A Sensual Novel. FALL
Fall is Chapter 8 of Traveling True: A Sensual Novel, first published in 2017.
Nightfall
A sleepwalk in town. Nothing was but asphalt arteries and dozens of speeds, numbers, continuous walking on curbs, spindly jets lashing at Mim’s cheeks. A carousel of speeds, either humid or crisp, the last balmy breezes, the first silent fragrances.
Quietness. God muffled streets, roofs, windows. Mute citizens bustling the evening into voiceless night and lit number plates of cars. That was all there was. And between crowded sidewalks and trails of light speeding past, on the borderline separating two worlds, Mim, hair strands riding wind wings, blind-listening and tracing the essence of her lost shelter, the cubicle where she first inhaled her man’s scent. Her pristine sanctuary hovered somewhere on the road, and Mim, her long neck stretched forward, expected to enter it with a kiss.
Mesmeric river
Nights and days, a flow of perceptions, a mesmeric river that drifted her love shelter to her. Mim did not laugh, was walking. Sometimes she stumbled over a random impediment of the surrounding scenery, but rubbed herself against any asperity, smoothing her hypnotic sliding along.
Mim did not cry. In an ocean of darkness, she wished to go blind, dazed by flutters of odors. Myriad scent-laden gusts, redolent whiffs, humming perfumes whizzed in dumb play, but she was not yet going blind. Mim did not scream. Numbed, she pursued her quest.
The others existed, though, whispering, since legions of meandering souls crossed their paths nearby. Then, a new man emerged. His field hung close, and soon she acknowledged him—a warm cloud lagging on her trail.
Trails
Mim did not speak. The girls, her roommates, spoke, but she curled under her blanket to continue the slide. The same routine filled the mornings when, after sunrise, Mim climbed stairs in a vast edifice. One summer, Anton waited for her, seated on the wide steps outside, and when Mim exited the building, he sprang up, and they strolled away clasping hands. He took her with him. Here, in this spot, she senses their steps’ tracks and his irises’ glim.
In other scenes, Mim viewed herself behind piles of books, listening in on the street. He has come—and she sprints off. Footsteps of hers walk in and walk out over and over, fleet along magnificent marble stairs, and they meet and depart as one. They are forever departing. Mim ghosted on their trails throughout the city.
Whenever she reversed course, the new man was at her heels. His breath warmed her each passage to dorm, before the tucking in for night dreams. Stefan followed her on lanes and avenues. But Mim hoped for the stroke of blindness, her shelter bursting bright to engulf her.
Fall stories
Day after day, the smoky haze above told fall stories. The evenings, though, some chance late-summer waft stirred her airy senses. Shoes muttered in decent tones on asphalt, echoing flat toward barren branches, and illusory vendors lined the streets, offering Mim regal ripe-flavored apples. Stefan’s savor, accompanying the delirium, elicited chuckles. But Mim, amidst car lights and breezes, was still tracing smells.
Mim no longer cherished her body, yet this frail frame carried her sensors along, nostrils eating the wind, hair billowing back, pores swallowing kingly autumnal chills.
The car
The body stopped. An electric arc, a thrust, and Mim’s body darted into the driveway. Currents whizzed and whistled through her, causing her willowy neck to elongate and protrude forward. Mim sent innermost powers to fetch what she was seeking. Good Lord, her beloved shelter! She cast invisible nets to enmesh her quest’s object. It was approaching her.
The car pulled at the curb. So close to her feet, the shiny door opened. Mim let herself loose and slid inside with loud inaudible screams, as though inaugurating lungs with Earth’s air. Blinded at last, she dived, dived to the bottom, gulping in her perfume melded with Anton’s. Oh, their bodies together and the old field of particles swarming in a love halo. An evil-proof membrane that, oh my God, bursts open. And here they sit next to each other.
Fall
Now Mim sees. Anton keeps gripping her shoulders as though she were an oddity. The fall outside creeps in and sets between them. She regains her hearing sense. “Mim, what’s got into you? I’ll give you a lift.”
Anton swivels the car around, headed to where he has been driving from. The student campus. Oh, but the shadow? Mim recalls Stefan queuing her. “There’s one other person.” The car comes to a fuming halt. On the opposite sidewalk, Stefan is drawing away.
Mim poured out her anguish, an absurd summer’s raving story. Anton bought a home in her absence, but come fall, didn’t phone her. He patrolled that road each evening to find Mim? What was he doing there, anyway? How could he live a summer without Mim? And was he happier, lonely in his apartment? Anton traded the rain girl for stark whitewashed walls.
Rain girl’s reminiscence
“Mim, you are … a puzzle I’m into.”
A gawky, abrupt way to define his tangled feelings one night at the disco. Anton took a firm grip of her long mane and pulled it backward, whispering in her ear. “Mim!” He tugged harder. “Mim!” Curving her neck in a painful arch, he asked, “Who are you, Mim?”
The haze of cigarette smoke and music ebbed away in large, larger and higher circles as Anton and Mim gaped an abyss around them. In its vacant middle, her uneasiness tasted uncanny. What on earth did the man want of her? Was he crazy?
For long months Mim had been waiting for him to express solid, salient notions, and now this? Nothing but muteness, and then sudden brutality. Strange, her fear gave way to expectation again. Mim would find out, once and for all, who that man was. So she fixed her stare on his wan mouth, determined to wait. Mim wanted words, actual words. But that silent freak puzzled her mind, sucked it in the fogginess of his ominous netting, where Mim feared she would get lost.
“You …” From mysterious inner deserts, he blew sandstorms to her. “Mim … you mean two things to me.” Her heart stopped beating to listen. In a cracked voice, Anton disclosed his heart’s definition of her. Ever since, those words have been murmuring in Mim’s mind: rain girl and train station.
Rain girl’s fall
How could he have found the heart to wipe that girl out of existence? An icy gale blew in Mim’s heart. She recounted her sad summer story on a sinister note. “My brain, my stomach, my bone and marrow were sick,” she said. “Day and night, I sat by the telephone, a monument guarding it. For two damn endless months. My sphinx’s stillness exasperated my parents.” But it was no longer Mim talking, maybe the Snow Queen. “It’s too late for us. I’ll never visit your … profane apartment.”
As if by a magic wand’s touch, the girl beside Anton melted into the seat’s cushion, whence a proud Mim emerged. Ha ha, anguish performed clown at an ice circus.
But sarcasm and terror grew side by side in Mim’s consciousness. The gelid pride of what she was saying prophesied dread, calamity loomed. Her inner torrent gushed out notwithstanding, since nothing could shun the glacial flow, not even the sense-shaking calamity of losing Anton. The ice-hearted queen was in charge now, whereas Mim, shivering in a dim corner, glowed from the margins of memory. Pray, pitiful girl, pray!
. . .
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