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