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John Gray |
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THE LOSS OF SENSATION Passing headlights on the wall above the bed, the closest this house ever comes to being haunted. The ticking of my wrist-watch in the dark... the nearest to an inexplicable sound. For something not quite human, I have only the slight wheeze in your breath, the way your leg kicks from your dream. Aside from the feel of sheet and mattress, my senses are unemployed. If I want ogres, pale phantoms, devils, I have to remember, and even then, they have names, and did the usual things on actual dates. If only something violent happened in these rooms years ago and not the ordinary stuff that goes on day after day. I want an invisible hand to grip my throat, a blood-curdling shriek in my ear. Or else, could you wake from your sleep a moment and just kiss me. Let me know it isn't like this. Let me think reality was framed. TWENTY YEARS ON He was more obvious about it now. Almost every woman could grab his attention, not just the shapely ones. A couple of times, his eyes everywhere but on the road, he almost smashed into the car in front. It didn't matter that his wife sat in the car beside him. She was too busy wondering about other men. They had both grown as familiar to each other as the things in their living room, the stuff on top of the dressers. They talked now and it was like opening up the medicine cabinet for their daily pill doses or picking through the clothes closet for a jacket or dress to wear. Nobody slipped in a new prescription. There were no surprises on the hangars. They still felt cravings and hungers but they shifted from stranger to stranger. They could never be satisfied because they could never settle on anything. Some times, after a day of literally hundreds of quiet impossibilities, of waists they would love to wrap an arm around, chests they longed to hug, they would huddle into bed together, make love like comparing notes about what they'd seen. POTATO PEELING TIME She despises the potatoes. She is glad for the knife in her hand, for its sharp edge against the sad gray bumpy skin of the hated vegetable. She will slice the rind away in one long curl of rage. When she's done, there'll be just this chunk of anonymous white bobbing in her hand which she will drop into the boiling pot like a fairy tale witch disposing of bad children. Or bad men. Her husband pokes his head around the corner. He says nothing but it's an order anyway. "When will dinner be ready. I'm starved." She hates herself for hurrying just for him, for slashing her finger in her haste, for spilling blood again. She plops a potato with a stark red stain into the pot. It soon loses itself with all the ones that didn't fight back. |