The Threads of Retribution

By Carlos Higgi-Naumann

After almost four decades, Amelia Grover receives the answer to a question she asked during her childhood; she does not remember it. It is a fulfilment of a promise made by Agrippina. Amelia must cross a series of thresholds. Dimensions bring predestination that Amelia must assume, forcing her to lose something precious.

Through Agrippina

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carlos Higgi-Naumann
• Release date: Jun 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922629241

Book preview

Chapter 1

My Prelude

You were, are and forever will be our perfect creation; your ultimate moment begins now little memory. You are free to word this saga. Three sounds conveyed into one voice***

In my best times, I always wished to be human. Now that I find myself decrepit, that feeling is more ingrained in my being. My era of perfection is becoming a thing of the past. In my future, I can only glimpse a number; 44460.

What does that number mean? You may ask yourself; I will immediately clarify, that number is the seconds I have left to live. It will take you, Mr reader, to read this story. I know, I deceive myself. It could be 741 minutes of belief and disbelief or something like 13 hours of darkness and light.

Anyway, it does not matter.

Whatever the deliberation, the absolute truth is there. The small irregularities of the earth; time, will not change what I know; the whole of life and nothingness where we go after death. Therefore, I must begin with my story.

I come from an exceptional woman; Amelia Grover. I am her memory, an undetailed copy of a manuscript which is not yet lost. Embedded in my name, I keep the words and paragraphs that once completed it. In that cosmic essay, episodes float tied to the thread of my being. ‘I didn’t let them go! Not yet!’ Diaphanousness has not reached me; however, I am not complete. Although a non-living being, I am one of a kind! I am no longer what I once was. Of my exquisite grandeur, as a magnificent jewel, and now degraded, my reality is nothing more than an ordinary piece of negligible adornment. I cannot escape from my real courage.

As my Amelia did, I accept this legitimacy. Something remains of my perfection. I tried to find that beginning. In the continuous ascent of reincarnations, transitions and deaths, they have dragged me from one life to another. Many lives have been here with me. Pure and other distant beings. ‘I can still feel them!’ They form the imperative set of an ending which has not yet reached me!

In the substance of my being, I have written those facts that marked my becoming. Although this tale is part of my exceptional human being; it does not belong to her. I will be a mere observer of this story; I will try to restrain my impulses. I must!

Nor do I seek sympathy. Pity is something I have rejected, something I do not wish to be associated. My relief is part of what I’m made of, but it does not lessen this damage’s depth. Although my knowledge is harmful despite that, when I get to my last chapter, ‘I will give in!’ After that absent moment, I don’t know what will become of me.

‘A second life?’ I doubt it.

I will try not to confuse my reality with stark immolation. Even though my form is less than unnatural, I am not dead. It has taken me a long time to convince myself. I was never a sacrificed victim, and there was never an evil intention in what has happened to me. Resignation is a word I wear and drag. Perhaps, my exceptional woman, there, she also would take shelter after my end.

We were both born in September; the day is not relevant. A little over 52 years ago, I thought. We complemented each other; she nurtured me, and I provided what supposed to come from me.

The almighty silent has returned; something forced me to concentrate on my aim. They stare at me and talk to me.

‘You must put an end to your compulsive obsession, uttering about your perfection.’ From the stillness, their voices roar. ‘I must be silent…! To them, I listen.’

‘You will obey, and you will ignore those details, which are not even necessary, to the judgement and openness of this story you are about to tell, be truthful.’ ‘About your Amelia and yourself. Be brief little memory.’

‘I say yes to *The Norns.’

On the path of this story, I will not be alone. The voices of those entelechies will remain with me. Although not like yesterday, I can still perceive colours and realities. I can see them. They are three stones, tall like the Trojan’s columns. In it, written with trillions of stories; human history. They will be my rulers and guides. They show me the steps as I follow the knots of this saga. The others are substantial, force me to focus on my mission; towards the most important journey of all. With some distress, I return to my saying. I return to the Ink and golden milestone.

In my story, the engraving of those lives continues to throb. They intertwine it with the certainties for which they have chosen me, namely able to narrate them with the knots of fibres and lament. Before reaching the end, the Time has empowered me to jump over it and pass through it and go back to the starting point.

That Time is a female.

Like a Casta Diva, her hair comprises an infinite forever unequivocally, and she is endlessly fertile. It is overflowing with sugary naphthalene, which does not stop reproducing by itself.

Yesterday, in this rumour, Time did not exist, and it has not made up futures. In that epigraphic voice, she told me that everything is written with stupidity and can be erased with wisdom. With calmness, she comes dressed in period costumes.

After that marvellous encounter, I saw her stretching itself beyond the infinite.

* * * *

I am ignorant of the original purpose, or if it ever existed. The beginning of this story seems not to matter. Not for me! When oneself is, unwittingly, the appointed one, worthy of a sentence ancient and vast, all I can do is continuing.

Undoubtedly, that grants me the privilege to recount the events. Even if they are in the most absurd and horrendous realities, increasing and magical. I do not even know; if this moment of reflection is a part of my yesterday, or it is a present, which has not yet happened. That is the only thing that lingers and confuses me. Still, I will not remain silent.

I will tell before my powerful voice dies out. And the sentences reach out to my exceptional woman; Amelia’s senile state. I will peel all those layers until I reach out to the core of Kaspar Sabacio and his reason to be and walk among humans.

As irony would have it; as I know, omens would coincide to me and everyone. If someone were to find my story, ‘do not worry, my condemnation will not reach you! It is a bond of a reserved soul!’ Nor do I wish to show me before you as a distorted memory, full of resentment, or with altered energy. I am what I am. Perhaps, I may sound cynical for you, and I’m not justifying that I am easily frustrated. I can be the opposite, and I assure you, Mr Reader, I was never, or will never become an aggrieved memory. Full of bitter moments.

Freely and with some trepidation, I can say, there have been many specific events, although difficult to understand, that came to me to fulfil someone else’s promise. ‘There is my only achievement, I wish it had borne offering out of my flawed perfection! But it’s not.’

The plot of names is still present, I can see them, and I can smell them. They are not confusing.

They emerged the day Amelia Grover, my exceptional woman, woke up half a second earlier than usual. She felt sunrise was aloof to that day. Eyes still closed, she sensed the shift in time. Something did not fit at the beginning of that dawn as the layers of time were spreading out. Far, far away than my capacity to remember could stretch out.

The second was different, in its time, from any other incomplete moment; that insecure feeling was new to Amelia and me.

Even that peculiarity was not strange to Amelia Grover’s unique and chronic nature.

Amelia hummed softly; she was in no hurry. She granted that privilege to herself. To wait for whatever was coming in our way. Her mind reached for the most precious memory in me. She thought of her mother’s tit. That immense security of that memory gave to my Amelia the comfort to protect herself from unexpected worries.

For you perhaps, Mr reader, may seem a morbid evocation. A mature woman was thinking about her mother’s breast. ‘Is incomprehensible, or unwarranted perhaps?’ Well, I can assure you, they make memories of that, and all that is unmentionable.

For Amelia Grover, that thought was so personal, unique and natural. I, her mastery, knew it.

That reminiscence went beyond the nipple or the milk that once came from it but the tit itself. In that window of time, a bond always sheltered her, granting waterproof protection from predicaments of her childhood. Amelia thought that she could put an end to her unexpected concern in that safe and preserved remembrance.

But the reference, taking precedence over the tit’s tie, was only the bond that came before she was born. When she was still in the belly and could listen to her mother, singing invented melodies; among many lullabies, there, in her own, in that safety box. Floating in the liquid that bred her, she stayed another eleven days. Contrary to the act of life-giving. She would not be born during, and not before, preparing homes preserves. Perhaps that act of refusing to come to the actual world may seem upside down. The tradition of making the homes preserves; was when Amelia’s family happiness was at its pinnacle. Amelia did not want to interrupt that perfect but straightforward moment.

That day the foetus that had already been dragging two souls of its own, letting three of her mother’s comrades, cried. Coming from the womb itself, she would prolong her gestation. That hissing sound broke into the ears of all present women. The pregnant woman’s belly was moving uncontrollably as if the baby in that unlit space was looking for air. The unborn child’s willingness informed the painless whining readiness. It was her decision.

One of the three women approached her right ear to the belly. ‘This little one has health lungs, I dare say.’ The second woman smiled in reply, as she tried not to reveal that the baby’s sound brought a gone by life. The third one remained silent; as nothing is to be told yet.

* * * *

Amelia Grover needed to think of that endless peace attached to the tit, unique and motherly. Yes, to the only tit her mother ever had; which had served her so well to nurture her young and some unforeseen foundling. But why remembering now? Why thinking about that?

She could not stop pondering.

Amelia could not detain time anymore; she opened her eyes and looked at the clock; it was 5:24 in the morning. Her usual wake-up never fluctuated infractions. If it were more than a second or less than a minute, it would always have consequences, which afflict her or her loved ones. Advised by her common-sense and supported by her reason, she should not contradict those facts, still unknown to her.

I know that for a long time, Amelia Grover had stopped asking the wherefore of things. From her former existence, the answer lay in the habit, to which she had already given in, Amelia had to ignore those things she could not confirm.

Amelia Grover had been born with the marvellous ability to remember details, moments and events, linking her and everyone. Detailed and straightforward information and scenes from everyday life. Under the equation of fate, I, her privileged memory, allowed her to intertwine contingencies patterns. Thus, the conclusion let her foresee the most uncomplicated and most intricate events before they could ever occur. Before being conceived, that soul given to Amelia brought added gracefulness along. But in this existence, in her life tarot, solely, I would be her *Le-Monde.

At first, as a child, Amelia tormented herself. She knew she could not avoid some tragedy.

For example, a simple fact might overcook a roast in the oven because of her mother’s worries. Who in three days-time would have to help a neighbour who would fall into a hole two blocks away from Amelia’s house as Amelia saw a fracture appearing on the pavement, as she walked by. Unexpected links would relate that event to an even more atrocious moment. The local pharmacy building would burn to the ground; because of the cashier lady in question; Amelia’s mother. The single breast woman would forget to tell the pharmacy’s landlord that an electrical outlet was defective, from which dense smoke had been billowing for three days. The day of the pharmacy’s fire, precisely at 10:32 minutes in the morning, a bus driver would lose control of his vehicle. As he would try to avoid a fire engine, crushing against a light pole in the accident, Amelia’s best friend would die.

Her friend did not listen to Amelia’s advice, as firm as a solid stone; ‘Do not take the 10:05 am shuttle bus.’ The senseless death of the young woman would be a limit that Amelia Grover could not exceed. All accidents intrinsically related to her mother’s forgetfulness to all accidents.

That was my conclusion, and Amelia withheld that information.

Amelia knew the facts are there, in front of all of us. Only she could see them. For her, each being born with specific weaves, which strung together to the rest of humankind. At six, she learned to read the time and everything that comes attached to it. She understood she possessed a marvellous attribute, and that terrified her. As time and events walk side by side. That tiny event helped Amelia to understand the future. No one would ever listen to her mathematical premonitions. Even if they could, events would out-correct themselves to deliver the same outcome. Amelia Grover had been born to be just a spectator, unique and selected.

Now, I can observe Amelia’s life and those two previous lives in which her soul and her essence had to pass through time and defined existences until I reached this point, where I am recounting. However, granted to me, I possess the immense prerogative of knowledge, giving me a unique authority. Shortly, I will untie those knots that tie the lives of my remarkable woman to others’ lives and the extraordinary existence of Kaspar Sabacio.

He, with a solitary soul, magnificent beyond comparison, like the vigour of his order.

---

* In the Norse mythology; The Norns are female beings who rule the destiny of humankind.

* Le-Monde (The World) represents an ending to a cycle of life, a pause in life before the next big cycle beginning with the fool. The figure is male and female, above and below, suspended between the heavens and the earth. It is completeness.

Chapter 2

The First Thread

Amelia held her hair together with an old toothless brush; the greys had taken over her eccentric head for some time now. That was an incomplete act; a wild curl, like a smooth waterfall, fell on her Nefertiti silhouette. The depth of her eyelids had settled more than they once were. Her eyes, almost with no eyelashes, were still big and almond-shaped, dragging some subtle wrinkles. The voluptuous generosity on her lips was still there, weak lines showing at their corners. These were not the consequence of some uncontrolled vice; Amelia had no I know.

Amelia Grover could not bear being subjected to possessive behaviour, which regularly needed to be rewarded. Those signs of the time were the fruits of her cuddles, their daughters and animals being the recipients. She felt that saying ‘I love you’ or ‘how much have I missed you’ when the words attached to the skin were genuinely worthy. She grew up hearing, feeling that love was palpable when it is real, and that was always worthwhile, never pausing before the sublimity of a message of love.

* * * *

Before Amelia got up, she looked at her husband. Boniface, while sleeping, was buzzing every time the clock struck a full chime. In *isochronous and pealing words, they made him whisper his dreams. As she came out of her bedroom, I know Amelia rubbed her hands.

‘Come to me,’ she thought.

It was not because of a wintry breeze; she did it so that her blood would bring to her mind and me those meddling and brilliant ideas.

Before opening the doors to her daughters’ rooms, Amelia paused. She murmured the time rhetoric, thinking about the facts that each of them would live that day. In understanding, Amelia Grover sighed. The catastrophe would not be present. With the chest filled with joy, she tried not to think about the threads holding their lives. Like Talia, her oldest and the line of her terror for teeth’ decay. Or the twins, both allergic to all. One to anything green, and the other to everything liquid in white colour. And Amelia’ youngest daughter, Dew, with her everlasting silence, fear hearing and to speak.

After living twenty years in that house, Amelia Grover knew perfectly well which specific floorboards would creak. Down the long hallway, sliding, she tiptoed, playing, jumping on non-existent hopscotch. Her joy would be momentary.

I heard her think of the delayed spring, the bills and the pantry she would fill that morning. She thought of the world’s problems, droughts, the famine of how those hardships were present in humanity’s daily life. Amelia was neither a philosopher nor intended to be. Of that, I am convinced.

To ward off the pithy anguish of that morning, Amelia Grover needed a solemn thought. As she fell back into her mind, I interrupted the intention. She could not set aside the safety of her mother’s breast gave her. That only happened when something was approaching in large quantities, events that marked a new chapter in her life.

She dreamed of the tit of the day, when Boniface, entering a bakery one morning, almost killed by a sack of flour that fell on his head. The accident had poured self-righteous fairness on him. Which, for all but her, represented a quiet solemnity.

Or when her third daughter refused to hear, and speak, for four days; because a classmate had revealed:

‘All Christmas’s gifts are brought by an obese man, he has got bad breath, and always is wearing a borrowed costume, underneath his beard there is always a different face.’

According to the informer, the real name of that character varied from year to year. They knew the truth to all that invented chubby in the red suit decided who was good, and worthy of his grace. It was there when her daughter proclaimed she would not speak or listen to nonsense behaviour. Amelia Grover took four days to explain to her that not everyone thought as she did.

‘People prefer to believe in something made up, instead of thinking for themselves! My sweet darling, you must perceive everyone’s beliefs, and respect them. Especially of those who are to be convinced there is something greater than the universe itself. If they have borrowed those beliefs, given or imposed.’ She stated.

* * * *

After passing through the hallway, Amelia Grover continued her slow monologue, the continuous sums of logical links. She did not stop her calculation process, knowing that Leopold, the eleventh rabbit, waited outside in the grassland. The animal was crawling through exaggerated vertigo. That dynasty of leporids had all shared the same name. I know, Amelia Grover was glad to think that there would always be a Leopold near her.

In her life, she had all kinds of them, lazy, fat, or bad-tempered. Even one who suffered from a dog’s delirium, Amelia did not care how they were. After the third one, Amelia decided that those who came would be named Leopold. My remarkable woman never got to know. The soul of that animal, wholeheartedly, returned and again. To be born and to die in that house. With that particular family for receiving that woman’s love because the beginning of that animal’s happiness stacked to the very skin of Amelia.

* * * *

Amelia decided that before the hens would wake up, it would fit to collect the eggs. She used to bring a tiny offering to the hen-house; she could not bear the guilt of stealing.

‘A sweet rejoicing compensation eased the grief of loss,’ she thought.

She entered the kitchen, the house’s soul covered with scents, opened the old tinplate with a flimsy daguerreotype image of a queen, taking out four shortbreads. Amelia put them in the pocket of her nightgown, crumbling them. That action made her feel redeemed.

She had to collect the eggs before the chickens missed them as Amelia made an omelette or poached them. At noon, always hearing the clucking, her mind could not bear the guilt, and her mouth could say; ‘what are these creatures saying about me, Mother Nature?’

She put on the shawl and the wellington boots. Before going out into the cold, I reminded her that the day before she had got her feet dirty with poultry manure. She stopped in front of the umbrella stand. Again, she had to hold the tangled mess on her head. Amelia Grover was still thinking about the tit. She added the half-second in advance to her focus when she woke up; somehow, she could not tie both things. They were an unparalleled mess; simplicity had put weight on me. That terrified her, made her feel helpless. Amelia felt her feet were marking her presence in the floor polish.

The feeling of nothingness passed through both of us. Nothing made sense, nothing was what I saw, and nothing was what I could forge. ‘Something is missing in this shapeless moment.’ She pondered.

For Amelia Grover to measure events and understand the outcome, it was necessary to intertwine those critical moments with something specific, accurate, and particular. To one first mark, to which she had to tie the remaining points.

They disabled Amelia Grover from her mastery. Aware of her lack of knowledge, a sweaty burden surfaced on her forehead. Her skin glowed. It was a damp omen.

Amelia Grover knew then whatever was coming; it would mark her life, so she could not unravel.

As nothing more would matter that day; Amelia felt that time-shifted was coming back and was about to reach her world. She did not hesitate to carry on with her stealing enterprise.

---

* Isochronal sound ; performed in equal intervals of time.

Chapter 3

Dawn of a Prodigy

As a child, Amelia Grover learned the significance in her family chores, trivial things, essential details that no one but her could notice. Considering this ability, she learned to surrender herself. The quickness of the results depended on how old was the memory that emerged from me. The entity, which ran through me like a funnel made of gradation of time, I connected to several essential characteristics.

I gave Amelia the patterns, and her logic delivered its results, supplying a total of events. The outcomes were always accurate.

She was never wrong.

Invariably her conclusion led to a denouement. It could be an animal, a name, someone, or just a noun, even a concept.

Yet, it was always a word.

That ability gave my Amelia the gift of looking through a peculiar peep-hole, one fixed in the future. On the other side of that magic glass, the event exposed as she thought, only predicted a conclusion extended into a lot made of twenty-seven days. If my exceptional girl had wished so, she could have unscrambled her entire life, with events, days, minutes, until reaching this point in her life, where I am recounting this saga and the others.

Such a feat would have taken her seven years of self-induced meditation, like a Buddha, but that revelation, she never knew. And I am glad for that, imagine, wasting seven precious years, sitting under a fig tree, or eating a grain of rice from time to time, just for the mere fact of knowing that I, at the end of her days, would not be so perfect. Such a sacrifice is not worth it; but yes, there is a fig tree in this story, which cannot change.

Next to the nebula that surrounds my memories, there is one morning engraved, Melba, the-quasi-soprano, noticed. Her little girl whispered words, simultaneously as her tiny hand tickled something impalpable mid-air. The incident lasted just a couple of minutes; the girl’s whispering, ending in a name. One day, the assumption of the-quasi-soprano materialized.

The child constantly repeated something Melba could not understand.

On a Monday before the clock struck eleven in the morning, Amelia began a pained murmur. Something distressed her.

‘Milkman!’ said the girl in a weak voice, repeating the word repeatedly. Then she added another name ‘Bertha! Milkman!’

On her neck, her the artery throbbed fiercely. That unexpected trance ended.

‘Aunt Bertha!’ Her great-grandmother did not understand what this four-year girl meant. Perhaps she had seen something improper. It made no sense; the milkman was a skinny boy, and Bertha was an octogenarian neighbour who spent her life pampering other people’s children. Melba saw that absurd image in her mind, in which the milkman was kissing the older woman. ‘This absurdity goes beyond my comprehension,’ she said to herself.

‘Girl, what do you mean?’ she asked.

From the street, a scream interrupted Melba’ questioning. She ran to the door. Horrified, she could see aunt Bertha lying on the road, all bloody. Many people came out of their houses to see. Later, it became known that the milkman, while driving his delivery van, had a coughing fit when aunt Bertha was walking across the road and struck her.

Amelia’s great-grandmother realized her little girl had something special. She told no one; the woman had her reasons. Her long life-experiences reminded her of evil tongues and wretched souls.

After what had happened to her brother, Melba did not want to turn Amelia into another attraction, or a piteous fairground monster. Her brother had been prolific once, at predicting earthquakes and floods. Those events depended on the pain’s intensity in his chilblains, along with cramps and spasms in his spleen. The clairvoyant became known everywhere. In the fields, they paid him to predict the seasons, even eleven months in advance what the years’ time would bring in the way of weather and the bounty of the year’s harvest.

The profits were so great; he could buy a small farm. That was before he’d fallen in love with the damn liquor. At the end of his life, he’d confused gut’s spasms, with the pain of fibrosis, tremors with raindrops and the other way around.

People mistrusted his predictions.

One night, inebriated by alcohol, he fell asleep on the railroad tracks, woke up with his feet severed. The poor man survived, but because he no longer had the gift, life had granted him. He surrendered to his pity; he died of grief.

Melba knew many people claimed to have been born with ‘gifts’, as she called them. The-quasi-soprano could distinguish perfectly well a true healer from a quack.

After that disjoint event, the-quasi-soprano knelt looking at her girl, grabbed her by the shoulders and with a beseeching voice asked:

‘How did you know what was going to happen?’

‘It was shown to me,’

‘Who showed it to you, How? Tell me’ her great-grandmother said, with the pressure on her nape was about to explode.

‘She pointed it out to me,’ Amelia answered, fearlessly.

‘Who is she?’ Melba thought of some flitting ghost.

‘Genevieve!’

Before her great-grandmother could ask who Genevieve was, Amelia looked at her gently and said:

‘Genevieve is my memory.’

That is how I became an entity. In that minute; that morning, and with that personal action of my exceptional girl. Complete and splendid. From that birth, a speech grew between Amelia’s and I, in her life, I was almost a living thing. I revealed Amelia as if alone, innermost thoughts and feelings.

From that day on, the-quasi-soprano swore that her glowing girl would not be the subject of idle gossip. The woman knew how words could consume the soul, turning the being into something evil and far from kind-hearted. Melba sensed something destined to Amelia for something monumental and magnificent.

Now, in delivering my assertion, I can understand that completely.

Every time she saw her great-granddaughter, categorizing things in the air and muttering syllables, she tried to protect her. She asked her to sing a folk song, any because it related those melodies to tangos, and they distracted those who listened to them; pushing away realities that hurt, bringing others that had music.

The-quasi-soprano knew that for those born vigorous as a hammer, nails would fall from the heavens. And pins that would help her in her ascent, and they would surround her great-granddaughter, whatever it was. She could, but did not want to glimpse what the future held for the girl. Palmistry had been Melba’s mastery. From a very young age, she had provided for herself with that divinatory process. Whoever asked, she taught her art as long as they had a kind heart and a transparent soul.

In her long life, she regretted only once having given her knowledge to the wrong person, but she did not know how vicious