Thu, 19 May 2005

before the sunlight
He first saw her as a series of glimmerings, the electric light reflected from her sunglasses and teeth and fingernails, breaking and catching in her endless twitching movement, a torrent of offhand opinion and facial tics, and he thought oh God, please don’t let her see me, please don’t let her speak to me. A year later he was sitting with her family, her father a railworker who managed to reach the day’s end through an absolute economy of motion, all nonessential functions disabled, waiting for the next family catastrophe. The others were all as she was, vibrating in their bones, eyes darting back and forth, dropped conversations and missed cues, and he realized the true secret of the father, who had become not simply another man to charm in order to make use of his daughter, but a kind of savant genius — if you do not move, and do not speak, they will not notice you. Just before the main course (some sort of casserole accident which might have contained green beans) he watched this girl who accidentally became his girlfriend, and her mother, and her two stringy brothers, and then finally her father, still as a stone, content to explore the line between the plate and his mouth. This is brilliant, he thought. This is the answer. He turned in on himself, shut down any reflective surface on his body, focused on the dinner before him, as if they had begun cooking one dish and changed plans at the midpoint, and his stomach attempted to boycott the entire process, but eating was no longer about taste and hunger and satiety, it was a place he went where response and conflict was expected of him, a little village made of burned cheese and unidentifiable pieces of meat.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #