borrowing pond

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 6:30:35 AM

2005-01-18T06:30:00.000-08:00

The first fifteen seconds of every day are the most difficult. It is in these unlubricated seconds that we grind to show are true steel and they had been his favorite times of the day. He would take a moment to lie in bed fill himself deep with breath as if it were purpose itself and whip the covers back; the day begun.
Now something had changed. He credited it to growing older and the glass of wine he had before bed, but that first breath left him less full and he felt content to be under the sheets. He felt that maybe this was as good a place as any to be.
So he would lie sliding his hand around the blank wall of what had been his purpose, his cause and feel for the light switch that would spark him again.
The city outside roared. It was incredibly loud. The chorus of an entire city joined together to produce on endless tearing of cardboard. He wondered if it was always this way and he had never noticed. He wondered if all his senses were always subtly on alert. He look at the cat that some one had left behind and how it never seemed to relax. He felt that way. Looking up at the ceiling and the seams of the drywall that shown though he wondered when he would stop feeling this way.
The morning air stung his bare legs as he pulled back the covers. He hadn’t finished the previous days coffee and reheated a cup. He took his first sip and filled his mind with everything else so that all the mornings nothing would slip back and away till tomorrow.

Monday, January 17, 2005 6

2005-01-17T06:29:00.000-08:00

That is the way the story began and had each time he had attempted to write it. But it had no ending. Nothing punctuated and definite happened and when he returned stateside at the end of the week he was back to work.
Immediately hemmed up with deadlines and meetings, due diligence and reports, he wasn’t able to think about anything else. He was good at what he did. He might have been great if he had really wanted to be doing what he did. His boss often told him how great he was but he was sure that was only an attempt to urge him to grow into greatness. He may very well do it as his other dreams began to fade and wither.
That week turned into three before he got back into his groove or rut, depending upon the day. When he finally sat down to write his knock kneed words clumped out on the page and resisted like petulant sea birds that would not come to his outstretched hand. She faded for him. More accurately he might have admitted if he had been asked it that he faced from her. Who he was on the beach or on the side of that mountain was a sliver of his former self. With her he had been who he was as a boy; when he was a better man, he thought with a smile.
He kept switching from his word processor to his daily organizer as he was trying to write. The only thoughts that came to his mind were ones of schedules and expectations. Finally, he stopped writing and sat trying to remember her skin and the way her bare feet had looked on the forest floor so delicately beautiful and wholly incongruous in its mélange of corruption; wet and black on pale flesh.
At the bottom of his desktop the icon of an envelope flashed twice to indicate he had received more email. He abandoned his memory of the moment and his past at large for his future. He knew it at that moment. He was no longer committed to telling his stories. His future needed him and it stretched out far beyond any fanciful tryst on the side of some volcanic mountain. It had been his last hurrah as a child, though at the thought the child within him corrected his misnomer by whispering ‘last hurrah as a human.”

Monday, November 22, 2004 6:27:52 AM

2004-11-22T06:27:00.000-08:00

Walking up a slender wash cut in the side of the mountain, he mused about what it would be like to be lost. But no sooner had he the thought occurred to him but he realized that he had not seen her in twenty minutes. Maybe it was already more, he couldn’t remember. He called to her, waited and heard nothing in return. Holding his breath he listened, but there was no sound save the forest which suddenly felt like it was constricting around him. Trees that had moments before been as innocuous as the side of the mountain itself were suddenly animated , swaying back and fourth, mocking him like children on a play ground. Even the damp air pressed at the periphery of his body. He called again, but the sinister trees huddled together to block the travel of his voice. Though there was still plenty of light on the forest floor, the sun had disappeared behind a cloud and shadows were softened and all forms seemed anonymous in the half light.
It was not unlike her to wander off. He tried to reconcile this panic with that thought but it didn’t work. He called again and heard the extent of his desperation in his own voice, sounding stronger than he was letting himself feel.
He didn’t know which was worse, the thought of being stuck up here looking for her and getting himself more lost or the thought of going back down and leaving her up here lost. A rescue attempt in the density of this forest would almost have to be done on foot and what had moments before been a rustic and charming city was now unsophisticated and ill prepared. Worst of all not only she was lost; the false sense of security that being with another person gave him allowed him not to pay attention to how he had come. Terrified now he realized that he too was lost.

Monday, November 15, 2004 8:00:11 AM

2004-11-15T06:59:00.000-08:00

“Death was at the tip of each paragraph’s tongue.” Even attempts not to write about it were discovered in allusions both direct and discreet. Critics poked at his work with the pointy end of their sticks and called it ‘achievement.’ He hadn’t written about death and so didn’t know what he had achieved.
He had watched a pink plastic woman carefully decorated at the bookstore purchase his book after some television celebrity had mentioned it. Perverse and thrilling to witness he still felt she was an interloper in his world and for an instant wanted to pull the book out from beneath her bananaed-back well lotioned fingers and wet nail polish.
When the book disappeared easily into her handbag with other imagined inconsequentials; lip gloss, a quetzal (from a Guatemalan vacation when she was still ‘soltera’ (single) and adventurous) and tissue lint, what he had crafted to be stirring and evocative seemed marginal and supplemental to all the other mass produced shit that the woman smeared on her face and smudged on their lips. His creation would soon be another ornament to decorate dinner conversations, then coffee tables, then book shelves. Soon, if it even did now, his book wouldn’t matter and in the vastness of the forest with his hand on the bare bellies of trees that would out last him and all of it, he wondered if he would ever write again.

Tuesday, November 09, 2004 7:07:11 AM

2004-11-09T07:07:00.000-08:00

She walked for a long while before she really considered where she was going, nor had she marked any spots so she could retrace her steps. She thought he would. It was the kind of thing he would do. She looked back twice but seeing him she kept on climbing.
A trickle of water once flowing fast had carried and stacked the tiny particals along beside it in ascending tiers. Like fans on bleachers the dirt bank walls sat and watched the rest of their kind still trapped or riding the current of this miniature river bed. Kneeling beside it she could see the tiny ferries of bits of leaf and sand size skiffs swirled and carried down stream.
A piece of the bank broke off and rejoined the stream. A tragedy or a triumph she couldn’t tell. The tiny particle citizens either were sucked back in to the torrents by the collapse of their eroding sedimentary foundations or they all leaped together to rejoin the ride. A communal choice to live again, she thought. A choice to live and not be the watchers of life. Actor or audience, she uttered quietly, her thoughts suddenly far away.
She snapped the shoot off a narrow trunk and bent it in two places until the tiny fibers snapped and the crease she made was permanent. Pushing the two ends into the soil on either side of the tiny river she marked the spot where the brave had left caution with the cautious and chose living for the alive.
Standing up the fragile little monument nearly disappeared into the fallen foliage. After a few steps further up the hill, her little world had disappeared completely. Its existent instantly irrelevant and any sign of it sure to disappear with the first good rain, but courage of those who through themselves back in, despite better judgment and more promising opportunities and more certainty and security, was what she thought about for the rest of the afternoon.

Monday, November 08, 2004 7:41:18 AM

2004-11-08T06:41:00.000-08:00

Leaves fallen and in various stages of decay were spongy beneath his feet. With each step he left a mark in the sediment deposited by the trees the dwarfed her. Like a character in a science fiction novel, stood at the base of the giant trunks, gray and round that disappeared into the earth below and then stretched up to a canopy high above. She, running her hand across the bark like an young child reaching for her father’s hand to hold.
“Is it vaguely cannibalistic that trees make leaves from the nutrients of the soil, and then drop those leaves so they will rot into nutrients so they can make more leaves?” He called out to her. Now further ahead of him she didn’t answer, though he didn’t know if she had chosen not to or if the forest had eaten his words too. “If a man talks shit in a forest and no one is there to hear him, is he still talking shit?” He asked aloud. Sounding closer than he expected she clearly said, “Yes.”
He thought it fitting that the smell of decay should be pleasing to him; it fit with his fascination with death; a fancy that she seemed to illuminate in him.

Monday, November 08, 2004 7:39:32 AM

2004-11-08T06:38:00.000-08:00

A large bird made black by the sun above flew overhead. He watched it trace the sky - long unflapping wings slightly shrugged at the shoulders – and wondered if the bird ever questioned the unseen forces that pushed him around the sky.
She followed his gaze to the bird until its arch leaned her head against the seat. She left her head there and looked at him. He was looking at the line of her neck with its smooth gentle line and delicate skin. “You’re looking at my bones aren’t you?” He laughed because he was. “I know, I just watched the skeleton of a bird soar by,” she continued. He replied, “And I have been thinking, what a great skull you have. It is strange that we don’t consider the bones that lay beneath the skin of the people we love.”
“That may be because it is a little morbid.” “No, it is morbid if we are thinking about our loved ones dead. I am thinking about your bones animated. Your chomping mandible and tiny phalanges wrapped in mine.”
She looked down at their hands and the bones beneath them. He laughed at her repulsion as she pulled her hand away from his.
“Do you think you would recognize my bones?” She asked. His eyes narrowed as if he was looking through her skin, pealing away the muscles to examine her skull.
“Okay, stop,” she said, “that is too creepy to have you looking at my skull.”
She jumped out of the jeep. “Let’s go for a walk, Bones.”
He followed her in silence, watching her graceful skeleton negotiate the forest floor.

Tuesday, November 02, 2004 6:00:56 AM

2004-11-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

“If we stay here forever,” she asked, “would our bones be found on the iron rich soil below or would a jeep be found with two piles of powder in the seats still connected by a powder line down the middle?
He turned to her, smiling at her terrible sweetness that now and again shown through the cracks in her veneer. He didn’t answer, just continued holding tight to her hand so that if the latter were possible, it would come true.

Monday, November 01, 2004 6:46:05 AM

2004-11-01T06:45:00.000-08:00

He wanted to reach out and run his fingers across the dashboard, but felt the near instinctual inclination to be still when you are being silent. Like prey he was frozen. His mind was not silent and to occupy it from wandering and fabricating reasons for the things that other people do – as he had often done in the past – he ran his gaze back and forth over the dashboard as if to expedite the inevitable deterioration of the flecking paint on metal.
Beneath yellow was white, and under white was another yellow. Something still was hidden under those layers - the original color – the real color, he thought. Each layer painted over to hide the previous. The metals in cheap paint oxidizing in the soft ocean breeze. A naturally occurring layer of protection muting the vibrant yellow and crisp white. Painted over. Layer of patina over paint, layer of paint over patina. Layer after layer cracking and peeling away. All the paint will come off, no matter how many layers cover it, he thought.

Wednesday, October 20, 2004 7:23:53 AM

2004-10-20T07:23:00.000-07:00

Once, more years before, she had been on a long bus ride from Mexico City to Oaxaca.
Amid the dust and the night the bus slowed to pick up a group at the side of the road. The first men were dirty and wet from the earlier evening’s rains. She pretended to sleep as she watched the men pass down the isle. The last man onto the bus was a young man below the brim a dropping hat. He dropped into the seat next to her.
He was too big for the small bus seat, his knees pushing into the back of the seat ahead of them. As the bus pulled back onto the road, tossing everyone hard to the right, he nearly fell into her lap. What ever he had said didn’t sound like Spanish, but in the warmth of his large brown eyes and the tilt of his broad face, translated an apology.
Something in his gentle manner was magnificent. His first words to her had been said with such concentration on her, his whole body and being focused for that instant in a pungent, fluid, familiarity. She had felt suddenly shy and simple. She was sure she had smiled stupidly as she pointed to her self and said, “Angela”. He pronounced her name beautifully. And though she repeated his several times, trying to forge the syllables with her too thick tongue, she forgot it immediately afterward.
The smell of the wet wool of his jacket was overpowering and was the last thing she thought about before going to sleep.
When she woke the jacket was over top of her and her head on his chest. His arms were wrapped around her and she wondered what it would be like to be this man’s wife. Would each night be this warm and simple – separated by language, tightly embracing to make up for it? Could that be enough for her? Would she follow him when she got off the bus?
She entertained herself with these thoughts as he slept beside her and the sun came up over her shoulder.
When he finally did get off in San Christobal or one of those cities in the south, she kissed him gently like a wife would her husband and ached as the bus pulled away.

She would always describe it as the single most honest expression of what transpires between a man and a woman. Simple and uninhibited by words, truthful and not convoluted by concepts, intimacy completely expressed.

Here sitting far above the a city they could no longer see, the ticking of the jeeps engine as the metals cooled, and in the silence of the forest, she was recreating the night on the bus by not adding anything to their silence.

Wednesday, October 20, 2004 7:21:51 AM

2004-10-20T07:21:00.001-07:00

Once, years before, she had been on a long bus ride from Mexico City to Oaxaca.
Amid the dust and the night the bus slowed to pick up a group at the side of the road. The first men were dirty and wet from the earlier evening’s rains. She pretended to sleep as she watched the men pass down the isle. The last man onto the bus was a young man below the brim a dropping hat. He dropped into the seat next to her.
He was too big for the small bus seat, his knees pushing into the back of the seat ahead of them. As the bus pulled back onto the road, tossing everyone hard to the right, he nearly fell into her lap. What ever he had said didn’t sound like Spanish, but in the warmth of his large brown eyes and the tilt of his broad face, translated an apology.
Something in his gentle manner was magnificent. His first words to her had been said with such concentration on her, his whole body and being focused for that instant in a pungent, fluid, familiarity. She had felt suddenly shy and simple. She was sure she had smiled stupidly as she pointed to her self and said, “Angela”. He pronounced her name beautifully. And though she repeated his several times, trying to forge the syllables with her too thick tongue, she forgot it immediately afterward.
The smell of the wet wool of his jacket was overpowering and was the last thing she thought about before going to sleep.
When she woke the jacket was over top of her and her head on his chest. His arms were wrapped around her and she wondered what it would be like to be this man’s wife. Would each night be this warm and simple – separated by language, tightly embracing to make up for it? Could that be enough for her? Would she follow him when she got off the bus?
She entertained herself with these thoughts as he slept beside her and the sun came up over her shoulder.
When he finally did get off in San Christobal or one of those cities in the south, she kissed him gently like a wife would her husband and ached as the bus pulled away.

She would always describe it as the single most honest expression of what transpires between a man and a woman. Simple and uninhibited by words, truthful and not convoluted by concepts, intimacy completely expressed.

Here sitting far above the a city they could no longer see, the ticking of the jeeps engine as the metals cooled, and in the silence of the forest, she was recreating the night on the bus by not adding anything to their silence.

Wednesday, October 20, 2004 7:21:18 AMOnce, more years before, she had been on a long bus ride from Mexico City to Oaxaca.

2004-10-20T07:21:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, October 20, 2004 7:20:14 AM

2004-10-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

Sunday, October 17, 2004 1:22:35 PM

2004-10-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

The bur of the failing road filled the silence that word have been in the jeep. She had not said another world as parting throngs of natives became the occasional man pulling a car to no man at all. Now the land cast out before them, a grey-green tarp that covered indiscriminate objects; distant lumps that might have been mountains or maybe shadows. The erratic topography he had read about. The writer’s prose becoming each moment more inadequate to explain the grandeur this small jeep was disappearing into. Looking at her reflection in the flat glass of the windshield, he wondered if she knew where she was going.
She pushed the jeep hard up steep hills and slow and methodically over large rocks. She kept on when the road changed from the two tracks of a truck to the single track of a man walking. Ever climbing, she kept on the throttle even as the path vanished, completely reclaimed by a slowly encroaching nature. The small young trees that they rolled over snapped back up behind them, blocking his view of the way back out. He figured that she must know her way back out.
The trees were blocking the sun with sprawling canopies and their broadening trunks could not be run over by the truck. Soon they could no longer weave through the trees and the jeep came to a stop. She finally looked over at him and with a smile of relievf she said, “We made it.”
He looked out the windshield to see what he must have missed. Only more of the same sylvan lay before them.
“We made it where?” He asked.
As if could it not be more obvious, “Here.”
“Where exactly is that?”
“At our end, we can’t go any further.”
She laid her hand palm up on his knee. He looked from it to her eyes, then back to her hand. He took her hand in his and said,”It is nice here.”
She smiled.

Friday, October 15, 2004 6:38:15 AM

2004-10-15T06:37:00.000-07:00

An unknown public address system popped. He looked away from a sea bird who had been chasing the surf line up and back. Joined by the small waitress, he peered at the speaker that had been mounted in the plaster ceiling. It was a human reaction to orient oneself to the sound of a speaker – an ingrained politeness to present that you were a listener. There was a brief pause while the speaker confirmed that the system was working. He gathered that the inefficiency of the speaker and the concerned look of the waitress that the system was not often used.
“Jeffery Talbot, Your party is waiting for you at the front of the building. Jeffery Talbot, please join your party at the front of the building.”
Even though there was no one to witness, as no other guests had yet shown up in the dining room, he still felt embarrassment at hearing his name announced over the P.A. system. Even more so because he was only called Jeffery on formal occasions.
Finishing his cup of coffee and taking the napkin from his lap he left them at the table and headed for the front of the building.
He had made no plans and had no ‘party’ that could have been waiting for him. Some mistake had been made or maybe there was another Jeffery Talbot.
The cool morning air rushed by him on its way out to sea as he stepped from of the building. A jeep was idling on the otherwise empty front drive.
The passenger door was open and on the seat were a camera, a bundle of film and the light jacket he used when he was shooting.
“Hurry up she said, we’re late.” She said as she ran past him and jumped into the driver’s seat.
“Hold on.” She popped the clutch and raced out into the street.

Thursday, October 14, 2004 8:06:33 AM

2004-10-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

Pulling the door behind him and holding his credit card over the door’s strike, he slid the card out of the jamb slowly so that the bolt would not snap shut and wake her up. He would have an hour to himself before she would get out of bed and he needed it this morning. Like the morning sky over the bay his mind was overcast; two converging fronts of air at very different temperatures disguising the sun.
He found a table looking out over the ocean and a small waitress politely took his order. “American coffee?” This had puzzled him the first morning, but here anything that wasn’t local was American. “Sure. Please” he said and felt silly and distant from the waitress and even from his words. The night before and the beach, the woman and her body, his sleep were made vague and distant by the clinically clean dining room with its plates neatly stacked, the uniformity of the table cloths and silverware. Everything in its straight-line parallel places; somebody’s instructions followed precisely and him askew, not even perpendicular.
All that he had known about women was abruptly untrue. Not all, he admitted while looking through the steam of his coffee. Certainly some of the fundamental first-held beliefs were debunked. The women in his life had always been vocal about how a woman was to be regarded and the tips he gleaned from their not so gentle prodding had served him well. Now, however, this woman seem to deliberately shuck each compliment he tried to wrap around her shoulders and returned every policy he attempted making the gesture less chivalric and more a trading of favors. At the same moment he felt agitated and cherished that she would dare to hold a door for him; and she did, and he walk through each of them.
Off violent flush of his cheeks the night before when she had put her finger in his mouth for him to suck in front of an elderly couple.
She said, “You must think me wicked.”
He raised the coffee cup to his lips to hide his smile. He wanted to keep this to himself. He didn’t think she was wicked.
He looked out at the ocean expectantly, but was only waiting for her to wake up.

Monday, October 11, 2004 6:50:19 AM

2004-10-11T06:45:00.000-07:00

He stood and helped her up. Looking down he could see the record of lovers in the sand. Imprints of their coming together; deep narrow ruts scored into the sand and shallow smooth impressions of the descent for climax. She turned to follow his gaze and looked down at the cast of their union. With a leap she shattered it and with kicks and the long arching blade of her foot she slashed at the two heads and at thick torsos gouging deep shadows in the beaches pale gold flesh. When she had dashed the mold into a billion indiscernible, unrelated grains of sand she turned to him. She looked him in the eye accusingly.
“Records destroy living” she said. “As soon as something is done it is the human affliction to think it needs to be recorded and then we spend the rest of eternity trying to live up to it.” “That is how humans progress,” he said, knowing full well that any argument with her could not be won. She had always been obstinate and proud and he had always hated that about her. Still when she turned away he followed her, even using the footprints that she left as stepping stones.
“Man kind has developed to such an extent only because they have recorded in art and in literature and in science their achievement, he continued. “I am not so sure I think that man has made it so far. Well that is not true; they have traveled a great distance but not in the right direction.” “But they have reached such…” She turned back to him with such sudden ferocity, crashed into his chest and by the hair on the back of his head pulled his mouth onto hers. She kissed him deep and rocked her pelvis hard into his, holding it their and drawing deep of him.
She released him and only his penis had understood her full meaning as is stood full and upright pointing directly at her. All that man has done is to draw a serrated intellect down the soft of his passion and pinch the wick of wonderment. I like to feel my soul in knots. No thought or concept has ever done that to me; but your body has-does.”
She turned away again, sand crystals and moonlight clinging to her naked body. And he, as she had left him after the kiss, stood frozen hunched over and knees bent; somewhere between animal and man.

Saturday, October 09, 2004 3:10:23 PM

2004-10-09T15:10:00.000-07:00

A narrow crescent along the length of her thy absorbed the last of the days heat. She felt the coolness in the instant the last of the sun was gone. She had been suspended somewhere in between the two halves of wakefulness and sleep, though she wasn’t sure for how long. Though many images had been in her mind she couldn’t remember their relation to each other and had not considered their relevance. She had been perched on a precipice and only tried to stay balanced there. All else flowed by in her periphery, she stayed focused on the point.
Stepping down she turned her head to where she had left her lover. He was still there, though she could not discern whether his eyes were opened or closed. Only when he smiled slightly did she know that he had been looking at her.
They lay there naked above the rising tide and looked at each other, each willing themselves not to look away and confronted by the urge to break the gaze. She knew he couldn’t see into the shadows on her face. That afforded her the safety to be more exposed than she would otherwise allow. He thought how strange it was that he felt no discomfort or aversion to being stared at by a stranger, but to have her looking directly into his eyes was almost excruciating. It was fear, he knew, but could never tell her. Introspection was not something shared between them. He had tried several times, but it had never worked. She couldn’t understand the value of it and told him often enough that he secretly swore not to bring it up again. If the sun had not set behind her and let a cape of shadow hide her face he would have seen the tears from her eyes, her body’s violent rebellion at such vulnerability.
She reached out across the space between them and laid the back of her hand down on his. He spread his fingers slightly to allow hers to fall between his. She felt his warmth. He felt the tiny grains of sand between them.

Friday, October 08, 2004 9:13:27 AM

2004-10-08T09:12:00.000-07:00

All thoughts came back to her and to his wonder of what she was thinking. It was, he thought, unlike a woman to want this distance after sex. In not fulfilling this ordained duty he puttered, unsure of what to do. He found himself needing to be wrapped in a post-coital embrace.
He looked at her, deep bevels carved smooth dark dunes, gradients of light stopping down spanning spectrums, a nearly impossible form created by absolutely improbable instances of chance.
He studied her until the shapes became discriminate geometries, abstract pallets, each a dictating and demanding unwavering allegiance from his creature’s body.
He wondered if anything else was so beautiful. Skies and mountains had made him small and inspired awe, he had once loved a set a train tracks that shown like two gold thread spun over the Midwest landscape and disappearing somewhere out west, but nothing like this. He tried to part his lips to tell her, but her distance and the dryness of the salt air fused his lips and he said nothing. Nothing like a woman’s body. He had never been able to look at one like this before. He had seen photos of women who had stood or been reclined, with their hair splayed out, displayed like a gift given or a manikin in a shop window ‘on sale now’, but never before had he been able to look at a woman for so long; without her becoming self-conscious and covering herself or without words interrupting and making clumsy attempts at rapture and without feeling like she was there for his benefit. She lay; separate from him, indifferent to him, on her own, for her own.
He was a satellite to this woman; the only thing that kept him from flinging himself into the universe beyond. He knew, even if he could fly away, he would stay to be stung by ardor and confusion simultaneously, again.

Thursday, October 07, 2004 7:30:44 AM

2004-10-07T07:30:00.000-07:00

“…just to see your face.” he said. And in any other moment this would have elicited wicked violence in the core of her ‘woman’ regardless what it would have spoken to her feminity, but here in the brief sacristy after love, with the sun and wind laying and tumbling over her bare skin as it did the dunes and ocean around her, as it had, as it seemed it must, his word were simply true. He needed sex just to see her face. He needed to get past his need. He needed to engage to disarm and trigger his archaic mechanics of his lust so that his eye could see without passions obscuring lens.
She said nothing. He had spoken and the breeze carried his words out to sea as a wave from some other storm far away from this shore crashed up on the shoreline.
Moments before, she was in nature. Without the impediments of her life she was suddenly and simple in communion with the nature she was a part of. Her body held tight to the earth in the cradle created in the sand by her body and another’s body struggling against the distance of their separations. The sky laid lightly down over her as beneficently as it did all else. Between the earth and sky, her animal, a pounding heart.
She didn’t want him to speak. The moment was hers and she knew it. She had believed such bliss was not so fragile before and broke it. She breathed slow and deeply so as not to interrupt the currents in and around her. She felt, and for those moment that would be all that she was.

He lay, defeated and deflating in a heap, struggling to regain his breath. A fallen atlas and awed at her beauty and cruelty. He was instantly aware of his frame in its odd angles, and the sun warming the inside of his upper leg. He felt too vulnerable and spoke. She didn’t reply so he tried to fill his mind with regalements of the conquest.