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January 17, 2005

Chance meeting... - dead engine

At a dinner table with the six-fold Chinese-speaking girlfriend.
Big brown eyes, dress-dress like the wing boy, I hear the dead engine talking. The danger people give themselves for feeling awkward. Dead ducks can't whistle, can I?

Tracing a line on the tablecloth with the tip of one lacquered nail while the speaker cuts a bit of morphology.
I get scared every day.
Sucking the charming and fresh little caramel feel, a selection of grains, give yourself time to get used to these wrinkles.
I may be assisting you.

Anytime people take an interest in me, if not their actual interest, extolling the dangers of uncontrolled run-on sentences by tempting to find, after the dinner, the last-known address on the principle of sharing the pain.

I plunk the brush down on the dressing table, stuck her tongue out at the reflection in the gilt-edged mirror. Looking into the mirror, two fingers crossed at the distant drive, pulling together a unified and blissful explanation.

With a reflective sigh, with few dangling bonds, she reaches for her notebook.

Push the plate from the edge of the table and trace a star on the white linen named Sunshine. I can finish glancing up quickly, pull the plate back down to cover the stains and try to think of something to do.

A stretch of regret and then she pushed out, sitting, in denial, envious, a little startled, reaching outward, looking for breaks and kinks of curiosity out of the growth chamber.

Turning to the left, and then the right, Catherine checked her hair in the mirror, and then took another swipe in a nearly comatose state of depressed sleep. After rising out the knife, closing the door of her apartment, Catherine waited patiently for her romantic shortcut to turn into a professional relationship.

Thread the fishing line into the sewing needle and push the needle through the hole in the bottom, wander at your 25th high school reunion, wave back the cravings for nicotine, drop off a song request at the online store.

Just outside the lobby, head buried in jacket, gloves, I tapped out a cigarette, shifted to block a stirring breeze and over the spurt of flame, straining to deeper questions. I knew there were troubles.

Along the front rows of parked cars and into an SUV, slammed the doors, sitting together in the back, nodding at each other to shatter some terrible pressure.

After one last soulful drag, Catherine had shaken her head. "Not as much as I deserved to become the victim of a starring role. I haven't yet determined why that is."

I grumbled under my breath at her failure of fabricating a Byzantine conspiracy.
Okay.
I sipped from a brown paper bag crimped around a Johnny Walker bottle.

"Frank?”

Funneling the paper bag into my pocket.
The real story only revolves when there is some nucleation site.
It doesn't melt, it rather sublimes.

"Frank, enlighten me, what's new with you?"

Receptive and ready to be sacrificed, absorbed, and devoured. An illusion, complementary and dissociated. This climactic "death,", an unraveling hand. "My divorce is finally legal," “Same difference”. "I am celebrating my freedom."

"There's little love lost between us"
I agreed.

"You were smart. I wasted fifteen years as a human to learn it."
A memory charged by domestic violence, short of breath, I stop when the phone rings, marry pretty faces and, involuntarily, shiver.
Without trying to arouse sympathy and curiosity, we are finally back in the present.
Present.
Wrapped.

Refugees, secrets, costal water jobs, memories.
Now.

About you?

Catherine speaks of the “nostalgia for paradise”, of the dangers of non-hypnotic rape, gracefully and insistently with no threat or fear, grabbing her hand as if trying to stop a tree branch from falling.

I pull the door open. Catherine is purring softly.

Tilting my head towards the stars I raise my arms up to my head closing them together until my hands meet.

© Fortunato Caragliano

Posted by lck at January 17, 2005 02:44 PM