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The sunset feeds skin already gilded by the sun. Warm reflections between her cheeks, her lips, and in the cascade of black hair curving over bare shoulders. A sailboat can be glimpsed against the blue of a summer sea, and the outline of an island swallowed by the horizon. Naxos 2024, says the caption. 220 comments.
You’re gorgeous ❤️ ❤️
Tell me where and I’m on my way 🛫
Nos vemos, señorita.
Four salaries, six if you’re a factory worker, many months of odd jobs. That’s the value of the red bicycle leaning against the rock at the top of the mountain, photographed behind a pair of knees pressed together.
What legs, baby!
So you wanted the bike?
Beautiful at any altitude ོ⋆☀︎ᨒོ
The eyes are a deep, melancholy blue, big as lighthouses watching over the world, and the photo is no product of deceitful filters, it’s as real as the sky.
The pool in the loneliness of two in the afternoon, dead leaves at the foot of a beech wood, yoga, mats lined up on the parquet, a windshield flooded with rain, and always the same caption: right now, like this.
Marshall is a three-year-old Labrador, fluffy as a cloud. One shot in four is his. At the park, downtown with the newspaper in his mouth, in the car with his head out the window and his ears folded back by the wind.
Right now, like this.
Faithful love!
I’d walk you both, morning and evening ;).
Beautiful Marshall! 🐶🐶
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The sad blue eyes are crying. The tears soak the blindfold twisted across her mouth, pressing down on her tongue. It’s the smell of fear that ruins the poetry. Right now, like this, tied to the radiator, crucified, knees to her chest, hair a mess.
The thief stops scrolling on the phone and gets up.
She is small, he is imposing. He is frightening, nose crushed under the nylon stocking, lips distorted. He kneels beside her and she shuts her eyes and sinks her neck between her shoulders. She is afraid. She wasn’t when she walked into the house with Marshall, laughing, in fact, at a funny video, and a gunshot had buried itself in the dog’s neck the moment he moved to attack the intruder. His last yelp had died with him. A pool of blood has soaked into the fur and is clotting beside the rug that reads: WELCOME IF YOU BRING WEALTH.
Right now, like this.
The cavernous voice is terrifying. It comes from a thick neck and enormous lungs but seems to vibrate straight out of a well.
“Why do you write ‘right now, like this’ under the picture of the pastries at Dolcevita when you’re not there, you’re outside your own front door? I had invested my whole morning in that!”
She can’t speak.
It feels as if the gag is sliding down her throat to strangle her, so the thief rests the muzzle of his Ruger in the middle of her forehead and lays down the unilateral terms: I’m armed, you’re tied up.
He stands, parts the curtain, and sees only countryside blended with the morning mist. The road is far away and the glint of a lone car guarantees there will be no trouble for a thief caught in the act. The gag comes away along with a lock of her hair. Coughing overlaps the first words the thief speaks.
“I’m sorry about your big dog. Really, I’m not a son of a bitch, but he was about to go for my throat and I shoot fast. The world’s a shitty place, you’re forced to specialize in something.” He raises the revolver, still stinking of gunpowder. “This is my master’s degree.”
She’s too busy breathing, so the intruder goes on.
“In a little while I’ll be gone, no tedious complications. I’d suggest burying the dog just as he is and keeping it quiet, mourning with dignity, alone. Say he went down suddenly after you got back from a trip downtown, or make up a story you like, that you took a shovel and dug a hole, and that he’ll be with you forever, in your lovely garden.”
In her eyes you can read resignation and fear. She knows that reporting him would do little good, that no one will protect her, and that her enormous empty house is too isolated for anyone to hear her call for help. She has understood that the man behind the stocking knows everything about her, schedules, habits, passions, friendships. She has no time to finish the thought before the confirmation arrives.
“If I smell cops, if I find out I’m being hunted and that maybe you’re under protection, I’ll pick someone at random from your contacts and leave them dead, just like your Marshall, bought as a puppy and groomed once a month, twice in winter, when the roads are full of mud. You wrote that yourself, if I remember right.”
“I’m not rich. Why me?”
The thief swallows, but you can tell he’d like to spit. His face is hideous through the dense flesh-colored mesh.
“Dear Barbara, or Barby, or Barby Doll, as your simp friends call you. You flaunted a Rolex that costs as much as a year of my father’s wages, a factory worker. You showed it off in a thousand photos, in an evening gown, in pajamas, in a swimsuit, and look how good I am, I found it in two minutes in the bedside drawer. And you know what, Barby Doll?”
Barbara lets the back of her head fall against the radiator. “What am I supposed to know?”
“That my father is dead. Silicosis, after a lifetime cutting stone, and that day you were in Porto Cervo with a blue aperitif and a little umbrella. ‘Today, like this,’ you wrote.”
The tears run down to her chin, her nose is running, her voice is broken. “I’m sorry about your father, but I wasn’t in Porto Cervo.”
“Oh no? Where, then?”
“Alghero.”
“What an unforgivable gaffe, Barby Doll, but I’ll make up for it. When I fence your Rolex I’ll go there, and to the other place too.”
Barbara looks at Marshall. She loved him like a son. She’s proud of him, spoiled and pampered, but fallen defending her. She can’t take her eyes off that motionless heap of fur.
The thief slips the revolver into his back pocket.
“I’ll help you bury him, come on. Out back, though.”
She won’t even be able to take a picture of him. The wound in his neck is too obvious, the blood too stale. Today, like this, she would have written.
“I’ll dig the hole. I mean, I feel like taking my leave like a gentleman. It’s not advisable for you to handle a shovel and me a gun. I’m fast, I told you.”
There’s only one thing worse than a non-negotiable proposal, and that’s a non-negotiable proposal moderated by a nine-millimeter.
“Fine. If you untie me, I’ll show you. The ground is soft behind the house.”
“Ah, but there’s a consequence. I’m taking your diamond ring. I wasn’t good at finding it, and in there, forgive me, I turned everything upside down, but I’ve been dreaming of it ever since you photographed it with your hand on the moss. Where were you, Cervinia?”
Barbara shakes her head.
“Saint Moritz.”
“Ah, out-of-the-way places.” He bends to untie her. He doesn’t bother with the knots, pulling a hunting knife from his pocket and cutting the rope in one sharp stroke. Barbara feels the weight of that enormous body and the smell of clothes worn too long. “When I fence the ring I’ll make a weekend of it.”
“It’s my father’s money.”
“The rich one.”
“The dead one. Just like yours.”
“And what did your father do?”
“He was in politics.”
“Then I’m sorry for him, but I won’t be visiting his grave...”
“Somebody has to be a politician.”
“Sure, some people steal and some steal but they call it being honorable.”
There’s something slippery about this man, something to be handled with care, and things, as everyone knows, can always get worse.
Her phone announces a new message. The thief picks it up and scrolls.
“Who might this be?”
“I don’t know, I get so many.”
Barbara hangs from the radiator’s charging pipe, one arm still tied. She rubs the sleeve of the free one under her nose, but sees that behind the stocking the deformed face has turned severe.
“Who would you kill, Barby Doll?”
Barbara is confused. Her throat burns with acid rising from her stomach, tinnitus hammers at her, her head spins. She doesn’t know what to answer and stays silent. It isn’t a compassionate voice she hears, it’s the one from the bottom of the well, loaded with an overflowing rage.
“Would you kill everyone who protests, and everyone who busts your balls because they can’t make money?”
It’s a chat, begun the night before and cut off because of the late hour. Her friend had been annoyed by protests and demonstrations, because she’d lost time in a traffic jam and a dinner had fallen through: people with fuck-all to do, she’d written.
“It’s just a friend venting...”
“Yeah, but you agree with her!”
“Untie me, please.”
His finger races across the screen and the thief is horrified. He paces the room, lengthens his stride and steps over Marshall’s body, comes closer, twists his mouth into a grimace, turns, repeats, and comes back. The comments he mutters aloud are clipped, not always intelligible. He stands there with the phone pinched between his fingertips. The last comment cuts like a razor.
“I’ll have to clean the screen properly, afterward...”
Barbara feels the chill rising and stiffening her stomach. Afterward? Afterward what?
Finger scrolling, a glance at the screen, a sideways glance at her. Barbara feels her bladder about to give way and wriggles her hips against the floor. The rope tears her wrist, her fingers twitch, his gaze accuses.
“It says something horrible here.”
Barbara whimpers. “We were supposed to bury Marshall...”
“But it’s truly horrible!”
“I didn’t write it!”
It’s a tackle. The thief drops on top of her and yanks her collar. The back of her head slams against the aluminum elements and she feels his hot breath through the pantyhose. Impossible to focus on a screen shaken five centimeters from her face.
“Then who the fuck is Barby Doll?”
“No, no, calm down please. It was to humor a...”
The phone’s flight ends against the wall above the couch, and now there’s a nine-millimeter hole there, just as hard to focus on.
The night before she was in bed, Marshall asleep on the rug, the TV muttering a rosary of bad news. When her friend had raised the subject, when the chat had opened with a laconic “Hi Barby, are you awake?”, she had accepted the conversation and read with heavy eyes. She had thought it would be awful to put those ideas into practice but that, all things considered, her friend was right.
She has the feeling that this man can read minds.
The iron of the revolver knocks against her forehead and Barby Doll is pessimistic.
There are those days when everything goes wrong.
Today, like this.
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