Nemesis

The first was the vacuum cleaner. It spat instead of inhaling.

Then the dishwasher began to dull all the dishes. Then a fresh new plate fell off the cutting cabinet on your foot. And the tree collapsed a suspicious number of times with all the balls that shattered and you were there to buy them back like a jerk at half the price because it now were only three days before Christmas.

Then there was the robot and you had confirmation. He deliberately removed a piece of skirting board, dragged it onto the newly polished parquet and, with a nail, scratched the entire floor. Conscientiously, clearly intentionally. Now the lines are evidently visible, they look like the curlicues of a furious hand.

The parquet… the parquet where it happened. It happened there because it was the brightest place and light was needed to shave the hair, to insert the needle cannula into the vein. It happened there but it shouldn’t have happened there, it had to be on the bed, in the crook of your arm, as you had arranged, imagined. But reality amazes us, prevents us, overwhelms us. The hollow of your arm turned into a wooden floor never warm enough. There were, yes, many tears conceived, but there were also inappropriate speeches, pleasantries, half smiles, and that trying to convince yourself that this was right. They even had to call you because you went away, because you weren’t where you were supposed to be, there with him, holding him, caressing him, you surrendered to the fact that things weren’t going the way you wanted. And you did not hug him until later, when his head was already dangling, when his eyes were wide open, when blood came out of his mouth. But little, not what you wanted and owed, not with that resignation, that exhausted and infinite sweetness that you had with others, rather with an irremediable, cruel, cold sense of action. With the sense of realizing it only when it was over, with the sense of not being at peace with your conscience, of wanting to turn the clock back an hour and do nothing.

You wondered if you did it because it was already planned, because the vet had driven for half an hour in bad weather, because you could no longer handle the agony of uncertainty, because a selfishness takes over and you want everything to end, because there was a Christmas tree to be done and relatives were coming and you still hadn’t bought any gifts.

He died pissed off, growling until the last moment. So, then, he certainly made you pay for it, even though he still loves you, even if you asked him for forgiveness a thousand times. Because he trusted you as much as anyone, because it was you who saved him, who nursed him, because he didn’t want to die even if he was suffering, because he still wanted to remain hugged with you on that bed and he had put his head in your hand and had also forced himself to get up, to eat, and he purred you.

Here, since then, things have begun to rebel, to take revenge, they have become angry. The sharp point of a door got stuck in your ankle like a needle in a vein, the mouse of the pc hops and tries to escape like he did all over the house as they ran after him with the syringe and, in the end, the robot took charge of raping the floor.

Yes, maybe you had heard some strange noise, maybe there was the alarm sound when an object gets stuck between the wheels and maybe you could even get up and go and see what happened. But you didn’t, you didn’t want to notice, you kept your distance there too. And so that nail of the baseboard was no longer between the wheels (paws?) of the robot, but it was as if it were between your fingers, clamped between your fingertips, scratching and scratching and engraving.

And avenging.