A dark shadow covers the silent, stone-hot city. My boyfriend just kicked me out in the middle of the night with all my belongings. I take a few steps down the urine-stinking street and collapse onto a bench. With nowhere to go, I still sit here, waiting.
Hollowed out, I stare the deserted city straight in its ugly, graffiti-smeared face, when suddenly a young Black man approaches. Dressed in skinny jeans, a wide belt, and a cap covered in rhinestones, he looks tired, as if after a long night of partying. Blood-red veins streak his eyes, and his tongue stumbles as he asks me for a cigarette. I don’t smoke. He sits down next to me anyway. The stench of the beer he holds pierces my nostrils. I hate it. In my personal hell, it smells like beer, burgers, and cheap street food.
He says he’s from Congo, his name is Booba, and he works in France as a glazier. I nod in response, feeling so empty inside that I have nothing to say. I’m not even sure I got his native country right, maybe it’s not Congo, but Burkina Faso, or somewhere else in Central Africa. Does it really matter?
Booba pulls a Marlboro pack from his pocket and lights a cigarette.
“I thought you didn’t have any… Why ask me then?”
“Just to start a conversation with you. You’re very beautiful. You look like an angel”
Angels are bodiless, they have no material form. Angels don’t need a home. Maybe I really am an angel?
Before kicking me out, my boyfriend even threatened to throw me out the window. I don’t remember exactly why we argued. Maybe I didn’t make the bed right, cooked the wrong dinner, or ate something from the fridge I wasn’t supposed to. It made no sense. In any case, the most fatal arguments always arise from nothing. Funny enough, life itself arises from nothing.
Instantly, a few gray strands of hair fall across my face, like a reminder that this body, which houses my reality, is aging. After all, I’m not an angel. At least, not yet. I’m still human.
Maybe he really did throw me out the window, from the fourth floor, and now I’m lying on the ground, sprawled in a pool of blood, my hips broken. I’m no longer breathing, my pupils have dilated, spreading into blackness. I lie there, unaware that I’m dead.
And this man with the beer, maybe he really is an angel ? Fallen, of course. A demon, that is. And this smell of beer is meant to show me that I’m in hell.
Okay. Here we are, waiting our whole lives to uncover the secret of death. But the only secret is that there is no secret. What comes next? Will I be stuck here forever, or might something change? Should I go somewhere? Do something?
“So, you don’t smoke, you don’t drink beer… how about coffee?” Booba suddenly asks, pulling me out of my thoughts. “Come on, I’ll treat you. The café at Castellane Square is about to open.”
