Hallucination or not?

Chapter 15

The sun glare woke Julian, and in less than a second he knew he was doomed. He was supposed to be up at seven o'clock and it was well after ten. Jumping out of the bed he rushed to the bathroom and fumbled with his clothes, getting dressed in less than five minutes. 'Great! I'm late for work and Carlos will remember it till my last day.'

At the last minute, he remembered the card and picked it up.

'Lovers or not, Lýkos should be walked at nine.' He crossed the corridors at full speed, reaching the kitchen almost out of breath.

“Good morning,” Lucia greeted him jovially. “Mr. Koiranos said to let you sleep longer today. He says you were up late.”

“Where is he?” Julian asked. “There's something I have to give him.”

“In the garden, by the old well,” she replied as she began to prepare Julian's breakfast, looking for two eggs inside the refrigerator. “Your brother went with Pedro to the Leroy Merlin. Lýkos went out by himself. The new vacuum cleaner was too much for the poor dear nerves.”

“I'll see to him now.”

“Wait! Your breakfast!” Lucia shouted but Julian was already closing the rear door behind him.

Here it is...

The Substitute

Book III

Chapter 1

December 10^th, 2013

Buenos Aires

For the Spanish for Foreigners teacher the afternoon was probing to be a hard one. His normally bright and inquisitive student was mind absent. He didn't follow her directions well and had picked up the odd mania of suppressing the verb “to be” at present tense in almost all of his sentences.

One single correction was normally all what it would take to make him mend his ways and finish the lesson spotlessly.

Not today.

Perhaps it were the news.

Yes, that should be the case. People looting supermarkets because of the police force strike while civil armed forces clashed against the looters in the poorest areas -just like any Mad Max scenario was expected to be- would drive anyone insane. For someone so sophisticated and rich as he was, the student must have been thinking he had landed in Somalia by mistake.

Mrs. Fernández Prieto was more than happy when the man's Vacheron wrist watch struck five o'clock and she was free to continue with her English for Executives lessons somewhere downtown.

The Patience of the Spider

The Patience of the Spider

January 27^th, 2013

'Nothing ever turns out as you want.

'But I always knew how to make the best out of the worst situations.

'If I have to eat at another mall's food court, I'll start to shoot people down. Alain is a good boy, but too provincial for my taste. The house and some money will be enough for him. He doesn’t desire anything more beyond his music or his sorry teaching position.

'Nobody was as perfect for me as my angel, but he was as crazy as you can be. Bloody father of his!

'The only good thing that came out of us was my Conor, but I lost him too. With Pavicevic in power, I can't stay in Europe any longer. America is not safe enough for me. Only one more month, and I'll be gone from here too.'

Brothers and Workers

Chapter 14

Several piles of large brown card-boxes, piled up to the high ceiling were a bad omen for Julian. He counted up to forty-three of them and collapsed at the large desk he had studied at many times in the past. There was almost no space left to move or breath.

'When the fuck did all this show up?' he asked himself as he had not seen them ever before. His eyes wandered over the many closed glass-bookcases and sighed. 'How on earth am I going to classify all this and stuck it inside these shelves?'

'I know now why Morgenthau jumped off that cliff.'

'Did Orion never unpack his things?'

He noticed that the computer he had used to write his home assignments had been replaced by more modern model. 'For someone who hates computers, Orion knows how to shop,' he thought as he switched the device on.

There was only one icon over the Milky Way wallpaper: “Library Catalogue”. A double click and an Excel sheet materialized in front of his eyes.

'I was expecting something better,' he thought a bit disappointed that his predecessor's work was so sloppy. 'BookCAT or Ex-Libris are your friends, mate,'

'This is impossible!” he whined out loud some time later when finding the old databases turned out an impossible task. Everything was efficiently deleted.

“I will have to start from the scratch!” Julian whined at the ridiculously large number of lines the Excel sheet proudly showed him.