Fade In, Fade Out.
I left the house around 6am-ish. I hadn’t put new clothes on or combed my hair, brushed my teeth showered or eaten or shit or pissed or even rubbed my eyes. Things were blurry but I was in a rush to leave the house and I can’t remember why.
I walked down my road in my pajamas when an older man, a slender man stood in my way on the pavement. He was naked.
‘Good Morning Sir’ I said staring him right in his eyes, blue and piercing.
‘You look stiff. Something got your spine?’
‘Many things’ I replied. ‘But your current state demands I stare you in the eyes and nowhere else’.
‘A Victorian are you? Prudish?’ He giggled to me insultingly.
‘Actually I’m more Edwardian than anything’ — my revenge!, ‘but there has been something since birth holding me back. I am scared of the naked body’ — cancel my last.
‘Your own body?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have a lover?’
‘Never’
‘You must. You will overcome this fear with the right lady’
‘Just with a lady?’
‘You are Edwardian. Edward’.
And he left, my path was clear. My name is not Edward.
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I soon found my slippers unsuited for the terrain as I passed onto the common and the bog left my feet bare in the mud. No bother. I’ll walk without and shower later.
Then I spotted a pool, on the common?
A woman. Middle aged, in a tight swimsuit and a shower cap on her head, although her hair was grey and dotted on her head, so I saw no use for it. As I went to tell her about her scalp, something paused me.
She wasn’t undignified in any way, very majestic and beautifully natural. She paddled like a dog, occasionally accidentally gulped water and stopped paddling to cough up the water that she swallowed. Her body shape was odd to me. I’d never seen a figure so natural. Aging, sagged and wrinkled. But, beautiful.
I ran over, then realized I had no shoes and cut my foot open on a rock, fell down a mudslide and into the pool with the woman.
I can’t swim.
The woman pulls me out the pool and pushes my chest down and down and down and my ribs are broken.
‘Your ribs aren’t broken, Edward’. She told me, opening my button shirt and revealing my pasty hairless chest.
‘How do you know?’ I questioned.
‘Because I’ve snapped your ribs before and they are stronger than most. You don’t smoke.’
I don’t smoke, no. I thought. ‘I don’t smoke, no’ I said to her. ‘Would you stop pushing my chest in? It hurts and I don’t know why you started in the first place’.
‘Okay, but don’t be afraid of the pain. It can teach you many things.’ She told me, then promptly dived into the pool without any elegance, which made me think she was elegant for having lack of. Odd little paradox there, but it makes sense to me and hopefully to you as-well.
My last stop was the shooting range. ‘Clay pigeons I hope!’ I shouted playfully to the lads in their gear with their shotguns in hand.
They turned menacingly to me like my mother would when she had drank in the day again.
I returned home. Went to bed.
I woke up around 6-ish to find the man from the day before at the end of my bed, cutting my toenails. What’s going on?
Fade in, I do. Fade out, always.
