-Nightmare- Short Story Written By Faouzi Boukhris, Translated By Mohamed Said Raihani

"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



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 Paris that the beauty of eyes is a trade mark registered in Italy!

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 Safi (Morocco) on July 17th 1971. Author of:" Zoom " (Short Stories)



* 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 " (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. he is getting ready for printing:"Beyond Writing & Reading " (testimonies) and "Kais & Juliet" (An E-Love Novel).



* "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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