#awakeaugust 26

The appliquéd flowers on the hem of my sarong cast shadows on the wooden floor like leaves under a tree, dappling and pulsing in a soft breeze.

Awake August facebook page here

morning with Seville

He does look cute, pointy little face with a white nose, and the intricate patterning of dark orange and paler ginger hairs around his eyes.  It is even cute that he follows me from my bedroom door to the bathroom and acts happy to see me, twining in and out of my legs and headbutting my hand to be tickled as I relieve my bladder.  He wants food, of course, and even at ~15 years old, he hasn't yet learnt that continuing the twining as I walk into the kitchen is not the most helpful thing to avoid tripping up a bleary eyed, coffee seeking human.
I open the packet and dump it's contents in his bowl, gulp back grapefruit juice and turn the kettle and the computer on, and then he miaows to be let out, so I open the door.  He turns his head upwards and just before he executes a sinuous jump to be away, I catch the alien reflective flash of the lenses behind his eyes, the utter lack of anything humanly intelligent behind them, and I ponder the strange symbiosis between us.  I guess if he ponders at all, it is quickly ejected from his little brain as the wider scents of the world flood in.

High rise

The 6th floor of the tower block is good.  Lower you couldn't see as far, higher and the scale becomes un-human.  Morning, the view off the balcony of other blocks and the grounds below with the people below sweeping, picking at the plants, holding dogs on leads, it's like a panoramic television.  It draws the eye from the sky.  The sky, today I can see the sky, it has lifted from the top of the buildings where it has squatted, sultry and moist, for the last couple of days.  The ghost skeletons of skyscrapers resolve into metal cages on top of the buildings.  The sky is still a grey white palette, but now tinged with yellow weak sunshine. 
In the morning too the frogs have stopped their baritone moaning; in the absence of pigeons to irritatingly coo at all times, the frogs took this niche in the night.  The angry dog on the 8th floor of the adjacent block, the one that belongs to the angry man and his Indonesian wife, that dog wants to become part of the accepted night chorus and spends it's time auditioning, it's bark raw.
I can hear conversations float up on the air but they don't intrude as I don't understand the local language.  The mornings are pleasantly cooler after hot days and self-inflicted fevered evenings; mornings I relax with coffee on the balcony and slip back into the book I am reading.

A good day to bury bad news

The duvet lay straggled somewhere across the top of her thighs, one of them had made an attempt to cover up after the last bout of sex. He lay spooned behind her, his arm cradled under her breasts, hers resting over his. She felt cherished, again.

The first time it had stunned her, to lie with him in between the breathless explorations, to simply lie in his arms and be cared for. The heady rush of sex with someone she trusted, someone she wanted to please and oh, she was so thrilled that he seemed to be pleased by her. The cocktail of chatting all day about minutiae, of flirting and teasing, the feeling that she could say anything to him, and vice versa had opened her heart. The way to a mans heart may be through his stomach, but he had reached hers from between her legs.

Waking slowly, later in the morning, dazed with lack of sleep and still a bit drunk, there was a knock at the door. The maid, she supposed.

He yawned and stretched, "What time is it?"

"Nearly half ten," she said, reading it off her phone by the bed. One new message. No harm in looking at it, she supposed; as he got up to go to the bathroom she clicked into it, an anonymous number? The trickling noise as he pissed into the toilet seemed to go on forever as she read the message, when he came back into the room she was sitting up with the phone at arms length like she had never seen it before in her life.

"The message is for you," she said, and pulled the duvet up around her in a protective cocoon.

He read the message, "Tell that husband of mine I have news for him"


Posted at ThinkingTen in response to the Word inc Wednesday challenge:  news, spoon
http://thinkingten.ning.com/profiles/blogs/a-good-day-to-bury-bad-news

Spring morning

I open the kitchen door, the coal tit cants its head and looks up, its beak full of fluff.  Cat hair and old leaves to line its nest with; an odd symbiotic moment.
The ginger cat, seeing the door open from his vantage point on the sofa, squeezes his eyes shut as he yawns, front paws stretching out.  He jumps down from the cushion and saunters outside, brushing up against the chair and table legs, the cornered plant pots, leaving scent and hairs behind.  The coal tit has already flown away but sits on an overlooking balcony, keeping a small obsidian eye on the patio.  They watch each other for their next opportunity.

Another morning...

How can my skin be sensitive now? I have pushed it outwards from my core, my body; I have converted the comforts of wine and crisps, chocolate and bread and plumped out the space between. It should be deadened from all the time it has spent with only the answering pressure of the mattress, pushing back at my weight. It should be as numb as I feel without you to grip me.

But I feel the slide of the satiny covers, cool against my leg as I move it to where my body has not rested, my skin twitches as a fly tiptoes across my rounded shoulder. My reactions are sluggish but not gone, I am only hibernating to recover myself.

Looking out

Looking out as she drank her coffee the sun splashed against the windows of a house across the corner, spilled yellow through the floor to ceiling patio windows in her flat. She loved the windows, although they would have been more of a joy to her had they not had to be fully shrouded in muslin for privacy. If they had been overlooking a rocky seashore with white spume and roiling waves.

She lived on the ground floor of a new apartment block right in the town centre; people and cars trickled past at most hours of the day; shoppers with baskets in their grips for daily groceries from the market, workers in the offices of the next block and visitors to the bar underneath the offices. At weekends tourists ambled past, having seen the Abbey and the market square, come to gaze on the remaining segment of the old city wall opposite her living room.

She twitched the curtain to see outside, to drink up the brightness after a flurry of cloudy days, yesterdays snow still white on the paths and branches and on the leaves droopy with cold; the snow was crisped up with the overnight frost.

Watching the people out and about their daily lives. The smart looking woman, maybe the same age as her, swinging black coat but treading carefully with stiletto heels biting into the icy snow to stop her slipping at each step. The thin chinless man, a scarf wrapped across his mouth to keep in the precious warm and wet breath, a small protection from sucking cold into his lungs. He was walking with a small dog that had a bobbly red blanket jacket (gilet?) as well as it's own fleecy coat.

She thought, although it was not a new one, a habitual sneer about the stupid animal, being tethered to go for walks, she thought about how stupid the man was to own a tiny dog like that, it seemed an admission that his life was small and conventional and rulebound. She thought that the dogs paws must surely be the coldest part, why not little boots?

She was surprised to lock gazes with the man as he glanced up, surprised that he did not immediately look away, scurry away with the dog.

Afterwards he wondered often what colour her eyes were, his brain had not grasped or processed that information as he looked at the woman in her short nightdress, her hair dishevelled and as ginger as the cat that twined through her ankles, its tail tickling her pale knee.

The muslin veil of curtain dropped in front of her and her pale bare legs, shrouded the sunshine as she blinked his gaze out of her eyes.

Last morning

When I wake up I am pinned down, my head is anchored to the pillow.  Resistance at my scalp as the skin pulls as I try to move, twist my neck.  Panic clutches me, like that waking dream where my body is frozen but I am alert, I can hear the footsteps coming towards me, coming closer, I know I am paralysed and cannot escape and still they come.  Breathe, gulp air, how effortful it is to do this now when aware that the allotted amount is almost up; how have I breathed unnoticed all this time?  Thoughts whirl and skirl, patterns in the air, a flock of seagulls, wishing I had a picture of you, I've been looking so long at these pictures of you...
The low rumbling I hear must have been going on for several seconds now and with this the terror recedes; it resolves itself into a purr as once again my cat has come into the room in the night and now squats heavily on my hair.

Morning

The sound of the radio hauled me into the present, the inane chatter dances along the borderline between bearable and irritiating as always, and as always I think about retuning it but don't, the well worn dialogue of my internal debate seeping through my conciousness.
Waking up knowing I haven't written anything for 4 days, recoiling from the derisive voice telling me I've letting people down again, no surprise there; recoiling from waking up as me.
Perhaps the radio is part of the problem, I wake up with other peoples words in my head, song lyrics being particularly pervasive, today I will find it difficult to forget "I'm safe, up high, nothing can stop me, so why do I feel this party's over?"  But every day, more words, more phrases, not just songs but fragments of speech, words I have read or written or thought.  They jump into my head and whirl around, dropping some bits and connecting to others, and how then do I tell if it is my voice speaking when they come out?
Small wonder then that I trust the only distinct voice I know, the one that tells me to forget about trying, it won't change anything, just turn over and go back to sleep.