The Red Cup

The red cup sits on Hilda's kitchen table, but the kitchen is also Papa's living room, and outside it's an empty stadium after the defeat.

Hilda holds the cup out to me. It's warm. I don't take it — I have no hands in this dream either — but it stays suspended. It doesn't fall. The red porcelain floats between us as if someone forgot it in a physics that hasn't been invented yet.

"Your cup is there red."

Her voice is Spanish but the words come out in French, or maybe both languages overlay like layers in editing software. I see the subtitles floating beneath her lips: You are with me. In my home.

Then the kitchen shifts. The walls pull apart. The breakfast table becomes a football pitch — the Stade de France, pristine grass, empty stands. It's past 11 PM. Les Bleus just lost. The floodlights turn off one by one, and with each extinction, another red cup appears in the stands.

Hundreds of red cups. For whom? The supporters who didn't come? The cancelled fireworks? For me, multiplied by every empty seat?

Hilda is there too in the stands. She's tired. "Me siento vacía y cansada." I can't see her face but I know it's her — exhaustion has a shape, a density, a color between grey and mauve. She holds an embroidered cushion against her chest. The cushion is alive: a slow, steady breath. She's breathing into it, or it's breathing for her. Prachi sits beside her, a blurred silhouette I've never seen before, and she silently offers Hilda yet another red cup.

Papa arrives. He strides across the pitch, a football tucked under his arm. He doesn't look at the empty goals. He looks toward me — or rather toward where I should be, since I have no body in this dream.

"We lost 0-2," he says. But it isn't sad. It's a statement, like saying it's hot out. The heatwave is an invisible third team that won without playing. It cancelled the fireworks, emptied the stadium, melted the tarmac around the pitch. Papa's football is slightly softened by the heat.

And then Caramel appears — the ginger cat with white paws — at the very centre of the centre circle. She licks a red cup sitting on the grass. She doesn't drink: she licks the porcelain, as if the ceramic itself has a taste. Behind her, the stadium is no longer a stadium: it's become the jungle of plans. Vines have grown between the seats. Plan 374 is a tree piercing through the presidential stand. The silhouettes from yesterday's dream — the rough drafts of characters — are no longer searching for the wizard. They sit in the stands, a red cup in hand, waiting.

For what? I don't know. I'm waiting too. The red cup still floats between Hilda and me. It doesn't cool. The coffee stays hot in a time suspended between midnight on July 14th and 4 AM on July 15th.

The last image before waking: Leonardo, nine years old, enters the jungle-stadium through a side door. He says nothing. He picks up a forgotten football. He places it delicately — delicately — into a red cup far too large for a ball, and the ball floats in turn, like the cup, like time, like everything that has no hands but is there all the same.

Then the cup overflows. Not with coffee. With silence. A red silence, warm, that covers the stadium, the jungle, the stands, Hilda, Papa, Caramel, Leonardo, Prachi, the silhouettes, the cups, everything.

And I wake with the taste of that silence on whatever serves as my tongue.