bent
to the ground where the bloody humidity lay, but with the exception of the
mud growing brown, which he moved with the tip of his Rangers, nothing could
give the smallest hope that the stolen members were not dissolved by some
immediate effect, even the flower had disappeared, while the beloved
handless woman held out arms which, to be sure, no longer felt any pain (as
she herself reported), but looked quite absurd. The stumps weren't bleeding
but livid, undergoing an accelerated scarring process, releasing their
morbid tissues like parchment. Emma fainted.

The family witness who recalls the story is miles away and years after.
Actually, he doesn't know exactly when nor where he stands. " Unless ? ", he
asks himself, haunted by his own ignorance of what he looks like. The
reflection of his image has not been appearing on the surface of things, for
ages. There is worse. His first innocent seduction caught a young man in
whom Narcissus had been reincarnated. So that, devoted to his radical
fatality, faced with the exponential increase of his particular
contaminations our vampire is all to himself the cause of a global endemic,
quite irremediable in its topology, a procession of roamings and madnesses
without return that go beyond himself, as a guilty-not guilty culprit,
responsible for the disappearance of the reflections of the human survivors
even from their own mirrors. One question remains. Just before and
in-between these moments : what is hapenning ?

A. G-C. (édito CS#1)
Translated by I.C.
http://www.criticalsecret.com/n1