Afterimage

Andrés knows how to swim. Nicely. A boy used to life in the country, natural life that gives all in plenty, but all takes in difficulty. I admire the sheer agility with which he goes from one point of the Horn Falls' well to the other. The water in the well makes my sight go darker. I notice I have had my eyes fixed to a point for some minutes and this is what makes my sight darker. While little Andrés swims as a fish in backwaters, I play with making my sight go darker intentionally, programming myself to fix a spot with my eye and let darkness take control.

I look into the well one more time and fix my eyes on it. The movement of daylight on the surface of the water distracts and mesmerizes me. My sight starts going dark slowly, it goes clearer when for some unknown reason it moves off the spot I should be fixing. A dark shape starts outlining inside the well. Down there the boy keeps to his quasi ritualistic swim. The dark shape gains more detail that gets lost when my sight goes clearer. I have to exercise a lot of willpower on it to make the image crispier.

And there is the image, finally definied. A bull. That's what it is. The triangular and black thing underwater, its horns look plain to see now. A bull with a phantasmagorical look in the eyes, and Andrés and his quasi ritualistic swim around the bull's head. A bull that is seemingly looking at me all the time. It now vanishes in the thin air, though my sight hasn't cleared yet. I feel a wet touch on the shoulder that pulls me out of my insights abruptly.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you. Are you okay?"

Then, noticing my expression, he queried me:

"Why are you looking at me like this?"

I have no answer but telling him I was taken away from distraction in such a brusque manner. Ele looks at me with distrustful eyes and sits down. He doesn't seem to have believed a word of what I said. I ask him how he got back here so fast and his answer doesn't convince me either. Though I have to take into account that, as a native of the place he moves through natural obstacles much faster than an outsider, even if I was aware of another completely different thing, his movement back here from the well was too fast to believe.

Another detail I put away together with my moment's insight is the strong assumption that the bull-shape (or whatever it was) that appeared in the well only appeared during the time the boy was down there. Not more than two seconds passed between the disappearance of the image and Andrés' wet touch on my shoulder. This was something that started going around my mind for a while.

Shadows of huge trees around | Tales of the near future: clairvoyance

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