Wriggling through the twisted branches of the City forest, Dannie said to himself...

Wriggling through the twisted branches of the City forest, Dannie said to himself that he would not have believed if it was not something that Polski had told him. That was some comfort for his tormented self. After all in that way it appeared that it was about his trust in Polski, not about his fear of death. Polski was his best friend, and the absolute atheist. Just four day ago the two of them were sharing a nice evening in the yard, sitting on the cozy cradle under the starlet sky. Polski had just pushed the lamb into the oven and together with Dannie came out in order to get some fresh air. The night was full of different aromas and once again Dannie felt like home. Three months had passed since the diagnose (Death! Without parole!). Polski sucked on his cigar watching the sky.

“Dannie, I have to tell you something”, Polski was obviously digging in his vocabulary, trying to pick the proper words, he wanted to praise. Dannie stopped his eyes on the suddenly prolonged and odd face of his friend.

Since the moment when Dannie told him about the disease (Death! Without parole…), up to that evening Dannie felt that Polski was tense. He thought it was due to the disgrace of the news, but that evening Dannie found out what it was all about – Polski was undertaking a soul crash. The two men knew each other for ages, they went to college together and almost like between lovers they had that invisible connection, their own language, own way of communication, a little intimate world of their own.

“I know how you can be cured.”, Polski said gulping dry.

Dannie raised his eyebrows, quite surprised by what he heard. “What are you talking about?” he heard himself saying. „You are not a doctor. And even if you were, I don’t think that there is a living human being in this world that can help me, a doctor or not.” Dannie was suddenly broken by the pessimism in his own words.

Polski remained silent and in that precise moment Dannie felt him really alienated. It was like his friend was having a bunch of secrets kept so deep inside – strange, fetid secrets that had never before seen daylight. But there Polski was – in that situation, life and death situation, that was forcing him to reveal his dark secrets. Dannie was about to witness that revelation.

“What’s going on, Polski?” Dannie asked slowly, staring right in the dilated pupils of his friend’s eyes. The young man stood still, tense. “I know how you can be cured.” he repeated.

“No one knows.” Dannie said quietly and looked at the top of his shoes, annoyed by that awkward repetition. Had Polski lost his mind? After all we are all going to die… eventually. Aren’t we?

Polski carefully put out his cigar in a butterfly shaped pink ashtray, left by Kora on the rail of the porch and went inside, dragging his slippers with that scrape sound. Dannie wondered for a second how Kora was putting up with that sound, but then he was frightened by his own thought – he had heard the sound over a thousand times and that was the first time when he found it disturbing. His eyes widened with fear – the terrible fear that his mutating cells all over his body were going to isolate him, from Terra, Polski, even from his own self. Am I going to become a selfish monster, wiping out everybody and everything in his agony days? –suddenly that question cut his heart to the quick. That was the fear of becoming a monster, becoming a human beast… He remembered how the giant forest spirit, whose head ended up in the arms of princess Mononoke, destroyed everything with his own dying self while falling towards the burned ground. It does not matter if you are bad or good; you are going to be crashed by a blind disaster.

“Common, Dannie” he heard Terra calling him, he was called for dinner.

“Common, Dannie” he thought and entered the deep part of the City forest. She became even weirder. The sun remained completely hidden and the town sounded like covered by a big balloon, transparent but engulfing. “It is deep there”, the new Polski, the strange man who used to be his best friend for more than ten years, had said. And Dannie felt that it was deep indeed. He was not quite sure if the City forest was really that sinister or it was the whisper of his sick cells and the description Polski had made. Perhaps if it was Dannie from before, he would have laughed over the bacteria and germs menace, over the strange snuffling sounds, over the unnatural movement of the grass and the bushes. Perhaps the man from before would have entered the forest and exited it completely unchanged, perhaps the man from before… Perhaps, but no matter how much Dannie was grieving, he knew that the man from before was forever gone. Different times had come, now Dannie was a walking dead body. Often his mind was playing cruel tricks on him making him forget his disease. Over and over again he had to find out all about it in every fearsome detail. “How bright the sun is today; how beautiful the ringlets spread on the pillow next to me are; how strong my arms are, I am happy” and then his eyes saw the veins that became grey, and his mind awaked and he once again realized that the nightmare had actually become reality. They switched places. The cancer was here, in his body, moving along and destroying it, while the mighty and healthy Dannie was unreal, left there, in the dream.
 
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