Brief Worlds

 I lit the candle and placed it on my desk. My desk was square, made of wood, and the same wood color. I didn’t have much time to finish my school assignment because the candle was small. I had math homework. I hate math. My dog lay on my feet, warming them. He was a bit cold. Not me, him. I played some mental music. In my mind, Beethoven’s sonata was playing, the popular one named Hope—oh, sorry, Joy. I started. Four to the power of… oh no, I need to blow out the candle, don’t want to wake up the elf who lives with me. I blew out the candle. The candle went out. “Hello,” came from the back of the room. I heard a growl from my dog and then silence. I didn’t hear anything else until the next morning. The sun came up, and my dog was gone. He never came back. Goodbye, Bobby. See you soon.

 When I arrived at the pool, I found a beetle crouched by it, touching the cold water. That insect with antennae and short legs, a black shell, and a heart of iron. Its expression was sad. Its drooping eyes hinted at some sorrow in its life. It could be about love, work, friendship—who knows? It was whistling an intense, high-pitched, mournful melody. There was a faint smell of old shoes. The weather wasn’t helping much either. The drizzle was insignificant. It didn’t wet you, but you could barely feel it on your skin. I said good evening, and it replied without looking at me. I approached slowly. It didn’t flinch. It remained absorbed by the ripples in the water as if it wanted to jump into the pool. At that moment, it decided to take off its shoes and socks and put its claws into the pool. It let out an intense scream. It hurt my ears. It said, "Get out, I don’t want friends." "No!" I said, "I’m not leaving until you tell me the truth." "What truth?...

 The hot morning coffee, as bitter as Teodoro liked it, mixed with his anger at not having seen the sunrise. For 364 days without fail, he had experienced it each morning. He almost missed it once due to intense stomach pain that nearly sent him to the clinic. However, his determination and perseverance allowed him to endure the pain, open his apartment door, climb to the building’s rooftop, and breathe in the fresh, cold morning air. And today, for the first time in the year, he couldn’t see the first rays of the sun. The bitter coffee couldn’t replace that feeling. "It’ll be for next year," he told himself, accepting his fate. "Goodbye, nature," were his last words as he went back to his room. He locked the door, put on three padlocks, and went to sleep.

 The steel ball moved from side to side. Slowly. Gradually, it approached the edge of the table. It almost fell off but then rolled back to the center where it started. Mary and her ex-boyfriend watched the ball move whimsically as if it had a mind of its own. Years later, she claimed she had been manipulating it with a magnet. An unlikely story she insisted on proving with fervor. After the ball fell violently, crushing her ex-boyfriend’s big toe during an argument that was far from friendly, she was taken to jail. A place where she never admitted her guilt.

 As Johnny was cutting out the shape with his special left-handed scissors, the teacher was writing the longest words in the Spanish language on the board. His idea was to write the most difficult words he knew from the dictionary so his students could never learn to spell them. Maybe his twisted idea was meant to set an example for other teachers and was frightening for the students, but the method corresponded to precarious forms of grammatical understanding. It wasn’t such a crazy idea. Anyway, the model teacher, a paradigm of the educational institution, suffered a cut from Johnny’s scissors right after he finished writing on the board. It was an accident, Johnny said, as the finger rolled across the blood-red floor. I didn’t mean to cut his finger, he replied to the teacher’s cries of pain.

 Walking down the busiest avenue in the city, a shoe salesman lamented that his life was a tragedy while his neighbor’s was beautiful. With every step he took, he thought of another excellent excuse for why his life was miserable. Although his life wasn’t as miserable as he believed, he always had a discouraging thought that one of his worst decisions was becoming a shoe salesman. I could have been a car salesman, a razor salesman, or even an ice cream seller, but why on earth did I choose to sell shoes? I hate smelling people’s used shoes, I hate handling hot, sweaty, and sometimes even sticky shoes. I detest trying to convince people to buy these shoes, which aren’t that great anyway. The only thing I love about selling shoes is walking around the city. Walking on these clean, modern streets. Breathing the fresh air and taking my dog for a walk.

All the kids appeared out of nowhere, shouting, raising their arms, calling my name over and over, like an angel had just descended from heaven. I felt like a rock star. Like a Beatle in the '60s. Like a Ferrari crossing the finish line. No offense to the other teachers, but my students were the best—they always were, we just hadn’t met before. We took first place in the soccer championship, and that was huge for them. For me, the important thing was that no one got hurt or cried. Winning doesn’t excite me anymore. Some say I’m a conformist, but I’d say I’m more of a magical realist, not in the literary sense, but because of the metaphysical awareness overshadowed by the cultural theatrics that always push the boundaries of the regular sociocultural norms of an average school in a modest neighborhood.

The green and yellow butterflies living in southern Africa, with long legs that look like swans’ legs, fluttered around Juan Francisco’s window. He was a tall, skinny kid with legs resembling the butterflies’. The alarm went off; it was 7 AM, and Juan Francisco's friend Ignacio, the most sought-after athlete by the soccer clubs, was already outside his house, waiting for him to head to school together. They sped off on their bikes, the wind brushing against their excited faces. Some butterflies landed on their shoulders. Everything was fine until they saw a shiny stone, glowing with its own light in the distance — or at least that’s how it seemed. The butterflies were landing on it. They stopped to watch. Everything felt strange, really strange.