I had seen fog as it spread from tree to tree in a swampy alder thicket, and as it slowly curled around a hilltop gun placement; I had seen from above, as it lodged in the trough of a valley far below, and as it steamed from north to south on a mountain pass; seen it as it layered on the asphalt road on my way homewards; I had also seen fog descending and lifting within just minutes, as well as choking smog that did not clear for weeks; on the shore of the Simpson Straits, I have stood in fog so thick that I could see only as far as the tip of my nose. But never before, anywhere, had I seen anything as dense as the fog inside me that summer.
By July I was simply convinced that Linna had left me—just like that, tough titties, that's the ball game, over and out, cut, basta! I couldn't imagine why she wouldn't come, did she want to kill me? I could think of nothing else. A heatwave was raging outside, the very walls of the houses sweaty, the trees wilting, the roofs foaming, window shutters melting, blades of grass, flies and leaves sticking to each other. The sky was bubbling up into blisters, and cancerous forests were gasping for air, but I was shivering, like someone stranded on an ice field in the Beaufort Sea. A brief but violent storm every afternoon, towards four o'clock, would give the landscape some respite from the melting. Sometimes gale-force winds brought jagged forks of lightning. This would always be followed, every damned day, by a tranquil, tepid, steaming twilight. Shuddering with cold, I would watch as lizards basked amid the drying spikes of lavender.
I have no idea how long I did not eat. In any event, when I had given no sign of life by the middle of July my mother dropped by. She happened to be passing that way and peeked in, just in case I was at home, you never knew, Morgen being so dumb. I had been feeling chilled and was sleeping. Mother came to a standstill among the weeds that were pushing up by the front gate, the look on her face so horror-struck that it took me long seconds to recognise her. When I finally snapped to and realised that the frightening stranger who was disrupting my shivering was Mother, all I asked was, "What do you want?" Mother responded with a question of her own: "Have you any idea what you look like?... When did you last eat anything?" I was unable to answer. Up until that point, it had not entered my mind that I was not eating. I never felt hungry; just freezing. Mother, in her desperation, said that it was not normal, one could even die of it, but in that case it would be no good my saying it was her fault. I reassured her that as far as that was concerned, it wasn't.
I waited for Linna for three months. It wasn't the way one usually waits, though: I did nothing else, just waited, for almost a hundred days. I seemed to recall that we might even have discussed a time when she would come. At the beginning of July—the "agreed point in time"—I sat for three days and three nights without sleep, barely moving, by the window behind closed shutters, my constituent particles were disintegrating at even the slightest noise. For three days cars came and went; storms came and went, the twilights, evenings, swallows, hedgehogs and beetles; a wind rattled the doors of the half-finished house; a bucket of plaster that had been left dangling on a rope, pulled halfway between the ground and the upstairs floor, swung back and forth like a pendulum; the foliage of the magnolia rustled, the planks by the entrance creaked; things would plop down from the trees every now and then—but no Linna. Through a combination of despair and sleeplessness, I must have lost my mind. To start with there were appalling temptations; plans, brainwaves, tormenting urges, and in the end, apparitions: flame-red figures sitting on the trees, on the furniture, the walls—I haven't seen anything so beautiful since! They were wonderful: alluring, benign, pleasant and bright red! Most certainly they came, though admittedly not so much to me as for me. They waved. They understood everything—at last someone who did!—so they said not a word, just swarmed across the room, the yard, the tree branches; their tiny legs dangled from the loose gutter, lolled about in clumps on the terrace; there were places where they were scattered casually in a row on the lawn, like a necklace string of inwardly glowing rubies, popping up now here, now there from a molehill or from behind a tree trunk; they teemed like ants in nooks and crannies, and hardly any larger, whereas in another place, in the gateway, would stand a lofty figure, over sixty feet high, with shorter ones seated on his shoulders, and on them in turn, pocket demons of some sort! And ever more of them were pouring and climbing out from behind the lapels, the belt, the mouth, the nose, every one of them most agreeable, attractive and goodlooking. Good-humoured. And every one of them, big or small, lazing about or swarming together, were looking at me and beckoning with a slow, unctuous gesture: "Come! Come now! Don't wait and don't fall asleep! Come along with us!" I was well aware that they were the angels of demise, but who would have credited that the cul-de-sac of death was so exquisite, so inviting, so reassuring and salutary! So pleasantly scary that I forgot to die and simply passed out.

[...]

Centauri
is a writer who has been publishing short stories, essays and photographs for the last
three years in various literary magazines, and whose identity is unknown to this day.
He/she has published two volumes of short stories, Pátosz a káoszban (Pathos in
Chaos, 2007) and Kék angyal (Blue Angel, 2008). His/her work is reviewed by László
Márton on pp. 119–125 of this issue.