Making Stories

He sat on the bed making stories.  He had loved, she  had died and he sat at the edge of the bed dreaming a story .  It was a sticky night.  The moon had come and gone.  Inside  was cool and black.  His hands closed on top of each other between his legs. 

In the city people slept and he (jewel green eyes wide)  continued to dream a story to tell himself so ho could say  to someone who asked, 'this is how she died.' 

The bed had been retrieved from the fleamarket and creaked  if he moved his foot along the floor.  And for a moment he.  forgot he was dreaming and lowered back onto the taut springs  of the bed and laughed, then belly flopped, now wrapping the  cool pillow around his ears like wet leaves. 

He coughed with a stutter.  His head lit with story.  He  gasped.  He wet his lips, once, with his tongue, along the  corners where spit collected. 

The room was dark but run through by white shadows between  the blinds.  The room was nothing but a table, bed, a  bulb.  The table was pushed next to the bed and on top sat a Bible,  its gold lettering flicking in the white shadows of the lamps  outside- poles hooded the light away from the street toward  the window of his room. 

The room opened into a doorway and from this doorway  came the smell of onion juice as though he had eaten a stew  earlier in the day and he loved the smell of onions slowly  dying in the stew and nearly got up from the bed to   scoop  out a plateful, heat some water for coffee, read the last chapter  of Ecclesiastics but suddenly his story grew a sharp, ivy trellis  about it and framed in the center by the body of his lover in  a soft field.  It was like a miniature painting has family  owned., stuffed at the bottom of a sea trunk in the attic. 

She had been a little girl in an orchard full of swings.  She had  seen the tree's die in the core and topple.  She had been sentimental.  She had been.  She lay in white, eyes closed, skin wet. 

The room was ten feel tall and flat along the ceiling.  He  rarely had visitors so the lace was dirty bare.  The  window  was covered . by faded Venetian blinds that he hadn't  raised and now street light streamed into the room  like rivers of dust. 

He rolled on his back.  She had been beautiful, wise.  Dead  now.  He folded his arms across his chest and turned the  radio on.  The radio was also in the room.  It was a cheap set  with a bit of the speaker thread ripped away and he never  received the stations he wanted. 

Something came on; on and over, then up by the naked  bulb above him that was dark.  The room was dark except  the running beams of .light from outside. 

He told the lover to get up- to get up out of the meadow  of flowers she lay in- to get up and move maybe dance- he would enjoy that- a dance and maybe, he wondered, she would enter  the room  But  she didn't move.  Flogging brown  pedals wrapped her body.  He wondered where the wind came from.  It hadn't been there but now the pedals of flowers were flogging her body and it was a wind. But he didn't feel it. 

She was rouged lightly on the cheek  could see.  One  arm was visible through the play of flowers and it was wet,  scaly.  Her nose was like a hill shaved of trees and  browning  as summer comes. 

But she didn't move and for a moment he became distracted  by a single wheel (that must have been four wheels sounding like  one, he thought) going by his window.  In the later hours there  was no noise but this wheel rolled by and he listened as it  rolled through the avenues of the city, past the jut of buildings,  through intersections of amber lights, past the neighborhoods  all shut up for the night and shut down that way, like a aeries  of carefully cut movie screens seemed sad.  The yellow lights.  Every street had a line of yellow lights impaling the sidewalk  and one could imagine someone walking by and getting trapped  by one of these yellow lights and being stranded, twisting to get  free but laughing too and swearing when a dog comes along and  pisses up his leg and the man remains stained until  the white-  gray morning peels back the sneer of night. 

When he returned to his dead lover she was still in  the pose of death and silently he whispered, 'get...get up...'  but she lay like brittle news and disappeared for a moment  leaving a trace of redolent ivy in hi!- mind. He bolted upright  in the bed and she returned. 

All week he had planned for the visit of a friend.  and remembered now that he needed milk.  One half gallon.  And maybe a loaf of French Bread.  He hadn't seen the friend for a year and they had much to talk bout but it was best to  talk over food and the corner store existed a block away and  smelled as an old kitchen. 

This friend was special because of experiments  be was  conducting  in his spare time he was very intelligent- and  these experiments were in the nature of -------  He laughed the  hearty laugh. The dead woman returned in a white sky.  A sky that nearly camaflouged her- made her meld into that she rolled  softly out of like a fish in mid stream, rolled—by the currents  But she didn't move.

Music came from the radio jingle.  Then a voice  announcing the midnight show.  It was a plangent voice cutting  through the cheap speaker in the radio that t tinted everything  but he could tell the voice was  resonant.  The  radio broke  away for a commercial.  And when the program resumed the mans voice had changed a bit.  He said, 'This is your program folks this is yours and "I'm here to  talk all night...we've got telephones lined and hot...but this show is yours...I'm not going to sit here all night waiting for nothing .  Now...where is that...  oh yeah, now hero's a quote from Shakespeare..you know...we'll get the show rolling with a snatch of culture..it goes...quote-  Now that that is out of the way let's go to the phone's.  Tell me everything, tell me anything.  Any problem.  Hey!  You  wanna hear a joke?"  And the announcer finished the joke with a blew from  his gazzuu. 

The dreamer got hungry.  A pot of stew waited in the  kitchen.  The onion's had been tiny boiling onions, particularly  sharp'.  Even if he didn't eat it he'd have to put it in the  refrigerator so it wouldn't spoil.  Maybe it would be best  to get the bread.  The grocery stayed open twenty-four hours.  Robbed twice the last month.  The store was  open but he  decided not to go to the store because he was afraid the lover  in his brain would disappear again.   

Back to Stories

Return to Oasis