Occasional Fiction

paths that cross will cross again

2012-03-09T11:53:00.001-08:00

Take me down tonight.

Down to the wharf of the terrified tide. The children died here in the summer, searching for a place to hide in the crests of foam while all around them, their innocence collapsed.

In the wharf are the remains of my

childhood. I don’t want any part as a young

girl any longer.

Take me down. Take me

now.

I was in love with a pale boy, a fat, pale

boy who liked to touch everything

he saw.

If he liked what he touched, he would taste it as well.

Ich träume

von ihm in die

Morgendämmerung.

He loved me and then he

took me. He threw me away only when

had

nothing

left

give.

We stayed on the beach past dusk. We

were the only people alive that night and

wasn’t mine. He had torn away from me and had been someone

else’s.

The ocean mourned silently like a mother for her

departed

son.

Und da waren wir

stumm.

Still.

Schlaftrunken.

I was a young girl and I laughed silently.

Er war fein und mein für

eine

Nacht.

On my skin was a dress of dead red roses and my lips were red. I didn’t know what I
wanted
or
if I wanted to want.

He wore a mask.

In it,

es war nur ein Junge.

He made me take his mask off.

When I sleep, I remember us as we once were, when I was yours. A quiet room with a summer breeze through an open

window beyond which lay the harbor and a ship sailing elsewhere

carrying cerements

for your funeral

years later.

meine Augen

es gibt

Bilder dass sind Real nicht

könnte.

So öffnen ich

nie

meine Augen.

Im Januar, wann

der Wasser

erstarrte,

I would step

the lake

after

dark

and

walk slowly to the center

slight

and alone

and

pretend

dass

ich ein toter Baum

war.

fall

slowly

wie eine Rose

the

autumn

auf der

Straße.

And you are by our window, watching me as I fly past. Behind me is the city we have lived in and the streets we know and the street corners on which we have kissed. This city, our city. On this summer afternoon, I

drop

like a whisper

of what once

was

but you

still

are

and

murmur

Abschied.

Nursery Rhymes

2011-11-15T09:10:00.001-08:00

There was a lighthouse overlooking a stormy sea, and Elle wanted to take a steamer out to the water and stand on the deck and look at the lighthouse screaming silently to a soundless sea. She was a beautiful little girl, thirteen years old, with hair that glowed platinum in the winter sun and a fragrance of fall apples and musk. She would stand thirty feet above the water and watch the dead fish resurrect from the seabed, their mouths now open in a rictus of yearning. She would have golden worms in her hands, and they would die as well as they dropped from her fingers into the water. Once they were dead, she would watch them be eaten by the fish, their jaws unable to do anything except let the food pass through their skeletal mouths. And Elle would whisper to each worm the moment she let it fall, This is how it feels to be eaten, and look them straight into their eyeless eyes, and drop them down.

Elle was in an empty room with her parents, who were dead. The lights were off, and the only person she could hear breathing in the room was herself. Her mother had slit her wrists in the bathroom, after pulling out the chair from beneath her father’s feet. The bathtub smelled of blood and shit. Her mother had been on her period that week. There was a storm outside the window, and on one of the mountaintops, there was a flicker of orange light every now and then. A haunted old man dying alone with the wind crowing above him. She would crack open the window a bit every now and then, and watch her father’s body shudder limply as the wind froze his dead veins into ice.

The train was speeding through the churchyard. It was a forlorn rainy evening. The mud was cold and soggy, and the water seeping through the padding of the coffin smelled of formaldehyde and sweat. Elle yawned, sat up, and looked at the train as it drew closer. A drop of rain hit her wound dead center, and the sudden cold in her chest made her shiver. There was a worm somewhere inside her sternum, making her twitchy and ticklish. The train was grey with orange windows, and most of the blinds were drawn. There was an old man at one of the windows, peering outside. Elle imagined her voice would be hoarse if she shouted out to him, You can’t undress me any longer. There were a lot of other voices around her, no doubt, and Elle wondered what they would say if she could stitch all their mouths together and make them speak.

The banyan tree had a large little-girl shaped hole in its trunk, and she was hiding there. Dawn was breaking, and she could hear her friends seeking her, their little feet clumsily treading on the bones of dead squirrels and used condoms. The trunk was musty and the bark smelled of mossed-over sunshine. Rats scurried inside the base, their claws gnashing against the aging wood. One of the bigger boys who had come to play that night found her before the others did. Elle had closed her eyes for a moment in the dirty haziness of the early morning, and when she opened them, he stood blinking at her, and put a hand over her mouth before she could say anything. He grabbed her hands and forced them someplace else, and in the closed dampness, she became a small bit of rancid cheese, with tiny feet pattering all over her, grabbing at her tenderest skin and biting at her pores till she was full of milk and sap and dawn light.

The walk up the hill had been harsh and his hand felt soggy and tired in hers. There were some small spots of blood on the trail, and his sentences, when he spoke, trailed off to a distant murmur. The branches hadn’t been able to hold the apples any longer, and they were sprawled on the hilltop, red and bursting with friendliness. Elle had always been good at climbing trees, and she let the boy rest on a bed of fruit as she secured a tight knot on a high branch. He gave her a tired smile as she laid a gentle hand on his shoulder before going on her mission. After she was done, she awoke the boy from what seemed to be a fitful sleep, and led him to the tree, which glowed scarlet in the midsummer afternoon. The previous night’s moon hung low to the east. She kissed his forehead, it tasted of grubby little boy. The rope fit well around his neck, and he did not squirm. For a moment, the air tasted of innocence and cider.

As the bus wound its way around the pyramids, Elle became aware that the mummies around her were beginning to stir, even the one which had been decapitated but preserved intact. She began to inhale the fragrance of oil and natron, and the aroma of the one sitting next to her felt pleasantly masculine. There were some birds bones bleached bare by the sun in the sand glinting in the light, and she was sure that the bus had gone past these particular birds five times now. The drivers’ bandages were peeling off, and she felt too lethargic to give him her map. The one beside her might have been a jester or a king, the uncertainty of his identity was pleasantly arousing. A pair of plastered hands began pawing at her ribs, she wondered if she should acquiesce. In a moment, her decision was made for her. His facial hair was still intact, although his breath stank of resin and rice wine. As the bus lurched forward, her tights gave away to his skeletal pressure, and they came to an endless pattern of randomness in the desert.

Someone had written a dirty word in the stall, and when she mentioned that to her grandparents, they turned red and her grandmother slapped her in the face. Elle’s face stung and the finger marks on her cheeks had the scent of perfume on them. There were happy people around her, and she was relieved to not eat in silence. Dinner arrived just as she took a sip of wine, venison and pork loin with Greek salad. The long white dress the old woman had forced her to put on left her back bare and blotchy. In the frozen invulnerability of the moment, she could do anything, and so she did. Her grandparents had sliced open fat chunks from the venison, and the meat was steaming and elegant on its gold platter. She waited till her grandmother sprinkled salt on a cut and put it inside her mouth. Elle took her steak knife, and languidly swept it across a desiccated and withered neck. The tendons paused as the edge cut a perfect gash across skin and empty fat, and she could see the meat trapped in the throat, struggling on its way to be reborn. This is how it feels, she murmured tranquilly at the still figure beside her.

As a young woman, she dreamed of love and being loved by someone who could see her without her face on at five in the morning and still kiss the soles of her feet and gaze lovelorn at her bleary eyes. She would wake up in his arms to a quiet morning and make love all day long as the sunflowers turned their heads toward the summoning sun. Elle, he would cry out, I love you. She would trace the bite marks on his neck and embroider a pattern of love and lust on his belly. The only sound would be that of a fan moving slowly above their naked bodies in an empty hotel room in Marseilles. His white suit would be draped across a chair, her evening dress would be ripped apart. He would gently remove her pad from her wetness, and lick the fabric clean. In the purity of their love, Elle would reach a sanctuary from a reedy and swampy wilderness, and in their sweat and need, she wouldn’t have to think anymore. All she would have to say was I love you, knowing that he loved her.

four women I have made love with, and their goldfish

2011-07-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

1/In which someone passes on.

Harris died on Thursday.
On Monday morning, he woke up to a white room with the absent debris of two decades of silent living. The guard outside rapped on his door twice a day, at noon and sunset. Years ago, when he could summon up the smell of broken hymen at will, he had forced himself to a regime of exercises. He didn't do them any longer. The morning changed into the afternoon with the marsh outside stretched flat and salty with fungi brocading the dissolving outlines of dead fish. Somewhere beyond the water, there was a city bleached dry in summer.
He owned a large ochre cardboard box and no books. The moon was waning, and he opened the box and let his soft liplike hands sift through the photographs. He didn't know whose photographs these were, they had remained from the last inmate, and the authorities really didn't care for possessions of prior entities.
This was how he spent the last three days of his life, then: looking at a taxidermist's visual paraphernalia. As Tuesday faded into the middle of the week, Harris reflected that some of the excesses the absent photographer had indulged in were scarcely any better than what he had done. A blowfish lit up with rows of tiny bulbs ate a young girl's jaws from the inside, staring at Harris. A chestnut mare with a crucifix where there should have been an eye forgave someone or something beyond the picture it was redeemed in.
Midday, the guard glanced at Harris briefly for the first time in a month: a dream of somebody evil in a plaid shirt and an indefinite stubble, the puzzlement of the blue irises occasionally replaced by the metallic certainty of memory caught and imprisoned. The marsh at twilight smelled of something organic, something waiting. He didn't know what to believe about himself or where he was any longer. He remembered nothing definitely. A trial, solitude, rape, but not in that order. There had been a murder somewhere, and a judge too, a queue with a score of other people naked in front of a hot shower, inhabitants of small white rooms, subjects of the law unto death, a dance of death with Harris somewhere in the middle, whipped raw by the weight of indignation and moral speculation. The warm bubbles arising from the swamp were ravenously dead in a way the pictures mirrored. The beings in the pictures were just openly contorted in a way which Harris and the others were within themselves, death row facing dead row. A dead woman grinning from ear to ear with the tips of her fingers pointing to the edge of her smile and beyond to the confines of her coffin. A small fetus which carried its scent of semen, placenta and formalin beyond the fading tones of a sepia photograph and to Harris' hands as he watched the echo of the sunrise in the eastern sky.
Sometime in the afternoon, he suffered a myocardial infarction and died in three seconds.

2/In which we remember.

Sierra felt the breath of the boy on his back, chocolate and milk and the smell of four years old.
-Let's go out.
-Open the window.
He hopped across to the window beside Sierra's desk and unlatched it. A shaft of yellow lit up the old Harvard Guide to Psychiatry.
-It's too early.
-No! It isn't! Let's go, please!
Sierra looked at the clock and smiled. Ever since the sunset had begun running backwards from September, the boy had run up to him progressively a few minutes earlier than usual.
-We'll go once the birds start chirping, all right?
The boy shuffled, and then replied.
-Okay.
Ten minutes later, there was a tug on his shoulder.
-What?
-It's a bird.
He was about to deny it, when he realized that there actually was a bird singing, possibly a jackdaw. He glanced at the bubbling figure beside him.
-Okay, come on.
The sibilant whisper of the trees had begun to approach the stillness of an empty abattoir, and Sierra was tired after an hour of walking. The air was crisp and silent, and they were at the entrance to what the boy would later call the hundred leaf lane.
-Let's go, come on. Your mother'll be getting worried.
-Some more time, please?
Sierra didn't answer, he just stood and watched the boy stand in a catacomb of brown leaves and humus. The last ray of that day's sun was changing into the quiet violet of twilight across his son's face when a redbreast began to sing, an oracle of the day passed preparing the ground for a new night to fade into another morning and on and on.
The two stood there for some minutes more, till the song died out in the silence of the incoming darkness. After that they returned home.
Thirty-one years later, the boy watched his father disappear into a crematorium and wished there was an autumn song in the smoke of the rising spring morning.

3/In which I question.

i. He was outside the operation theater, waiting for his wife to stop screaming. Her voice reminded him of a Japanese comic he had once read, about a woman being devoured by her own baby while giving birth. The doors to the OT opened, and a priest approached him.
ii. She had miscarried, and was dead. He watched the priest's lips tremble, and remembered the first time they had quarreled, her lips shaking. They had often wondered about killing each other in case something demanded euthanasia.
iii. He stepped across the room to the grandfather clock, turned the dials back, over
iv. and
v. over
vi. again
vii. Till he was back at the dance where it had begun. He wanted her to live again, he wouldn't approach her, he felt old in his uncomfortably supple footballer's body. She was on her way to him, she would ask him to dance with her, he would refuse.
viii. She passed him by.
ix. He would never kiss her, they would never meet. She wouldn't die.
x. He felt his legs move.
xi. “Um, hi. You have a date?”
xii. “Yes, but he ditched me. Do you want to dance?”
xiii. “Sure.”

4/In which you lie.

She was pregnant, but it wasn't his child.
Five weeks ago, she had gone to a retail store to grab some toiletries on her way to pick the boy up from school, and he had complimented her on her nails as he stood behind her in line at the cashier's. She had liked that. She didn't think Bruce had noticed anything like that for some years now. He had accompanied her to her car, and she had been surprised by how flattered she had felt when he asked for her number. She felt wanted. Later at dinner, Bruce mentioned that she looked slightly flushed and she regretted the color. It had always turned him on, and she didn't want his naked body against hers. That night, as Bruce entered her, she felt violated. She didn't want him, she wanted Andrew, with light blond hair and blue eyes, whose handshake felt strong and not sluggish, and who had pronounced her name slowly, almost as if licking along a succulent fruit: Lil-li-an.
A week later, she dropped the boy off at swim practice and headed for the turnpike and to a Best Western. He was waiting for her, with an extra top sheet to collect all the semen on the sheets. He was gentle with her dress, and savored her breasts slowly till she couldn't bear it any longer and asked him to tear her apart. They made love four times that night.
She wished it would rain. On the dining table, the ice in the jar of lemonade was condensing into small droplets on the glass sides. She was sitting by the sink, her arm resting on the kitchen counter. Their bedroom was visible through the open door, the bed neatly made, the sheets blue and unsoiled. Somewhere outside, an engine started up and a car drove out into the Wednesday morning.
There was a knock on the door. She considered letting it go, but then decided to answer it anyway after the second knock.
-Good afternoon, Mrs. Hale.
-Yes?
-I thought you might be interested in this set of glasses, blown by quality workmen in Tacoma. They've got floral patterns perfect for a fine night with some wine. May I come in?
She felt too lethargic to say no.
He was a large man, with black corduroy trousers and a striped tie, and he was sweating heavily.
-Would you like some lemonade?
-That would be wonderful, thank you.
As she opened the cabinet to take out a glass, he spoke.
-Why don't you test one of these?
-I don't really know if I want to buy them.
-You could try one all the same.
He took out two glasses, and she poured the liquid in carefully. They were pretty, with rose stems outlying the edges and a delicately curved rim. They toasted.
-This is a fine house you have.
-Thank you.
The stem of the glass was icy, and the lemonade was sweet.
-Notice how they bend to your touch.
-Yes.
They were silent. He drank noisily, with the sweat on his forehead intermittently pooling across the bridge of his nose and into the lemonade.
-Well?
They were good glasses. And perhaps she could stare at them later in the night when she talked with Bruce.
-I'll buy them.
Ten minutes later, the glasses were on the table, and he had left with a check for twenty dollars.
She poured herself another drink, and decided she needed some gin.
The gin went down easily, and she didn't feel too heavy. It was bright outside, the sunlight a shade of algae green. She considered what she would give Bruce to drink when they talked later tonight. A gin and lemon cocktail, maybe, they were out of wine. The chair where the salesman had sat smelled faintly of deodorant and sweat. Andrew was probably in school, teaching history to high school kids. She wondered if she should call him, and was tired of wondering. She brought the vermouth closer, and began pouring it into a glass. Her hands were shaking, and a little motion of her pinky knocked the glass over. The crash tinkled in the empty house. Lillian sat there looking at the gin trickle its way along a fossilized flower stem.

Last Anniversary of First Winter; Intermezzo 1 / Dead Letter Office Box 371

2011-06-02T19:47:00.000-07:00

Last Anniversary of First Winter; Intermezzo 1

Do you remember, Adrian, that first winter? The first time it snowed?
We were at the picnic tables beside the lake. It was a flat day and I was
cold and upset. You had your back turned to me and towards the water,
which was a sheet of metal. The wind was biting and every time I attempted
to say something to you, the wind cut off my stillborn words. I was
looking at the ground, wondering what you were thinking, and praying that
you weren't tiring of me already. The first flakes hit my hair, and even
as I was cursing the rain, you were up and staring at the lake, where
there were small ripples already. “Miranda”, you cried out, “look at the
snowflakes! Look at them on the water!” And then you reached out for my
hand, and you grasped it, and dragged me closer to the water. There were
small fishes groping below the surface, and the flakes, falling gently,
made them appear to be driven by slow, kinetic thrusts. I don't think
either of us spoke a word, we listened to the snow fall softly and the
silence of the lake. When I started shivering, you held me closer and we
just stood there, entwined. Eventually, the wind died down, and when the
snowflakes began to seem to be in danger of being swallowed by brown earth
and dead leaves, we left. An hour later, in my room, you made love to me
to the sound of disappearing snow.
Last night, I couldn't sleep. I considered calling Derek, but he would be
fast asleep in London. I imagined that I could make out the sounds of
summer through the hum of the air-conditioner. There would still be girls
and boys somewhere outside playing below a velvet sky, and I suddenly felt
colder than I had for some time. You really haven't mattered to me much
for the past, oh my god, Adrian, has it really been thirty-two years?
You're someone who's inscribed in my past, I just want to write something
before I feel that it doesn't matter any longer.
The fall had been so rainy, I remember walking with you down the wooden
bridge from the little island to town as it poured, days on end, and
leaving you at the library and then going back home. We were still
pretending to be interested in other people, and I was desperate to be
sure that I didn't want you. I had graduated with a degree in political
science from Amherst, you were (I just realized that you still are, I
think I persuaded myself to believe that you stopped existing or living in
the same world as I did) two years older than I, an assistant librarian in
a small town in Michigan, where I wanted to spend a year before going to
Europe. I don't remember how you looked, or how I did, and perhaps that's
for the best.
That's strange. I was going to write about the first time we met, but I
just realized I don't really remember. Perhaps it was at the Tricorner
statue, on a fall afternoon while I ate my midday meal, or was it at the
library, you ambling up to me and asking me what I thought of Mati Unt? I
think I like it better this way, you don't have to be a concrete figure
for me any longer. Not any longer, at least.
There was cold rain on the wharf, and I would buy some peanuts from the
grocers' and come to meet you there. We ate our way through those nuts,
watching a calm, steady rain fall on that liquid sheet of metal. We would
imagine ships passing along that same wharf, centuries earlier, and it was
enough for me to know that with you, I didn't have to worry about growing
old and becoming decrepit like some scrapyard ship. I didn't know if I
could fall in love again, and I had begun to be scared by what I could
sense myself feeling for you.
I remember the date, November Second, 1963, the ground had a patchwork of
slush and grey mud, and in that café, holding your cup of coffee close in
between your hands, you waited till I was concentrating on my milkshake,
and you said, “Miranda? Miranda, I love you.” I recall tasting the
chocolate syrup and being amazed by how much being with you at that moment
meant to me: I could see myself, my hair stringy and limp after a walk in
a damp rain, looking at myself staring at a glass tumbler, facing you,
shorter than I, hair closely cut, looking at me with some intensity and a
smile, that smile, Adrian, I've seen many smiles since, but never any like
yours, and I was smiling too, and I put down my straw, leaned over, took
your head between my hands, and kissed you, I kissed you.
Both of us were virgins, and both of us had had relationships before. I
had let boys feel me, shuddered as their hungry fingers scurried towards a
part of myself I touched only late at night, when I wanted to feel a heavy
rush of blood, not mine, within me, you had held other women and fallen
asleep, and as you would confess, nude next to me in our bed, you wanted
to be loved, and I loved you. All those evenings with my aunt, when we'd
gradually fall silent and then I'd announce that I wanted to go to bed,
and the widow would look forlornly at us, we would traipse to my room and
close the door. I never wanted to stop feeling you or holding you, touch
your chest as I sensed you growing hard against my legs, we were away from
death and loneliness, I believed that I would never be lonely again, and
after we had made love, in the still darkness of those late autumnal
hours, the lights from the harbor dissipating through the Venetian blinds,
as you stroked my pubic hair, I'd clutch you tight and dream of never
letting you go.
Do people in their twenties possess the relaxed urgency that you and I had
any longer? Part of the reason I never had children was that I didn't want
to look at them when they were nineteen or twenty and wonder how they bit
or if they enjoyed each other's bodies as much as they did, because I
didn't want to feel any older that I already would be, and didn't want to
desire someone as much as I had. The promises we made, Adrian, I don't
think we lied at the beginning. When we arrived at the library together,
sat beside each other and just talked, talked about kittens, living in
Italy some day, a few snippets of political or critical argument, neither
of us really wanted to involve the other in anything serious, all of that
was silly and stupid and we were enough for one world. A child would come
up to us occasionally and ask for permission to get books from the adult
section, I cared about the rules initially and would demand to know how
old he was, but afterward, it didn't really matter.
How did we survive all that desolation? The town was dying even as you
began teaching me how to live, we were watchtowers for a life that neither
of us knew existed. Maybe you did, perhaps you just convinced yourself you
didn't. There was President Kennedy, Adrian, we were listening to Fats
Domino when the music crackled off and a voice said that there had been a
tragedy, and according to unconfirmed reports, the president was either
dead or dying. He was gone, then, the man we both loved and who had been
ours to keep. I asked you to hold me that evening, and we did, falling
asleep, two living people, alive and in love.
Here I am, Adrian, remembering all the good times we had. I was afraid
you'd get fed up with me and my constant necessity to make myself
personable and into a beautiful person. We made one another warm, two
lovers walking across a bridge that stretched itself above a frozen lake,
our footsteps sounding on the boards of a wooden whisper for love and
belonging that stretched itself in silent, white, dead land. My love, I'd
whisper to you and immediately feel your happy flush, and we were so
sensual, holding each other exactly right, tip-toeing that fine balance
between something rough and something gentle, so jagged, so intimate.
Christmas together, waking up to brandy and plum cake, and then growing
drunker and more sexual, I gifted you my body, you gave me your yearning,
enough for both of us.
What died? We tasted the snow as it fell, and I felt your desire
throbbing, manic in its intensity like the lights that lit up the wharf,
each pinprick of yellow light signaling those flashes of passion,
intermittent bursts of love and want which I knew I wanted to reciprocate.
As the winter ended, I could feel myself growing old, while you still
remained young. I was a woman, you were still a boy. There was one moment
when we were walking back from the library and you pointed out the spare
humming of a few early cicadas to me, and I realized I wanted to be alone.
Perhaps you loved me too much, or maybe I did. That silence, the silence
of winter, it was a dream, a soft dream of cotton candy and warm brandy,
spring destroyed that balance of drizzling serenity: I was too warm, too
alive, and you clung to me.
I left on April Twenty-Seventh. We corresponded through letters, I called
you often, and each time we said goodbye, I could sense the disjointed
ebbing of love in your voice. I cut my hair, I remember the hush when you
asked me why, long distance. Because I wanted to, Adrian, and because I
needed to change. And I think we were perfect and beautiful together, and
you gave me something, I don't know what, that I never really could lose.
It's seven minutes past two in the morning, I wonder how many teenage
couples have climaxed tonight and are now nonchalantly asleep. It was
about that time for you when you called me for the last time. It was
December 1964, and we had never broken up. The last time you had called me
was in October, and I was now in Perth, studying at university. It was
Christmas break, and a friend of mine and I had rented a house on the
beach. I was out there that morning, sunbathing, when a friend of mine
came up to me and told me there was a trunk call from you.
You asked me how you were and we were silent. Neither of us could
enunciate how we felt. You didn't say goodbye, and I stood by the window,
waiting for you to hang up, a bright blue ocean shimmering in the horizon.
Finally, the dial tone went dead, and I hung up and walked out to the
empty beach.

Intermezzo 1
||

Dead Letter Office Box 371

Dear Sara,
if I possess the little self-confidence I believe I do, you won't be
reading this anytime before August Twelfth. On second thoughts, no. If I
do post this, you won't be reading it before much later. Everybody tells
me to get over you, move on. Not even the men and woman I trust most
understand this. Writing this letter has been painful enough. It'll
probably be intolerable for you (not my words).

You can choose to read the following statement and discard the rest of the
letter, or you can continue reading.
Sara, I love you.
As I write this, I'm already in a desert of my own creation. I'm acutely
aware now of what its like to be alone. There's nobody to talk to or
actually be with for the major part of my day. Its usually sometime
towards the night, around ten thirty or so, that a few of my friends come
online, a few lines, and I restrain myself even then, I can't let my
feelings show.

"This was always a problem with you. You never let your feelings show."
Maybe it was, but can you actually chide me for it? I can write, I love
writing, and I'm grateful to you for one thing: you've destroyed whatever
ego I had as an artist or a writer, also as a man. I concealed my feelings
somewhat earlier simply because I wanted to keep them private and sacred.
Now I'm just plain distrustful. I can't even name myself any longer, I'm a
nameless being who can't even grant himself the stillness of death.

"What are you distrustful about?"
Consider this. I've mailed you my journal for the past year with this
letter, read through every entry. Take some time off and read through each
of them. I broke every rule of writing which I had followed, I stopped
thinking of myself as a writer. If it wasn't for what I've written in that
journal, I doubt if I would've ever come this far. I trusted you and your
boyfriend. There was literally nothing I didn't tell you. I respected you
then, I respect you still for the woman you are. I expected an equal
exchange of feelings from you, I got it most of the time. I texted you a
day or two before I left, vodka and Mountain Dew with me. And your replies
reminded me just how much I loved you. You were whole and dreamlike.
I wonder why you never told me. My best friends are of the opinion its
primarily because you were scared of my reaction. You clarified just as
much in another message.
Sara, what the fuck? I never shouted at you once as far as I can
remember. I told you to fuck off once, that's all. Was it simply because
you no longer knew how to gauge my moods? How, Sara, how? My moods? You
were with me through the beginning of the most turbulent phase of my life,
one which I now realize cost me my family, my lover, my self-respect,
my blood ties and nearly my sanity. But it takes just one bullet to kill a
person, and, if you'll forgive the analogy, it took one concealed secret
to break my trust in you. About him, later. I had almost decided on the
night you first came to know of my other blog that I would tell you I
loved you still and I wanted to return. You thought everything in there
was high on alcohol. I didn't deny it, I was an idiot. Later on, after I
returned, I nearly told you the truth on the bridge, but I restrained
myself again.
He and I haven't talked much lately, and I'll be honest with
you. I'm revolted by his behavior. He told me about how it felt to be gone down on, back when I was still a virgin, and he didn't tell me about you.
Just how long were the two of you in love? All those nights towards the
end when I turned into myself and didn't talk to you, was it then? Did he
become the lover you wanted back?
Doesn't matter now. You aren't here, you probably won't be ever again.
Losing my trust in two of the people I trusted the most has been a
valuable lesson. I'm not going to be as open with anyone else in the
foreseeable future as I was with you and with him.

"But you told me that love can die!"
It can. But death isn't an end. Its life. Life and death are the same
thing. And its too easy to mistake hibernation for death. It was only
after I lost what I had that I realized just how much I needed you. Late
January and February were tortuous, to understate it. Those weeks are painted in hues of rugged blue in my mind, the
rugged blue of early winter evenings. I would go to an empty room
and simply stare out of the window, trying to forget you and everybody
else. My sister left for Antwerp on the weekend before I flew to New
York, my father left two days after her. I woke up once he had gone,
checked my cellphone, no messages, no calls. Nobody online. Involuntarily,
the first name which came to my mind was "Sara".
I never told you any of this, I just believed that it wouldn't do you any
good to have any further contact with me.

"So when did you decide differently?"
The trip from Boston to Sydney was about twenty-six hours, including a
pathetic nine-hour stopover at Dusseldorf. Drunk or otherwise in the plane, I
was cold and tired, the only thing I wanted was some warmth, all I could
think of was you.I dreamt of luscious women endlessly nourishing me
sexually, but I didn't want them, I still don't. I needed someone to tell
me I was fine, I was all right, I was okay. I needed you.

"Why did you leave me?"
I didn't leave you because I was tired of you. I was afraid for you and I
didn't want to protract what I felt was an increasingly false affair.
Perhaps you've forgotten this about me, but the only thing I have ever
searched for through my writing and through my actions is truth. Truth
about who I am, why I am, what I am and what is am. We never talked
together about art or what it means to the two of us. Art, for me, is
writing, and art is life with all the objectivity that men and women lose
in life. And art is truth. I couldn't tell you I loved you any longer
without meaning what I said. I doubted any definition of love, I doubted
everything, and I'll continue to do so, simply because its the way I am.
The only lesson I've learned to good effect is this: love is. No more, no
less. Love is.
I've continually questioned who I am, what I am, why I am, what is am, the
nature of my existence, whether I'm real, what is real.
After my grandfather's death, those questions took on a more nightmarish
meaning. Everything I experienced was tainted with death, your face was a
centuries-old skull, I was already dust. You know about my parents'
illnesses and the legal wrangles, I wont repeat them further. Art school
was the only way out I could possibly see, and I'll admit it: I dedicated
myself to it.
I wonder if you understood the eventual toll they extended on me. You
probably tried to, but I shut you out. You were the only beautiful thing I
had left, and I abandoned that thinking that the solutions lay elsewhere.
I didn't want our lives to become a lie, and I accordingly told you so
that January night.
The breakup was always my fault. I didn't care for you enough, I couldn't
make myself someone you wanted to be with after Thanksgiving. You had no
fault.When you read this, I'll have been left with nothing of the past. I
will literally be someone else.

"So what?"
So nothing. I don't expect you to leave a man you're happy with just to
return to a steadily more puckered person. I'm happy the two of you are so
in love. Just, well, I love you, and if you ever want to return, anytime,
anywhere, I'm here. I don't think you'll ever have considered what the
next three months will have been like for me. There's another phase of my
life beginning in August, I'm at a turnstiles now, nobody to talk to most
of the time, I'm truly alone. Some people opine they would kill to live
like me. Go ahead. You've given me the strength to write something which I
didn't have enough experience for, something which I believe will be as
therapeutic as writing this letter has been. I miss you every moment.
Maybe we weren't humorous enough with each other, we took each other too
seriously. Maybe this is a mistake. Even if it is, its already been sent
if you're reading this.
Tell me something. A mutual acquaintance informs me that you told her
through an online chat that you knew I still loved you. This was when I
was abroad a few weeks back. What does that mean, Sara? I've beaten
myself up over it literally. The "I...miss you" you wrote, you seemed to
be on the verge of telling me you were willing to accept me back. I
haven't been able to answer this question adequately.

"Is this goodbye?"
Possibly. Interpret that as you will. I've played my hand.I don't know
when I shall return, neither do I want to know. This letter has taken
seven hours to write. I've taken a very long walk since then, had time to
think over the veracity of these words. Maybe they'll seem vicious, but
I've been very honest.

Have a great time with him, lead a happy life my love. I'll support you in
whatever you do.You made me perfect, and I'll be indebted to you for that.

Nine nineteen pm.

I love you.
Q.

Almanac.

2011-04-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

1. After the orgy, the women and the men lined up in the garden outside. The air was dank with unwilling consent and unfulfilled consequences and the man with the lion mask lit the pyre beside the swimming pool, lighting up their unclothed bodies. The oldest among them began the ritual. He looked into the night and jumped into the fire. The others followed, one by one, till only one remained. She breathed in the crackling skin and then climbed on top of the pile of wood. When she was done, brown and pink and crisp sputtered in the water. She waded in to the deep end, closed her eyes and drowned.

2. Two children, each of them shouting so loud that you could barely hear in your head what you wanted to say to them. He wasn't helping at all, mildly sitting at the head of the table and drinking his water. The younger of the two, the boy, wanted more roast chicken. She got up and saw the knife cutting deep into the breast. She walked up to him and placed some more chicken on his plate. As he was swallowing, she brought the knife closer and cut it all along his throat. The man started, she repeated the perforation a second time. And now there was only the girl left. She waited for her to swallow.

3. The air smelled of spiders and an afternoon stale with a dead woman's clothes. He didn't love this woman who he had wanted to be his wife, she was out shopping. The light through the seaboard window tasted of summer apples from seven years old, but those apples were dead with the clothes. He flips a coin, flips it again, and again, till its only his fingers which are alive and the spiders have reclaimed their property. He doesn't feel cold and alone, he's in a parlor like the one where he watched his mother knitting, and there's a spiderweb somewhere. He's warm, till it falls tails.

4. Four years after they first touched, they had to leave each other at an airport. As they got out from the taxi, she told him about her lover and how she couldn't stay with him any longer. She asked him if he wanted a cup of coffee, he said no, loaded her luggage onto the conveyor and left. Now he's in one of the airport bathrooms, looking at the white tiles on the walls and wondering which one would take less time, the knife from the duty-free shop or just keep on hitting his head against a wall. His flight leaves in an hour, he can hear the boarding announcement. There is a knife, there is a cubicle and there is a wall. He sits down on the floor and feels the metal against his wrist, and he waits.

5. On a warm afternoon in early spring, she walked her brother to the river, and told him to do what he wanted when he asked her if he could swim. Her parents didn't have to know. He was a smelly, grubby, incoherent eight year old, and she was thirteen and feeling fresh and new with her breasts, which she touched every night to convince herself she would be a woman. When he got stuck in the weeds and started calling out for help, it was repellent. He was stronger than that. He would be able to swim out on his own and after he came out, in a few years, he would be one of the boys who brushed against her, hard. He called out her name, until the gurgling took over and she felt beautiful again.

6. They have been so angry at each other for fifteen years, and now, when it seemed to be getting better, they started fighting over a bottle of wine. It couldn't be insignificant any longer. He hated the older man, and hadn't felt like his son or family for years now. The father had cancer, nothing malignant, and he looked so bloated and still alive when his wife was dead. He considers a knife, and then feels his fists. His fists, then. He feels the blows on the older man's skin, but hears no entreats or apologies. So he keeps on hitting till there's a whisper, and then he hits harder, his hands slowly disappearing into a soft curtain. Afterward, when there's only his own breathing left to hear, he gets up and drinks the wine slowly.

7. Her birth control had failed, and he now had a child. As soon as he had seen a nurse emerge from his room following the new cries, he had popped a mint into his mouth and started running and not stopped till he was at the underground parking space. The car squealed and blubbered its way onto the highway and didn't stop screaming till he was blinded by the sunlight by the ocean. He didn't want to have to care for a boy, he loved her just fine but he was tired of forcing himself to love and care. Somewhere in the Mediterranean there would be a couple just beginning to fall in love in golden sunshine, and he wasn't there. He was in a car with the seat scorched uncomfortably and smelling of rubber, an ocean rippling by, his head throbbing.

8. The blood wasn't clotting this time, but she didn't want to die. Her parents were asleep and the lights in the house were out. In that tranquil time she was alone. She had been raped earlier and had wanted to be free from her memories, and now she realized that it wasn't that she wanted to live, it was some defensive streak which she hadn't known existed. If she lived, she would be silent, and if she died, she would be silent. There was nothing to win or lose. She looked at her wrists in the mirror on the medicine cabinet and then looked at them in the fluorescent light. She lay down, the floor was sterile and cold, and felt the soles of her feet. Her toes were numb, and soon, she was too.

9. Nine.

December Peaches

2010-12-30T00:16:00.000-08:00

The airport stumbles over itself in the crookshack light of a dead night cremating into a stillborn day. Terminal 302, recline, sit back, watch yourself imagine a sun light up in your iris, soon. Soon from now, and he's on a cement alcove, a throbbing fire at the gristle of his nerve and tongue.
He rises and poppy seeds and sandalwood and floral paste and garlic and rice pudding and crisp white cloth swirl around, the seat opposite to you smells of a practiced breakfast and posthouse matter from forty years ago. It burns, it was once a body, and then you see him light the fire, flash, spark and s t r o b e. Watch, dysfunctional, fourteen past lime o clock in the morning, that thing on the metal platform's not dead yet, no, now he is, he died after four days in the maternal ward while he was being born into the light of a day seventy years on when he collapsed from the bookcase surrounding his eyrie of half-read books among the pages of which an adolescent boy split come on feverishly to nude pictures of someone's mother, now dead. Fly from your next terminal to your previous one running s.d.r.a.w.k.c.a.b till you're drinking black coffee again, he's calling for an ambulance, for crying out loud, motherfuckers, this is my father we're talking about, till he doesn't talk anymore and surrenders himself to the funeral police demanding money to let the endless river take over, no, I won't listen to you, I'm better off with you dead and I will go to the party, I'm sixteen, I want sex! Take me out where the rivers rustle and gentlewomen pass us by with morning broccoli and empty cartons of oranges, when redbirds swim in the sound of a sunset so large and blinding but nowhere as delicate as your father's smile as he sees you graduate. Take me out and back, please, I don't want this anymore. Duty-free liquor and souvenirs from the edge of memory tinkling around, a child's laugh into a journeyman's rattle. Reflect on this as he's reflected in the glass panel separating you from jet-bound eternity, departing and then meeting and somewhere in between, knowing.
Sob, sobs, sobbing, and the scream you quaked inside cheap red wine echoing in the empty shops and the chlorinated smoke, rise, rise, rise, run back in a loop, here, take his flesh and make it yours. Fade into the morning with which you've risen elsewhere. A chant, your flight's ready, and his is too, a button, your boarding pass in your hand into the funnel of something giant and steel and a push on an asbestos platform transporting something not quite real into black fire.
Have you really traveled six hundred miles in four hours, or is it just that you think you're someone who's gone that far, but you're just pushed back, trying to wonder why crematoriums transport people differently than airports do?

Hyderabad

2010-09-29T21:34:00.000-07:00

[fade out]
I spent four weeks in Hyderabad in July. I can no longer remember where I stayed. I lived with two other people, with a third woman appearing every few hours.

The walls of the room are pink and pale, there is a sun outside, but he's drawn the blinds and he's blind as well. The sheets were crumpled already, now he stares at the blades of the fan cut out into space, smelling disinfectant. Perhaps it's perfume.

Lunch was a dollar fifty and included grape juice. I didn't sleep much.

By a promenade along a lake. Night. There is a row of lights surrounding the water and deckchairs arranged beneath a deliquescent sky. Two women and a man are silhouetted on the lake by a yellow bulb. The man is ravenous, the women talk, one of them glances at him every few moments, as if to make sure that he's real. Her companion twinkles when she does so.

The women were beautiful and more exotic than any I had ever seen. I incepted a smile in one beneath the folds of a veil and she then crossed a street wavering in Sunday heat.

Half past two, the portico of a house. A Deccan wind combs his hair with sand and dust and cools him down as he talks to a person over the telephone about a woman he trusts and who is in despair. The leaves of a mango tree interrupt him occasionally from watching the moon as he speaks.

I arrived half a minute too late to see a goat being killed. I watched its head falling softly into a bin as I stood in a scarlet ditch.

There is an animosity between these two men, an adrenalin curtain of sorts. The television is on, the woman tries not to feel senescent while her husband listens with his head bowed as his life, achievements and failures are whipped raw. He leaves after half an hour, the younger man sits silently on the divan.

To the east, there was deception and the nonexistence of self respect. I stopped reading the newspapers.

A train slithers by along the tracks beside the kitchen. Dawn, he watches from the living room as a flat gray sky is born from an orange night. The antechamber smells of impotent midnight fucking.

The airplane departed at half past six on an evening with two people who did not trust the past any longer. It was stormy and the runway smelled of new cement and earth. This is all I remember.
[fade in]

Cain

2010-08-06T09:26:00.000-07:00

Night falling on a road, nobody else around, just you and your weight. You look around and see that this is always where you wanted to be and you're here. You'll meet someone soon.
You're tired and there are white bubbles in the blackness above when you see him over at the next crest, a flutter of blue in ink. He doesn't recognize you but he doesn't have to, brother and sister, the two of you walk together, sand splintering under your broken feet. There are no words and there are no expressions, your destination is still far. Anger burns away and disappointment fades. If the sun rises, it doesn't strike either of you, and when it sets you're asleep in your shadows. The load remains, yours and his. Sand, dust, clay, thorns until ice. Your clothes are worn thin, his face has aged and you're where you were, but you never were here.
A river, your reflections stare out, your desire has bled out from your skin. He no longer has any, and there is no shame. Echoes of forests and fruit gurgle and you stop whispering, she's behind you and she loves the two of you. Golden light ripples around the three, you are her children but who does she love more?
His hands have cupped it so long that the fingers have taken the shape of the leaf, the edges of the flesh shaved into dead arrows. She tastes him and now looks at you. Only women can feel pain, and his eyes set on you and you know that he's fine with it, he couldn't have expected a better person. His hands are of bone and the neck yields to your arm, in that moment of force you feel the sky darken and the gold crumble into ash. There is no hair and your mind is clear, there is none of the hatred you felt in the past when you fought. You pinch his lips, he blinks once and your offering is ready.
But she's not there. He grows lighter every moment, everything else is the same. When he's gone you turn to the water, his fluid already dry on your remains. You've reached the end of something, the water is warm and sour. You wanted to rest, and now, you lie down. You dream of stepping stones and galleries, of men you can possess, of being the space within conversations, and now you are dreaming with your eyes open and your feet have already scrambled you up. You'll go on, you won't be stopped, there will be regret and savage joy, everything you do will eventually be insignificant and forgotten, there is no redemption, all your dreams are burned and that is your mark. This is the beginning.

Lovers Against A Blue Sky

2010-06-20T15:03:00.000-07:00

The call came at half past midnight. Five minutes later, they were on their way.
They had left the neon green of the highway bar a fistful of miles behind them when the older man, the one behind the wheel, finally spoke.
-You remember what I told you about the nails, right? Spread them out in a long V-shape, don't be economical.
His companion just nodded. His face could be seen only during the intervals when they passed one of the highway lights, the orange roadbursts lighting up a sallow face with a three day beard and a nose which met a vulpine mouth. The driver had folded himself into the darkness. A papery voice was all which he let out.
They drove steadily north along Highway 10, ignoring the two turnstiles they passed. It was an empty autumn night and the flickering road in front of them grew grainier as they progressed, till they were the only ones left on the dirt road which the older man took at a sharp left turn moments after passing a closed gas station. He turned off the taillights soon after, and shifted to fourth as the car rolled along a painted land. They had crossed a small bridge across a gentle river when he brought them to a halt some feet beside the road. He allowed the engine to settle down and then addressed his partner.
-Get out now.
Neither of the two had been wearing their seatbelts. The younger man reached behind him and took two cartons from the back seat before exiting. He went up to the place where the bridge terminated and arranged the nails in a careful geometric pattern, a flock of iron starlings heading home to roost.
-I'm done.
The older man was standing against the bonnet of the car. He shuffled about his person and handed over an object which he extracted from around his trousers.
-I'll fire first. You probably wont have to use yours.
-How long do we wait?
-They'll be taking this bridge and going by the highway to Delhi. I'm told they were seen at a tea joint at eleven. Not more than an hour.
-Till then?
-It's in your hands.
He lit a cigarette and leaned back, still.
They didn't have to wait that long. The older man was halfway through his fourth when they felt a dim rumbling. He remained where he was, his companion crouched down beside the road.
A yellow oval lit up the stretch of land behind them, steadily brighter till sound and light coalesced into a motorcycle rushing across them, hitting the nails and collapsing onto the railings of the bridge. There was a sudden high-pitched cry and a pair of confused legs silhouetted by the headlight.
The older man cleared his throat and stepped forward.
Drag the boy out, he told his companion.
The younger man ran into the mess and felt about.
-It's too dark here!
A few seconds later, a flashlight landed at his feet. He switched it on and examined the faces: a young man, a pencil mustache airbrushed across his cleft, face partially obscured by the chest of the young woman it was buried around. The sleeves of the striped shirt he wore had been ripped apart during impact. She seemed relatively unharmed.
He grabbed the young man's wrist and held it to his ears. A minute and he let it drop. He did the same with the woman.
-He's dead.
-What about her?
-Alive.
The older man turned around and walked to where his companion stood. His face was visible for the first time that night: creased and gentle, with a shock of gray hair curling itself around his forehead. He had a light beard burnt frosty in the flashlight.
-We were told to get the couple and return them to their families. The boy's father hired us specifically to get his son back. There's nothing mentioned about her.
-So?
-So we kill her.
He began to draw out his gun from the edge between his waist and his trousers.
-Wait!
He stopped. His companion was pointing at the woman.
-Yes, what?
-Look at her.
Peachy cheeks, a good deal of flesh under the simple T shirt she wore, she hadn't waxed recently.
-So?
-She's pregnant.
The two men stared at each other.
-We can sell it.
-It's a deal. Her family doesn't want her back, there's not a clinic here which will allow us.
-It doesn't matter. This is money.
-Step aside.
The younger man had been practicing. He drew out his revolver before the other had a chance to make his move.
-I'm taking her. You try to come, I'm going to shoot you. Get behind me and go. Don't go toward the car.
They stared at each other again, and then the older man smiled.
-All right.
He started to walk slowly, his fingers nonchalant of their position. He had walked a few yards onto the bridge when there was a kick inside the woman and his companion jumped involuntarily.
The older man snatched out his gun and fired. There was a barely feminine cry for the second time that night until another bullet shut her voice out. One shot hit his companion squarely in his stomach but he used his weapon all the same, whirling it as a discus. It hit his opponent's head dead center.
The older man blanched, and fired again. The younger man went down this time.
The survivor threw his gun away and walked slowly to the car, kicking aside an arm which got in his way. He wrenched one of the front doors open and crashed into a seat.
When he awoke, there was a low hum from somewhere nearby and a metallic twist in his mouth. The gleam from the bonnet hurt his eyes. The sky was a clear, flat blue painted over with a shade of migraine yellow. There wasn't anyone around, the bodies lay where they had fallen. The husband looked as though he was sleeping fitfully in the sunshine, but his wife had her lips drawn back in a rictus of pain. Her protector had his face on the ground. The older man spat on him and got down to work.
It took him twenty minutes to push the couple inside the trunk and hoist his companion into the back seat. The air was scented with diesel and the smell of something more human by the time he finally turned the key in the ignition. He drove back the way they had come, except that he continued north when he arrived at the entrance to the dirt road. He took the next right turn at the crossroads and drove on till an exit which had a row of fluorescent lights patterning its edges. The few trucks which passed him by didn't glance at him a second time. There was a cyclist occasionally and some children strolling, but otherwise it was quiet. Somewhere nearby there was the smell of reeds, fish and wet earth. Some smaller roads cutting a swathe across rows of yellow and green fields joined in to the one he was on until he arrived at the entrance to the crematorium.
He went directly to the office, to a clerk who occupied a desk overlooking the chimneys.
-I've got a few to burn.
-A few?
-Three.
The clerk didn't look up.
-Sixty thousand.
-One of them is unknown. Nobody cares if he was alive.
-Fifty.
-You'll get it tonight.
-Any special directions?
-Try to keep the couple together.
There were two men standing in front of his car after the meeting concluded. They had three wooden platforms with them, and a plethora of incense, flowers and vermilion. He motioned to the trunk.
There are eight bodies in line right now, he was informed. It might take some time.
-No problem. I'll wait.
He used the common washroom to wet himself, and a bottle of country liquor to ease the hacksaw in his skull. The liquid hurt more than usual, and in the rancid confines of the toilet, his image in the rusting mirror appeared broken and already dead.
He headed for the burning chambers once he came out.
-Where are my bodies?, he asked the priest.
-The two you requested special delivery for are waiting there, behind the disused furnace. It's nearly time for them now. The other one we've kept for later. Would you like to sprinkle a few drops of water on them?
He considered this proposal.
-All right.
They hadn't been cleaned up in this time, and it was impossible to tell where the smell of the eaten flesh came from: the bits and pieces of once-living people scattered across the huge cement floors or simply as a consequence of the events of the previous night. The couple had eventually been thrown into the same metal platform, garlanded together and tucked within the same white cloth, a hastily drawn line of sandalwood stretching across their entwined temples, their pose oddly post-coital. The water he sprinkled fell mostly on the dead woman.
A door opened and the platform rolled in. There was an edge of flesh ringing yellow and then the door slid shut.
He went out, smoke and ages past choking his lungs, into a watercolor of blue which spread itself around a now-white center. At the foot of the entrance to the crematorium, there was a new wooden bed. A woman lay in one, perfectly poised, white hair neatly camouflaged against the pristine cloth, hands and feet curled up inside. A man sat beside her, his face turned away, looking at the reclining figure, a thin, angular person who no longer quite belonged to any known spate of existence and was instead pure and learning.
He turned around, to where the furnace doors remained steadfastly shut, and turned back again. The old man's head had dipped further forward, he was now cradling a pair of shrunken hands.
As the killer walked past him, he smoothed a stray strand of hair obscuring her eyelids, slowly, with an arthritic shudder. His hunched figure quivered in the light breeze which swirled around him but refused to carry him away, two figures in white holding on to each other as the world around them faded into blue.

Sunrise

2010-05-20T18:06:00.000-07:00

At sunrise, the lovers entered the park. It did not look as though it would be a sunny day, and the waters of the pond were gentle. They didn't speak to each other till they were past the ruins of the old toy train station and beside the old bridge which connected the small island in the middle of the pond to the rest of the city.
“You realize what this means, right?”
His voice dropped lower than usual as he replied.
“Sure. But we could still have a chance.”
“A chance with what? There isn't any way to begin explaining ourselves to anyone we know.”
“Why don't you just tell them that we're together?”
“Are we?”
He had been expecting this question himself, nevertheless, it hit him with a good deal of intensity.
“What do you mean, 'are we'? What have the last three weeks been, a sort of dream? They were good enough to be a dream, but that doesn't make it any less real.”
They had come to fork in the parkroads, they took the left turn and entered a small lane cutting directly around the pond. On clear mornings there would be a golden mirage above the water and the bits of dead leaves floating on its surface would appear like crystalline teardrops. Today, however, there was a strip of dark cloud to the east which covered the tips of the sole skyscraper which could be seen.
“Listen, I met you, I liked you, we had sex, we're with each other now. That's all.”
“No, that isn't all.”
And he stopped. She did not.
“You told me some days back that you didn't want to belong to anyone else except me. You were naked in the light of the signboard beside the hotel window, I remember you telling me that, that's the loveliest thing anyone's ever told me. We aren't with each other, we are each other.”
He nearly had to shout out the last three words to her, she had disappeared behind a hedge of bear-shaped foliage. He hurried on.
“Did you get what I said?”
“Look at the water.”
He did not think he had ever seen it this calm anytime before. It was smooth, like a sheet of tattered glass, and the tops of high buildings on the other side of the park were submerged deep into its depths, where misshapen fishes entered their empty rooms and exited through the ends of wisps of gray cloud.
“Yes, it's beautiful.”
They walked in silence till the point where the pond curved and the lane merged into a larger road bluntly showing the rest of the way. Most of the people around them were dressed for a morning walk or for some jogging, they stood out in their simply cut jeans and plain shirts, white with a floral emblem at the pocket for him and a pink sleeveless creation for her. It was extraordinarily humid, and he passed his handkerchief to her to wipe her face with. She had returned it to him when they noticed that there were tiny ripples in the water which slowly became larger till there was an ocean of needlepoints which marched on and drove back from the shore as the light twisted, every moment.
There was a rudimentary rest spot a few feet away which she turned towards, but he caught hold of her hand.
“Let's walk. It won't rain too heavily.”
She said nothing.
Occasional raindrops fluttered down from the skinned leaves above them, neither of them seemed to mind too much.
“So what will you do?”
“I leave tonight at eleven. They're expecting me back today.”
“What will you tell them?”
“I met an old friend and spent the night with her.”
“Will they believe that?”
“Sure. I have plenty of acquaintances who've chosen to forget me, I can summon their names at will.”
“Do you really want to do this?”
The statue at the exit near the eastern end was crying slow, earthy tears when they passed underneath it.
“It's not a question of want. It's what I dreamed for, I couldn't forgive myself if I didn't take hold of it now. You and I were never in my itinerary, this was something else.”
“Something else?”
“I've paid far too much in kind to leave all that no matter how much I want to now.”
They could see the path they had walked down through from the spot where they now stood. He thought he saw the two of them approaching the place he was from the other side, but only for a moment.
“I'm sorry, then?”
“It's not about being sorry, can't you see it's just the way it is? You walked to me, we talked for a day, then we got naked, we swam together, we ate together, we lived together for around three weeks. Neither of us expected this to go on forever, you told me as much yourself.”
“That doesn't mean it can't.”
“Everything ends”, and she smiled as she said this, the serenity in her face turning ashen in the cold light.
“Let's sit here”, she said, approaching a stone bench only a few feet away from the pond, opposite another fork in the road.
Once they were seated, he looked at her for some moments, but her face was turned away from him towards the posse of hyacinths creeping about below and ahead of them. It had turned from a thin drizzle to something resembling rain, and his tone, too, had changed when he spoke. It was gentler than before.
“So last night?”
“What about it?”
“We had dinner together, you told me about the telephone call, and you were leaving to return home to them. Then you suggested we come here and watch the sun rise.”
She stretched out her hand and took his palm in hers.
“Either of us would have to go anyway. You never expected to find me, you told me you didn't want to find anyone, I didn't intend to find anybody else here. Didn't we have a good time?”
“Yes. We did.”
“Do you want a kiss?”
He smiled, though it didn't extend beyond his eyes.
“That would make it impersonal”, and took his hand away.
They stayed in silence for a few more minutes, then she arose.
“Hey. Take care, be happy.”
He gave her the same smile, and replied,
“You too. Have a wonderful time. Call me when you return.”
“I will.”
She looked at him once more, then stepped onto the road and left.
He went home an hour later. Her flight departed at eleven fifteen. This was the last time they saw each other.

The United States

2010-04-06T18:12:00.000-07:00

What will I remember?
As the airplane curves down near the edge of land and sea, I can see only petals of light below, straight-chained roads and little yellow beams which turn every last bit of black into orange. I'm waiting for the turnstiles in Dubai, where there are stores but there aren't any people. Everybody is a shadow passing through, I'm invisible.I flit past prayer halls and shampoo to gate 201. My flight takes off eight hours after I land. That time disintegrates even as I wait. I'm back living once I'm up in the air.
What an ingrate I am. I love,I sever and I'll continue to do so, eating up my past and anyone I've felt for.
I step out of JFK.The hawk instantly turns me faceless. I'm No-one flashing through Highway 15, a broken graveyard calling aloud to the New York Times and the Hudson River trickling down into my aqueous humor.
A tree stretches itself out to yawn and instead freezes here.The hawk shreds it over,grabs every leaf and poisons it and leaves the bark for dead.
So these are the routes some of us choose for ourselves: polished suburbia with the cotton-gin sameness of grilled ribs and lemonade gumballs.
Last minutes at Dubai airport, men and women of all colors and intents merge seamlessly into the towering arabesques carved on the windows. Centuries ago Constantinople linked the two cortices of its world: Oriental and Occidental cultures desperately trying to suffuse into each other. They are memories now as New York will be, individuality more distinct and respected than ever, our thoughts and sicknesses striking a beacon of angst into a landscape of prototypes.
I was departing from Meriden just now and I'm already watching myself in a Middle East mirror. I'm everywhere and now there is no time any longer.These experiences fade even from the past. I was there and now I'm elsewhere.
An hour left homeward, the last thing I see is sunrise to my right and night at my left, an orange spiderweb of expectation which can't trap the moon scurrying away beyond the east. Sunrises and beginnings, cemeteries and ends, because this is how we will remember our dead: by becoming them.

Sikkim

2009-11-12T11:27:00.000-08:00

Sometime and someplace, I don't remember when or where.
Two men and a woman share the room next to mine. They stayed awake till late last night, the woman's voice jarring in whiskey-soaked strength against the baritones of her friends. I could hear the clink of bottles in the still air, their spirit-swept laughter drawing my mind further into a web of sexual abstraction on its wandering way into sleep.
Couples have come here together, all of us will come somewhere like this, all of us will make love all day long, we'll be together.
Nine forty five pm, jammed in on the top berth of a train, I can't see any snow yet.
Death is a curious thing. While sitting beside the window earlier this evening, I watched the evening sky rent with qhite spiderwebs of lightning which briefly paused time to illuminate a bridge some miles away or the figure of a cyclist heading home to bed, distant towns running past in a mazr of orange and yellow lights, India rushing up, India dying down.
A woman in red just came out from the pharmacy with the green doors, she smells of the most delicious fragrance.
Sunshine on those ridges, for a moment in the train ten minutes back, when I didn't have a pen in my hands at five forty am, I thought they were clouds.
In the dawn, as each mountain bronzed itself a porky pink, all I could hear was a waterall roaring its way into the valley, through the valley, across the valley, sagging where the roads twist, turn, slice and circle each other around these ranges, intercepted by small fusilages of water which drop out from raindrops from sunspots, wet rocks and small pebbles at their feet, the roads scooped out from the inside.
A man and a woman could lay all day long here by the side of the hill road.What would it be like, their naked bodies touching the sunburnt grass, those inscrutable rock faces masturbating to the sight of them coupling, warmth trickling across their bodies to the streams below, watching the clouds pass by from a stillborn dawn to a struggling twilight?
The Mall is a street of happiness, of beauty because you think it to be so, desire and memory. I can only watch as women and men pass by elsewhere.
The Himalayas don't exist here of there, they're all beyond what we can imagine. Sunrise on the Himalayas, they really turn pink bit by bit so softly that you just watch. Stop trying to make sense, their isn't any.
Three young women and a man passed me by on the Mall, they were gloriously happy. They were also stoned.
The environment is dying.
Everything ends, I can only accept it as we'll accept a dying man's wishes. The snows recede farther each year, one torrent of water dries up after the other and so on.
The Golden Pagoda casting silhouettes of faceless people dancing their night away as I star solidly ahead. I wish they didn't bring the children here.
The women here have extremely languid faces, I feel one night as I'm dizzy after an uphill climb and hearing a smile freeze in place from a naked window. Their faces are made of stretched plastic into which spectacles hook in like knives in fresh butter, their delicately rouged eyelids not betraying for a moment the fury within their bodies as they struggle through dust, cold and alcohol.
Alcohol. The brass Buddhas are soaked in gin so potent and harsh that their smiles turn into leers.
Ten past ten, Wednesday morning, and in the hotel lobby I remain in the sunlight. A desultory morning, a gaggle of voices from the kitchen, a mural of Old Father Graybeard adminstering lessons to a flock of animals benath some brightly-fruited orchard.
The moon's risen, a pearl earring on an obsidian sky, a single star in the North-West, or is it the South-East? What if death were just an orgasm, a point of no return, the only true checkpoint in our lives? But one moon fades into another, turns light, breaks, grows and returns at dusk. We don't return.
Love grants you hormone highs, nothing can ever extinguish them, not at that instant at least. That wetness of a kiss, the throbbing in your temples, you know someone's smiling but it really can't be you.
A lady in a white salwar with green flowers embroidered on its edges with the scent of frangipani around her stands with her back to me. At that distance she was a dream to behold.
She turs around and the light falls on her face. Her eyes are slits, her smile cracked.
The green bottle of a soda drink casts the misspelled "SOUVINIER" in a wholly Baroque light, Prince Prospero might tap me on my shoulders any moment, only he's not young or beautiful any longer: his face is eaten away, his eyes are empty and his soul's dead. O my soul.
Endless night at thirteen thousand feet, the rain pittering away and falling into the gorge cut out by the ecstasy of the falls. This is barely civilization, a cluster of nine hotels, small ones, owned by families whose coffins lie in a jagged cicle around this last outpost of humanity. The mountains rode over the car as it shot out from dead man's turns, fog rising over the rain-speckled peaks, the waters of some river softly slithering like a krait far below, the lights of a hydroelectric project suffusing their way into the thin air. Each curve is littered with the dreams and despair of people whose whiskeyed breaths are now part of the atmosphere, the sighs of the laborers who gnawed out rock, three-star generals discovered asleep and frosted over before a dying fire, rum still trickling into their livers, and above all, the masks these gods must wear staring at me from some hazy shop, faces vermillion with maladorous intentions, teeth gnashing in impotent fury.
Tibetan Buddha flags allow my irises some rest from the soaring sunlight from a scalloped sky, nine or ten of them fluttering: we flutter, we part, we make love, we strive, we boast, we stop.
The barks grow fainter as I approach the lake, and I'm not here anymore; I'm in Thrace, in some promontory, watching an eagle fly with the food it has been allowed even as the shouts of a tortured man fade into the aqueous stilness, the breeze comes from where I can dimly make out an enormous oyster in the shape of six orange seeds, so cold and so wise that it commands only fear. The flags continue their periodic march towards oblivion, a sky so gray that it could almost be within the December waters of the Aegean we're staring at.
I have begun to feel that Sikkim is mostly unreal: the rockfaces are all intricate deathmasks of people who lived and died as you and I and the plants grow without any full stops, they're part of death itself, contributing to its endless methylated machinery.
The Mall Strip, where I can smell a perfume for every crack in the cobbled streets and where there is enough laughter to break out every lifer in Alcatraz into sunshine. Streetlights light it up- not that the shops, with their assortment of tungsten and neon havent blinded you enough. Sunspots on the falls travel upwards to where evergreen trees chant above me.
Just one light above me, I should really get some sleep, I'll be going two thousand feet further up two hours later, where I'll drop, but whose light is it? The trees sway and the light blinks its way in and out of my existence. The cars bend from one face to another, at the shop where I stop for tea is a Mickey Mouse bag and warm cinnamon flavors hit the single lightbulb dead centre. The lady thinks I want to shoot a photograph of hers, I oblige.
Clouds burn at sunset and they arise again in the morning, ghosts reborn on and on.
The way I see it, if death truly resides in some place, it is this. The whole mountains are as serene as the expressions on the faces of the dead before they pass into fire. I can nearly believe that is an event, a person and a place. It just is- and what can we possibly commit to death itself? The river gurgles on, splashes, semen floating on froth when the water frops and the women, with their veiled eyes, know all this. All women do. To die here would be to become death instantly. In this small hotel room, with a single bulb lighting up this strange room and casting my shadow against the viridian walls, death is here.
We can ransack the Himalayas all we want, rape him, feast on her skin. I won't win. This isn't a prophecy. It's just life.

The Life Of My Love

2009-06-10T01:43:00.000-07:00

The British Council sponsors a fiction competition for women every year during late summer. This clause eliminates the Orange Cat,who is a feline after all. This is what the Cat might have written, had there been a proviso for coloured kittens as well.

The Life Of My Love
This here shows Jeff with Conrad when he was two and had just discovered the inherent fascination of crayons. He streaked his bedroom wall with green and yellow bat-like flowers from Mars and in the picture...

Read more. Contact the author at rg13.1729@gmail.com

Crossroads Of Love

2009-04-30T08:42:00.000-07:00

Two men without any shred of a believable past whatsoever sit beside the counter in a bar one cold night in 'Crossroads of Love' and try to make sense of life.
'Is there a heaven?', Kenny (played with an infuriating lack of gravitas and honesty by Atul Kulkarni) muses,'Or just a hell?' He receives no answer from his sloshed comrade (Victor Banerjee, unconvincing).
Cinematic hell certainly exists. There has been 'Gigli'. There were the whole set of 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' films. And now, there is Anjan Dutt's pathetically misplaced labor of love, 'Chowraasta: Crossroads Of Love'. Mr Dutt possibly intended to create a memorable paean to the hills he loves so. Martin Scorsese documented his fascination with New York City magically in his eighties gem 'After Hours'. Darjeeling in Mr Dutt's film remains nothing more than a two-dimensional picture postcard, a chloroformed frog awaiting dissection at the hands of a man who has proved himself to know slightly better (Bow Barracks Forever).
Purportedly dealing with what passes as real life, the film tracks down the events in the lives of seven people over little more than 24 hours. A schoolteacher trying to educate his boarding-school pupils in the mysteries of the vernacular receives a visit from his ex-wife, a starlet of B-movies, with her prepubescent son and a fashion photographer with whom she has been 'intimate' in, to borrow the film's memorable dialogue, nearly every imaginable place. The photographer opines, however, over endless dregs of alcohol, that the actress has loved only one man in her life, and he stays in Darjeeling. Whether or not they are divorced or merely separated remains fuzzy throughout the ninety minutes of the movie's running time.
Rita and Sunny are an eloping couple who bicker throughout the labyrinthine streets of the hill station when they aren't fulfilling the purpose of their honeymoon. There's Kenny (Mr Kulkarni) as well, an accidental terrorist who needs cash-and lots of it- to see him through to next week. In time-honored fashion, they cut in and pass out of each others' lives, connected only by the character of Victor Banerjee,a tea planter turned mysteriously rich writer who pens letters to a woman he loved and lost, all the while conjuring new ways to commit suicide (the identity and indeed, existence of this woman are assumed to be self-explanatory).
The comically childish script could be nearly bearable if not for one pitiful performance after another. When Rita runs away from her wastrel of a husband, there isn't a trace of sorrow, guilt or even indecision on her face as she accepts a cup of steaming coffee from a stranger, whose place in the scheme of things is also understood by Mr Dutt to be self-evident. Her face remains eternally inconclusive as she watches the man she married metamorphose into a rock star overnight. Kenny kidnaps the starlet's son, planning to ask for the ransom which will be part of his getaway plan but has a mystifying change of heart. As a man caught in the wrong place and in the wrong time in a world which no longer possesses any divisions between right and wrong, Mr Kulkarni puts in a suitably bemused performance, but that bewilderment perhaps rises from the script and not from his unquestioned acting chops. It is a signal directorial failure that when a secret central to one of the protagonists is revealed, the revelation is neither exciting nor dramatic: it isn't a revelation at all.
In true New wave style, Mr Dutt decides to let his audience arrive at their own conclusions regarding the possible futures awaiting his characters. The spark in Rita and Sunny's marriage seems to be rekindled by the discovery of love letters written by Mr Banerjee's character. That they have been married for precisely four days seems to be hugely unimportant. The schoolteacher takes his wife's son - a bloody monkey, in his carefully observant words- as his own, while she walks away into the fog and the terrorist simply disappears. The movie is interspersed with Mr Banerjee reading aloud one of his letters in a pitch-perfect public school manner, replete with sonorous vowels and leonine chortles, presumably intending to summon up visions of Darjeeling's glorious past, but instead adding an extra dimension of pretentiousness to an already misplaced movie. Which is really a shame, because each story holds the raw essence of human relationships and frailty within it. Where 'Crossroads Of Love' should soar high on wings of lyrical direction, it simply lies still.

The Reader

2009-04-26T21:38:00.000-07:00

Kate Winslet's piercing blue eyes haunt The Reader, striking deep into the heart of Michael Berg (overplayed by David Kross as a young man and excellently fleshed out by an older Ralph Fiennes), who conducts an affair one summer with a tram conductor named Hanna Schmitz. It is her lips which initially attract the boy: red and succulent as virgin plum-pits, they are akin to some delicious fruit for him, the salty, feminine sting of which bites him, soothes him and finally, tells him to leave. He visits her every day after school, reads some book aloud to her and they have sex. She lets him read, she likes listening to his voice, or so she tells him. Its not until long after that idyllic summer that he is confronted with a more prosaic truth: she can neither read nor write. One day she vanishes, and some years later, the newly-adult Michael learns that Hanna was a Nazi, culpable of gross crimes against humanity. He possesses evidence which can possibly save her, but he chooses to restrain himself instead.
An inconclusive screenplay tries not to offer any judgments but instead succeeds in creating only a flat one-dimensional world of intertwined lives and bitter secrets. Ms. Winslet's acting chutzpah, however, transcends the script to form a niche of her own, where she is ably joined by Mr Fiennes, never more rugged or sympathetic. Ms Winslet is specially striking when she sits before a jury for war crimes and confesses to having participated in Nazi atrocities but refrains from publicly confessing her illiteracy in an effort to maintain her dignity, whatever that means in her context.
Moreover, The Reader also fails to impress in its content on the Holocaust. There is a streak of indecisiveness in Stephen Daldry's direction which prevents him from recognizing that men and women are not good and evil by sheer nature, its their actions which lead them to the wrong side of that thin red line.
The young Michael's relationships with his family and classmates is obscured by the director's tendency to focus only on a summer fling. In the process, the boy comes across as a sex-starved young Turk (understandable) with an inexplicable habit of philosophizing. This disconnect rips across the screen as the lithe, smooth and perfect form of a bikini-clad girl only reminds him of the myriad wrinkles which Hanna's muscular body possesses. An older Michael is unable to form any stable relationships, choosing the warmth of a night spent with a prostitute instead, but this emotional detachment never really cuts to the screen as it did in another movie based in Germany, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others.
Hanna's guilt lies unquestioned and her gradual initiation into the world of scholarship, spurred on by tapes full of classics read aloud in Michael's voice, seems to be a sort of atonement for her sins. Hanna's illiteracy seems to justify, in part, her role in allowing three hundred women to suffer a tortuous death, but offers no clue as to the true nature of a woman who could even think of such a crime in the first place. Her death finally liberates Michael, letting him come clean with his daughter Julia, with whom he has possibly the most revelatory and human moment in the entire film, when he confesses that he has never been totally clean with anybody in his whole life. Every relationship of his has been suffused with the same dim glow which lit Hanna's naked back as he read the opening lines of The Odyssey to her, and its her physique which he recalls while a different female form lies writhing underneath him. It is the harrowing portrayal of a forlorn world inhabited by gray figures forced to develop a yen for deception that is of primary concern to Mr Daldry, who is content to merely let his camera track down the sharply parallel lives of Hanna and Michael over four decades. Above all, it is a pair of blue irises which are reflected in every action, every word and eventually, every decision.

?

2009-02-01T10:15:00.000-08:00

As you might have noticed, my earlier posts no longer exist in their past format.
This method of publishing wasn't exactly one which I much appreciated. Besides, they weren't any good.
As usual, Shakespeare has the last word: Our revels now are ended.

-An interjection-

2008-12-19T22:46:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone. Merry Christmas to you all. I won't be posting anything more on Inseguimento' till March. I intend to edit and take the story a lot further than it has gone so far. I've got some prior engagements till Spring, so till then, read the other stuff, namely Anti:Gone.

A Departure, My Apologies

2008-10-02T23:01:00.000-07:00

Just something which I wrote, again when I was 14.

It's winter again, nearly, as I wake up, yet again, on another Monday morning, oh hell, what the hell am I doing staring at my face in an unwashed mirror when the rest of the apartment sleeps; try to convince myself that yes, New Year does exist and is not an obsolete ritual wrapped in decks of confetti and billboards of tomorrow's parties as I crawl to school where something considerably cooler than a petty north wind is obviously awaiting me where did I put that chemistry copy anyway ; twist the shower quickly, hoping to get it done with perhaps I'll enjoy this perhaps I'll actually wake up and get a rude, cold shock even as I'm rushing to grab the telephone perhaps it's important and as I lift it off the hook Jolly Good Day Sir I'm From AbsoluteRubbish Brand And Want To Know What Size Your Eyebrows Are;try to make sense of the fact that when any closed curve revolves about a line in its' own plane,which does not cut the curve,the volume of the ring formed is equal to that of a cylinder whose base is the curve and whose height is the length of the path of the centroid of the are of the curve ;and finally head off to bed end of another day this is obviously how winners are made and oh (deleted) didn't I have an assignment for history due sometime this century?
Each day passes away inasmuch in a haze of cigarette smoke which hangs in the air everywhere I go in the Tube, Bus, Taxi,Train as the smokers cough out their lungs and swallow yellow blobs of evil-looking mucus even while their lungs inch that bit closer to a last spark; and girls, women with far too much black-and-blue colour on their eyelids and eyebrows trudge past brickandwood factories with blackandgray smoke swimming out of chimneys past cats floating in a semiliquid state their green eyes piercing into the beaks of ravens as they cry out KRACKOW in reply to a langorous hmm... beside endless young/old men and boys dressed in virulent green carrying swords and crosses to hack down and alternately cover girls' sweaters keeping or trying to keep still on trains going past stations to the sea and then the hills even while Pope Benedict visits Turkey. My temple throbs as I look into the magazine and its' advertisement of what a young woman needs to impress her lover who's standing outside a bar; carrying a gun in his head and a bottle of liquor under his windbreaker but is in love,infatuation,desperation with the transvestite ambling by the bookshop lazily glancing at himself/herelf/itself at the window which has misted up with the attentions of a septuagenarian checking exactly one of whatever hair he pretends he does not have left and is alerted by the sound of a crowd cheering in Norway as Puskas nets a goal in 1960 long years ago just after India's tryst with destiny before he met his wife who died at the age of sixty-six leaving him free to continue debating over Hamlet and thrilling himself to the sound of her sighs as he removes her shirt unaware that he's videotaping them the one who's had a lacklustre summer and wants to make up for it in December and circulate the thing in dance halls in rooms beside young dancers discreetly putting their cold fingers around each others necks, warmed by the fizzle of central heating never dreaming that each year after they get sloshed in copious Bloody Marys that they'll just be like the man dying in a bed in a house in a nondescript house in a suburb who looks at It's a Wonderful Life and breathes slowly, dreaming about that Christmas, a lifetime ago, enclosed in the susurrus of the last century when he put up the star his father brought for him before he went out to fight for truth,justice and the patriotic way on the tree oblivious to his mother, sobbing in the bathroom as she kissed her husband just once more a tear escapes and rolls down to the bound edition of Punch somehow quietening the buzz of the jazz band practicing outside his house even as all over the world, a generation dies.

A Cautionary Tale

2008-10-02T22:58:00.000-07:00

Tom had it all planned out. Rachel would go and answer the telephone while he hid inside the closet. All she would hear on the other end was the faint crackle of static, and even as she felt the first waves of unease,Tom would have the handkerchief dipped in chloroform on her face, a syringe and an accompanying vial in his left hand. The television would obviously be switched on, the kitchen lights would be dimmed-Rachel often fretted about all the electricity they wasted-and all the neighbours might be able to make out through the drawn damn polka-dotted curtains was a normal silhouette of a husband and a wife.
The drug coursing through her veins, Tom would quietly drag her limp body through the backyard,haul it quickly into the front seat of the Ford, and drive at a reasonable pace to the county cemetery, just two miles away, Rachel's peaceful face bright in the soft glow of the moonlight.The effect would take not less than five hours to wear off - this Tom had personally verified - and by that time, Rachel would be six feet under the ground, vaguely comprehending that she was somehow confined to a tight, uncomfortable casket made of oak, with only the unyielding walls of her silent prison to tuen to. Very soon, the screams would be reduced to a half-hearted groan, her pounding to a feeble series of thumps.
And at that precise moment - give or take an hour or so - Tom would be taking a long, hot, masculine shower all by himself.
Tom fixed the date on Wednesday, the third of June. From mid-May onwards, he had quietly spread the word that Rachel would be visiting some exceedingly rich and tiresomely old aunts of hers in June. When they were interrogated later, his colleagues at the firm would agree that Tom had been normal that day, perhaps the hint of a nervous smile had played at his lips for some reason, but no, they could not be sure.
At half-past nine, when the cherry trees outside had sprayed the fibreglass with their husky, forbidden scent, Tom positioned himself inside the closet, cotton swab and bottle in hand, and quietly dialled the number,06161904, from his cellphone. Rachel, of course, could not possibly know that he was back. He had crept in through the back door while she had been kneading dough in the kitchen,halfheartedly listening to a young newsreader telling her about the precautions she needed to take to be safe from Joseph Wood, the pychotic who had escaped from a mental hospital on Tuesday and fled into the soft, black night; having smeared the blood of four orderlies and two doctors on the frangipani lining the walls of that building.
The telephone rang once. She didn't pick it up. She never does on the first ring, Tom thought.
Twice. No answer. She's hurrying along now.
Thrice. He couldn't even hear her over the din of the set.
The fourth time. Still no reply.
Fifth.
Sixth.
Seventh.
Eighth.
Ninth.
On the tenth ring, the line went dead. Tom decided to risk it. Quietly unlatching the closet door, he stepped out, pad and syringe in hand, the air of mothballs and syringe all over him - and stepped on Rachel's breasts. Her eyes were blue, blank and devoid of life. A gash showed through her throat, and a pattern of blood coloured the white apron. Starry white flecks of dough floated in the rapidly accumulating pool of blood.
The cloth dropped from Tom's hand, as he groped the wall to steady himself. Suddenly,from behind the staircase, a voice called out, conversationally, " A nice night, don't you think?" He emerged from the gloom of the grandfather clock, taking slow steps. " A real hunter's moon tonight." And slowly, in spite of himself, Tom's trembling hands slipped down the walls, his glasses fell into Rachel's mop of auburn hair, as a mild,clean-shaven,hairless man approached him, a glint of steel in his hands.

Eleven hours later, between the ruckus of the scavenging television crews, Inspector Winter settled down on a chair on the porch and gave a long, petulant whistle as he gazed at the two bodies, draped by sterile, ammoniac, white sheets, on the floor. Sergeant Copper stood, smoking his fifteenth cigarette of the morning, beside him.
"An ugly piece of work, this." "Mm. What do you think was the motive? This time?" "Oh, I'm sure the boys back in the hospital will find some bloody excuse - they'll probably attribute it to the fact that his great-grandfather or someone had an Oedipus complex as a result of which the maniac has some intense dislike of society."
Inspector Winter sighed. "I'm getting too old for this. I awoke this morning a year younger.They obvioulsy loved each other very much. I mean, the wife was a lepidopterist. She loved her work - she kept those bottles of chloroform in the basement. The husband even took some of that on the swab - he probably wanted to make him unconcious. He's not the type to wield an axe. It was far too late, of course. Even the car's in perfect condition. She was going to Ireland or somewhere. I saw them last Sunday at the Parish barbecue. Good people."
Copper assented. "It's true then- when you kill a man, you take away not just what he was, but all he will ever be. I can imagine them with children and-"
"She couldn't have kids."
"Oh. Grow old gracefully then."
They gazed quietly at the fading tracks of the '69 Ford, dark and redolent against the lonely, brown land, coloured azure by the sun rising slowly over the mountains, far, far away.

I wrote this story back when I was 13.