God’s dust. SOIL IV
One week after the take-leave visit, Mim gets ready to attack. Be it or not, she will wait no minute longer, dead set on putting into practice a barbarous feat. To soil God’s earth, pitiable sinner.
Mim started the ordeal session by heaving her bed ad nauseam, and resumed the routine first thing the next morning, laboring with such grimness that the arteries in her head almost burst and eyeballs popped. She had bought a bottle of red wine—vermouth, toxic enough, she had heard—and would drink it till the damn last drop: half before the searing-hot bath, the other half afterwards.
A movie scene lingered on her mind, of a dead-drunk young woman immersed in a steaming bathtub. Everything fitted in well—a Sunday, and on top of that, a hot-water day.
Mim let the water scald her for as long as she could bear, while concentrating brainpower and senses on the consequences inside her body, right beneath the pubic mound. Each time her hips stirred water, an unsparing sensation not only sent blood on a simmer but also induced panic in the local neural network. A thousand needles were stabbing the flesh in her womb.
Losing soil
Cruel, nothing short of cruel was Mim, barbaric. Intoxicated, swaying on wobbling feet, she kept telling herself her undismayed guts would prevail over Stefan and his traces on her. She headed out of the steamy bathroom back to her bower’s safety, eager to finish the bottle’s poisonous content. Her folks lounged in the dining room, confident their daughter was painting or reading.
She slit the door open and, with a rat’s caution, grabbed the telephone in the hallway and plunked it on the floor in her room. Reluctant but with unflinching determination, Mim forced the remaining wine down her throat. What might those guys enjoy who drank their bellies full? Once she drained the last drop, came the answer.
Walls swirled and Mim dropped flat beside the phone. Invisible wires hoisted her limbs in the air and let them drop heavy in a most absurd puppet play. But why, the plush carpet was a cool venue, the cute yellow telephone a blessing between her lax thighs, as was Mim not the center of the universe? Oh yes, losing soil, Mim wore the world in her pocket, and the plague she confronted weighed a bagatelle. Including her histrionic crying for Stefan.
Triumphal march
A searing rod of longing thrust through Mim. Blistering tears stung her eyes. Well, let her have her cry out, let her indulge in dramatics, caressed with her spilling humors, prostrate on the ground. In twilight silence, the wide world was humming Verdi’s “Marcia Trionfale” to her. Though Mim ached for Stefan, her breast soared stronger than life.
She dialed his number. “I wanted to hear your voice.” God knows what else she blabbered, and what the man made of her neurotic outbreak. Anyway, Mim can’t have unveiled too much of her grief, since she did so once she banged the handset in its cradle. On a notepad she found blank at hand, she scribbled in large, loose, barely legible handwriting: Stefan, I love you. With numberless variations on pages and pages.
The next morning Mim was again free and all by herself.
The loom
Lonely now, in a sickening bed, forgotten beside a hag in a shack in a village that went pitch dark with nightfall and didn’t see light before daybreak’s shy gleams. How Mim wished the sun would rise at once. She was counting the plump lazy seconds and must have dozed off.
Bam-wham-zonk, wham-zonk—the bunk went, jarring with crack and thunder. It yawed and rammed against the wall, and pitched, and just as she thought it would snap, it jolted to a halt. Mim was roused by her heart’s beating.
When Mim turns on the other side, the peasant’s wide behind, clad in dun-colored bafta, meets her sleepy eyes. The woman is pounding in stern commitment against the loom’s beater by the dim glow of a petroleum lamp. Outside it was dark, still night—darn, whenever dawn cracks here?
In mute amazement, Mim gapes at the weaver’s rough elbows butting the air hither. Brusque stillness—she is passing the yarn across, yeah. A silent interlude when the peasant hunches over the loom to harp-play with warp strings. Then—boom! Wham-zonk. By now, Mim’s heart jolts a semitone before the menacing elbows pick up momentum. She abandons herself to the torture, as where on earth could she go?
Town love
That was Mim’s only night in the village. The following afternoon, the nearer she got to town, the more thankful she felt for its kindness to receive her, wallowing in love for its citizens, avenues, paved sidewalks, trimmed curbs, giant stores, the lighting, her comfortable bed, her family.
Mim always tried to read the villagers’ envy, but during that tormenting white night she got to its root. Why, them city folks enjoyed water running out of the wall, and if they cared for a soda or ice cream, they stopped and bought it. Oh my, townspeople sat in a fancy restaurant if they wished, goggled at passers-by, or entered a theater to watch a pointless movie.
God’s soil
Despite discomfort and chagrin, in that village Mim’s nostrils smelled the earth’s herbs, Mim’s soles trod tolerant soil, and her soul floated in the zenith, penetrating the world as God made it.
Time was slow in the fields, and fall came with humiliation, as teachers were sometimes allotted long stints, depending on the communist party’s directions. Austere activists supervised them and yelled vicious admonishing for leaving behind some unpicked potato or whatever vegetable.
The image of a former elementary school teacher turned party activist still flickers in Mim’s mind. Erect in her red high-wheeled sulky, she materialized out of nowhere to check on them, blowing hot coals on their tracks.
Lunch hours, though, were pure gratification for Mim. She listened to the call of the grassland, to winds’ swishing, the buzzing of insects, gulping in the scent-laden air, her blue irises gaping in unbounded radiance. There, Mim fell in love with soil and envisaged her future paintings, born from orgasmic loneliness.
God cast Mim among fields to unite her with earth. Otherwise, her love would have stayed voiceless, and her paintings, too watery. God’s dust is the substance of everything Mim displays on canvas.
. . .
Adapted from Soil, Chapter 21 of Traveling True: A Sensual Novel, published in 2017.
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