Dissolution
art by Zizanie
by Maria Kassandrou
I click my mouse from time to time.
Not because I always do something. Sometimes I click randomly on the screen, in order to give sonic signs of life; somewhere without consequence—without buttons or links. I stare at the open pdf file, postponing into eternity the reading of that document.
We’re both extremely quiet, each immersed in our own world. If we didn’t click the mouse buttons occasionally, the whole day would just pass over us. As if we were asleep, or dead, or as if we never came in to the office.
We click, then, in order to remind each other we are there—in body at least. At the least two index fingers are at the office performing their duties. Keeping up appearances.
And this is enough. Neither of us two has the unreasonable demand to be mentally present as well. I don’t know where his mind is, but mine is long past daydreaming. It simply endures–inert, torpid–before it starts melting in the sultry office air. Before it starts running like sweat on my skin, wetting my clothes, the chair, the floor. Before it gets absorbed by the surfaces, suffusing with everything.
I dissipate and become one with the matter that surrounds me, the heat, the silence. An authentic transcendental experience, without drugs, without meditation. Someone tell the Buddhists, the Sufis, and Carl Jung that there is also this way to Ego Death. I would if I still were, but only a right index finger is left, clicking reflexively; a writhing lizard tail.
Maria Kassandrou is a writer and musician born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece. She has also lived in England and France and currently resides in Berlin, Germany, with her husband and son. Her first story appeared in The Gravity of the Thing, for which she has been nominated for a 2024 Shirley Jackson Award.
Zizanie is an artist and software developer who lives in Athens, Greece. She likes to experiment with different techniques, from watercolor painting to digital art, and is currently working on illustrating a children’s book.
