Although most of the people know that that scene between table-tennis plays, in which one of the players tries to catch the little ball while it bounces off every readily available surface, is one the most hilarious things to behold, almost nobody is aware of how long this situation could actually go on. One certain time though, one hapless man got to find out… but was never seen again.
After losing a point in a ping pong match, a man named “Martin” took it upon himself to catch —between the snickers of casual spectators and his opponent— an unusually rebellious ball, without much success for a few seconds. But when seconds turned into unsettling minutes, the spectators —who didn’t show the slightest intention in helping him— started to lose interest in the whole thing, and little by little went away, until they left only the poor man engaged in the, up until then, fruitless task.
The scene went more or less like this: bounce, swipe (failed attempt at catching), bounce, one or two steps forward, bounce, swipe… repeating itself over and over again, because, with each rebound off the hand or the fingers, the little ball recharged it’s momentum, and kept on moving forward in an erratic zigzag kind of way. Eventually his endeavor took him outside of the room, and put him on the street.
Thanks to the intense concentration in which he was submerged, Martin did not notice that around him the commentaries of the bewildered people that watched him pass -hunched and swiping at a little ball that kept bouncing in front of him- started being said in Portuguese, then in an ancient Yanomami dialect, and soon in a forgotten language that was little more than clicks of the tongue and guttural grunts. He didn’t see the strange stone causeway, un-spoilt by human steps for millennia, that soon replaced the ground he started walking on, nor did he notice the glyph-covered arches that crossed over his downward-leaning head.
After an unreasonable amount of time, Martin could finally clasp his hand around the little ball, just to see that, over his head, the sky was undeniably green, the moon had a twin orbiting her, and an odd number of compound eyes stared at him with curiosity.
By: Fabio Romanelli.
A Spanish version of this story is to be published in the magazine Volumen, issue #2, on the 11th of May, 2011.
