ORPHIC ❃ O-Dog

彡 ¦ 第一章

Julian Arvelo Backer was very addicted to opium. As she understood it, the woman had contracted this habit at university because of foolish recklessness; After reading DeQuincy's description of his dreams and sensations, she soaked her tobacco in laudanum in an attempt to achieve the same effects. She discovered, like so many others before her, that this habit was easier to acquire than to abandon, and she lived for long years being a slave of the drugs, inspiring a mixture of horror and compassion for her husband and adoptive daughter.  Who could still see her – face pale and bloated, her teeth yellow and rotten, with orbs open in fear, the only light present in them would be the television on – lying on the dusty chair like a wool doll, reduced to the ruin of what was a woman of bad vibes.

The little girl — named Mikaela – remembered arriving early to her mother's funeral.  The sun was above the clouds when her coffin was lost to the ground.  That cheap wooden box was lost under three meters of the feets that walked by the back part of the church that they attended almost every day; just as the recently deceased wished to be buried. She had cried to her with heavy tears falling between the thick subsoil and her worn shoes that she had been wearing continuously for a year and a half, feeling like a field of quicksand, sinking next to the woman's body.

After that event, Mikaela and her father involuntarily arrived at their small home, their movements looked unconscious and anyone could have mistaken her for a living dead, one of those she secretly saw so late at night, just when she knew that her father seemed to be in a coma – and obviously on the last day of Halloween –. She had no desire to eat, so the man made her swallow even a piece of bread at the mercy of the Greek gods. She went to bed later as if it were her first night in prison for a crime she had not committed.

To the surprise of their neighbors, and anyone who will know the Backer's family, Julian's death had not caused a distance between father and daughter.  The girl admitted after a while that at first she had to endure feeling like a bubble that didn't change shape no matter how her anatomy or mind did, but the man refused to leave her as a newborn kitten in a corner covered of raging and hungry dogs, if it wasn't his presence of flesh and blood, it would surely be his shadow.

Holmes Backer, whose misanthropy distanced him from most of the people residing in Los Angeles, California; was still dependent on where they lived, buried in the four walls of his room and pure coffee, oscillating week after week in the dim light and the electricity that made them move everyday, between the sleepiness of the blessings and the insomnia of his mind.  Realizing the reality that hit them like the little toe on the cabinet, Mikaela would not leave her father in the stinking mud, and Holmes would not leave his daughter on pieces of paper.

That happened in June 1986, right in the invisible tranquility and ignorance that characterized the city where they lived. She had to emphasize that nobody was interested in the death of her mother, completely regrettable is the case. No inhabitant of MayWood kept worrying about something for more than 24 hours. Everyone found out about the death of Julian Backer, but on the day of her funeral there was only Mikaela and Holmes, crushing the grass for a time.

She captured after several years that it was probably because the blonde woman blurted out negative terms towards individuals she considered different from normal people;  racism. One of the phrases for which she was startled was: " if it won't benefit me, and only me, I don't want to be included in that humanitarian disaster "; selfishness. Julian always wanted to be the mother of an adorable little girl, and even if she was annoyed by the fact that the only option she had was to adopt, since she was infertile, it didn't stop her from the emotion of wanting to demonstrate to her mother that it's possible raise the graphic demonstration of purity being an unclean spirit; failed mission. People simply ran away from her like the smoke crawling over her shoulder from the cigarette that always graced her parched lips.