NOTE ON BROWN PAPER
Each day it took three days to warm the room. On the first day of each day he remained in bed too cold to move. Too cold to shiver. Too cold to eat foil-wrapped pizza. On the second day of each day, his remains collected some dust and a bucket of wet coal from under the house and pretended to kindle a fire. Startled by the cackling flames, his remaining remains would retreat into the gap between the sink tiles and the clapped out oven. On the third day of each day, too tired to eat foil-wrapped pizza, he dozed, then finally set off for work. At work, he did nothing but thaw his spine in the large microwave oven, and eat his paints.
At curfew time he would set off, exhausted but alive, on the journey to somebody's home. Anybody's home, but his own. At that place he would sup warm tea and cook parts of himself on a grate. Speaking recklessly at chairs, he would inevitably, to the best of his ability, skill-lessly postpone another journey to somebody else's home. Inflating and deflating himself in the manner to which his hosts had grown accustomed, he would take the opportunity, whether it arose or not, to clean himself with thanks, feed himself with chocolate eggs, stretch himself, prostrate himself, and occasionally copulate. Eventually, towards the start of the following three days, he would excuse himself, relieve himself, and plod off some place. He would disengage successfully, grimacing pathetically, and sod off. Thus, dead-beat, breathless and bitter, apologising through shivers, he would at last piss off.
In the early hours, he would slide off his bed. His own bed, usually. Counting bits of frozen sheep he would drop off it effortlessly to embrace a collection of classic nightmares. Palpable nightmares which stung and reeked through his pillow. Upon shouting himself awake, half choked in sweat, he would savour the taste of His latest fantastical dream-bound ordeal; for these visions, these dream-shrouded clues, were a passion of his. Perhaps his only passion, it was hard to say. He wrote it once. He wrote:
FANTASY IS PASSION
and then blotted it away. He inked it back in, and then blotted it away. Over and over, he did it; inked it back in, and, with a corner of the sodden sheet, blotted it away.
Eventually it read: PASSION IS FANTASY
Eventually he said "Passion is a fantasy..."
And the most of them agreed.
NOTE ON BLUE PAPER
Emotionless still, he continued his faint-hearted search for passion in the heat, welcome and feared, of another new summer. Through this motionless summer he meandered and searched, till a teething amount of it, passion that is, was splashed upon him by a passing washer-upper-cum-pastry-roller in a passing German-Brazilian restaurant.
He stiffened, then ducked to catch a hint of it. He softened, then ducked again.
For she was smaller than a woman and his own neck was extraordinarily long. He cowered, and kissed, and bit out both tongues. She, mild like her mother, fluidly smiled and dribbled and ran with bare hands a-plundering about his docile hair and skin. They thrashed intelligently for a longish while, in his hole or one of hers, and bothered reluctantly to do it more often. Confirming the attempt on both their lives, they troubled to do it more often. They worried alone, and as some kind of pair, but suffered to do it more often. And, almost as shocking as that: more often than not it came off.
His method, defensive perhaps, but cripplingly clever, was to imagine himself high in a body in one of his dreams, and filled to the teeth with one of hers.
Her method, or whether she had one at all, he never imagined. He never considered nor guessed.
Do what you want, just do it to me! they lazily pleaded.
The summer passed. The future passed. And the present passed effortlessly before his critical, sleep-filled eyes. He visited others, when suited, but always came back. Most likely, she did too, but her visits were quiet and harder to see. One evening, in a room with sticky fingers, during a light storm, she looked upon him with a curvy face, and he looked at her, as they limped to the window.
Through that wide open window he studied the scaffolded church on the other side of the street.
Her bells rang off the hour.
We're out of time, they said together, and clung forever tighter.
