AN ANTHOLOGY OF
MOROCCAN NEW SHORT STORY, VOLUME 1
Nightmare
-Short
Story-
Written by Faouzi Boukhris
Translated
by Mohamed Saïd Raïhani
"Dream is a paved road towards our own selves, towards the Realm of
Freedom where the relationships between signs and things are at loggerheads…
Dream is our downstairs world towards which we should always be guided to
discover its spaces."
Faouzi Boukhris
Moroccan
Short-Story Writer
Born
on July 17th
Author
of:
"Zoom"
-Short Stories-
There creeps the
evening drowning the room gradually in the darkness. The cracks in the window looking on the
street turn into pale luminous strips. You let yourself enjoy the darkness. You
feel that your breathing is growing heavier and heavier as if you were
drowning, drowning in the darkness. You are starting to feel so dull that you
cannot even get up.
You take some time
to stand up on your feet before the window. You peep through its cracks at the
street outside. You peep through the leaks in the curtain of your fortified tower
at the trivialities overwhelming everything in everybody in everywhere. You enjoy this secret habit of yours:
watching people without been seen.
The girl in the
opposite balcony is dancing to the rhythm of hard rock and roll music. You wish
that she will respond to your inner call and look at you in loving interest.
At the bottom of
the street, there are two silhouettes in a private position in the dark and
some children circling around the electric post playing cards…
There comes to your
hearing the microphone cracklings followed immediately by the muezzin’s call
for prayer. A few moments later, there will follow the noise of the closing
door of the neighbouring shop. The shopkeeper has never missed any appointment
to pray in time.
You are getting rid
of all the links that relate you to the world and taking refuge in a book
against all the trivialities in this world. You strike a match and light a
cigarette. You are breathing out smoke all over the room. The feeling, however,
that you were used to whenever you smoke a cigarette, is turning negatively
into a feeling that every living organ in you is flaming up simultaneously with
the burning cigarette between your lips.
You replay the
series of photographs in your imagination. You find the photos more beautiful
as you decode their enigmas and unveil that erotic tendency lying behind them.
However, the eyes of Laura, the Italian beauty who owns the exposition, remain
the most beautiful of all. You tell yourself:
-
“Beauty yearns for beauty”.
Then, you remember
that Earnest Hemingway has written in some of his books about
Now, you feel your
limbs turning heavier and heavier. Strangely enough, when your resistance to sleep
weakens, your sensitivity to voices sharpens. The threads relating you to the
world of sleep look like an abandoned spider-web easily torn by the slightest
voice frequency. Like a drunk, you start your game: listening to the faraway
voices.
The still of the
night makes faraway voices quite nearer. However, you can distinguish, in the
amalgam of voices, nothing but the throb of a car that you imagine parking
somewhere. You can even see it with your own eyes: a car shivering like a
frightened animal.
That night, you
slept sadly. You would never have slept in that hour, were you not sad. The
weight of sadness vexed your eyelids. Night was getting in from the window:
Utter darkness, sky broidered with stars, remains of distant voices but no
trace of the moon anywhere.
Suddenly, you
felt something monstrously heavy lying on your chest paralyzing you entirely.
You could not do the slightest movement. You felt suffocated. You gathered all
your strengths and tried to stand up and get rid of the monstrous body but in
vain… You fell down helpless. You breathed with great difficulty, feeling that
you were breathing the ultimate oxygen atom into your lungs...
You trusted your
nails in the giant body, trying to push it away from your chest but vainly.
You asked for help
in a stifling animal voice. You started shrieking but you noticed that your
shrieks were lost in the void, leaving no echoes around. You screamed and
screamed… but no-one could hear you. You wake up terrified, sweating all over.
Cold beads of sweat on your forehead streamed down your face like small snow
balls. You felt very weary as if you have just come out from under a heap of
ruins. You wondered:
-
‘‘Is it a nightmare?’’
Now, moonlight
comes in from the window and there is no trace of any of the voices that were
echoing around. Silence reigns over the universe. You can always distinguish
the voice of silence from all the remaining voices. when silence takes control
over the world, frequent low whispers come to your ears growing louder and
louder with the flow of time.
You joined both
palms of your hands together. You inserted them between your thighs next to
your genitals. you balled up the way you do whenever you feel cold, fear or
loneliness.
Warmth started to
run through your veins. You started yawning. You wondered, astonished:
-
‘‘Is it a nightmare?’’
That was the last
thing you have thought of before shutting your mouth, closing your eyes and
dozing off again.
Now, your bladder
is full to the brim. You feel the pain intensely and you realize, with your Pavlovian
sense, that the morning has come.
***********
*
The writer, Faouzi Boukhris, is
a Moroccan short-story writer, born in
*The translator, Mohamed Saïd Raïhani, is a Moroccan
translator, scholar & short-story writer, born on December 23rd 1968
in Ksar El Kébir. He published in Arabic "The Singularity Will" (A Semiotic Study on First-names) 2001, "Waiting For the Morning" (Short stories) 2003,"Thus Spoke Santa Lugar-Verde" (Short stories) 2005, "The Season Of Migration to Anywhere" (Short stories) 2006, "The Three Keys: Freedom, Dream & Love" (An anthology of Moroccan New Short Story in Three
Volumes) 2006-2007-2008, "The History of Manipulating Professional Contests in
Morocco" (Syndical manifestos in Two Volumes) 2009-2011, "Death of the Author" 2010…
He is getting ready for printing:"Beyond Writing & Reading» (testimonies), "Kais & Juliet" ( Novel) and ""When Photo
Talks" (Photo-Autobiography).
* "Nightmare" is the thirteenth narrative text in the
"The Moroccan Dream", An Anthology of Moroccan new
short story directed by Mohamed Saïd Raïhani.
***********
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