TE23 Double Feature

Sandrine Collette

The Forests

And yet he got up.

there was no reason anymore to keep going. He looked at himself in a little mirror hanging on the wall by the single window. He’d lost weight. He’d gone gray—his skin, his eyes, his hair, as if something had been extinguished, something that had bogged down his entire being. His beard had grown a little. He ran his hand over it, and through his dark hair that he had not managed to untangle, matted as it was with sweat and ash. When his fingers scratched at his face, they left a lighter trace and the dirt collected under his nails. Suddenly he could not stand himself. He was disgusting. He did not recognize the young man in the reflection. He saw someone, and for a moment he wondered who it was.

At what a price, he would think, later.

It was like being uprooted all over again, like on the first day after he left the catacombs: an unknown suffering, the sense he was severing every tie that held him to the ground and that was part of him—like an absolute urge to cut his own flesh into strips he could bury, so as not to face the world because it was too trying, and he was sinking into the mud with them, he had to pull himself out, tear himself away, his heart was pounding, his body covered in sweat.

He got to his feet, and that changed so little.

For days he’d held out, to get this far, and now his legs would hardly carry him. He’d found the strength, he’d taken everything, demanded everything, and he had nothing left inside that would keep him going—and anyway, 82

Because this could not be him.

Not somebody.

This thing.

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