The History of Writing (Part Three) Sisyphus & Samantha

Back in Brooklyn, New York, Sisyphus was getting acclimated to life in Samantha's apartment and the nursing home and the neighborhood they sat in. He was dearly perplexed about 90% of the time, but he had his love for her to ease the burden. She seemed to grow softer and wiser by the day, if only for the reaffirmation of those qualities, as though the very soul of the Goddess Persephone had willfully detached its ineffable shape from the fabric of the cosmos in order that his troubled, overwrought bones, form be promised to persist another day. 

At least once a week, after a morning of delicious fucking, shared showers and clean clothes, they'd make their way down to the nursing home's community center to join the affairs of their senior neighbors. The air shimmered with a palpable awkwardness as the same dozen or so residents & staff shifted from whatever they were doing to delicately stare or take notice of the strangely authentic pair. Everyone referred to them as partners in crime, both with fondness and disguised jealousy. Samantha's feelings were retained behind a mask of inscrutable politeness while Sisyphus, always referred to as Troy except when alone with her, became hard & scary as a barbed-wire fence--either of which impressed on the others as the same, or at least that's how they acted. 

Today, a familiar pair of women in their late-50s, Tiffany and Brittany, were sitting in front of one of the 3 televisions cranked obnoxiously loud in what brochures for the retirement home coined: the media room. Neither had been a party to delicious fucking in quite a while, if ever, however this in no way prevented them from reflexive agreement whenever any subject--no matter how obviously unrelated if mildly similar--was mentioned in their company. They had faces like little girls imitating rubber elephants and voices like mean birds oiled with overacidic juice. 

"Good morning, you old villains," Samantha greeted them as they pretended to steer their attention from the empty drama-porn their stone eyes were chained to. "We've made it past another 11 AM, I see." 

"Good morning, Samantha. Good morning, Troy," said Tiffany. 

Samantha looked at the t.v. "What'd I miss? Someone want to fill me in?" 

"Same old, same old," said Tiffany. "We'd practically have to open an artery to have any fun in this place." 

"No rest for the wicked as they say," said Samantha. 

Brittany looked at her as if in spoken response, numb agreement saturating down to the roots. 

"It's enough to make you take up hard drugs," said Tiffany. "If we could afford any." 

Sisyphus's hands went to his lower back, squeezing his kidneys as if to massage or protect them when she said this. (A male staff member walking past the media room took notice of this uncommonly uncomfortable and spontaneous sight.) 

"Well, how about a game of cards," said Samantha. "Maybe it'll help to break up the monotony." 

"I don't care about Monopoly!" protested Tiffany. "What am I? A second-grader!?" 

"Monotony," repeated Samantha. "You girls need to expand your horizons a little." Or expand their legs in the shower more than once a year. 

"We don't have any money!" she informed. 

"We don't have to play for money. Just a little something to remind you of the good old days." 

"Yeah right." 

"I want to play," said Brittany, grateful for any interruption to the deathclock rumination of her junky friend. 

"Since when do you play cards," said Tiffany--all statement. 

"I've seen this show already," she said. "And they're always telling us to try new things." 

"You always do what you're told?" 

"It's just a silly game," said Brittany. "Since when are you always so serious?" 

"Since my father was killed by a drunk-driver," an outright lie. 

"Probably by someone else who took themselves too seriously," said Sisyphus. 

All three of them turned to him with vulnerable wonder. 

"No offense?" 

"None taken!' Samantha seized the first-word and his dry hand simultaneously. 

"You could be SHOT for saying something like that 10 years ago," Tiffany told him. 

Oh, dear.... 

"They'd have to find a gun first," Brittany informed her. 

"Oh, it's just an expression," she replied, her withered brain drowning in its own hypocrisy. "Why do you have to always pick on me?" 

"No one's picking on anyone," said Brittany. "You're just taking things too seriously because you're in a bad mood." 

"You sound like my dead husband." 

'Maybe you should go hunt him down', thought Samantha. 

Brittany just solemnly shook her head. A modicum of deathliness lifted from her spirit... 

And Sisyphus waited for someone to ask him a question or say something he might add to. He'd been adding days in 2036 a few months, at that point. He could feel something changing inside. Something that was previously only existing. 




****  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Various Appointments (to be completed, soonish)

ONE  At night, he'd lay a plastic tarp in a wooded area near the edge of the city he relied upon, a certain modicum of gratitude in the ritual. He'd remove the comforter from the large leaf-bag, unroll it, shake it, lay it upon the tarp. He'd take some default note of the temperature--typically cold--and provoke a small memory of endurance, push against the unkindness of his situation. It was all but permanently bad, hardly more than an accumulation of rudeness and inhospitability that consumed the energy and good will that wagered against it. He'd lay a backpack with a few books and like supplies and everyday needs such as a toothbrush at the head of the blanket and remove his coat and sweater and fold them into a pillow and set the bundle atop the backpack. The hard air running slow and steady through everything. And on nights when he was sober enough to, he'd remove his shoes, socks, pants, shirt, and set these somewhere dry enough, close enough, for the morning....
Read more

the respiratory habits of fish

if there's some habit, vitamin, pharmaceutical that corrects short attention spans I haven't seen it.  all day long my eyes drown in the hapless, abject conformity of turdsuckers overpiling with words and not a flare of meaning or  whit discernible,  their voices trapped in some world before language: immigrants of this unwanted country this timeline all futures would beg to be spared from-- the leaves and the rocks and the wind and what else move in the space of the expanding universe and I try  to meditate on the respiratory habits of fish: those whose ancestors navigated, bred  endured trials century and millennia old, hungry, thinking creatures with a perception older than dinosaurs, citizens of a world no name has been provided.  **** 
Read more

glass [and] razorblades

 glass ~ even the routinely-poor are afforded  some small mercies and graces --  earlier, today, for instance  a discreet 3-panel  animation of a woman  smoking in close-up  of narrowing proximity  rolled into my periphery of  a sudden at the weedstore  and, tonight, outside the church  where my eyes close to some rest:  the fierce stone of the architecture  spraying indismissibly into  the moment...  ...when counselors,  nurses,  clerks, interviewers,  doctors, various staff  ask me why I consume  alcohol to the degree I do,  this is what I can't remember  or manage  to tell them, this  perpetual, permanent  withering, something abundant yet  feeble in its abundance, the glass  before something else  that always  was.  ****  razorblades  ~ stuff this into your brain:  there's this overflowing pile  of billions and more...
Read more