Friday 25 June 2010

Catch-Up


The bike is a total write-off.  Even worse, my precious red, viscous, life-giving fluid is seeping away slowly into the arid sand.  My mind is swirling, consciousness fading and returning, as I recall how the evening had started.

She’d met me at the door, flushed and perspiring slightly, her voluptuous curves startlingly accentuated by the dim light in the porch doorway, and I could hardly wait to get my hands on her ripe fruit, to sink my teeth into their juicy flavoursome flesh.

But I knew that Diana was cheating on me;  it had become obvious as soon as she got down to her seventeenth consecutive set of lacy French underwear.  And that was after losing ten or twelve sweaters and scarves and three or four layers of footwear to my skilful Poker.   It was fortunate that I too had had the presence of mind to prepare in advance, and even more so that my recent trip to New Guinea in search of exotic ketchup formulations had given me the opportunity to acquire a large stock of even more exotic articles, in the shape of clothing for the gentleman’s person from the New Guinea Highlands.

Thus it was that after many hours of play, I threw on one or two of my shirts and staggered out into the morning mist, laden down with my considerable booty.  No doubt I should have been more careful;  and no doubt I should have been suspicious when Diana had gone outside at 3am, ostensibly to feed the horses, for on her return I glimpsed her shiftily sliding an oily spanner into the back pocket of her third-from-last pair of scanty shorts.

Alas, it's far too late for retrospective regrets;  my Deux-Catties Racer is ruined, my trigger-finger fractured and the only Kosher English Fish-and-Chip Shop in Montana is going to have to do without an entire month’s supply of Diana’s Premier Tomato Ketchup.

Copyright © Donnie Ross 2010


Thursday 10 June 2010

My Kind of Girl


While waiting for the bill, I arranged our coffee cups, wine glasses, candles,  plates and remaining cutlery into a fine abstract pattern.  We adjusted the distances between each item and the angles they made with the rectangle of the table’s periphery until it was bearable to look at the assemblage intently for an extended period of time.  All too soon, the waiter arrived with the card machine; fortunately the figures, and the paperwork, matched the pattern perfectly, but the electronic machine was entirely impossible to place.

After a while, Linda and I drove to her house.

“Are you OK with this?”  I asked.

“96.4%,”  she replied, and I could see that she meant it.

We undressed, placing each item of clothing carefully on the carpet.  To  roll or fold the trousers and shirt?  Top left, folded, we decided.  Her underwear, which was expensive, French and black lace, was easy enough: bottom right.  Even so, it took many minutes to get all the folds in the right places.  Shoes and socks are never an easy matter, but finally they too became absorbed perfectly into the arrangement.

We made love with such passion that at one point I nearly miscounted. Arcane Japanese counter-rhythms interplayed in moiré patterns against ancient Indian coital positions hour after darkening hour, until it became difficult to scrawl the tally legibly on her increasingly damp notebook.

During the seventeenth iteration, she screamed the tones of a B flat minor seventh flat five chord:  Bb, Db, E, A natural.   Root position:  it was time to sleep.

I awoke at 05:31 precisely.  Searching with one hand along the pillow, I encountered something unpleasantly cold and hard:  Linda’s dentures, top and bottom set.  With a start, I sat up to find her wig, as red as the hair of a girl in a pre-Raphaelite painting, crouching precisely in the centre of the pillowcase, with her lower-arm prostheses symmetrically positioned not far away.  Distal to these, twin aluminium-and-resin legs formed a subtle but asymmetrical angle.

After a few hours of solitary contemplation, I caught the bus back to the Institute.  It’s always the same whenever I meet my kind of girl.  Things never turn out exactly right.

Copyright © Donnie Ross 2010