His thigh is heavy as it has migrated to the bend of my knee, and an arm sinks limply over my waist. I am Toto, the stuffed bear from his childhood.
He breathes inconsistently, one minute through his mouth, blowing a short passage of air into the nape of my neck; and suddenly, with a hiss like a leaky gas pipe and a short gasp, the tunnels change and he exhales through his nose, down my back.
It can't last, and we both know this, but with my eyes wide open, our legs intertwined, and as he is clutching me like Toto the bear, we will take what we can get. With the back of his hands brushing the hem of soft pink chiffon, I feel very eerily like I am on an airplane, seatbelt cinched at my waist, watching the turbulence light flicker.
In two hours, the sun will rise, and I will have both feet once again planted on solid ground.
C'est tout, bébé. We both know this was a one way ticket.
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She stands over the kitchen counter, delicately and lovingly slicing pears. She takes her toasted bread out of the oven, spreads Nutella over them, and lays each sliver of pear across the slices of bread. She glances at the clock.
In the last forty minutes, she has woken up (beating her alarm clock by 13 minutes), lay in bed in deliberation, taken a shower, gotten dressed, and is now eating her breakfast over the kitchen sink. In the next twenty minutes, she will brush her teeth, fix her make-up, zip her luggage bag, and roll it out the door, realizing, two minutes after ensuring all the locks, that she has left dirty dishes in the sink. She does not turn back.
When she is safely on the bus, she takes out a book and flips it to the first page. "I Wish Someone Were Waiting For Me Somewhere". This is an unusual selection for her - it's a recently release book, for one thing, and the title tells nearly nothing about the plotline. Perhaps she chose it because one week prior, she was in the area of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, the very location where the book begins. Or maybe because Vogue (a magazine she frequently leafs through) has hailed the author as a "distant descendant to Dorothy Parker" (a poet she frequently enjoys).
However, most likely of all, it may just be because she wants more than anything to find out how the story ends.
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Hello, mes cheres. I'm back, and boy, am I ever in the deep now.
13 years ago
5 comments:
WTF, Jess? These are too great. We're expecting two novelettes from you now.
this comment is mostly because you asked. if it seems brutal, it's because I find it hard to enjoy sentimentalized writing. if you think I sound arrogant, you're probably right, but you asked for it, so:
1st: as I said before, I think it's ambiguous. the french is slightly unnecessary. she must be pretty short if his thigh can be at her knee and he can still breathe down her neck. saying she is Toto the bear is a really strong statement, and seems kind of out of place, unless it ties in somewhere else in the story. seatbelt implies she's safe and secure, but also restrained. wtf is chiffon. and why the line about it being a one way ticket? what's a one-way ticket? their relationship? what's the significance of that?
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2nd one: lovingly slicing pears? toasting bread in an oven? (nutella and pears though, I'll try that sometime). also, strong housewife feel from the first paragraph.
second paragraph is a run on list. sorry, two. the bit about beating her alarm clock is unnecessary. I've been told sets of lists in literature beg for comparison between the items, couldn't really find anything here. the second list kind of melds into action at the end, and commas are tricky. get rid of the one I'm looking at so that it reads "zip her luggage bag and roll it out the door"
safely on the bus? was she threatened before? title of the book seems sappy. typo at "release[d]". bulk of that paragraph is extraneous information to the plot, which is alright, but it seems really forced here. information in brackets should be removed both because it can be mostly extrapolated from the surrounding sentences and because the symmetry is thin and annoying. and how can she be curious about how the story ends if the title tells her nothing about the plot?
however, with that statement (the title of the book saying nothing about its content), you could be making a statement on romanticized literature -- lots of pretty words and emotions and not much other content.
If that statement were intentional, I would go a step further and say that it's auto-criticism, though I do spy a strong autobiographical influence in these selections.
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and now you sort of know how my profs feel, and why I'm barely scraping up 60s in english.
yikes. dave is HARSH. i liked the pears part. it also made me think about how i am much to lazy to ever stand and eat my breakfast over the kitchen sink.
to dave: not unreasonably short.
...from personal experience.
chiffon is a type of material.
oh. one last thing. read a book by ann-marie macdonald (specifically Fall On Your Knees). i think you'd like her writing.
i warn you though, its a bit of a depressing book.
SEE DAVE? WAS THAT TOO HARD???
Okay. So as Rachel said, she doesn't necessarily have to be that short for that position. Also remember that these are snippets of larger things (which are in my brain but have not been written), and so the French may seem out of place and unnecessary now but is actually relevant as the story goes on. The seatbelt part is because seatbelts, while also imply a sense of security, also means a FALSE security --- when you're 1500 feet into the air, seatbelts may help you from getting a bit jostled, but doesn't really help you the same way that seatbelts in cars help you. There's not much you can do if the plane is in danger. The one way ticket refers to the fact that this is the only time they'll ever be together.
OKAY THE SECOND. Pears and Nutella= amazing. And I purposely gave it a housewife feel, because they're part of the same story and I want to emphasize how different this character is when she's away and when she's back to her normal lacklustre life. The lists (detailing the monotony of her life) reinforce this idea.
The book, actually, is real. Fair enough on the random forced extraneous information thing. But "I Wish Someone Were Waiting For Me Somewhere" --- not a lot of information on the plot, but enough. The character picked it up because she can somewhat relate to the title. She's going to want to know it ends.
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