"Devil's Saliva"

The photographer's operation is always a kind of displacement: to replace his personal way of seeing the world with the insidious way of seeing forced on...

Devil's saliva (Las babas del diablo)

Julio Cortázar

No one will ever know how this was revealed. In the first person, or in the second person? Or are you borrowing the shell of the third person plural, or are you constantly forging words that will eventually disappear like smoke? If it can be said like this: I, with the eyes of all living beings, witnessed the moonrise; or: We, it hurts my eyes; especially this sentence: You, the blond woman, were once a flowing cloud, passing over the intertwined faces of mine, you, him, us, and them. --Oh, what a devil.

If I have to talk about it, the most perfect situation is to retreat to the street corner, sip a glass of white wine, and let the machine continue writing alone (I am tapping a machine). This statement is true. Yes, perfect. Because the "hole" that needs to be told is also a machine (another kind, a Contax 1.1.2), and the machine may know the soul of the other machine far better than me, you, and her - the blond woman and Liu Yun -. But my stupidity is only a result of luck. I know very well that if I leave the table, this Remington will turn to stone on the table, with a double deathly silence - the kind of ghostliness that is unique to moving things when they are stagnant. Therefore I must write. One of us must write if all this is to be told. Then, it is better for me to do it. I, a dead person, have less worries than the rest of you. I have nothing but flowing clouds. I can think quietly without any distractions. I can write quietly without distractions (here, another piece of silver passes by, edged with dead gray). I can calmly remember without distractions. I, the dead person (but I am also alive, I have no intention of deceiving, when that moment comes, everything will become clear, because I have to find a broken wall in the end, and I have chosen this end, the end of this story, the source of time, when people want to tell it, this is the sharpest end of all beginnings after all).

Suddenly, I asked myself why I had to tell all this. But if people always ask why they do everything they do, if people just ask why they agree to a dinner party (at this moment, a dove flies by, like a sparrow), or why when someone tells us a wonderful story, After reading a wonderful story, there will be an itch and restlessness in the stomach immediately, and the person will not stop until he rushes into the office next door and tells the story again. Only then will the person feel comfortable and satisfied, and can return to his work. As far as I know, no one has ever explained this. Therefore, the best way is to put aside all shyness and tell the story. Because at the end of the day, no one should be ashamed of breathing or putting on shoes; if we do these things, we do them. And when the weird comes, when we find a spider in our shoes, or feel a piece of broken glass while breathing, then we must tell what happened, tell it to colleagues in the office, or to the doctor.

Oh, doctor, every breath... has to be spoken, has to quiet that annoying turmoil in the stomach.

Since we have to talk, let's establish some order. Let's go down the steps of this mansion and go back to Sunday, November 7th, exactly one month ago. After descending five steps, we have entered that Sunday, bathed in an unexpected sun that hardly belongs to Paris in November, and my heart is filled with the desire to wander around, watch, and hunt for images (because we were, and I was, a person who captures light and shadows). I know that the most difficult thing will be to find the way to tell the story, and I am not afraid of repetition. The reason why it is difficult is that no one knows for sure whether what I am really telling is me, or what has already happened, or what I see at the moment (flowing clouds, occasionally, a dove), or whether I am just telling a truth that only belongs to me, and that truth will no longer be true if it is not for my stomach, for my desire to run away and to end it all in some way, no matter what it will be in the end.

Let us tell the story slowly. As we write, we will see what will happen. If someone replaces me, if I have nothing to say, if the clouds dissipate and something else emerges (because this cannot always be watching the clouds drift by, and occasionally, a dove), if all this... After the word "ruo", what should I continue, and how should I draw an impeccable end to this sentence? But once I start asking questions, there is nothing I can do; it is better to tell, and the telling itself may be an answer, at least, to someone who will read it.

Roberto Michel, a French-Chilean, translator, and photographer in his spare time, walked out of No. 11, Rue de Princes, on Sunday, November 7th of that year. (At this moment, two smaller flowers, trimmed with silver, floated by). He has spent three weeks on the French translation of Professor José Norberto Allende's monograph on legal avoidance and appeals at the University of Santiago in Chile. It is rare for Paris to have wind, let alone the kind of wind that whirls around the street corners and whips against the old wooden shutters. Behind the windows, frightened ladies are talking in various words about the increasingly unpredictable weather in recent years. But the sun is also there. It controls the strong wind and makes friends with cats. Therefore, nothing can stop me from going to the docks of the Seine to roam and capture a few frames of light and shadow for the ancient prison and Sainte-Chapelle. It was only ten o'clock, and I calculated that by eleven o'clock, the light should be just right, the best that can be achieved in autumn. In order to kill the light, I drifted to the Ile Saint-Louis, walked along the Anjou river promenade, stopped for a moment, and stared. At the Rozan Residence, I recited a few verses of Apollinaire to myself. Whenever I passed by the Rozan Residence, these verses would come to my mind on their own (although I should have remembered another poet, but Michel has always been stubborn). Then, when the storm suddenly died down and the sun suddenly swelled at least twice as much (warmer, I mean, but essentially the same), I perched on the parapet and felt a terrible, unparalleled bliss on that Sunday morning.

Among the countless methods of combating the void, photography is one of the supreme. This skill should be taught early in childhood as it requires discipline, aesthetic education, a keen eye and a steady hand.

This is not like an ordinary reporter, spying on lies and capturing the foolish profile of a big shot as he walks out of No. 10 Downing Street. However, no matter what, once you carry a camera, you feel like you have a responsibility, a responsibility to be alert at all times, not to miss the rapid and sweet rebound of the sunlight on an ancient stone, or the running arc of a girl with flying braids carrying a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk. Michel knows very well that the photographer's operation is always a kind of displacement: replacing his personal way of viewing the world with the insidious way of viewing forced on him by the camera (at this moment, a giant cloud of almost pure black drifts by). But he had no doubts. He knew that just taking a Contax camera out with him would be enough to regain that careless tone, that frameless vision, that light without aperture or 1/250 second shutter speed. At this very moment ("this moment", what a foolish lie), I could have sat on the wall of the riverside, watching the black and red barges flowing past, without any thought of photographic composition in my mind, and just surrendering myself to the flow of all things, running still along with time. And the wind has stopped.

I then walked along the Bourbon Strand to the tip of the island, that small, secret square (it is said to be secret because of its small size, not its secludedness, because it exposes the whole chest to the river and the sky). I love it, I love it deeply. There was only a man and a woman there, and of course, there were also a flock of pigeons; perhaps a few of them were flying over the scene I saw at this moment. I jumped onto the parapet and let the sun wrap and bind me, entrusting my face, ears, and hands to it (I had put my gloves in my pocket). I had no desire to take pictures, so I lit a cigarette for comfort; I think the moment I put the match close to the tobacco, I saw the boy for the first time.

At first I thought it was a couple, it looked more like a boy and his mother, but at the same time I understood that he was not walking with his mother, they were a couple, the meaning we give to "a couple" in those partners leaning against the parapet or hugging each other on the benches in the square. Since I had nothing to do, I had a lot of time to think about why the boy was so nervous. Like a pony or a hare, he put his hands into his pockets, then pulled out one, and then the other, combing his fingertips through his hair, constantly changing his posture, and especially why he was so scared. Yes, fear was evident in every gesture of his, a fear suffocated by shame, an impulse to retreat, that impulse appeared in his body, as if he was on the verge of escape, but was forcibly maintained by the last pitiful bit of dignity.

It was so clear - just five meters away, on the tip of the island, we were the only ones alone - that at first the boy's fear prevented me from seeing the blonde woman clearly. Now, looking back, I feel that in that first moment, I saw her face more clearly (she turned around suddenly, like a copper weather vane), her eyes, her...

The eyes are there), when I vaguely understood what might be happening to the boy, I told myself that it was worth staying and staring (the wind swept away the words, leaving only an inaudible whisper). I believe I know how to gaze, if I know anything at all. And all gaze is permeated with falsehood, because it throws us to the farthest place outside ourselves, without any guarantee. Instead, it's sniffing, or (but Michel is easily distracted, so don't let him chant as he pleases). In any case, if you understand the possible falseness in advance, gazing becomes possible; perhaps, you only need to make the right choice between "gazing" and "the thing being gazed at", and peel off the layers of foreign clothes for everything. However, all this is difficult after all.

Regarding the boy, I remembered his image before his actual body (this will become clear later); and about the woman, I am now convinced that I remembered her body far better than her image. She is slender and graceful. These two words are not enough to describe her, and it is unfair. She was wearing an almost black fur coat, almost floor-length, almost gorgeous. The entire morning wind (there was only a breeze at the moment, and it was not cold) had penetrated her blond hair that cut into her pale and gloomy face - two more unfair words - leaving the whole world alone and horribly abandoned in front of her black eyes. Those eyes were like two falcons, falling above all things, like two leaps into the void, like two streams of green mud. I'm not describing, I'd rather understand. And I said, two streams of green mud.

To be fair, the boy was well-dressed, wearing a pair of yellow gloves that I was sure belonged to his brother, perhaps a law or sociology student; it was laughable to see the fingertips of the gloves poking out of his jacket pocket. For a long time, I didn't see his face, only a profile that was not stupid-a frightened bird, the angel in Brother Filippo's painting, a bowl of milk and rice cloth, and the back of a young boy who was eager to practice judo. He had fought once or twice for a certain idea or a certain sister. From his age of fourteen or fifteen years, it can be inferred that he was fed and groomed by his parents, but had no money in his pocket. He had to discuss with his companions for a long time before he dared to decide whether he wanted a cup of coffee, a cup of cognac, or a pack of cigarettes. He should be the kind of person who would wander in the streets, thinking about his female classmates, thinking about how wonderful it would be to go to a movie, watch the latest movie, or buy a few novels, a few ties, or a few bottles of liquor with green and white labels. In his home (that home should be decent, with lunch served on time at twelve o'clock, romantic landscape paintings on the walls, a dark foyer and a rattan umbrella stand next to the door), time will fall slowly, like rain, the time to study, the time to become what his mother expected, the time to become like his father, the time to write letters to his aunt in Avignon. That's why there are so many streets, the whole river flows for him (but not a penny), and the fifteen-year-old mysterious city, with the code on its door, its shuddering cat, the thirty-franc bag of French fries, the pornographic magazines folded four times, the empty loneliness in the pocket, the happy encounters, and the enthusiasm for many incomprehensible things, but they are illuminated by a kind of complete love, a kind of complete openness like the wind and the streets.

This biography is for boys, and for any boy. However, the one in front of me became isolated and unique because of the presence of the blonde woman. She was chattering to him. (I am tired of repeating it, but two more long, broken clouds floated by. I think that that morning, I never looked at the sky once, because as soon as I realized what happened between the boy and the woman, I could only stare at them, wait, stare at them, and then...)

All in all, the boy was so disturbed that it didn't take much effort to guess what had happened just a few minutes ago, or at most half an hour ago. The boy reached the tip of the island, saw the woman, and was smitten with her. And what the woman is waiting for is exactly this, because she is right there, waiting for this. Or maybe the boy arrived first, and she saw him from a balcony or a car, so she walked up to him and struck up a conversation casually. She was sure from the beginning that he would be scared and want to run away, but she would naturally stay, puffing out her chest and looking sullen, pretending to be experienced and adventurous. The rest is easy, because everything happened five meters away from me, and anyone can measure every stage of this game, this absurd fencing; its greatest charm lies not in its present, but in the foreshadowing of its outcome. The boy would eventually excuse himself to a date, an obligation no matter what, and then stumble away confused, longing for a leisurely pace, yet naked and exposed to the mocking gaze that would follow him all the way. Or he would stay, charmed, or simply unable to take the initiative, and then the woman would start caressing his face, ruffling his hair, words lost to words, and then suddenly take him by the arm and lead him away. Unless, with an irritability that might have begun to be colored by desire and the risk of taking risks, he mustered up the courage to put his arms around her waist and kiss her. All this could happen, but it hasn't happened yet. And Michelle, with a kind of evil pleasure, sat on the parapet, almost unconsciously raising the camera, preparing to take a picturesque photo: in the corner of the island, an unusual pair of men and women were talking and staring.

Strangely, this scene (this nothingness, almost nothingness: two people there, very different in age) has an unsettling aura about it. I once thought that I gave it to myself, and that my photos, if I took them, would restore everything to its dull truth. I wanted to know what the man in the gray hat sitting behind the wheel of the parked car on the pier leading to the pier was thinking about, whether he was reading a newspaper or taking a nap. I had just discovered him because the people in the parked car had almost disappeared, lost in that poor, private cage that had lost its beauty by depriving it of movement and danger. The car, however, was always there, forming (or distorting) part of the island. A car: like a street light, a park bench. But never as good as the wind, not as good as the sun, not as good as those ever-living substances made for skin and eyes, not as good as that boy and that woman, those unique two people who were put here to change this island, to show me this island in another way. Well, maybe the man reading the newspaper was also paying attention to what was happening, and feeling the malicious pleasure that came from total anticipation just like me. At this moment, the woman turned around gently and placed the boy between her and...

I could almost see their silhouettes between the parapets. He was taller than her, but not by much, yet she enveloped him, hovering over him like a dark cloud (her laughter, suddenly, like a whip of feathers), crushing him with just her presence, her smile, her hand across the air. Why wait? Use an aperture of sixteen, and use a frame that does not let the ugly black car enter the lens, but can accommodate the tree. The tree is necessary to break up an overly gray space...

I raised the camera, pretending to examine a focal length that did not include them, and then I lurked, convinced that I would eventually capture that finishing touch, that condensed expression, that synchronized rhythm with life that was destroyed by the rigid image when it split time-unless we could select that imperceptible, essential moment. I don't have to wait long. The woman was advancing her project of tenderly binding the boy, stripping away the last remaining freedom from him piece by piece in a slow and sweet torture.

I imagined the possible outcome (a small, frothy cloud now appeared, hanging almost alone in the sky), I foresaw their arrival in the room (probably the ground floor, which she would fill with countless cushions and cats), I imagined the boy's panic, his desperate determination to pretend, to let it be, to pretend that nothing was new to him. I closed my eyes. If I had closed my eyes, I would have rehearsed the whole scene in my mind: the mocking kiss, the woman gently pushing away the hands that tried to untie her clothes like in the novel, and placing him on a bed covered with lilac quilts. Then she forced him to take off his clothes, like a real mother and son, under the dim light of a milky white glass. Then, everything will end as normal, maybe. But maybe, everything will be different, the boy's enlightenment will not be able to pass, will be blocked, after that long foreplay, those clumsiness, those anxious caresses, those busy hands, will eventually dissipate into who knows what, a kind of independent, lonely and self-sufficient joy, or an arrogant rejection mixed with the art of killing and disturbing that wounded innocence. It may be so, it may well be so; the woman who does not seek a lover in a boy, but who at the same time possesses him for a purpose that is incomprehensible except by imagining it as a cruel game, as an insatiable lust, as an excitement for another other who can never be the boy.

Michel is a sinner of literature, a weaver of illusions. He loved nothing more than imagining exceptions, individuals outside of their species, monsters that weren't always disgusting. But this woman herself invites fiction, and perhaps gives enough clues to touch upon the truth.

Before she left, before my contemplative memory filled many days and nights to come, I decided not to waste any more time. I put everything into the frame (including the tree, the parapet, the eleven o'clock sunshine), and then I pressed the shutter. Just in time to understand, the two of them were aware of it and were looking at me. The boy was surprised and inquiring; while she was full of anger and decisive hostility. Her...

Both the body and the face know that they have been stolen and shamefully imprisoned in a small chemical image.

I could describe it in detail, but it would be of no value. The woman said no one had the right to take pictures without permission and asked me to hand over the film. All this was said in a dry and clear voice with a pure Parisian accent, which continued to rise in timbre and pitch with every word. It doesn't matter to me whether I hand over the roll of film or not, but anyone who knows me knows that asking for things from me must be done in a gentle way. As a result, I am limited to stating my point of view: not only is photography not banned in public places, but it enjoys the strongest official and private support. And as I spoke, I was enjoying with a mocking pleasure how the boy flinched, fell behind - simply by not moving - and then suddenly (almost unbelievably) turned around and ran away, the poor man thinking he was just walking, but really running, speeding past the car like a wisp of a virgin's hair, dissipating in the morning air.

However, the Virgin's hairspring was also called the devil's saliva, and Michel had to endure those trivial accusations, hearing himself called nosy and an idiot, while he deliberately tried hard to smile and declined them all with a few simple shaking of his head. What a cheap rejection. Just when all this was starting to bore me, I heard a knock on the door of a car. The man in the gray hat was there, staring at us. Only at that moment did I realize that he was also a character in this comedy.

He started walking toward us, holding the newspaper he pretended to read. What I remember most clearly is the grimace that twisted the corners of his mouth. The grimace made his face full of wrinkles. Something shifted and deformed on his face because his lips were trembling. The grimace was like an independent and living thing, moving around his lips without the control of his will. But everything else is frozen, a clown with a whitened face, or a man without blood, with dull and shriveled skin, sunken eyes, and the black holes in his nostrils are clearly visible, darker than his eyebrows, hair or that black tie.

He walked cautiously, as if the pavement stung his feet; I caught a glimpse of his patent leather shoes, with soles so thin that I could feel every bit of roughness in the street. I don't know why I came down from the parapet, and I don't know exactly why I decided not to hand over the photos, why I refused a request that I could detect as fear and cowardice. The clown and the woman exchanged glances in silence: we formed an unbearable perfect triangle, something that must break with a snap. I smiled in their faces, then turned and walked away, more slowly, I guess, than the boy. When I reached the first row of houses and approached the iron trestle, I looked back at them. They didn't move, but the man had already thrown away the newspaper; I felt that the woman, with her back to the parapet, was rubbing her hands on the stone, with the classic and absurd gesture of a besieged person seeking an exit.

What happened next was right here, almost at this moment, in a room on the fifth floor. It took Michel several days to develop the photos of that Sunday; he photographed the Convent and Sainte-Chapelle exactly as they should be. He found two or three forgotten test shots, a botched attempt to capture a cat perched startlingly on top of a street urinal, and the photo of a blonde woman and a boy. The negative was so good that he developed an enlargement. The enlargement was so good that he made a larger one, almost a poster. It had not occurred to him (he asked himself now, he kept asking himself) why only the pictures of the ancient prison were worth the trouble. Among all the photos, only the snapshot at the tip of the island interested him; he pinned the enlarged sample to the wall of the room, and on the first day, he just stared at it, remembering, and performing the comparison between "memory" and "passed reality", a melancholy operation; it was a petrified memory, like all photos, lacking nothing, even, or especially, not even "nothingness" - the real coagulant of that scene. The woman is here, the boy is here, the trees above them stand frozen, the sky is as solid as the stone of the wall, and the clouds and stones are mixed into an indivisible substance (at this moment, a cloud with sharp edges floats by, like running in the head of the storm). In the first two days, I accepted everything I had done, from the photos themselves to the enlargements on the wall. I never even asked myself why I would interrupt the translation of José Norberto Allende's monograph just to see the woman's face and the dark stain on the wall again. The first surprise was silly; I never thought that when we look at a photo, our eyes repeat the position and angle of the lens; these are things we take for granted and no one thinks about. From my chair, across the typewriter, I stared at the photo three meters away, and then I realized that I had placed myself right in the crosshairs of the camera. That's fine; it's undoubtedly the most perfect way to view a photograph, although squinting may have its charms and even its discoveries. Every few minutes, for example, when I could not find the right words in French to express what José Alberto Allende expressed so beautifully in Spanish, I would raise my eyes and stare at the picture; sometimes it was the woman who attracted me, sometimes it was the boy, sometimes it was the pavement where a dry leaf happened to fall, adding value to a corner of the picture in a wonderful way. Then, I would take a break from my work and happily merge into that morning soaked in photos again, with a hint of sarcasm, recalling the angry face of the woman when she asked me to hand over the photos, the absurd and tragic escape of the boy, and the appearance of the white-faced man. Deep down, I was pleased with myself; my departure was not a glorious one, for if the French were endowed with the gift of swift response, I could not see why I should have chosen to leave without giving them a full demonstration of their privileges, immunities, and civil rights. What matters, what really matters, is that I helped the boy escape in time (if...

The validity of my theories has not yet been fully proven, but the escape itself seems to have proved everything). Out of pure nosy, I gave him a chance to finally use his fear to do something useful, and now he would regret it, feel small, and feel less than a man. But that was better than being in the company of a woman who could stare at him with that island gaze; Michel was occasionally a puritan who believed that people should not be corrupted by violence. After all, that photo was an act of kindness.

But I stare at it, between paragraphs of my work, not because it is an act of kindness. At that moment, I didn't know why I was staring at it and why I nailed the large sample to the wall; perhaps, this is the case for all destined things, and that is the condition for its completion. I believe that the almost imperceptible trembling of the leaves did not alert me. I believe that I just started a sentence and then ended it successfully. Customs, like giant herbariums. Ultimately, an eighty-by-sixty-by-sixty photo, like a screen on which a movie is projected, shows a woman and a boy talking at the far end of the island, a tree shaking its dry leaves above them.

But those hands were too much. I had just written: Donc, la seconde clé réside dans la nature intrinsèque des difficultés que les sociétés… (The second key therefore lies in the intrinsic nature of social dilemmas…) - and I saw the woman's hand, which was slowly beginning to close, one finger after another. There is nothing left in myself, only a French sentence that can never be completed, a typewriter falling to the ground, a creaking and shaking chair, and a fog. The boy lowered his head, like a boxer unable to fight anymore, waiting for the fatal blow; he raised the collar of his coat, looking more than ever like a prisoner, a perfect victim who had contributed to the disaster. Now the woman was whispering in his ear, and the hand opened again and touched his cheek, caressing, caressing, burning him without a trace of eagerness. The boy was more wary than panic. He glanced over the woman's shoulder in that direction once or twice, while she continued to speak and explain something. The explanation always forced him to look in the direction where Michelle knew that a car was parked, the direction where the man in the gray hat was. That person was carefully excluded from the photo, but reflected in the boy's pupils, (how could he still doubt it now?) echoing in the woman's words, in the woman's hands, in the woman's agent-like presence. When I saw the man coming, stopping near them, staring at them, with his hands in his pockets, with an air that was both bored and stern, like a master who is waiting for his dog to finish playing in the square and is ready to blow the whistle, I understood, if that can be called understanding, what was about to happen, what should have happened, what should have happened in that moment, among those people, after I had intruded and naively disturbed an order, an order that had not yet happened but was about to happen, about to be fulfilled. But what I imagined at the time was far less terrifying than reality. That woman, she did not come for herself, she did not come for her own pleasure to caress, to encourage, to seduce, to take away that fledgling angel, to play with his fears and his yearning grace. The real master is waiting...

With a smug smile, convinced that his plan had succeeded; he was not the first to send a woman as a vanguard to bring him prisoners bound with flowers. The rest will be as simple as that car, any house, those drinks, those exciting pictures, too late tears, and waking up in hell. And I am powerless. This time, I am absolutely powerless. My power was once a picture, right there. In that picture, they were taking revenge on me, showing me without any cover what was about to happen. The photos have been taken, time has passed; we are so far apart from each other, the corruption must have been completed, the tears must have been shed, and the rest is just speculation and sorrow. Suddenly, the order was reversed, they were alive, moving, deciding and being decided, moving towards their future; and I, on this side, a prisoner in a different time, a prisoner in a room on the fifth floor, I don't know who the woman, the man and the child are, I can only be a lens of my camera, something rigid, unable to intervene. They threw the most terrible mockery in my face, that is, in the face of my powerlessness, they have the power to "decide"; that is, the boy looked at the clown with the whitened face again, and I knew that he was about to accept that the offer contained money or deception, and I could not shout to him to run away, or just use a new photo, a small and humble intervention to destroy the scaffolding constructed of saliva and perfume. Everything will be in this moment, in that...

Instantly, it was resolved; there was a tremendous silence that had nothing to do with physical silence. That thing is stretching and building. I believe I shouted, I shouted at the top of my lungs, and at that same second I felt myself getting closer, ten centimeters, step by step, the tree spinning its branches gracefully in the foreground, a stain on the parapet sliding out of the frame, the woman's face, turning towards me, with The shock grew bigger and bigger, and then I turned a little, I mean the camera turned a little, without losing the woman, and started to get closer to the man who looked at me with black eye sockets. He looked at me in shock and anger, wanting to wash me away in the air. At that moment, I glimpsed a large, out-of-focus bird that flapped its wings and flew across the frame. I leaned against my wall, I was happy because the boy had just escaped and I saw him running, again in sharp focus, with his hair flying in the wind, as he finally learned to fly around the island, reached the trestle, and returned to the city. The second time, he slipped away from them; the second time, I helped him escape, I returned him to his precarious paradise. Panting, I faced them; there was no further progress, the game was over. The woman, with only one shoulder and a strand of hair, was roughly cut off by the frame; and the man, facing me, with his mouth slightly open, could see a black tongue trembling, he slowly raised his hands and stretched out towards the foreground, still in perfect focus at that moment. Then he turned into a blur, obliterating the island and the tree. I closed my eyes and didn't want to see it anymore. I covered my face and cried like a fool.

"Devil's Saliva"

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