If it hadn’t happened right at that moment, it likely never would have happened at all. The timing so eloquently vital, the chimes of the church tower striking just as she passed me by. It was out of a movie, perfectly synchronized. The mood played along with the setting. I was beaten down from a depressing poetry reading piggybacked on the breakup of a three-year relationship. My ex girlfriend got the bed because if she had left it there I would have taken an axe to it, as I couldn’t to her. With wounded passion I had shredded the sheets where she’d admitted she’d made love with another man.
So I was open to the moment and the flight of auburn hair set afire by the late afternoon sun. Does anyone really wear apple red lipstick these days? Her mouth was full and pouty with it, I could see that even as I caught the dazzle of emerald eyes. I’d almost let it all go past in a clicking of heels on the brick path. Something still alive inside stopped me, spun me around to rush after her. She turned as if she had known.
She sucked up hot chocolate through a straw–so odd. It mesmerized me. She blew big chocolate bubbles that murmured and snapped at the rim of the cup that she held in a grip that–oh my Lord, it was more than suggestive. Or was it just me, slowly getting up from my knees? The afternoon darkened to evening and minutes and hours flushed my veins with promise with the speed of cocaine.
It was midnight and the third time we’d made love after a long dinner of sushi and delicate plum wine. I fell asleep in the scent of her, now familiar on the new sheets. I woke up inhaling it, her, smiling before I opened my eyes. I imagined her hair fanned out like flame on the pillow, her green eyes simmering beneath ivory lids. I was unreasonably happy, fulfilled, confident again now that she–but I’d forgotten her name. I opened my eyes and rolled over.
No fan of auburn ablaze in sunlight on the pillow but rather a mass of tangled copper like a rusted kitchen scrubby. Her alabaster skin was sprayed with freckles. All over, freckles. Her lips were kissed clean of their apple-red paint and appeared puffed rather than pouty. As she resettled herself in her sleep, there was an impression of more weight than I would have expected. I lifted the bedsheet ever so slightly aside. My breath froze in my chest. My eyes blurred with the explosion of tiny red specks of light. The sheet slipped from my fingers as she awoke.
Susan Gibb is a writer, publisher, reader of all sorts of story. She has explored the nature of new media as in hypertext for fiction and is opening up to the graphic and audio versions as just another means alongside poetry, fiction, lyrics and film. She has presented her sides of the stories at conferences, workshops and gatherings and enjoys the interconnections of artists in all forms of expression.