The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
‘Paris 1976’ by Alejandro Bastidas
Rue Saint-Etienne, Meaux
My skin fades under cruel blankets of snow in the Frankian winter. Then, as everything that exists and walks and breathes and thinks and cries, it decays during the wars waged by my builders who have forgotten their morals. They are more monstrous than I—the grotesque perched on a holy cathedral. Well, it used to be holy. Now I’ve watched miserable clochards defile it by tumbling across the cobblestones until they reach the walls below me, pull their shriveled pricks out of their breeches, whistle an improvised tune, and trace overlapping ovals in their p***.
Paris always smells like p***.
A bomb of white feces splatters my skull and the culprit flies on with no apology offered.
“Va te faite foutre!” I yell at the creature, although my voice is no voice at all.
No one has ever heard me speak, but I’ve heard every voice in Paris, guarded every secret no matter how filthy. My appearance might look dreadful to the common onlooker but the true frightening image is the one in my mind. That is the scary place, the true reflection of Satan. My builders thought it would be conveyed through my wings of stone, my bared fangs into the open along with a forked tongue, but the monstrosity resides in what my eyes have gathered and what my memory withheld. I’ve been witness so many murders and kidnappings that now I’m unfazed by them. After my birth I often longed for the labyrinthine streets of Paris, shackled to the solitude of statues, but now I feel safe in the heights of this cathedral no matter how forsaken. Better to be here, embedded in the stone, than to be down there where no one is safe. I’ve seen generations come and go, seen joyful children grow into criminals that wind up hanging in the gallows, three streets away from me, I’ve seen Napoleon parading the streets below, and heard how the Luftwaffe dropped ruin on my brethren and painted the sky in smoke.
The only thing that soothes my troubled mind is the rain tickling the length of my spine like a gentle serpent, cleansing my skin from the filth I have gathered, while also protecting the foundations of my home so it won’t grow damp and weak. I was built for this, and it makes me proud to at least preserve one function throughout the years.
I, unlike the Parisians here, have a purpose.
My friend Albert Camus, who frequented this cathedral for inspiration, was right when he said that there is no purpose to life. No purpose at all. I have come to the same conclusion as he after studying the most visceral details of human behavior. A man’s life has no purpose, but mine does, so quel con celui-là, I say to the bipeds that walk by me convinced of their superiority. What strange creatures, these humans, capable of building something useful like me, of giving purpose to something that isn’t themselves, but holding on to the belief that there is one for them. Thus they waste their limited and fragile existence in the desperate search for a purpose until they expire or get destroyed by one of their own.
Absurd.
