AH1:DCaa

From Create Your Own Story

Revision as of 23:04, 7 December 2023

Michel was still staring lividly at himself in the bathroom mirror. He was holding as many superstitions of a change in the expression as possible. It helped him to imagine a separate person to accompany him in the light of any sudden changes to what was reflected, who would definitely communicate whatever came back at him as dryly as possible. There had been a lot of volatility in his dreams. Not out of keeping with his regular habits: whenever he was restless, his imagination liked to reshape drapery into muscly caricatures. To him this was a direct analogy to other ways he wasted time.

The rain almost projected itself indoors, frequently interrupting this meditation. His face would occasionally lope forward into the sink and he was steadying himself around the basin. He would be caught up in rituals of feigned character even when on his own, tracing small spots of sheared skin on his hands and massaging the thin, circular plates on both sides of his forehead.

The mystery from the balcony at this time of night was very beautiful to him. It pointed down from a sheer slope from a cedar forest and looked into a net of trees; it made the house look ugly and unimportant. When the rain was swirling his hair outside, he'd wrung out the smell of coal tar from the fire in the abbess in the forest earlier today where he was cooking dinner.

Michel's mind dramatized that the sleet was making his hands purple and spongy and then ripping through them like wire cloth. He'd walked barely a hundred yards to retrieve the crockery, and it had to be reasoned out like the protest against the falling prone back to sleep in the morning. He moved the steelware in sumps up to ridges in the face of the hill, particularly mindful of the threat of totalling over. The posture seemed embarrassing but no one would see it. One of the things he liked most about the strange house was that the ambition while living there never preceded the reality. They were all simple enough, but perhaps his mind never meditated to the point of a complex ambition. He was never consumed by a cause or a role or function like he sometimes used to be. He would spend a disproportionate amount of time reorganizing cooking implements like this, or just as easily chopping wood or staring at the coast.

Having recovered the pot and the ladel Michel had no idea what to do next, but he felt incredibly tired.

across stream | back indoors | watch the stream