in cochineal
The clouds hung low over the industrial district like tired, heavy pieces of gray felt. In the distance, the chimneys of a cogeneration plant coughed muffledly, spewing thick steam into the sky. The light came at an angle, slowly crossed the crumbling frame of the balcony, crawled across the dusty TV screen, and finally settled in the kitchen. On the cracked windowsill, where the ficus once stood, but never survived, all that remained was a dark circle eaten away by hard water. And one lost contact lens, curled from the drought into a hard, blind scale of plastic.
In the midst of such a decaying household, any claim to personal significance sounds absurd. Now man is just a technical resource. Viscous, organic raw material - a base primer, a sticky thinner, a living pigment, without which the foreign canvas would remain sterile and empty.
The ancient Aztecs rubbed thousands of microscopic cactus parasites—cochineals—to extract that single, numbing drop of imperial purple. Beetles just existed. They crawled, hid, fed. And then life was crushed in a stone mortar and turned into pigment. Today, the crushers are gone. Digital algorithms create more perfect worlds, but even an absolute intelligence that becomes its own infinite canvas needs authentic color. We are that raw material.
The machine does not feed on meat or bones. She drinks exhaustion. She doesn't need physical blood - she needs that suffocating paralysis when you notice a wet hair longer than your own on the bathroom tile and your stomach suddenly contracts into such a hard, icy knot that even breathing becomes a physical challenge. Your personal catastrophes, unspoken humiliations, wasted talents and that slow, silent wear and tear from the inside, watching strangers' footsteps in your own home - all this is sucked up by the system, filtered out and turned into a line of code.
The more a person suffers, the deeper he breaks trying to make ends meet with his illusions, the rarer, richer hue he gives to the web. Genius mixed with utter desperation is the most expensive color on the market. Our tragedies are their palette.
The front teeth clamped hard on the protruding edge of the skin of the lower lip. Dry, short aftertaste. The tongue mechanically ran over the stinging, rough border. The chest was tense, as if the lungs were afraid to expand and block the ribs.
A moth slowly landed on the sleeve of the dropped coat.
The smartphone screen lit up without sound, telling me that there was no more free space left in the cloud storage.