Sat now, alone at the party, my can empty in my hand, dented in several places where I had absently crushed my thumb and fingers into it, I considered getting another one, scanning the crowd for either an opening I could push through, or someone worth talking to, and was just about to stand when an unfamiliar girl threw herself down onto the sofa next to me.

“Hi,” she said.

Her face was thin and sharp, with a narrow nose and green eyes that looked away as I met them; cheeks rose-tinted, vasodilated; hair the colour of dry leaves, or of beer held to the sun, sticking out like straw, jagged and uneven because she cut it herself. In her hands, which rested on the patchwork fabric lap of her dress, she held two slim bottles. I did not think she was pretty.

“Hey,” I said, smiling, pressing the lager can between my fingers until it clicked and crinkled.

“I’m Remi,” she said, laughing nervously. Her laugh was not musical. “My name’s kind of a joke.” She looked down at her hands, tapped her fingers on the glass of one of the bottles.

(more…)

Willowy, slight as one of the twigs bristling at the end of her nostalgically-fashioned broom, camouflaged against the day, she stood, sweeping. In her ears, as if straight into her conciousness, music played through tiny white earphones. Her hips swayed with the rhythm of music and sweeping, her eyes down-turned towards the sodden leaves that plastered the concrete. A black plastic sack rustled next to her, its crumpled surface rippling in the November breeze. It was a warm day, the first after two of wind and rain.

She did not see how it happened, heard only, above the sound of her earphones, the cry of surprise, the sharp scrape of metal on concrete: the sound of a bicycle losing its traction on the decaying leaves and throwing its rider to the floor. She looked up, pulled out her earphones, saw a student lying in the road, curled into the foetal position. She gasped, dropped her broom, ran towards him. There was no one else around. Already the student was picking himself up, assessing the damage. He wore an open chequered shirt over his t-shirt, the sleeve of which had been ripped by the fall.

(more…)

Read part (i)

She was painting a picture of him, she had told him earlier across a table. Art feeding art. Life feeding art, criss-crossing across the way. Her breath had been warm, beer-tainted, warm. Two mornings later he changed the sheets on his bed, an hour after rising. They were still warm. Would he have been able to tell the difference between the warmth of two bodies having slept in that bed and just one? In a way, in mind only, there had been another person in that bed, a phantom of imagination. The bed was warm when he woke; comfortable; phallus erectus. He had not arisen immediately, but there had been no sleight of hand and no spring of warm, wet, pleasure-sensation, just a dull longing.

(more…)