Homeland

   When Muriel was in the shower, she suddenly remembered how being in a combat zone felt. The water reminded her of the many times they had been under heavy fire and how they had narrowly escaped death. Well, how she had narrowly escaped death because there were others who had gave their lives for the cause that they were defending, a cause that Muriel had trouble understanding now that she was home.

 She had arrived just a couple of days ago, being received by her parents and her boyfriend, although she hadn’t seen much of him. Muriel couldn’t explain it but, she had missed John so much in the filed and now that she had seen him again, she couldn’t even make herself hug him or kiss him or say anything sweet to him. She felt as if her heart had dried out in the desert, consumed by everything she had seen, day after day. She hadn’t even hugged her parents and they had tried and she knew they had felt it too, that awkwardness, like a barrier that now existed between them.

 Trying to scare all the negative feelings and memories away, Muriel decided to shampoo her hair and enjoy the nice odors of her parents’ home. Where she came from, she didn’t really have the chance to wash her hair very often. Actually, she had showered a few times the last month and it was always a minute, two at the most beneath the coldest water a country that’s hot as hell can have. But, even so, she had to confess that made her feel alive.

 The smell of chamomile that the shampoo had reminded her of a time that seemed very far in her past now. She had been picking up flowers with her sister near a house her father had rented in some mountains, not very far from the city where she was now. That time seemed like a dream. Because it was almost false, unlike the burned bodies and mutilated corpses she had seen in the last year. Her mind immediately went to the destroyed cities she had seen; the destroyed cities she had helped become a battling ground. Because, the more she thought about it, the more she realized her presence there was also a problem.

 For many people, she was the enemy and even locals, just people that tried to survive, ran away from her when she tried to come near them. It didn’t help that she was the only woman in an assault team and that the rest of her teammates could be considered brutes. They were man built like a mountain, guys that she had managed to control during training. Some were nice enough, she could even talk to them about what she liked and didn’t like in life, about her boyfriend, her parents, her dream to someday become a veterinarian. But other were just beasts that had to be controlled at all times. And some other times, they were released.

 She rinsed all of the shampoo from her head and then just enjoyed the warm water falling on her black, gliding down her breasts and belly and legs. Muriel instinctively touched her breasts, as if she didn’t know that they were still there. She really touched them and got a bit aroused but her goal was not that but to really feel something, whatever it was. She had been numb for so long that she started touching more and more and then put one of her hands over her vagina and… And she stopped.

 Like a pinch to the stomach, memories came running into her brain, once again. One of those beasts, one of those animals she had been to war with, had tried to rape her on the first week. Luckily, Muriel was a good cadet, a good soldier in general and was able to turn his brute force against him. She threatened him with telling everyone and he laughed at her, touching his penis over his pants. She ran away before he could say or do anything else. That image stuck in her head, even though she had been trying hard to eliminate of her mind.

 She grabbed the soap and decided to clean herself properly, every single centimeter of her body. She even sat down in the shower floor in order to feel she was under a waterfall or something like that. She had always done that, fro, the time she was a child, and her mother always told her that was a waste of water and that people in other countries would have loved to have that water to drink and cook and live. And then she would argue with her and loose.

 Now, Muriel had seen the world and the truth was that she didn’t really cared if a family or a boy or a girl had no water to drink because of her. She simply didn’t believe that it made any difference. For her, she had discovered, the world was full of shit. The world was evil and awful and people didn’t really ended up in the bright side of things. People had bad endings, every single day. People died or they were killed, and there were orphans and fear conquered all of their hearts and that was just how things were.

 What Muriel had done in that country, her killing and her helping, was not useful. She didn’t make any difference by doing those things and she was ready to tell any idiot than helping with such stupid things didn’t help anyone. Being kind one moment and awful the next didn’t make you even or something. It made you human and humans are made to make each other miserable, make each other suffer and, slowly but surely, make competition go away because that’s how the world goes.

 Then, she stood up from the floor and closed the shower. The lack of water noise made her tremble but she inhaled deeply and stepped out.

 She took a yellow towel her mother had left her and dried herself with it over the small mat on the floor that was shaped like a hamburger. She liked that mat, ever since she had seen it once, one of those few times she had been able to chat with her mother over Skype. For some reason, she had shown her the hamburger mat and told her it smelled nice and that she wanted the house more fun with it. It was such a silly thing but that stupid mat was a symbol of the home Muriel wanted to go back to. Her goal was to go back home and see that mat in person and now that wish had become true.

 Walking slowly, she got out of the bathroom and walked to the closet in the next room. She had somehow done that automatically, because of a force of habit that came from years of doing so, but her true attire of the day was on the bed. Her father had gone to a special store were they specialized in pressing and cleaning uniforms. And hers now looked brand new, with every single detail in the right place. She removed the plastic and just left it there, on the bed.

 That green, that shade of color on the uniform, had always symbolized so much to her. And now, she was trying to remember what it was that she had felt the first time she had seen it. And she did remembered but, again, she couldn’t feel it. She knew that the uniform had made her and her family happy and proud. She was one of the few people she knew that had decided to join the army. The reasons were many; include the benefits in education and even health but also because Muriel had been a patriot for a long time.

 When she was just a little girl, she was the one that made her father built a small metal thing to put over the front door of the house in order to put the flag there every time there was a holiday. With time, she just left the flag there because she liked to see it move with the wind. She liked the colors and the shape and how it made her feel. Muriel liked to learn more and more about her country and her community and was really admired by many parents and teachers, not so much by her fellow students.

 But now, all of that had left her. Her patriotism had been left for dead in a horrible battlefield filled with charred cars and corpses, were the only noise was the crying of a baby somewhere. Her flag was a rag with which she had cleaned all of the blood from her hands, as well as the blood dripping from her weapons.

 Muriel put on the uniform and didn’t even look at herself at the mirror after putting it on. She just went downstairs where her parents waited for her in the car, to take her to the ceremony where she would be qualified, by all her brothers ands sisters in arms, as a “hero”.

Alone in the desert

   There was no wind. Only the heat and the sand that was very soft and in which her feet sunk deep, making every step very difficult to make. She had been holding her shoes on one hand but suddenly decided to drop them and let the sand claim them. She might never return to that beautiful hotel she had been staying in and even if she did, she had more shoes there, where they could actually be used.

 She stopped walking sometimes and tried to compose herself, looking in every direction; desperate to get any sign of life or of the person she had been following. Suddenly, she saw a scorpion come out of the sand and just ran the opposite way, not minding the heat, the sand and the fact that she had to climb a really big sand dune to escape the small creature.

 It was on top of that sand structure that she saw the oasis that the woman she had encountered in the market had told her about. Or at least it seemed to be it, because all of those water springs in the desert looked the same and she couldn’t forget that she might be imagining the whole thing, her mind already being affected by the heat and by having walked around a very still desert for at least an hour now.

 Once she made it to the oasis, she realized it was real and just when straight for the water. The small pool of liquid that was there was no good for swimming but good enough for her feet to relax and have a well deserved rest. She also took some water in her hands and drank, feeling how her body thanked her for it. As she drank, she looked around. Besides that small pond, there were only three palm trees, a few rocks and that was it. It was a very small island of life in the immensity of the desert.

 She started thinking that maybe she needed to go back but then she realized she had no idea what “back” meant as her senses of direction was not precisely on point. She had her cellphone with her but, obviously, it had no signal and the map feature wasn’t working. So she just there, here a soft breeze that brushed through those parts and moved the leaves of the palm trees.

 But the sound also moved something the woman had failed to see. Just in front of her there was the pond, and after that one of the palm trees but the wind made her notice some sort of fabric that was caught behind the palm tree. She stood up slowly and then realized she really needed to open her eyes better because what lay in front of her was not just fabric, it was a women dressed in a black gown, barefoot, apparently passed out, just there in the sand as if it was the most normal thing of Earth. She thought the woman looked beautiful but also a bit scary.

 Her body was very still. The other woman came closer and noticed she had a beautiful bracelet on her right arm and a necklace made also from gold. The bracelet had a name on it: Desi. She concluded that her companion’s name was Desi and that someone had left her there, because she was so perfectly put on the ground that it wouldn’t be possible that she had fainted and just assumed that very calm position.

 Desperate for human communication, the woman touched Desi’s face and caressed it a little bit too hard in order to wake her up but it didn’t work. She also tried shaking him by the elbow and the shoulder, even going to the extent of doing it really strongly, but without success. The last thing she tried was tickling her sleeping companion’s feet with her fingertips but the body didn’t even move a millimeter.

 So the woman just sat there besides her sleeping, or maybe dead, companion and just stared at the pond and the palm trees, secretly begging for an answer to this ridiculous situation. She even attempted to remember what it was that had drawn her out of her suite into the desert but the only thing she could remember was the voice of the woman in the market, telling her to find that oasis she was in right now, and wait for a revelation to occur. Maybe that was the place where she was destined to know a great truth but, being honest to herself, she didn’t want to know any truths if it meant being in the middle with nowhere with a dead body.

 She shook Desi violently this time but the body wouldn’t budge so she decided she didn’t care. Also, she decided to go back to her hotel and just hope that the same voice that brought her there was capable to get her back into a nice bed and a continental breakfast. She had been out of bed before dawn and she felt dusk was about to take place and she certainly didn’t want to spend a night in a place filled with scorpions.

 So she just stood up and started walking the way she thought her hotel was located in. Her steps were more secure now and the sand didn’t engulf her feet as it had been doing before. She almost floated over the sand and walked with much more grace than anyone else could in such an awful place. She reached a high dune and decided to look back; in order to give a last look to dead Desi but the oasis wasn’t there anymore. There was only sand.

 It was the first time that she felt scared and that feeling was accentuated by the fact that the sun was less and less bright, and she could already see the moon in the sky, very bright and all of her features visible. The moon seemed massive in the desert and she found herself looking at it for a long time before she remembered her wish to go back to the hotel.

 She walked and walked. But couldn’t reach any place. She was now thirsty and no oasis awaited her in the route she had chosen. She just had to keep on walking but she wasn’t walking as secure as she had been walking before. Her feet were starting to sink again and she felt very insecure about every single step she took. It was very sudden when fear took over her mind: she was sure she was going to die there, all alone, cold and with a thousand scorpions and other creatures of the desert poking her lifeless body, Her mouth would fill with sand before her whole body was to be covered by the desert, forgotten by the world there.

 It was a bright light that made these thoughts go away. But the light had been just a flash, just a moment in time that she never saw again. She kept walking and decided to travel only on the crests of the tall dunes in order to have a vantage point and not be surprised by death, if it came from beneath her. But it was there, the moon almost in the highest part of the sky, that she saw her again.

 She recognized the dress and her face and ever her feet, there in the dark. The moon illuminated Desi and that beautiful blue light bathed her in a strange aura that made the woman feel scared but also very calm. It was as if her mind was screaming but her body was incapable of acting on that fear. She was kind of paralyzed, also fascinated by the fact that the woman she had seen earlier was there, looking at her.

 But none of them moved. Not until Desi took off her necklace and let it fall into the sand. Then, a gust of gust covered her body and she was never seen again. She had been an illusion or maybe a dead person. That was why the lost woman had not been able to wake her up. She walked to the spot where she had been standing and grabbed the necklace from the sand. Just like the bracelet, it had a charm with a name. And the name was Florence.

 It was right then that she opened her eyes and realized the desert was there, just beyond the windows in her room. Her grandiose bedroom was there, all the complimentary beverages, the fruit basket that had been given to her as a gift and all of her clothes and shoes. Florence just touched her face and the rest of her body, trying to understand what had just happened. She stood up and went to the bathroom. She checked her eyes and her mouth. And then she just looked at her reflection.

 And as it happens often, she forgot Desi’s name, and the scorpions, and the body in the oasis. But she didn’t forget the fact that she had dropped some shoes in the desert, that she had found a necklace with her name on it or that a voice had called from beyond.

 She cleaned her face with cold water and decided to get some breakfast but, just as she walked in the space between the window and the bed, Florence stepped on a small mound of desert sand.

Him and the gym

   It was very annoying, but it was more and more frequent that, in the middle of the night, he had to wake up to a cramp or some other time of pain. It would normally be in his feet or legs but sometimes it was his waist that felt the pain or even his face. He had gone to the doctor several times and to many different ones but none of them was able to tell him why that happened. He hated when it was obvious they were inventing what to say instead of giving him a science based and objective point of view. They just shot in the dark, trying to get it right.

 Many had told him it was the lack of exercise so he tried to jog in the mornings. Soon, he changed it to the afternoons, and then the nights. All of this happening in the same week, as he realized he hated to reorganize his life around such a menial activity. He didn’t understand how some people dared to say they loved to exercise often and for many hours. He didn’t tell this to anyone, but for him all those persons in the gyms and the parks exercising every single hour of the day, were just insane people without any real talent in them.

 Of course, he didn’t tell this to anyone when he signed on for a year at a big gym near his house. A perky girl showed him all the machines, explained the courses he could take (as if he was entering Harvard) and told him about the trainers that helped people there. Some even had experience in the military, which assured quality but also inspired some fear. In his first week he avoided the trainers and the courses and the dancing lessons, in order to focus only in the machines. It was a failure anyway but at least he wasn’t getting yelled at.

 The screams were constant in that place and everyone behaved as if it was extremely normal that a man build like a house would scream a bunch of skinny short women about how they couldn’t meet his extremely bizarre quotas of exercise. The man was clearly deranged somehow, always screaming and never really doing any exercise himself, only when he needed to demonstrate something he wanted all of them to do. Even then it was strange, because he would do the exercise so fast and in such a bizarre way, none of the women would get it fast and the screaming would ensue.

 He wasn’t the only insane one in the place. For a spinning class, there was a lot of yelling there too. The “teacher” there was a woman. She was very beautiful and her body was testament to her prowess in the exercise area but she was another one that yelled a lot. And he could never hold his laughter when looking at the spinning class because it was simply ridiculous. That woman yelling others to accelerate on bikes going nowhere, in a closed room with the concentrated heat that everyone was releasing, without the refreshing sight of the actual world.

 He exercised independently as long as he could but in every area of that place, there was a man or a woman kind of supervising that everyone make good use of the machines, normally looking after the cleanliness of everyone in the gym and to see that everyone was using the machines in the right way. To him, it was amazing how little sense of humor people in a gym could have. He saw a young man once trying to do a choreography he had clearly taken away from the TV on some of the running machines and they simply expelled them for that because they deemed his behavior “irresponsible” and “dangerous”.

 No one laughed there unless it was hypocritical laughter or if the person was talking on the phone. Besides that, the sound that ruled was heavy breathing and the eternal sounds of the machines and the one of the stupid music the put every single day. Every day it was the same playlist, from beginning to end and he already knew it by heart. And what was so annoying about it, is that it was there to make you feel you could always do more, like the music they put on shops and so on.

 Basically, the place was a laboratory, and every stupid person that paid to be there was a mouse or a hamster forever turning in their little wheel like an idiot, not ever thinking twice about anything. It was easy to see how brainwashed some of them are and the scary thing was that the results they had made them even more prone to stay there and keep on going and just obsess about the whole thing. He had hated to rearrange his life around exercise but many others were happy to do it, dedicating even more and more time per week to what they called “the art of exercise”.

 “Horseshit”. That’s what he told his doctor after a couple of months going to the gym. They did a lot of exams and tests and it was revealed that the exercise had nothing to do with whatever was happening to him. The cramps would even get worse some nights and he had slowly became a person that slept on his chest, as it was impossible to him sleeping in any other way. His legs always hurt and his body was still as bad as it was months ago.

 When he saw the results of the test, he decided to quit the gym. He had paid for a year but he didn’t mind “loosing” that money because in any case he had already paid it and new that the people in the gym had already spend it in some stupid machine. So he decided to only exercise in the weekends and on the park and maybe doing something he would enjoy, for a change. He played football with friends sometimes, or with a Frisbee or he could even buy a dog and play with him. The possibilities were endless.

 Yes, he wasn’t ripped like those nutbags from the gym but he started feeling better once he decided to relax about the whole thing and when he decided to get massages and eat better. All of those decisions made him happier than going to an enclosed space to run like a lunatic. Now he enjoyed his life and, even without the killer body, he felt better and that’s all he ever wanted. He had always been happy with who he was and had been depressed the whole time being in the gym. With all the pictures and the trainers and the brainwashing, it was hard not get out of there thinking “I have to be like all of this people”.

 He sometimes saw some of them in the park or in the street and they always gave him this look of superiority. But the look wasn’t only at him but at the world around them. For some stupid reason, all of this toolbags that had once decided to go crazy in the exercise, decided they were better than the rest of us and the worst thing was that all the media and the society at large believed that to be true. We have been taken by the balls by a small group of people and now the prototypes of beauty are radically different than what they were a hundred years ago and even more than what they were on the Renaissance or before.

 But people can stand up to that and just move along, living their lives as they may and not thinking every single second about how they look. He laughed alone when recalling some of the conversations he had overheard in the gym while in the machines or in the locker room. It has to be left clear that he didn’t thought they were all stupid but some of them were such idiots, it was a very difficult thing to ignore. They talked about sex in a way it was simply funny to hear about it, as if it was an exhibition of the caliber of a two peacocks showing their feathers to the one female, who also happened to be ripped like them.

 It hadn’t been his thing but he new that some people liked it and he was fine with it. Even some of his friends told him he should have at list used his membership the whole year, at least once a week. But he told them he simply couldn’t stand going there anymore. Seeing the faces of people that claimed they had fun exercising but were there every day stressed out because they didn’t lose as much weight as they had planned or because they wouldn’t meet theirs trainer’s demands. It was a disaster.

 He finally decided to buy that dog and it was the best decision he ever had. Not only he had tons of exercise running after his furry acquisition, the dog also became his best and most loyal friend. And that was something exercising like a lunatic couldn’t offer. It couldn’t give you real feelings, only shallow ones that surfaced because you can’t even think as you kill yourself on those damned machines.

Dogs love rainy days

  There were puddles of rain everywhere, forming small lakes, an interconnected system of fluids that occupied a large area in the center of the park. The storm that had hit the city the night before had been very strong and it was a miracle that all that remained from it were a couple of puddles and some tree branches that workers from the city had already cleaned up, right before the largest amount of people came into the park in the morning.

 Some children had already begun to enjoy the mud in the puddles and the parents let them be, seeing it was good they could at least go out to the park and have some fun.

 Pet owner Loretta had decided too that her small dog needed to breath after being kept inside for the duration of the storm, which had lasted about three straight days. The poor dog didn’t really like to live in an enclosed environment and would get really annoying very fast. Loretta walked the poor Roger all around the park, enjoying the mud and the wet trees and the large amount of other dogs that had also come out to play and were visibly as excited as Roger to be in the park.

 Loretta decided to let him off his leash, as she knew he wouldn’t go very far. She had trained him to follow only her voice and it seemed to work some weeks ago when they visited a relative of hers in the countryside and Roger would come back after having scared every single sheep possible.

 So the dog went away with other dogs as his owner chatted with the other humans. The first thing the dogs did was going to the large area where everything was mud. They enjoyed it a lot as they could play with one another while feeling the refreshing scent and texture of wet dirt. For a dog, that combination was a winning one and it was really difficult to explain why. Maybe it was because it reminded them of their most basic instincts; of the jungles and forests their ancestors had gone through, hunting, before their domestication.

 After almost covering their entire bodies with mud and under the close surveillance of at least one of the humans, they ran to the place where all the fallen branches had been put into a big pile. It was a very big mound made of sticks and leaves. Each one of the dogs tried to grab a stick to play with but most of them were just able to pull some leaves out of them. The branches were very thick and it was after several minutes struggling that they realized the mound was full of bugs.

 There were some beetles and worms and a myriad of other little creatures that had come down to the ground when the storm had pulled every single one of those branches down. The whole ecosystem of the trees had been messes with by the storm but that’s something neither dogs nor humans care about. The dogs barked at the branches for some time at which point one of the owners had to come with a special whistle and distract them away from the pile and closer to the rest of the people.

 The dogs obeyed for a while but then they left for the other side of the park, where the real lake was located. The geese and ducks that lived in it were nowhere to be seen; possibly resting in some of the homes humans had built for them. The dogs normally loved to chase them; barking at them and making them run like crazies. But the surface of the lake was now like a mirror and the water was as cold as it was normally in the winter.

 However, the dogs encountered a group of elderly humans entering the water. They were doing so through an area that looked like a tropical beach but without the palm trees or the warm climate. Yet, there were about nine men and women there, dressed up in their swimming outfits, about to enter the chilly water.

 Somehow, the dogs felt it was something that had to be seen and, besides, they knew elderly humans were mostly kind to them and loved to pet them and feed them. So there was probably no problem if they got near.

 The humans slowly entered the water, laughing and complaining. But after some time they were all inside, asking others how cold it was and saying the water felt really good all around their bodies. The lake also had many branches and leaves and felt dirtier than usual but that didn’t bother them

 The dogs got bored fast and decided to move on into a square were many events took place. There were fountains, from where they drank some water, and many children that would come and pet them, some softer, some harder. Contrary to popular belief, not all dogs like children. Some of them loved the firm hand of an adult human instead of the hesitating one of a child. They were too insecure for some of them and dogs needed reassuring instead of hesitation.

 When one of them started barking to a girl, who instantly began to cry, one of the owners came and took him away. With humans, if you overreacted in any time, you could lose all the privileges you enjoyed, so the smartest dogs tried to be as calm as possible, only sounding the alarm if something really didn’t made sense to them.

 The pack went on to the only area of the park they had not explored that day: the forest. It wasn’t really a proper forest, instead a small area covered in the former woodland that had been present in the area before the city started to grow without control. It had been preserved because some birds would rest there in the spring and in the summer and even in the months leading to winter when every single flying creature escaped to warmer climates.

 The best thing to do in those woods was to smell the ground and everything around it. Some branches had been picked up here and the dogs were eager to try and pick them up, as a present for their owners. At least half of them, eager to show some proof of how much love they had to give, had already grabbed a branch and left the woods to go their masters and show what they had found. That would probably begin a whole game that could last for hours.

 Only some of them remained, of them was Roger. He was not the type of dog that liked branches. He loved the toys he had back home, the kind that made a wheezy noise when he grabbed them in his snout. Branches were not that big for him so he kept on smelling the floor of the forest and noticed something almost right away: the smell of piss.

 He instantly went crazy, eager to find out the source. But as he sniffed more of it and other dogs followed him, he realized that odor had not come from a dog. Actually, it hadn’t come from any other animal. He recognized it as the smell of human piss. Roger knew it well from his adventures in Loretta’s bathroom. He noticed, though, that the smell was a bit stronger this time and decided to follow the trail, because there was one.

 The dogs then arrived at the thickest part of the forest that was located by the perimeter fence that enclosed the whole park. The odors here were strangely stronger and it was very particular because the storm was strong enough to clean up all of that. Any human who had pissed around those trees, had to have done it after the storm was over, very early in the day, even in the dark.

 Then Roger began to bark. Others dog did the same. What he sniffed next was not pissed and it was something he knew was bad. So he barked loud and clear. The human that followed them came first and remained speechless for a minute, then left yelling, probably asking for help. The rest of the owners and many others came in, including two humans in uniform. They got closer to Roger and other dogs and checked what they had found.

 It was the body of a male human, all covered in leaves. His pants were still wet and his mouth was covered by some kind of plastic. Roger kept barking until Loretta came and took him away. Apparently some humans did not like to stay indoors, just like him.