Adder is a singular man, never accepting a plural. He is square, has four angles and walks alone, leaping in four directions, without getting tired. As you imagine, he is bidimensional, contradictory to the idea of tridimensionality. Don’t even think to extend over the demarcation line. “I will stick to my space, never fall into disgrace” he hums every time he is drawn on a white sheet of paper, awry, lopsided. When Adder cries of happiness, the teardrops are quadrilateral, slightly curbed above, where the main idea nestles. He then goes to sleep, folding his laterals one over the other, perfectly symmetrical. “Don’t disturb” he snores in solmization, hanging his thoughts on the sol key, abstract and flawlessly square.

Last week, Adder was convoked by the Organization of the Uncurbed Euclidian Geometrical Forms to make a speech on “how to avoid to be reduced to a triangle when you oscillate”, powdering its pointy corners with fractions, without sneezing Xs and other unknown variables. He started his speech superbly, leaning aside, squashing himself dramatically, bouncing back gloriously, adding a plus and a formula on the top. Then a natural cataclysm occurred and Adder’s shape was modified by a monstrous pen, into a trapezoid. It was too much for him to endure, so he decided to defy all the mathematical laws and divide himself into two equal halves. The tragic adventure didn’t end, Adder being later crushed by a ruler, losing his consciousness. A parallelepiped woke him up, Adder finding himself a bitter rectangle. All his formulas had been changed absolutely, irrevocably, making his life rather unbearable.

Flawed, the rectangle couldn’t meet the required standards, getting so nervous that it started to pulsate and turned into a window. The window was opened, brusquely, by a blast of wind, brutally throwing it against the wall. Rain drops, hailstone and incredibly cold air invaded the void contained by its almost materialized framework. White shards of all sizes and shapes were pulverized in the absolute time and space, surpassing the Euclidian distance. Relativity was abolished, the concrete assaulted the unknown for more than expected. Nevertheless, the space-time around the Earth remained warped and twisted, vibrating elusively, as if breathing. “Where are you?”, Adder asked himself, without getting an answer. Not even the echo bothered to multiply in mockery. “Why are you hiding?”. Still no answer. Irritated beyond measure, Adder realized he wasn’t transparent anymore, if held against the light. He felt profoundly, utterly miserable, shedding inverted tears in a diverted direction. Curious dark shadows were thrown onto himself by a giant, broken fountain pen, laughing diabolically. Adder tried to avoid the catastrophe, asking the rubber to erase it, but there was nothing left to be done, truly a tragic and overtly impossible result to an exasperating equation. Adder closed his eyes, finding himself in the beginning, formless and empty, undulating over the surface of the deep. And it was so since then. Adder was now created in the image, or maybe beside it, quite possible a superimposed one. It could have been a carbon copy, the darkness stinging his eyes, rather too soon, somewhat too late, quite constantly, probably till the e

 

Excerpt from the volume Tongues of Flames and Other Stories