cyclingthrough

[cyclingthrough]

Vagina, Salt Lamp

I am holding my baby in the light of the salt lamp. She loves this salt lamp. I think she loves the salt lamp because it reminds her of being born. Of looking out through my vagina from inside of it. The light beyond its pink walls. I don’t tell this to anyone because it sounds vaguely conceited and insane and I don’t want to worry them. They will think: You don’t know what it looks like to be born. But it doesn’t worry me. I think I did once know, I just forgot. And once she is old enough to confirm or deny my guess, she will have forgotten too.

I am holding her here in this warm light and thinking about what else she will forget. Will these moments she and I are living together now be stored somewhere? There is a place I imagine they may be hidden, kept safe, if not also so far out of reach they cannot be found again. This place I am imagining looks as though it is underwater. But, instead of the usual blue-green of underwater places here the rippling light is pink and warm, like a salt lamp. Its walls are soft and warm-wet. They move in and out, very gently.

But maybe these moments will not be kept. At least not safe in such a place. Perhaps these moments may be swept instead into one singular, shapeless dust pile of her infant memory that sits underneath later, firmer memories. Memories like falling off a bicycle for the first time. Panic hard ground pain skin grit blood bandaids. Surer and sharper memories made in her toddler mind, when she is no longer a baby but a child; having crossed some opaque line that the passing of time impressed upon her.

It is after three in the morning. I know it is after three because the sliding door is no longer a complete black, with only the reflection of the pink salt lamp against it. The faintest lightening of the sky is beginning to show through. The outline of trees can be seen. I inhabit these hours now, I am familiar with these changes in sky and outline. I am familiar with the sight of the people I love laying, deeply asleep.

Will I forget too?

Lingering behind the question itself is the knowledge of all the times I’ve deliberately urged myself to capture a moment I find myself living through with all of my capacity to do so; tried with all the force of [could it be called love?] to wrestle it from the stream of that-which-is-passing; to pin it against me somehow. Brow crossed in concentration. Eyes bulging forth in cartooned exertion, extraction. But despite, or due to, such effort, all that ever remains is the memory of the effort itself. Everything is slipping further and faster from me, all the time.

For a moment I wish to be able crack open my form like a smudgy laptop and pull this scene and others like it from my centre to watch on a loop. The idea being that I could replay them: over and over and over. Each rise and fall of a chest that I love. The same few breaths of air taken in, and out again. With no following gesture to break the float of time, with no need to reply to the question mumbled from a hot, sleepy filled mouth. With no change, no death.

But, oh. Sweet, sour but. How quickly the wish reveals its own tangled curse. How immediately the answer to the question behind many questions is brought forth, brought forth because it exists within me. It is the knowledge carried by my skin, it is the message my skin writes in order that I may read it within the lines upon my face.

No death means no-thing. No life. No motion to wish to capture. No breath to halt or bones to pause in their aching growth. In their ageing.

A howl exists in me for this answer, this always, unavoidable answer. A howl that is the howl of teeth bared, appreciatively, hungrily for life that they tear through and are, in turn, torn apart by. A sweet metal taste appears in my mouth at this image of blood. It sings a note which tugs at my ribcage. My body reminds me of itself once more. It sweats and rises beneath the sticky cotton aired night.

The fan circles, pushing warm air against the sweat of my skin. It creaks loudly with every rotation: breaking but not yet broken, it sings stubbornly. Marking sweet time galloping softly toward us all through the softly greying sky. My mind drifts in time with its song until I join the others in dream.

[cyclingthrough]

Wind

It takes me a moment to realise it is the wind that has woken me from sleep.

It is not yet heavy. It is just stirring in the tell-tale way, telling the tale of something stronger coming.

I lay and listen as the house creaks. Its creaks are coaxing the wind on. They say

Give me all you got.

Within minutes, the real wind has arrived. The window is only open a few inches. Not wide enough to let enough of the wind in at once. It creates a bottleneck of air that pours itself forcefully through the little opening.

The weight of the air and its wildness seems to have startled the house into silence. The creaking taunts stop, uncertain of what they have done. For a moment, all that can be heard is the wind and its urgent rushing as it whistles in through the window, over our blanketed bodies and away down the hall.

The bedroom door slams shut with a crack. It is a sharp, sudden noise in its shape and sound, and though it takes me by surprise I do not jolt. The force of the slam has just as suddenly become absorbed, added to the force of the wind as it moves purposefully on. It is through this method of collecting all it moves, that the wind grows stronger, wilder and wider.

I am still. I am hardly breathing at all. This is a skill of mine. I am able to exercise it best when I am lying in bed, because I understand exactly how large a breath is required before the air in my lungs is made too heavy by the weight of the room and its contents. The dust on the dresser, the dirt on our slippers, the lint on the shirt draped across the chair in the corner. My wife lies beside me, snoring gently. Her breathing is the steady kind of a body in deep asleep. I observe the warm weight of the air which she breathes out. It is tangy, a bit sour and wet. It is at its wettest in these late (or early) hours, when she is drawing it from the deepest parts of her. It may be that I love her but I do not want her air to mix with mine too much, in so far as it can be helped.

However, this wind does not allow for any of my usual caution to be taken. It simply moves too quickly; taking ahold of her breath and mine and mixing them into one single breath that it carries away on its blustering path. It is as if we are laying in a river of air. The weight of our breath is swiftly carried on, and with it all the weight of all the objects in our room. The arms of shirt which rest on the chair lift slightly, as if growing lighter. At the same time as the room is emptying, it is also filling, and these actions occur in equal measure. The air which enters the room is busy and heavy with the weight of many other things. In it are the sounds of innumerable slamming doors and the wet breaths of other peoples sleeping spouses. They have been carried far across dust filled fields to swirl dizzily through this bedroom. I begin to feel a little fizzy, as if my body were an aspirin and the room is filling with water.

I am lying very still, so that I do not have to breathe very much at all. The fizziness becomes also dizziness as I grow light-headed from too-little air. I am wary of this air which moves too fast for me to determine its weight or taste, and therefore also of the correct amount to take in. Lying here though, I know I will gave to get up soon and close the window. It is an inevitable fact that my dizzy brain seems to want to cling to, despite my dissolving body desiring to do no such thing.

Amongst the other information it carries, the wind says also this: Rain is coming. I imagine my wife rising in the morning to see the open window and a sodden room and the mere imagining of her anger towards me seems to make my skin dissolve even quicker. I must close the window while I still possess enough solid body to do so.

The sound of the coming rain carries through the air like lots of little bells. As if several cats with collars on are running through the night outside, padding lightly upon the dry earth and leaving it wet in their wake. It is a pleasant sound and were I in a different situation I would like to keep on lying here listening to it. But were I in a different situation right now, the coming rain and its perfect chorus of small bells would also be in another situation, and I would not be lying here listening to it. So.

I draw in one short sharp breath to create an outline of a body again. I draw my skin back into itself. Then, suddenly, I am out of bed and over by the window in a single swift motion. The sound of my body moving is so quick it is silent. Its motion is weightless. If my wife were awake she would have been amazed to see me move with all the certainty of a slamming door. She is often urging me to move faster through the world. Though I do want to appease her by keeping pace, even the words with which she asks me to speed up come through too quickly for me to catch. Instead, I often find myself needing to ask that she repeat her request as I did not quite hear her. This seems to only make her talk louder and faster and more difficult to understand. In this way, the situation slips ever quicker out of my grip. I have grown increasingly used to the sight of her back as she walks several paces ahead of me, her shoulders in their yellow coat hunched against the wind and her head bobbing in time with her step.

I am standing by the open window and for a moment I’ve forgotten why. I am aware that I am swaying slightly. The wind is strong and my body feels very light. Just as suddenly as I became a door-slamming, I have un-become it and I am once again a body with its outline dissolving. The wind is unrelenting in its heaviness. There is an urgency to it that I am trying to understand. It reminds me of the speech of my wife when it doesn’t quite reach me. I find myself standing in front of an open window and wind is rushing all around me. I go inside to find the weight of the air in my body and find instead that there is nothing, my body is empty of air and yet there is only air all around me. Maybe I have forgotten? Maybe I have made a mistake and it is my body that is full of air, and the room and the window and the world are empty of it. It is all inside and out. There is an urgency to it, to the emptiness, that I think I understand. I need to let the air out, to give it back to the empty world and fill it up again.

I feel my mouth open. My jaw drops wide, and the outside and inside air are one river moving in every direction. The world is full of dancing air and the sound of small bells. Cats with silver paws are bounding through the window and I have become a laugh so loud it is silent. The wind pours out of me and through me and I am it and there is no more urgency in anything as I am pulled back by my toes, out of the bedroom, through the front door and away into the night. When my wife is woken from sleep by the cold weight of the wet blanket clinging to her skin, I am already far away.

[cyclingthrough]

Point A, Point B

“A distance is only so far as your ability to fold it”. So goes the motto of the fold. One can fold a journey in half and this is preferred for efficiency because it neatly links up two previously separated points. Others in the past were said to have folded their distances too many times and wound up creating more distances in the process. Indeed it seems that for some, this manner of perpetually folding distances into halves became a kind of mania which overcame them.

The warnings tell of bodies appearing high in the sky, with distressed onlookers having to watch as they then plummeted back to earth, and to certain death. Often, so the stories go, those who folded themselves into the sky were too surprised at where they’d found themselves to fold their way back to earth safely. For those that did fold away in a new direction in time, the heady thrill of the quick thinking fold in itself wound up being their demise. Towards the other end of axis upon which multi-folders found themselves, bodies were also said to have been discovered during earthworks, buried alive beneath many metres of dirt.

As the ultimate goal was to maximise efficiency of output and mostly that involves keeping workers along the earth bound axis, multi-folding was soon to be criminalised. Single folding was purposeful, respectable, and it enabled people to get from Point A to Point B quickly (and alive). There was no need to multi-fold, and indeed given enough time, the memory that one even could became folded into the obscurity of collective myth. It is in this post-multi-fold world we meet Harold.

Harold is, by all official and self-recorded accounts, a diligent and model single-folder, a straight Point A to Point B type of person. His work is located in a Stationary Building and his residence is Stable, though prone to a wobble now and then due to its proximity to a Public Fold and Residential Dot.

Commonly, Public Folds can be a bit wobbly. This is due to being so frequently bent. People are encouraged to fold in groups when heading to the same location but even so, the air along a Public Fold line will begin to thin out from over extension and physical objets within the fold line lose their vibrancy and sometimes, more distressingly, start to flake away in bits. This will, eventually, result in the Fold being relocated, to give the stuff within its line a chance to bounce back, but once an area has been over folded, it is never really the same. A great big storm seems to help a bit, something about the massage of the heavy rain and the extra moisture in the air, but nothing else really helps a tired old fold except time.

The fold near to Harold’s place is not so old as to need a rest yet. An average Public Fold generally has a wear-life of 7 years. The Residential Dot’s are spaced in such a way as to maximise the life of a fold by avoiding overcrowding. A little wobbly exposure is pretty standard Fold adjacent behaviour. Though, when things get really wobbly and the grass starts flaking, local residents are encouraged to write Letters of Discontent. These letters have rarely, if ever, been known to result in a Fold being moved before the seven years is up (the deposit boxes for LOD’s are rumoured to in fact be discreet incinerators) but they are encouraged nonetheless for the sense of agency and release it affords the writers.

A fold is a quasi-natural occurrence and as such hard to cordon off or change. You may liken it to trying to change the lines on your palm- not impossible technically, in that all is required is that you hold your hand at a slightly different angle every minute of your day from now on. This is easier when you are forced to do it, such as when your hand is injured. This is how it is achieved when a fold line becomes unusable and things along it start flaking, fading or even, disappearing. Collectively, the injured hand adopts a new, temporarily uncomfortable position.and the injured line (or, fold) is able to heal. Anyway, the metaphors tire. Harold ought to have been an ultra-efficient folder because he only ever went between the place he worked and the place he rested. Granted, the latter was a little wobbly but it was still one of the better Residential Dot Zones around. The fold was relatively new, and it folded neatly and reliably. Some RD’s suffered from overcrowding or were located too close together, creating intersecting fold lines which caused thin air and unreliable arrival times. The same people Harold worked with from these places quietly complained of migraines often, and were also, often, late.

From Harolds home it was only a few steps, really, to the Supply and Entertainment Depo, a journey Harold took by foot every Saturday. It was on one such Saturday that the event took place. Harold was walking to the Depo, past the other Residential buildings. His head, despite best efforts, was not completely at ease. It seemed to be stuck, looping a mnemonic phrase that, while repetitive was unresolved. Despite wanting to walk his few steps in silence, he found himself externalising this internal loop. This sound interfered with his habit of quietly counting his steps, of which there were 535 in total from door to door. He had just stepped the three-hundredth-and-thirty-second step which, like usual, landed in a narrow beam of sunlight which fell between the shadows cast by the surrounding buildings. The beam was just wide enough to fit the length of his foot and the placement of this sun shod step was a highlight of his walk. He had cast his gaze down momentarily to be sure of the alignment, and to get the satisfying glimpse of his foot where it ought to be, lit up gloriously between the two shadows. In the process of lifting his gaze back to the path ahead, his eyes came to rest upon something that was not there before. Now, where previously there had only been pavement and buildings and in the far distance another person walking also in the direction of the Depo, there was a body. Harold gasped.

A whole body, a person, was suddenly suspended about 4-feet in front of Harold. They were bent double, contorted in a painful looking fashion and the expression on their face confirmed the pain of their position. Harold reeled back and, for the briefest of moments, locked eyes with this person before they disappeared again, just as suddenly as they came. It was all over in a moment, but as Harold stumbled backward unsteadily on the pavement he just as quickly had the thought as to whether he would have to include these extra steps in his count. He shook his head violently and for a moment all thoughts fell out of it and everything was quiet. Then the eyes of the person returned to him, overlapped with the image of his sunlit shoe, and he felt very nauseous. Harold looked around himself fearfully. He had never experienced such a thing. Indeed, he had not known it to be possible. And yet, he had no experience with his imagination either. He had never known himself to invent anything- indeed, he’d only heard of dreams from others, even, and didn’t have any himself. He likened them to the screens one saw at the Supply and Entertainment Depo and as such had been rather glad for never having had any. But this, this had been so real! Not like the screens at all. He shook his head again in an attempt to regain some quiet but it would not come. Their eyes! What a terrible expression. The person had made no sound but how loud their eyes had been. They seemed to implore him from some unknown place, to take action. Yet, both of these concepts were wholly foreign to Harold and so he simply stood there, motionless and a little out of breath.

He was not sure how long he had been standing there when he discerned the sound of footsteps over his unsteady breathing. Someone was coming up behind him on the foot path. He heard the footsteps slow, and then come to a stop, the walker clearly at a loss with what to do next. Harold too was unsure, too flustered to accommodate yet another wholly new experience. Pathways were single-file, and walking intervals timed in order to avoid congestion or over-consumption of too-thin air. Of course, the footpath was two lanes wide, allowing for walkers returning home from the Depo, but no-one ever stepped into the wrong lane. No-one ever needed to. The person behind Harold cleared their throat quietly. Harold turned slightly as if to look at them, then thought better of it and turned his gaze forward again. “Hello”, he said aloud, and bowed slightly, in a greeting addressed to the now empty air ahead. He stifled a shudder. The person behind him coughed again, this time louder. “Hi.” They paused, and Harold felt the air move a little as they bent slightly in return. “We will block the pathway... if you do not keep moving.” Their quiet voice cracked a little, from lack of use or fear, Harold could not tell. But the words reached him clear enough to rouse him from his own uncertain state. He understood their meaning: Everything is on the brink of chaos.

He nodded briskly in reply towards the empty path way ahead of him before jiggling his shoulders up and down a few times. Following this strange warm-up he took off and after ten or so steps so did the person behind him. Harold could hear them murmuring to themselves “three-hundred and seventy-one, three-hundred-and-seventy-two,” and so on, all the way until the Depo entrance way. The doors slid smoothly apart against the oppressive air, like two large, glass hands generously parting a sea. Harold felt his fear leave him; sucked out of him, as it were, from the top of his head and out through his feet at the same time. It left him with a light, empty feeling right in his centre. The floor-to-ceiling screens seemed to beam a benevolent warmth right into him. The words of the advertisements flashed too quickly to make out in his dazed state, but the message was clear enough: He would be safe here.

[cyclingthrough]

Another Pidgeon

At the exact same moment that she came a pigeon landed in the skylight. She stared at it with her fingers still pressed up against her pulsing self and wondered if it was a sign. She had been in the habit of looking for signs lately, and the synchronicity of this moment was certainly noticeable, if nothing else.

She didn’t really want the pigeon to be a sign, because if it was, she didn’t know what is was supposed to signify. That it had arrived at the exact moment of her climax seemed to create more questions than it answered. She lay there on the white bedspread of her partners parents guest room, of which they were the guests at present and tried to understand what it might mean.

She looked at the pigeon in the skylight. It stood still on the sill of the glass, bobbing its head slightly, while appearing to look right at her. Though for all she knew, the pigeon was only looking at its own reflection.

Are you magic? she asked it aloud.

The pigeon made no motion to suggest it understood. It said nothing, or nothing that she could hear through the glass.

It didn’t seem like a good sort of magic. Luckily, she supposed, it didn’t seem like the wrong sort either, neither sinister or evil. There was no ready supply of hot shame ready to make masturbation feel like that for her.

She didn’t have enough shame to stop her from masturbating on the spare bed of her partners parents, (though she did have enough to close the blinds).

It felt, if magic, like a sort of lethargic magic, not quite able to deliver a white dove and not committed enough to send a crow. Can magic be middle of the road and also sexual? Probably. Probably yes, and thats how babies get made every day.

She sighed, and decided to ignore the sign. She watched the bird as it flew away.

Her guardian angel sighed inwardly, and returned the body of the pigeon back to the slightly confused bird from which they had borrowed it. They wondered, drifting formlessly through the sky, slightly perturbed, how to convince a human woman that her pleasure was divine and to encourage her to create more of it. Maybe next time, they ought to take the form of a cat instead.