Stories Told to Be Forgotten: Part III – On Mythology

The unfurling sky known only as ‘Elle’ hung over the world of things briefly as her once vertical body had become a horizontal mirror to their reality. The hanging white sky had patch work clouds made of shadows mocking the objects around the room on her back. The distant and unknown mockeries of real things grew bigger and in so doing, marked the acceleration of a woman caught in gravity plummeting onto the world of things.

The desk was alive with passion and heat. What objects were lucky enough to roll of the edge could only imagine the reality of those left under the soft flesh of the fallen sky. The lamp tipped, landing on its switch, and turning on with a flash of brilliance. Meanwhile, the only thing standing on the desk was the globe who supported an upside down atlas on its brass top. The pages marked where some forgotten traveler once peered allowing the waters of the Mediterranean to become alive to his eyes, before turning them over and making them the sky atop the globe, whose base now found itself intimately close with the nape of the young woman’s neck.

Beneath a rolling white sky the spines of several books cracked. Sweat caused thin pages to stick to flesh – Shakespeare’s Tempest clinging to the posterior of the whispered ‘Elle’. Her head gently forced up by a thick anthology of Plato’s complete works. Her back arching over volumes of assorted poetry. The rest of her bed was too dense to be described here. The still erect bronze sun stood over her, reaching his fingers down to pluck a single page from a book, pinned while escaping, just out of reach of her left bosom.

He read aloud: “I have awakened from the death of absence, my Elle! my spirit arises, strengthened, as from sleep”. His other hand ran over soft stomach and rested on her hip. It was now, as she hanged limply over the antique desk like Dido, that she gained the strength of Antaeus. The leviathan’s again awoke and met the man’s eyes.

She whispered: “A sin so sweet, I think I shall indulge twice”. The two lay together. A day had passed, and now a night. The room had only one inhabitant again. On the second day the morning appeared in the window of the old study and the woman was alone. As if it had all been a dream, but it had not. She turned the paper in her hand over, and read aloud: “‘Silly! what is parting?’ she whispered mysteriously, with the smile of an immortal”. She allowed the paper to float to the ground. “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”

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Stories Told to be Forgotten: Part II – The Sky is not Alone

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. In…

From underneath the horizon a hand latches onto the nape of her neck. Her breathing is cut short by the emergence of another body. The life giving in and out, the gentle airy wind, now filters through another mouth. Again silence lays heavily on the world of things below the spectacle. What splendor, what sorcery. From one body arises another as if called from within her.

She closes her eyes, and the world-gorgers disappear as if turned inward. They hide under the surface of eyelids and lashes. Who knows what other worlds they feast on. The hand around her neck slips off, allowing her to emerge over the leveled desk. Her once large proportions suddenly becoming titanic. Rising like a mighty tree whose canopy cannot be seen. Her once intimate details are no longer visible as endless curves flow toward the heavens.

The ivory landscape is uninterruptedly smooth save for a small divot whereupon hung a metal loop still within reach of the desktop world. The gemmed whole hung like the moon, a dark hole in a white sky which appeared to suck in the viewer as if by gravity or some other natural force. Yet its contents where obscure, forcing the untrained eye to dart about the fleshy horizon out of shame.

Her sunrise fingertips run along the desk, writing history in the dust. A single wave ending at a small ornate bookmark that bisects the plot of a hefty Russian novel, one typical to the snowy tundra – a handful of lovers, tormented by their own minds, and subject to a fate written out as history by the narrator. The bookmark would never know the end, probably for the better, it had been abandoned by the reader who got bored of reading about a hero confined to his couch.

Her right hand was not so worried about the world of things, it grasped for a companion still hidden from sight. She motioned, and a new horizon emerged. The landscape was rocky and tough. Compared to her, its ground seemed muddy, red, and infertile; but strong. He too had eyes – dark endless eyes that cast shadows over the world. They were deep like calculation. They moved back and forth with purpose and determination, leaving footprints wherever they trod. They were the eyes of naming.

He was a striding colossus beset on the world. He towered even over her as the night sky towers over the setting sun. His worked soil stretched a hand and covered the jeweled moon.  The other works with the strands of hair that taunt the mighty leviathans by hanging out of reach. She turns to embrace him, separating the sky into two halves, as if a painter had created dusk by separating the best of night and day then resetting them next to each other.

He whispers “Elle” and for the first time, brings name into the world of things.

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