2023
“Quickly drink away your loneliness, for meadow flowers will not deceive you sufficiently. Shall I remind you in what course your father departed from birth? My child, your life will grow shorter day by day, darkness courses through your body, you desperately long for freedom, but you would rather pull the reins yourself.”
The last week of November began.
Upon leaving the Gypsy fortune-teller,
she wandered beneath the spruce branches and brushed against them
the long echoes of her former self.
…
She deceives her utterly strange desire, yet feels herself
breathtakingly. A scattered buttercup upon the victim’s stony
bosom lies; in its long veins, poison awakens at once.
She cries out to it… “Look!”
They whisper immediately…
“Look, look, behold, behold, behold…”
She looks.
Determined, facing her fate.
…
To lose the signal, she continued deeper through the black spaces of the forest.
On 27 November, five elderly ladies gathered at the counter
of the family bakery, this time, however, no questions about bread
or rolls were asked.
“Do you know anything about her?”
“They say still nothing… still missing.”
“I heard they found her phone. But I have no idea
whether it’s true…”
“It’s true that yesterday there was that tall one with the beard,
the policeman… so I asked him, but he didn’t tell me anything.”
“It’s also… such a little village, we’re all practically
like family here, and they hide absolutely everything from us.”
“Oh dear, I feel so sorry for the poor thing… and besides, I never thought
I would live to see such tragedies!”
“Well, then again, don’t you remember… her boyfriend?
How he had to move away? There must be something to that too…”
“Wasn’t he her brother? I mean, I never saw them in public
being particularly close…”
“I don’t know…”
“The whole thing had seemed strange to me since last week…
she always ordered her bread in advance, reserving it,
and this time she didn’t want any… then it was as if the earth had swallowed her.”
The woman without a signal leaned her back against the bark of the chestnut tree.
She let the bottle with the remains of alcohol fall to its roots.
She admired the evenness of the meadow, which stood dominantly before her,
and for a moment thought that she could manage it too.
She straightened up, wanting to put her hands on her hips, but her legs
became tangled and she just barely caught hold of the trunk.
The woman without a signal tilted her head back. She gazed into the eyes of the chestnut tree,
in which she recalled the fortune-teller’s words*.
The woman without a signal began to laugh with all her lungs.
She ran into the meadow to pick chamomile.
