Craving Oxygen

Lesser Shades of Melancholy

Clocks that struck thirteen and silent music had never snared his interest. He cared more for the streetlight outside his window that aimed, aimed and tossed beams of orange light through the crack in his curtains and let them thud onto the floor. The predictably irregular thump-thump of pumpkin-light would leapfrog in time to the streetlight’s winking (the lamp had been squint for as long as he could remember). These very thuds were what lifted his heavy lids from his eyes somewhere around two – or perhaps just after three – that night. He brushed Sleep’s nest of cobwebs from his brain and nose with thoughts that, when enquired about afterwards, seemed to have dissipated from his memory.

Slowly and deliberately, he drew back the bed sheets and then stood up with a single fluid movement so as to keep the springs from grousing and waking the form that slept beside him. He stealthily made his way across the room, a tempo to the breathing of the woman with the sneer-spattered mouth asleep in the bed. The ginger children from the streetlamp gleefully romped about its face, pointing and laughing at the grimace tattooed into the lines around its lips and discontent pooled in the hollows under its eyes as the man slippered steadily away.

The door presented a slight problem, for its hinges always squealed upon its opening or closing. First brushing his hand against the door’s wood, the man slowly turned the handle and pushed the termite-ridden door open, holding his breath as the hinges sang their cadenzas – in perfect pitch of course. The woman did not stir. The man slowly continued on his way.

Pictures of blurred faces, closed eyes and moving limbs stared at him from the walls; he had never been photogenic. Dumbly unaware of their silent entreaties to take his clarinet from the hall cupboard and reminisce with them of better days when the sun always shone and, even when it didn’t, it was okay for the picnic blanket to get wet since it always lead to clothing that clung to thighs and hips not waterlogged with age; he padded along the hall.

Frigid air assaulted his nostrils and tumbled into his lungs like sea water into one’s sinuses. As he squelched down the garden path in sodden slippers, he watched the streetlamp’s light skidding over the snow and hurtling into the walls of the houses strewn about the road. Curtains scarfed around the houses’ eyes and mouths glowed in shades of pastel and mumbled words from television sets and stereos.

Twelve-sided, gamer’s dice seemed to determine time and addresses; eventually only time and the trees he passed. Trees like the magistrate’s creased and rumpled face, double chin and all; trees like his old school teacher’s angular jaw and skin taut from too-tight hair. Trees like the whores lining the street corners: skimpy and brittle. Trees like the pastor’s son and the washer woman and the beggar. And a solitary log.

He knelt in the decaying carpet.

He hesitantly reached out two wary fingertips, touched her bark and withdrew again sharply, eyes glued to the stump. At no sign of protest from the rotting log, he reached out once more, softly caressing his hand along her knots and bared roots.

Starting cautiously, the man picked off a patch of bark near one knot, revealing soft, flesh encapsulated in the muddy crust. Continuing with renewed fervour, he deftly peeled at the scab harbouring ivory skin.

Crack – crack – tear. Crack – crack – tear, in time with the winking of the streetlight, of course, but this was unknown to him. Wink – thump – crack – crack – tear.

Wink – thump – crack – crack – tear.

Wink – thump – crack – crack – tear.

When the street lamp was finally snuffed out for the night, a woman with grumbling eyes awoke frost-bitten in a forest, planted in a bed of rot.

When the sun finally clicked on for the day, a man awoke in a quilted bed beside a naked figure of log to the murmuring of sun rays on the floor.

*Okay, so I’m thinking that it needs a new title, but other than that I’m quite satisfied with it 🙂
It’s about a man who wakes up in the middle of the night to peel a log. He then plants his wife in the forest where the log was and wakes up the next morning with the log next to him in bed. The reference to the wife at the beginning as an ‘it’ and to the log as a ‘her’ is completely intentional.*

Posted in Prose
Tags: cravingoxygen, forest, infatuation, log, love, married life, melancholy, nostalgia, Prose, queer, short story, wife, wood