A girls day out

There are people who enter a capital city in a helicopter as if nothing happened. Queens, ministers, rich guys who want to spend insane amounts, then there is also Paris Hilton and her doggie. . . and yes, me. Me, can you believe it? Living in a small town close to the borders with Germany, we were always planning a trip to Prague and of course it never happened. A girls day out, some shopping, sightseeing, laughing, maybe pretending to be a foreign tourist. Just being bad girl for once in a city where nobody knows you, you know. Oh and the Zoo. Never forget the Zoo.

There are elephants and you can get really close to the apes in some pavilions... and birds. They have a special walk-in birdhouse where you can get one so close it can poop in your hair. Really, my friend said it happened to her. And bats in a cave. And strange alien bugs. And... well, they just have everything, its not like a village where all you see are cows and dogs.

Anyway, forget about the Zoo. There are things that are even more fun. The Charles bridge for example, I heard they are repairing it, but the main thing is that a girl can always get a chance to pose with some tourists or even get asked for direction by a handsome foreign guy. And who knows if he does not fall in love with you or something. You know, the kind of things that happens only in movies.

Or mischievously watching the crowded streets, pointing and laughing at the mad drivers. It does not happen in my town or the areas around. Of course we have cars too, what do you think of us, but you do not get hundreds of them stuck in a kilometers long line like on the highway to Prague. I saw it in TV. Every time a major crash happens, the traffic goes to hell.

And then there is subway. It may not be a big deal to the residents of Prague, but hey, we do not have these things in the countryside. Of course the public transportation is there, but only busses. Only Prague has subway. I really want to ride the line where you can get out of the tunnels and roam above the city roofs. I heard that is possible in some parts. Ok, I admit, I am such a child sometimes, even though I am already 14.

Then there are shopping houses. I always wanted to go to a shopping spree with a friend or even my mom. She always laughs and tells how they used to go to Prague once a year by a special bus when we were still communistic. You could not get most things outside Prague or Brno and they were doing annual shopping trips to get things like fabrics or wigs or even underwear. It's a funny idea, not being able to shop for underwear. But I guess they had no supermarkets and Vietnamese shopping stalls. In my town, everybody buys cheap stuff from "the yellows," and everybody keeps complaining about the quality even so. I always imagined the people in big cities are different. More refined, you know?

Refined like... wearing nice clothes even when being at home or taking out trash, not like our moms and aunties who can even go shopping a two sizes larger jogging suit. And there are all these cafes and restaurants. And nightlife, not like our only one dozens of years old croaky seated cinema that caters for four towns and shows movies months after the premiere.

Oh and my dad is always complaining about the money. He says the guys in big cities are earning double his pay for the same job. And guess what? I red about some families having their dog sitted for money. Sitted, you hear me? In my town, dog belongs to the garden and courtyard all year long.

Which brings me back to Paris Hilton and her doggie. They can come with helicopter and people would be doing a big fuss about it, right? So she is just like me. You see, there are helicopters over Prague all the time. Some carrying heavy cargo above people's heads, which really scares some guys, some are patrolling over the city... and some are carrying patients to the Prague's biggest hospitals. Oh and some are for sightseeing!

When I came, there were people all around. A lot of fuss. A lot of attention. We landed on the roof and suddenly the whole world was focused on me. People asking about me, helping me, carrying me out and then to a special room inside of a huge building. So, you see? I am in Prague and I came by a helicopter, just like queens, ministers or Paris Hilton and her doggie.

Yes.

The only difference is that it hurts a lot and I am not really in mood for sightseeing. But I can not see much since my eyes are swollen from all the medication they gave me anyway. Shopping would not be fun, being weak like me, but I get lots of attention... almost like Paris Hilton... if Paris Hilton got hit by a car.

I think if she got hit by car, the lil doggie would die.

So it is better if she is not hit by car.

Everybody would be sad about the doggie.

Anyway, so now I am here, in this sunlit room on a hill on the outskirts of Prague and the air smells like disinfectant and drugs. Somebody told me the Zoo is just a hour by bus from here and so is the Charles bridge. We came through the air, so we would not be stopped by a possible traffic jam, they said it was important to come in time.

I suppose we did not.

I did not get the organs they promised.

Or maybe they just did not work, I do not remember and nobody tells me.

My mom went away few minutes ago to buy some things. She says she needs them for the night, but I overheard the doctors before she started crying.

So you see, this is my girls day out in Prague. It is a special precious day out of the village, a day in a big city with my mom and I entered like a celebrity.

This is my day out... because the doctors told mom that without a new donor, I will not survive the night.

So, I suppose this is the day of my life and I should be grateful, but I am being a bad bad girl. Yes. I am not really nice, you know? Because all this special time out in Prague I keep hoping that down in the city, somebody dies. In the subway... in a car crash... on the street.

Because I do not care for Prague at all... I just do not want this day to end.



Lanterns and cobblestone

When the daylight dims and the shadows creeping up the walls start growing until they cover the whole city in a pitch black cloak of darkness, it's the lanterns hovering above my head that saves the streets from being completely swallowed into the all devouring depths of night. Their soft yellow light fights the mother of dreams and mirrors on the shiny heads of wet cobblestones polished by the feet of countless travelers, but can not reach the bottomless darkness in the dirt filled rifts, in the dark corners, in the narrow back alleys.

Light and darkness.
Day and night.
Life and death.
Consciousness and dream.

I know they are not real lanterns. When I look up, they are just lamps, solid objects of hard metal and glass. Just things, something man-made, something mundane and replaceable. Decorative gas lamps placed a few dozen feet apart to guide late visitors, to give late night tourists this fake warm feeling of a romantic walk through an old European town. The idea may be fake and money-driven, but not the atmosphere everyone feels swirling in the calm heavy air when all the haste of the daytime surrenders to the shadows, dreams and magic. Because even with all the time passed, all the changes, all the tiny lives of the creatures within, this is the heart of Prague, of the ancient city of magic, the silently breathing town of cobblestone and dim yellow light reflecting on the fur of night cats strolling the streets just after the last tourist surrenders to fatigue and withdraws to the safety of a house, bed and the unbreakable fortress of daily life habits and vices. Mundane and noisy humans are. Mundane and noisy, to keep the magic at bay. Because if you start to believe, strange things may happen.


They are all around. Behind the shut doors, waking you from your dreams, reminding you, that the city is more than just a piece of stone, making you check under your bed in a childish episode of fear.


They are everywhere and nowhere. Street cats, the solitary children of the city, silent killers of sleeping birds, shadows quickly cast at doorsteps and blending with the night around, the voices crying by pain and pleasure from dark corners and city roofs. Like fairies. Fairies with sharp claws clad in soft coats of shiny fur. Magical children of the city itself, meant to vanish with the first ray of sunlight. Fairies. Ghosts. Dreams. Something people stopped believing in. Something the people could not stop believing in no matter how much they kept convincing themselves they did.


I am dancing through the mosaic of hundreds of years old stone, inviting my own shadow to be my dance partner just to evade him in the last possible moment and mock our newly found relationship by jumping up on a small fence in a closed garden restaurant. The darkened Old Town Square. It smells of beer and cigarettes and the faint smell of countless people lingers in the air even now. I leap to an empty chair and sit down in a mockery of human habits, almost painfully aware of each one who sat here before me, and listen to the night.

The night is alive.
The stones are breathing.
The shadows are reaching out to touch you.

At night, you can hear the heart of the city beating, the veins of streets pulsing with energy, the mind of the city alert and thirstfully tasting every trace left by the busy daylife.

At night, I am alive.

The massive astronomical clock of Orloj ticks through the darkness and my ears can grasp each click clack of the dozens of toothed wheels perfectly fit inside a stone clad ancient machine in hope to leash people's worst fear – the passing stream of time. Because unlike the city, people were not given an eternity to live.


Nor was I.


A lost bird cries through the night, the unwelcome lights of a lonely car flash through the dark before they u-turn to some side street. A shadow night cat melts in the light cones just to leap out of a dark corner and curiously watch the disappearing taxi with its gleaming eyes.


The night is curious, it marvels over the smallest things over and over. Never satisfied, never bored.


"Why looking away?" it asks silently. "Why the light scary?"


Yes. I am scared. Scared down to my fail, frightened even though not knowing why. I forgot, I wanted to. All I am aware of is that I hate direct light, harsh light. . . flickering pale light above my head that I can not escape, evil light pale as death itself. No, a lantern and the big circle of blue moon floating high on the cloudless skies are all I want, all I need, all I remember.


I jump down and softly land on all four, carefully avoiding the pitch black areas of full shadow and my paws land on the cold feeling cobblestone. No, it is not cold. Now it is pulsing. Breathing, living. Just like the night air full of fresh and lingering smells, footsteps of living creatures, tracks of paths carefully woven and intertwined by fate, moth wings flashing in the cloud of light, fresh smell of trees quietly growing in their cages imprisoned in the asphalt flavoured sidewalks of the streets. A leaf falling to the ground, a thin scabby dog rummaging through a fallen thrash bin at the heel of the monumental twin towers, while the baroque Church of Our Lady stands tall and silently pierces the skies.


What is human life, human fate to a city? Just a toy, a taste, a special experience to marvel on. An old city is eternal, a structure, a creature. A godly being created by humans and enlivened by countless lives and deaths, wishes and dreams, prayers, hopes, curses. . . despairs. . .

And even now, in this godless time, the city is watching.
It is always watching.
Wondering.
Like an almighty and yet powerless child.

As all of my kind, I have been given the fate to live through the night and vanish with the first ray of sun, first ray of life, for I am just a shadow. A night cat, a silhouette of a girl in a white dress, a shadow of a former existence, a dream dreamt by the living soul of the sleeping city created to savor an imprint of each thing that happened during the day. A slave granted immortality.

A lover.
A pet.
A memory.

But unlike other night cats, I can not forget myself in a bohemian free life, not yet. I have a reason. There is something for me to do each night I am granted existence, that is why I can not step into the darkness and lose myself, that is why I can not let myself give up and become one with the centuries old soul of the city.


So as every night, I run through the streets of Old town, let by the trail of light, the sounds of sleep from open windows and the taste of the night air flavored by mold and riverwater mist. It lingers on my tongue and reminds me of my fragile nature and the greatness of this place, my creator, my eternal cage, but only till I reach the one wall, the exact window left unclosed and lit by a trembling light of a mourning candle. Then I change, feel different, warm, happy. And as every night, I accept the invitation.


This place feels like home. Soft and warm, even with all the unwashed clothes wrinkled on the floor, even with the smell of tobacco and spilled alcohol, even with the trash and dry dying pot flowers slowly rotting in the pots.

It is him who feels like home.

My man is sleeping. I jump on the wooden head of his bed and elegantly climb down on to his chest, stretching my claws a little, leaning to touch his cheek with my soft snout. It feels strange. Enfeebling, humbling, yet so fuzzy and warm. Here I can not hear the overpowering will of the city, I do not have to fight or obey. His unshaved face feels rough and smells of a good night drink, his way of dulling the pain and drowning himself in heavy dreamless sleep.

I am a memory. . .
A memory in a fragile body of an animal.
His memory.

He wakes up, grasps me with those bear hands and lifts me up to look at me with eyes still clouded from the sudden awakening.


"Where have you been all day you tramp?" he murmurs as he presses me against his chest and I can feel his pain soothing for a moment, while I catch myself happily listening to words that have no more meaning for me, watching him fall asleep again, oblivious to the milk prepared as if to lure me in.


He is desperate for company. And I am not going to leave him. Why? I do not know. I made myself forgot the reason.

Maybe because he feels so warm.
Maybe because he feels so desperate.
Maybe because he makes me feel.

My human is a lonely man who lost his only child, a pale hairless girl in a house of bricks and stone, a tall and huge maze of a building called hospital. A place with no lanterns, just the sterile flickering light of fluorescent lamps that could never be mistaken for a friendly fairy tale objects. A place with no hope, a place full of sobs and hidden tears. A horrible place meant for dying.


I do not know of such a place, but I know why I am here. I live to ease his pain, to give him a calm dream of a smiling daughter, to wait to be stroked and embraced and called by her name, before the day creeps in and the soul of the city becomes silenced once again.

Because I want to save him.
Because the nights allows it.
Because I wish to .

The day is nothing for a fragile creature like me. Streets filled with millions of feet rushing from a place to place, millions of thought and noises, cars, animals, leashed dogs and camera flashes. It is too much, too overpowering, too bold. Not a world for me anymore, for I am just a dream. A last thought woven weeks ago. A dying wish granted by the graceful citadel.

I was lucky to die at night.
Because the night can grant wishes.

So before the dawn breaks in with the first ray of sunlight, I leave his side, careful not to wake him up, and search for the last shadowy corner from where I watch him as I slowly fade and fade until there is nothing of me left for the day, for the daytime when people stop dreaming and reality creeps in, just to crawl out of a dark corner in the middle of the old town again and again in the coming nights, to fight my fate of one granted eternal life by the city of magic. It is a hard fight doomed to failure, for if I ever step into the pitch black darkness, I will forget myself and become a night cat, a free child fathered by the city and mothered by night itself. A creature free of all fears and thoughts, a happy simple soul living for the pleasure of life itself.


I yearn for this fate as much as I fight it and the lamps and the candlelight are my sole allies. And that is why for me, they are lanterns.


They are irreplaceable, for they lead me home.


Ekleksographia:
Wave Two

March, 2010

Fiction

Lenka Candar Petrova

Lenka Candar Petrova

Lenka Candar Petrova is well known in the Czech Republic for her short stories in the genre of fantasy, sci&ndash fi and horror. Since her debut in 2002, she has published over 30 stories and articles, mostly under the penname Lady Candar. She recently finished her first book, Kiseki, and plans an English translation as well. Her interests include mythology, language, and Asian culture. Her website is http://www.candar.org .