The Coming Flood

At times, the prospect frightens her. As if something inside her might stop being human after the horn. The hard horn, inside her head, like a clenched fist, like the seed of an impossible flower. She isn’t sure what it is or what it wants to be but she concentrates on copying the horn’s serious appearance, trying to imitate its cruelty and its tenderness. More and more, she searches the Internet for images of animals, make-believe monsters, fish from abyssal depths. Spellbound by their shapes, as if to understand better, as if some part of her had to master a monster’s strange delicacy, at least a bit; she spends hours at a time gazing at the images until she feels embodied within them, feels she’s taken a great step forward. And when she goes out sometimes, she doesn’t know where to go, or has unsettling moments of panic. Gaping and silent, she’ll range from corner to corner, hiding. Other times, she suddenly finds herself in the neighbourhood she grew up in, without knowing how she got there or why she came.

The men keep coming, the days pass. She gets beaten up again, this time it’s brutal. A teenager, a kid almost, handsome and fragile-looking. She’d been scared of him from the start and yet she let him in. And when he leaves, she’s lying on the floor surrounded by glass. She puts her hands to her face. She has a vague recollection of having covered her face, just her face, so it wouldn’t get bruised, and since it seems he hasn’t left marks, she falls asleep on the floor, out of sheer and simple exhaustion, imagining she’s a dog, licking her hands with her little tongue.

Imagining she’s a dog, imagining she’s a horse, she’s a mermaid, a naiad, an insect. The horn is set somewhere between her eyes. Some nights she goes out and prowls the streets: a form of wringing her hands. Dressed for a party: earrings, lipstick, eyeliner. She prowls the streets, trying to incite danger, and sometimes on her way out a thought flashes through her mind: ‘I hope I get killed.’ A thought with no pity, delicate, like the horn; she thinks, ‘Ihope I get killed,’the same way she thinks, ‘I hope I can sleep.’ She’s read in the paper that some thugs had set a homeless man on fire a few blocks away and she walks there, not sure what she hopes to see or find. What would the thugs do to her? What she wants is rougher and harder than being burned alive. She’s fearless, mad, like a dog. But no. She doesn’t want to die. Not really. What she wants is the horn. So she fishes a knife out of the kitchen and when she goes on her nocturnal walks and sees someone, she sets off after them with determination. One time it’s a man, about fifty, and when he sees the knife he runs away. One time it’s a girl. Mónica heads her off, takes out the knife and says: ‘Your money.’

But the girl’s got almost no money. All she’s got is a book, a scarf and seven euros in change that Mónica simply takes and slips into her purse, her heart racing, but only slightly, surprised at how awkward the whole encounter is, surprised at how ugly the girl is, how ugly her reactions are. She thinks, ‘Now I’m a thief.’