Stories and News No. 723
It has happened in Messina, Sicily (Italy).
Not in exotic lands of third world.
A couple paid € 30,000 to buy an eight years old Romanian child.
The transaction would have been successful without the intervention of the police.
I wonder, would it have been a good deal?
What is the market price of a child?
I enlarge my eyes.
I expand the frame to the utmost.
Up to put at risk my imagination’s boundaries.
Because you need a particular abstraction to visualize such a store.
Cautiously I come in.
I walk and I see them.
I try to watch them
A shelf, like many others.
That like burns there, where what I strenuously defend inside me resists.
I hope to still have it today and every tomorrow will follow.
They are there, a lot of them.
Wrapped with care, but also packed in a hurry.
Enfolded in shiny paper, but also locked up in anonymous bags.
There are three for the price of two.
And there are family size.
There are even in a light version.
Sugar-free and free of that you wish.
Especially without thinking too much.
Without tears, nobody like them.
I walk to one of them.
Maybe because he is the only one who seems to look at me.
A kind of product that stands out for absences, rather than opulence, commercial paradox I would call unique.
He is apparently free among the prisoners.
With no deception of paper and color, lies and illusions.
I am just a step.
My voice trembles, but I shut it.
Don’t you dare, I whisper myself, keep quite any weakness that could only offend those crushed souls.
"Tell me," I ask the different child, not seeing any label, "what is your price? Is it perhaps thirty thousand euro?"
"So much?" He replies. "Let's see," he continues, "hands and arms at least ten thousand euro per pair. Arms embrace the hands take, fingertips read the world and fingers free the nose from unwanted presences, which never hurts. Legs and feet ten thousand more. I will walk, run, especially consuming socks and shoes, so someone else makes even more money about it. Five thousand euro for the upper body, and I want to spoil, look: I pretend not to know that inside there are the famous storyteller and his unknown Ghost Writer, respectively, heart and belly. Stop avarice, for the remaining five thousand euro I will give you my head. Given the age, how much memory will bloats the brain? So, that's it: thirty thousand euro."
"But is it all here, what you are?" I ask as if I desperately waited for a negative answer.
"I don’t know," he murmured, "none of us knows. We are the gifts you write the price. Thirty thousand, but also ten thousand, a euro, if you prefer. But if you think I am worth more than what you see, what are you doing here?"
I walk away, saying hi I walk away.
I go out and take what I imagined possible in my hands.
I hold it, squeezing it with envy.
I break it in pieces.
Hoping that with the dream.
The nightmare too will disappear.
Also on Stories and News:
It has happened in Messina, Sicily (Italy).
Not in exotic lands of third world.
A couple paid € 30,000 to buy an eight years old Romanian child.
The transaction would have been successful without the intervention of the police.
I wonder, would it have been a good deal?
What is the market price of a child?
I enlarge my eyes.
I expand the frame to the utmost.
Up to put at risk my imagination’s boundaries.
Because you need a particular abstraction to visualize such a store.
Cautiously I come in.
I walk and I see them.
I try to watch them
A shelf, like many others.
That like burns there, where what I strenuously defend inside me resists.
I hope to still have it today and every tomorrow will follow.
They are there, a lot of them.
Wrapped with care, but also packed in a hurry.
Enfolded in shiny paper, but also locked up in anonymous bags.
There are three for the price of two.
And there are family size.
There are even in a light version.
Sugar-free and free of that you wish.
Especially without thinking too much.
Without tears, nobody like them.
I walk to one of them.
Maybe because he is the only one who seems to look at me.
A kind of product that stands out for absences, rather than opulence, commercial paradox I would call unique.
He is apparently free among the prisoners.
With no deception of paper and color, lies and illusions.
I am just a step.
My voice trembles, but I shut it.
Don’t you dare, I whisper myself, keep quite any weakness that could only offend those crushed souls.
"Tell me," I ask the different child, not seeing any label, "what is your price? Is it perhaps thirty thousand euro?"
"So much?" He replies. "Let's see," he continues, "hands and arms at least ten thousand euro per pair. Arms embrace the hands take, fingertips read the world and fingers free the nose from unwanted presences, which never hurts. Legs and feet ten thousand more. I will walk, run, especially consuming socks and shoes, so someone else makes even more money about it. Five thousand euro for the upper body, and I want to spoil, look: I pretend not to know that inside there are the famous storyteller and his unknown Ghost Writer, respectively, heart and belly. Stop avarice, for the remaining five thousand euro I will give you my head. Given the age, how much memory will bloats the brain? So, that's it: thirty thousand euro."
"But is it all here, what you are?" I ask as if I desperately waited for a negative answer.
"I don’t know," he murmured, "none of us knows. We are the gifts you write the price. Thirty thousand, but also ten thousand, a euro, if you prefer. But if you think I am worth more than what you see, what are you doing here?"
I walk away, saying hi I walk away.
I go out and take what I imagined possible in my hands.
I hold it, squeezing it with envy.
I break it in pieces.
Hoping that with the dream.
The nightmare too will disappear.
Also on Stories and News: