AH1:DCaabb

From Create Your Own Story

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. He'd head down there and collect some things from earlier.

Despite the canopy the sleet was making his hands purple and spongy and then ripping through them like wire cloth. It was similar to trying not to fall prone to a few hours passing by in the morning. He moved the steelware upwards in clumsy sumps, particularly mindful of the threat of totalling over. Perhaps his mind never meditated to the point of a complex ambition here. He was never consumed by a role or function like he sometimes used to be. Perhaps to him it was always a way to try and create a social repose if he could just state a purpose. Now he would spend a disproportionate amount of time reorganizing cooking implements like this, or just as easily chopping wood or another errata.

Having recovered a few parts of the kitchen that probably wouldn't have gone missing in the morning, Michel went back indoors and started reading from

a book of local topography and tourist's descriptions | a work of fiction by Stu Martin | a book on papermaking