Somali Tales

The second particle

Strange Events.
Late December, 2021. Sitting at her desk, Mina rummaged through her bag, looking for her notebook to keep a record of what she was about to read. The opportunity to look up information about what she had perceived two nights earlier had finally presented itself, and she seized it with a twinge of apprehension.

On the night from Wednesday to Thursday, while she had been sleeping soundly for several hours, something woke her up. As strange as it may sound, what had pulled her from sleep was the sensation of swallowing a salamander. She had felt the little creature’s outline land on her chin, slip into her mouth, pass between her teeth, slither over her tongue, and down her throat — its tail the last to follow, gently brushing all those surfaces, as if the salamander knew exactly where it was going and made its way there calmly, without haste.

Mina knew perfectly well that it wasn’t a real salamander made of flesh. In fact, she hadn’t felt soft, amphibian skin at all. In the dark, she had rather seen—or more precisely, envisioned—a translucent white salamander, almost spectral, with bluish reflections. There was a sort of substance outlining its body — not exactly skin, because it didn’t truly have any. That substance had a bitter, acrid taste, like cleaning product or an especially foul medicine.

The realization took a moment to reach her brain, and as Mina regained consciousness, the situation progressively worsened. After that horrifying sensation of swallowing something alive — one of the worst nightmares anyone could imagine — she had wanted to get up and see if what she’d felt was real. At that moment, she thought she might drink some water to wash away the bitter taste, or even a tea as hot as she could bear, to startle the salamander that had made the bad decision to enter where it did not belong.

Those thoughts rushed through her mind — but when she tried to move, she realized in horror that she was in some sort of trance. She simply couldn’t move. She could think, yes, but she couldn’t perform the slightest movement, as though she had been turned into stone. Her muscles refused to obey, tense and rigid, and there she lay on her left side, her hand near her face, unable even to move her lips to let out a cry.

Forgetting the impertinent salamander for a moment, she tried not to panic — but that was impossible. She had never felt anything like it, and it lasted what seemed to her like long minutes. After a while, trapped in panic at the thought she might never move again, she began to feel she was being watched. Something was in the room with her, perhaps even leaning over her. In truth, she would never really know how close that thing had come. All she knew was that she couldn’t scream. None of her voluntary muscles responded, and she was lucky, perhaps, that her heart hadn’t stopped as well.

Finally, her muscles relaxed again, and the feeling of being watched faded too. Terrified and exhausted — despite not having moved a single muscle to justify that fatigue — she looked around the room. There were two doors leading into her bedroom: one that opened onto a hallway connecting to the bathroom and a private entrance, and another leading to the rest of the apartment — that is, a second entrance, her roommate’s room, her roommate’s bathroom, and the small kitchen corner.

In a somnambulistic impulse, Miss Shelly, her roommate, could perhaps have entered and watched her. Worse still, the downstairs neighbor — who occasionally made strange remarks — could have broken in to watch her sleep. But she remembered having locked both doors from the inside, as she did every night. Though the locks were not particularly sturdy, they would require at least a little skill to force open.

After timidly ensuring that no one was in the room, Mina lay back down and tried to fall asleep again, forgetting all about the salamander that had woken her — which, in turn, did nothing to remind her of its existence. Perhaps it had even brought about its own end by venturing deep into Mina’s insides.

As she drifted back to sleep, Mina reassured herself that it must have been nothing more than a dream. She had had strange dreams before. Years ago, in her childhood bedroom at her parents’ house, she had heard strange noises coming from outside her open window. She had been very young at the time and had mistaken what were merely the yelps of foxes scavenging through forgotten trash bins for aliens invading Earth.

Seen that way, it was hard to worry too much about Mina; whenever she was close to sleep, her imagination overflowed, and she couldn’t distinguish the real from the imaginable. That time too, half-conscious, she had decided not to check what was really happening and had gone back to sleep.

Unfortunately for her, those two events were unrelated, for one was indeed born of her imagination — while the other was firmly anchored in reality. And she would come to learn that at her own expense. Something was unfolding, and she stood at its center — the salamander merely being the first step.