“Open the door and go out, spread yourself to a dangerous engagement. Your consciousness has created and preserved an image of a desperate ten-year-old girl in your mind to make you afraid of any adventurous effort to decipher the message.”
“What is the message?”
“There is something wild in your nature. The interpretation is beyond the field of psychology.”
“Aren’t I normal?”
“No, you are not. What if we don’t have psychological terms to describe your behavior? What if there are some silent genes in you belonged to a very long time ago that now due the torment of the event have started activating. You get your consciousness by mirroring the behavior of society. This works for the people who are evolved in the same trend. You can communicate through your smell; this is a very primitive ability in humans. Evolution of language area of the brain has made this capacity weak and non-applicable. I cannot verify my analysis by your verbal responses, but I can feel its correctness by your change of smell as has happened recently.
“So I belong to the wild.”
“Must go out’
She noticed the woman in the mirror was smiling, not a simple one, there was some peculiarity in it. The lips were gestured in a smile formation more to show the whiteness of the teeth than the happiness of coming across a friend. An idea came to her mind, why not flirting with her image or doing some oddity she wouldn’t do normally. She took her underpants off and twisted it around her index finger. The scattered scent widened her nostrils, a strange feeling, a white flash blurred her eyes, frightened her. She thought, “This is not a woman you can have fun with.” The smile was gone.
She could not believe that eyes were not hazel-brown as supposed to be but blue; two shining blue pupils were glowing in the mirror. The shock made her threw the panty out her index finger, swirling in the air; it flew into the opening at the back of the mirror.
She turned back, walked to the kitchen, needed some distraction from the mirror. The smell of tomatoes had filled the kitchen. She found an appetite to eat meat, which was a strange desire for a dedicated vegetarian. She acquired the new desire from the time had added these tomatoes to her food. Yesterday, when her downstairs neighbor was barbequing, she could not resist the smell, opened the window, and looked down to his balcony; the juicy steaks were sizzling on the rack. It was strange to her that after eating two juicy tomatoes the meat-eating desire quenched as if the tomatoes had fresh blood in them. It was not only the taste, but there was also something peculiar in the scent, which had filled the whole apartment. The nostalgia of her past blurrily traveled into her memory, a reminiscence of wilds belonging to a time far before she had been born, a dance of ghosts around her.
She looked into the dustbin at the three empty silver bags of the super fertilizer. She took one of them out and read the information: “Miracle Fertilizer. Add this magic additive to the soil of your pot. The miracle of creation; you will be amazed that your plant is growing 15 times faster with an unbelievable taste and a strange aroma. Effective only for 24 hours that is actually comparable to 15 days of similar ones.” “Certainly 15 times more expensive. It is odd that one describes his fertilizer with the word Miracle.”
She had bought the additive and tomato seeds from a shop in a remote area out the suburb as she was seeking a new way to fill her free time, of which she was going to have plenty. She thought to go and see different items in shops until she may figure out of some hobby. It was three days ago that as she was driving idle and talking to herself lost the time and the road. Unknown streets started and ended with shops at both sides closed until she found one in a place with the least possibility. At a large parking lot, a light on the other side attracted her attention. She drove closer across the lot. Strangely, it was a big store located out of nowhere in that deserted area at the end of the vacant huge parking lot. She parked her car by the store to ask for direction. It was a big botanical store with no customer and one old Botanist owner standing at the cashier.
She could remember her first encounter with the man vividly. As she was going to ask for the direction, he said smilingly, “Hello, my beautiful vampire, what has brought you here? Unfortunately, we only have flowers not human flesh or blood.” “My mistake, I can’t also catch the smell of anything here but dead flesh and rotten blood,” She retorted and amazingly, the brief offensive conversation changed her mood, made her relax, and thought to buy something.
She remembered the Botanist got in the mood too; his smile grew wider and started narrating his life story, “My dear father was saving money all his life to buy this land, in a hope that someday the rich people would build a road passing beside this area; then we would be some among the rich people. As he was dying, gave all his savings to his only child, me, as well as his last and only lifetime-unfulfilled hope. Unfortunately, the rich people were too rich; they built a highway instead of a road and along that highway were stretched guardrails, the not busy area became dead vacant. Yet, I kept the promise, could not spend his money otherwise. I purchased the land, build a store and a big parking lot same as he had always been describing for his beloved son. I am old now and have not saved much for me, nevertheless was able to save him in my memory.”
“Sorry, I was wrong your blood is not rotting.”
She did not feel lost anymore, turned her face looked around, then walked along the aisles of the store, browsing the items sometimes taking an interesting piece to look at. At the end of one of the aisles, she entered a large open area; a simple advertisement on a sign caught her attention: “So many humans were engaged in the production of these fertilizers. Their souls are in it.” Below the banner, there was a cardboard box filled with silver bags of Miracle Fertilizer. She bought three bags, some tomato seeds, and a large rectangular flowerpot.
“I have run out of the god damn good fertilizers, have to see the Botanist again,” She was talking to herself in the kitchen, looking at the empty silver bag in her hand. She turned her heels from the dustbin to her kitchen cabinets at her back, raised her hands up, opened the cabinet door, there was a glass jar filled with crumpled money bills and some coins in it. She took the jar, opened the lid, removed a ball of money out of it, and placed the jar back. Snatched her car keys off the cabinet counter and rushed to the door, it was already late in the night.
Last glimpsed into the mirror, “Oh, I am not wearing my panty,” She said with a shameful laugh, noticing that the white underpants had fallen on the floor, in a gap between the back of the mirror and the wall. She crouched, stretched her index finger while holding the ball of money in her palm, as the finger reached the underwear, hooked the tip of her finger into the elastic band and pulled it toward herself. The elastic stretched but it was like something was holding it back. The panty was stuck to something at the back of the mirror. She dropped the money on the floor forwarded her head toward the gap as close as possible to realize what had been tangled in her panty. Her left eye saw in the darkness deep behind the mirror a wooden frame. She stretched her arm into the gap, felt the wood of frame; grabbed the outer side of the frame and slid it out. A small part of a wooden frame appeared out the back of the mirror. It was a wooden frame with canvas stretched over it.
To get the whole of it free out the back of the mirror, she stood up and dragged it out until the frame reached and inclined to the apartment door. She lifted and carried the frame to the wall in front of the sofa, placed it on the floor and inclined back of the frame to the wall. She stepped back to figure out the painting. The canvas had been painted with a white paint, no drawing, or figure on it.
“Whose is the painting and why it was hidden behind my mirror? At least now