The Prisoner

By: submission | November 22, 2024

Author: Srdjan Budisavljevic

..Finally, he opened his eyes. The feeling was strange, like the feeling of rebirth. Faint images of his former existence sporadically surfaced in his consciousness, but he was unable to recognize those memories as integral parts of his existential continuity. The first thing he felt was amazement, immense amazement, and then his being was filled with fear. Inherent, primal fear. His reality collapsed into a blink of the present moment, his perception shattered into fragments. Water, turbulent water, water and foam, the familiar blue element, then the wire, and the foreboding sense of an alien presence. And then the strange unknown outlines, which had never found a reflection in his eye before, and the voices, muffled at first, but increasingly clear over time, rough, aggressive, voices that called out to each other. It seemed to him like the voice of a flock of raptors cheering themselves on, tightening a ring around their prey. But the weapons and the cunning of this enemy did not belong to his world, in the depths of his bowels he felt the unknown superiority of the life that was subjugating him. Suddenly, in great fear and convulsion, he pierced his face through the surface of the water in which he was immersed and finally saw the Eye. It was the Eye from the other side, the mirror of the will that wants to dominate the universe, the display of a machine devoid of empathy that operates on the other side of good and evil, on the other side of the postulates of nature and the laws of the soul and conscience. And maybe, for a moment, with the spark of his eye, in all that fear and despair, he tried to ignite the flame of love in the cold neon glow of those sockets. Maybe, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Just as it doesn’t matter what all the procedures and treatments foreigners have applied to him.
What was important is that one sun-drenched afternoon, in the Arena XXX aqua complex, he jumped out of the water, with all the grief and misery of his restrained soul, performing a graceful figure, followed by the roar of hundreds of wild foreign throats.
And he was just an angel trapped in the body of a fish, like any dolphin.

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