Le chateau de vent

Constant Craving

2011-04-29T11:00:00.000+02:00

I've been weak. I mean, I've been getting that feeling of weakness, mushy mangled up helplessness mixed with a little bit of happiness, hotness, craving for sex and skin contact. I don't know if you have the faintest clue as to what I'm talking about, but I think it's what K.D. Lang calls "Constant Craving" in that song.
I get it when I watch lesbian movies with hot sex scenes.
As if there's a game of mine sweeper going on in my body. Engulfed by romance.

Don't get me wrong: I don't even like Kd Lang, neither do I like to feel mangled.
But I've been watching Desert Hearts, that old pre-dyke-revolution movie with big American convertibles and lots of sand. And God, that sex scene hits right home.

There's more to it than the sex scene. It's an excellent movie, a good story set in a seductive environment (heat, crooners, casino's, horses and chicks with boots).
The movie is based on a book by Jane Rule and the storyline is rather simple: 1959. Vivian Bell (Shaver), an English professor at Columbia University, travels to Nevada to establish six-week residency to obtain a divorce. She stays at a guest house for women waiting for their divorces to be finalized. That's were she meets Cay Rivers, a free-spirited ceramist who works at a casino. (source: wikipedia)

It's a story of opposites attract. Two smart women. One young, one older. Cay is out, Vivian is struggling heavily with her sexuality.
When Vivian finally gives in to Cay's seduction attempts, she's in that state of utter confusion when there's no way back and a very frightening experience is looming over you. "Somewhere between sex and fear passion is" wrote Jeanette Winterson and that's what it's all about. The intellectual,reserved Vivian has lived a life as dry as the desert. Cay is her way out and Vivian knows it.

While watching the Desert Hearts bed scene I could feel the fear and exitement seeping through Vivian's pores, the hotness and the want stirring her body in cold electrifying twinges. Sex after yearning.
It's about the longest most sexy close up of kissing between 2 women I ever saw in a movie. And what I liked even better was the humour and the realness of it all: the awkwardness, vulnerability and uncontrollable want.

Well, now you know what to watch, when in need...

Commuter sickness

2009-10-20T21:03:00.001+02:00

"I don’t fit in. That’s the problem."
She says it with a decisiveness that reminds me of old wood. Old furniture. Oak and chestnut, polished a thousand times. Repainted and recoated with thin layers of expensive nourishing substances, but never really touched.
"Every night I drive home together with thousands of other commuters. We crawl down the highways in our pompous shiny cars. And then I feel it: I don’t fit in. I’m always driving out of pace. People get bothered driving behind me. I don’t know why. They don’t want to be around me. I’m keeping too much distance, I guess."

muscle and bone

2008-11-12T10:32:00.002+01:00

Sometimes I want to be a man. A bloke, like the one driving the truck in the lane next to me. One of those muscle and bone men, with dark stubble and fast growing hair. Greasy long hair that needs to be shampooed every day under the shower.
But that's not what I am.
I'm a 65 year old woman looking out of the window of a tourist bus driving through Paris.

Why be happy when you can be normal?

2007-11-15T23:56:00.001+01:00

Just take some time to watch this, it's amazing ...

A very good interview "from way back" with Jeanette Winterson "Face to face with Jeremy Isaacs" BBC, 1994, now available on Youtube.
In pieces of course, due to Youtube's bloody 10 minutes policy.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgSsDdd2gIg
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNVVTzap5Ko
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKMkukxUWCg
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJVYIfHMBQM
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3B647tMhKI

A trip to the supermarket, like a lot of things we do, can take a long time.

2007-08-17T17:16:00.000+02:00

She lights candles and whispers softly into the fire’s open ear. ‘Work for me,’ she tells it, seducing it to life with her marvellous tongue. She is a deputy of fire, a keeper of the flame. I want her to burn me. I want her to hurt me and for me to do the same to her.

An excerpt from the beautiful story "Gun-metal day" by LOUISE McCLEMMAN. Read on MSLexia.

dream

2007-05-29T12:47:00.000+02:00

When I came to wake you up with coffee this morning you were still sleeping. While you turned around and slowly opened your eyes you sighed and told me what you had been dreaming. In your dream you were making a nipple out of clay. Your hands circling endlessly. You stayed in bed with your eyes closed for another half hour.

Break up sex

2007-05-24T17:53:00.001+02:00

Break up sex is one of the hardest ways to say goodbye.
You hurt most in the softness of the arms of the one who just dumped you.
But when she started the obligatory “We can’t continue like this” - routine, the only thing I thought was “Please let her get into bed with me just one more time.”
She did bring me home after she had told me it was over. Guilt. I felt so miserable she had no choice. So she stayed. Not on the couch, but in my bed.
“We can sleep together, but I don’t want to make love. That wouldn’t be fair to you.” She said. That made me feel even more miserable. I put out the light and turned to my side, away from the body that rejected me. Hurt.
All night when I had tried to kiss her deeper and with tongue she had avoided me. But now in the bed, we were on dangerous grounds. The mind can be strong but the flesh is weak. Familiar flesh is even weaker.
I felt I was caught in a pantomime of breaking up, not able to change anything about what was going to happen, but I knew sex was unavoidable.
We were wide awake, lying very still and listening to each other breathing. After a while she turned to me. I felt her body heat against my back. She softly stroked my shoulders and then spooned me. I could feel her hard nipples through her t-shirt.
It’s strange how feeling in women can get so complicated and twisted that in the end they always get hard nipples.
I pushed my buttocks into her. Closer.
I remembered the nights I had had her pinned down here on the bed, whriting, moaning sighing, softly uttering oh’s of wonder and calling my name. Coming.
And suddenly I hurt so much. Starting to cry is the one thing you should not do if you want to avoid break up sex. But the tears were already streaming down my face and of course she noticed. Of course she pressed her body closer to mine and started to kiss my neck.
I could feel her tears too.
She was dumping me because she was in love with someone else. “I don’t know where it’s going to go, whether we will start a relationship.” She had said. I hated that “we”. I hated the cunt that had caught her eye.
And what was worse: I hated the fact that I couldn’t master her. All this time I had thought I had her. When she was sitting on my face, when she made me bite a pillow so I would be quiet. When she told me I was wild.
I thought she was at ease with me.
But suddenly I realized why she was leaving me. I never had her because I had never given her anything. Orgasm, yes, but nothing more. There was nothing she could love.

When I turned around and kissed her, she didn’t pull away. Her hips pushed into mine and she kissed me back, deep. Our tears mingled. Now if there’s anything leading most certainly to break up sex, then that’s mingling tears. So you can imagine, it didn’t take long before our hands were trailing over each other’s bodies, firing up the mix of lust, anger, rejection and frustration that was already lurking underneath the surface so impatiently.

I wanted to fuck her, feel her, merge into her one last time, I wanted to remember every part of her. The noises she made, her scent, the crook of her arms, the weight of her breasts. We made love slowly. She kept saying she was sorry, even when she was coming.
And after a while, I started to feel numb. A numbness so typical of loss. I was already letting go. I was preparing for the morning, when she would take her bag and leave for good.

X-rays II

2007-05-24T14:20:00.000+02:00

We’re sitting at the table, finishing dinner and we talk about insurance.
I think that the insurance you have might be inadequate.
“I’m hardly ever ill.” You say.”It’s not worth paying an extra fee for.”
You pause.
“Don’t worry.” You add. “I’ll get extra insurance before I’m fifty.”
Fifty.
I look at you and a gap in time opens.
“I’ve got time.” You say. ”Still more than 10 years to go.”

10 years.
I’m not sitting at the table in our house, I have been sucked away in a black hole of fear.
“What’s ten years.” I think. “And then another ten. Sixty. And another ten.”
I wish I could draw you into this black hole with me, this hiding place against time.

Happy Music

2007-01-19T13:48:00.000+01:00

Dykes and the City asks me about songs that make me happy.

The song that definitely makes me happy these days is Feist's Inside and out.

Other feel good tunes:

- The Gossip - Standing in the way of control
- Katerine - Louxor j'adore
- Joan As Policewoman - I defy (with Anthony)

Funny:
- Lezzies on X - 30 large (Their excellent heavy metal version of The L-word's theme song.)
- Gretchen Phillips - The reluctant butch

I'm tagging Ysengrin and Sortof.

>> I forgot Heidi Mortenson.

The Vagus nerve

2007-01-11T10:17:00.000+01:00

Not fiction, but sounds like poetry:

"Vagus" means wanderer -- the nerve wanders through the body. Previously, it wasn't thought that it goes as far as the pelvic region. But our research and that of other laboratories is showing that it does in fact go to the cervix and uterus and probably the vagina. It carries the impulses from those regions, travels up through the abdomen, goes through the diaphragm, through the thorax (chest cavity), up the neck outside the spinal cord, and into the brain.

An excerpt of an article in Wired.

X-rays

2006-08-28T14:45:00.000+02:00

I've been looking at your X-rays. They were in the old trunk upstairs.
I was looking for wrapping paper, but before I knew it I had opened the large brown envelope that had the name of a hospital printed in one corner and your name in capitals.
I held them up to the light: 3 parts of your spinal column, one thigh and your left wrist.
I looked at them for a long time, but I couldn't find anything broken.

Time

2006-06-29T23:23:00.000+02:00

"Are you happy?" my grandmother asks me casually, brushing past on her way to the toilet. Her heels scrape over the floor tiles when she stops and turns around.
Her dark eyes lock on mine. The question is crucial. I know it is.
My grandmother never asks anything. Nothing personal.

She has an identical twin sister. But though they look so much alike, they compare like darkness and light.
My grandmother hates flying. She needs to be firmly connected with the earth. She never tires of walking. She walks miles without taking a rest. I can't hardly follow her on my bike.
One day she was violently stumping down the stairs when she suddenly rested. Sweat was pearling on her forehead. "What's the matter?" I asked. "I'm not ill." She answered, "I have never ever been ill in my life and I intend to keep it that way."

She keeps sugar, flour and canned meat stashed in the cellar. Just in case. A war. It could start all over again.

My eye is the biggest thing in the world

2006-05-09T14:26:00.000+02:00

"Edith," he says. "I have daydreams about losing my mind. I am afraid that one day I'll wake up, like in that movie Lost Highway, and discover that I have murdered my family.
I drive home from work at night to the sound of the screen wipers. I can't stand listening to the radio. And every night I fear I will crash into a tree or the vehicle in front of me.
My wife is upset. She buys pickles every time she goes to the supermarket. She walks around there for hours and comes home with big bloody steaks. She eats them rare.
When I open the fridge, the smell of blood spreads through the house. The pets get restless and the baby cries.
I wink all day, a nervous affection of the eyes. I see more darkness than I see light.
I look at people only asking myself one question: will you have regrets when you die?"

Ta ligne de hanche

2006-04-22T16:56:00.000+02:00

Bon Jovi 1994

2006-04-19T23:19:00.000+02:00

Mercury retrograde

2006-03-15T01:36:00.000+01:00

Mercury in retrograde from March 2nd to 25th.
"Mercury rules over the mind's processes, studying, communication, businesses, travels and the like. When Mercury reverses its direction, all these areas are affected as well...
Businesses, travels and communications tend to experience delays and different problems. Computers and other processes that work with information may experience crashes, unexpected failures.

Don't enroll to courses, don't buy expensive Mercurian items (books, cars, mobile phones etc.), don't sign important contracts and do not marry."

And remember: Mercury runs your television set (that's what I read on the internet)

source: Astrology Weekly

Here, here and here Mercury is blamed for all kinds of things. And I'm going to blame Mercury some more.

how our bodies fit

2006-03-09T10:34:00.000+01:00

Life passes by and we forget the details. I remember the bike ride home. The house you stayed in. A beautiful, old house with a big bath where we saw eachother's bodies for the first time in broad daylight. Days we slept. You worked late. And then you left for the mountains.
Mountains permanently covered in clouds. And when you phoned me I desperately tried not to hear you.

Break up

2006-01-31T15:53:00.000+01:00

I wondered if she had already decided that she was going to leave last time we saw them together.
She looked radiant. She was wearing blood red pants and her face shone. Eyes-nipples-cunt. That’s all you feel when you’re in love.
She had lost weight. A lot.
He was shaking in the freezing cold outside and shivering all through dinner.
Said that his toes were ice cubes. He couldn’t get them to warm up. It hurt.
Did he know she was laughing, glowing, sweating, open, free for another woman?
It’s shocking to learn how easy it is. How you only need one moment to say: "I’m in love with someone else. Now get out of my life. Clear space. I’m transforming myself. Our room. I’m having her on the bed. And when she fucks me it tears me up deep down inside where I haven’t felt anything for such a long time. She’s what I need. She makes me complete. Compared to her full colour love, you and me, we’re history. Old newspapers on a pile. I’m taking the kids. Goodbye."

I’m appalled. How can this happen? And yet I know it’s just one look. A movement. From here to there. Hand to hair. To heart.
I know how it stings and burns the first weeks after she’s gone. It makes you smash your head against the wall. She fucks she focuses on someone else. What you are to her has shrunken into a tiny ball. You are nothing.

In the dark she strokes my back softly until I fall asleep. She says: "Maybe you need someone else. Someone different. Maybe I’m not good enough for you."
And I think: how long has it been since I smiled at her and said something nice?
I open my eyes. She’s sitting at the table, writing a letter. I kiss her neck. It’s delicious.
Sunlight splashes through the window and sets her hair on fire.
It’s spring.

eight traps we fall into

2005-12-14T00:26:00.000+01:00

The eight worldly dharmas are:

Wanting to be praised. Not wanting to be criticized. (praise and blame)

Wanting to gain. Not wanting to lose. (loss and gain)

Wanting to be happy. Not wanting to be unhappy. (pleasure and pain)

Wanting to be famous, Not wanting to be infamous, or ignored. (fame and notoriety)

Autumn

2005-10-18T13:58:00.000+02:00

Autumn makes me tired and moody.
I lie in the bath for hours and stare at my pubic hair, simulating an alligator farm in the New Orleans marshes before and after Katrina (seen from the air, I love miniature. Mm, I have to check the map of the US ...).
I am confused and distracted. Yesterday I flushed half a cup of cold coffee in the toilet and peed in the sink.
My sense of humour tumbles into a bottomless pit, while leaves discolour and waltz with the wind….
Which reminds me of Patrick Swayze. I don’t know why. But the word s-w-ai-z-ee embodies all that autumn is today.
It’s like the word” sole” when I stand on the beach in Northern France, staring at the white cliffs of Dover in the distance. I can only think of that word. Sole, sole, sole. With every step in the sand I have to repeat it. And nearby seagulls pick it up. Sole, sole, sole, screaming it into the air.
When I was little, I used to wonder about the language of birds. But then I discovered that the mistake we make is to isolate sounds. We want to give meaning to each sound, each word, while birds speak in patterns. Their sounds draw images in the air.

Birds mimic the sound of cell phones. In the Brazilian Rain Forrest, parrots mimic the sound of chainsaws, power tools and bulldozers.
I wonder how they laugh. It must be so hard to smile with a beak.

dyke against god hoax

2005-09-22T20:42:00.000+02:00

datelinehollywood.com featured an article last week saying:

ROBERTSON BLAMES HURRICANE ON CHOICE OF ELLEN DEGENERES TO HOST EMMYS
Hollywood – Pat Robertson on Sunday said that Hurricane Katrina was God’s way of expressing its anger at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for its selection of Ellen Degeneres to host this year’s Emmy Awards. “By choosing an avowed lesbian for this national event, these Hollywood elites have clearly invited God’s wrath,” Robertson said on “The 700 Club” on Sunday. “Is it any surprise that the Almighty chose to strike at Miss Degeneres’ hometown?”

It was a hoax, evangelist Robertson ( yes the one that called for the assasination of President Chavez) never said this in his Sunday television program. But Pat Robertson reacted to the satirical article in a very strange way. He wrote a letter to the editors of datelinehollywood.com:

In the letter he states that New Orleans was destroyed because it's the "epicenter of sinful jazz music". Ellen has got nothing to do with it.
Ellen “DeGenerate" ,"will meet her fate when the Good Lord creates an earthquake centralized directly below the studio where she tapes her talk show."

I wonder, will this get her more viewers?

More at BoingBoing

via mijn kop thee en Puck

Musical Beds with K.d. Lang

2005-09-15T11:31:00.000+02:00

I bought Camille Paglia’s essay collection “Vamps and tramps” in 1994 and after reading it again and again for about a year, it remained on the shelf for more than a decade.
Ten years mean a lot of changes.
But today I find myself reading “Vamps and tramps” again. I forgot how much I liked it.

Paglia’s writing style is aggressive and direct. She drags you along, then surprises you with her bluntness. The essay “No law in the arena” is Paglia’s “pagan theory of sexuality” and largely explains her views on homosexuality, lesbianism, gay activism and theory.

In 1994 I had sex with men, not with women. I could understand Paglia’s abhorrence of the closed lesbian community of the ‘90s. I was labelled “straight” by lesbians. Not even the fact that I am a woman granted me any sympathy. Maybe I was just another straight, dick-loving traitor to them.

Ten years later, I have seen a fair deal of the lesbian community. I’ve discovered – for example- that lesbian bars are the same all over the world. I got punched in the face or could barely escape a fight for saying inappropriate things to inappropriate lesbians more than once. And most of the time I got plain drunk out of boredom.
Camille Paglia is to my knowledge the first to describe the phenomenon of lesbian bars shamefully accurate: “One is deafened in [lesbian] bars by the juvenile whooping and hollering of packs of lesbians greeting each other like screeching teen arriving at a slumber party.” She says.

According to Paglia there’s no opportunity to have an interesting talk and the music is shit, certainly if compared to gay men’s bars. “Music in the men’s bars is pumping, pelvic, and sweatily sexual; there is an edge of menace, a darkness of artistic ambiguity. Music in too many women’s bars is bland, defanged disco, with a monotonous tic-toc beat ideal for bad dancers. A complex Latin polyrhythm clears the floor. Classic dance tunes, numbingly overplayed, have a chirpy, cheerleading, middlebrow tone.”

Paglia points out that gay bars for men are open to anyone. Strangers can enter a bar and cruise other men anywhere in the world. But in lesbian bars that is hardly the case.
“Solitary cruising and pickups do occur among lesbians, but they are not the rule. Lesbian bars are organized in huge kinship groupings.” says Paglia. “Trying to break into these shifting cliques could drive you mad – unless you join one of their sports leagues. Musical beds is the name of the game. But each person sets up the next affair before she breaks off with the last, so there is an intricate overlapping, producing endless amounts of what Alison Maddex calls, with exasperation, “lesbian drama from hell”. Lushly eroticized push-pull emotion, rather that genital sexuality, is the real heart of lesbianism.”
Well, reading this makes me laugh, because it is so true. It's slowly changing, but still true.

In “No law in the arena”, Paglia states that the lesbian community is childish, debilitating and infantile. Creativity and wit are killed at the root and heterosexual men are rejected out of fear.

Lesbian feminism in the 1970s condemned heterosexual sex and its emphasis on penetration. “Anything echoing heterosexual penetration had to be avoided or disgusted.” writes Paglia.

During the eighties, dildoes were tolerated, but they shouldn’t be compared to penises. They were lesbian toys, but certainly not substitutes for male genitals.
“What bothers me is that the lesbian dildo craze stubbornly avoids acknowledging its anatomy-as-destiny implications.” Reacts Paglia “Why stop at dildoes? If penetration exites, and if receptive female genitalia are so suited to friction by penis-shaped objects, why not go on to real penises?”
Lesbian feminism opposes men and equals maleness to oppression, patriarchy, exploitation. Men cannot be considered as potential sex partners.

The points is, according to Paglia, that lesbian theorists have always evaded every possibility of reconciliation of the sexes and creating a bisexual awareness. A bisexual awareness would be a far more grown up way of dealing with sexuality.
“Any woman, gay or straight who cannot respond to penises or who finds them hideous or laughable (…) has been traumatized by some early experience. She is neither complete nor healthy as a person.” states Paglia.

This makes me think of Adrea Dworkin, the feminist who was radically opposed to pornography and said that penetration (by a male) equals exploitation.
Dworkin had been raped and abused several times and based her views on those experiences and the experience of many abused women.

Paglia and Dworkin aren’t really buddies. Paglia is a fierce defendant of pornography ("a pagan arena of the archaic vigor of nature”) and devotes a 5 pages rant to Dworkin in “Vamps and Tramps”(which was originally published in Playboy …). They take extreme sides in the nature-nurture debate.

I don’t want to go into this, but I really appreciate Paglia’s assertion that something went wrong in the feminist movement the last decades. Sexuality has been so mangled up and stigmatized, that we don’t see the point anymore.

“The real butches are not the lesbian ones, but the heterosexual women.” says Paglia.
Because dealing with men makes you stronger. Women like Lauren Hutton, and Chrissie Hynde should be role models for young women (whether straight or lesbian), not k.d. Lang “with her lugubrious singing style and her passé persona of baby-faced desexed boy.”

Men and women need each other. That’s Paglia’s point. When lesbians cut off men and create their feminist lesbian utopia and when gay men create their macho world of muscles without women, something essential is lost. If we want to be sexual beings we need to explore femininity and masculinity. We need “dual vision”, says Paglia, “in a world in which people can freely cross gender lines”.

Camille Paglia, Vamps & Tramps : New Essays, Vintage, 1994

Animal (4)

2005-09-01T22:29:00.000+02:00

I don't give in to her pleas. I don't even touch her. I just pull off the few clothes she is still wearing and turn up the heating.
Then I sit down and drink whisky. Quietly.
That gets her angry. Rage is building up inside her. Her arms are becoming heavy and she' s running out of patience. But she knows we haven't finished yet. For the first time I can see insecurity in her eyes.

She has the most beautiful hips: round and brown and soft. When she moves, I can see the muscles in her upper arms move under her skin. I observe her and enjoy.

She's standing upright, kicking and cursing. She's too proud and stubborn to admit that she has lost the game.
I approach her and push her against the wall with my body. Brutally. She struggles and pretends to be disgusted. Our breasts touch and I shiver. She's breathing heavily into my neck, but she doesn't bite. I massage her nipples and cup her breasts in my hands. I know this turns her on. She’s getting wet now and keeps pushing her hips against mine.

"What do you want from me?" I whisper in her ear. "More whisky?"
She turns her head away. I’ve still got the bottle in my hand and take a big swig. Then I kiss her. She wants my tongue but I try to push the whisky into her mouth. She doesn’t swallow, just lets the liquid run down her chin, neck and breasts. Slowly, with only the tip of my tongue, I lick it off. From her neck to the hollow of her scapula. Down in between her breasts. Over her stomach to her hip bone. -Thighs, knees, calves to all ten of her toes.
Then back up along the inside of her right thigh. She’s trembling. She’s shaken with emotion and I thought she couldn’t feel anything.
I lick teasingly slow and carefully avoid any spot she likes me to touch. When I reach her lips and kiss her, she kisses me back wildly. I’m afraid she will bite my tongue.

I slide my right finger into her cunt. She sighs. I try not to touch her clit.
She’s really horny now and can barely contain herself. She just wants to move and buckle and grind. Like an animal. Her muscles contract and relax and her skin is burning. She’s having trouble standing up.

“Do you want me?” I whisper into her hair. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I want you. Go on. Don’t stop.”

But I do stop and untie her. I push her into the bedroom, onto the bed and massage her wrists. She pulls me on top of her and starts to move. I slowly push my hip against her wet clit. She’s so horny she can barely hold a rhythm. I push her hips into the mattress and try to postphone her orgasm as long as possible, but she comes almost immediately. Long and hard. I keep moving. She groans and sighs each time my hip or thigh touch her cunt.

She moves a little and squeezes her hand in between our hips to help me. I’m as wet as she is. I can feel her fingers slide over my cunt and I know I’m about to explode. She keeps moving slowly until a big full blown orgasm hits me.
I shudder and contract on top of her, her arms pushing me tightly against her body. I lie motionless and a feeling of release and loss, of sadness and emptiness washes over me.
She caresses my back and shoulders and I stay on top of her for a while. Completely still. After a while she whispers something in my ear.

”Animal.” she says.
”You”, I answer, “You are my animal.”

Animal (3)

2005-08-30T09:49:00.000+02:00

She pushes her fingers in between my legs and I can feel water entering my cunt, its heat slowly spreading itself. Each time her fingers enter me, she pushes my head deeper under water. I want to resist, but I know that the more I struggle, the longer this will take. She wants to be the boss. I will make her think she has broken me.

She's fucking me rhythmically. Slow and deep. I try to concentrate on her fingers and the heavy pulsating beat of blood in my cunt. I try to relax and move with her. She reacts and pushes her hipbone against my lower back.

The water level is rising and she keeps pushing me under water for longer and longer periods. The more I gasp for breath, the more she seems to enjoy it. Her breasts sway with every move. She laughs at me and tries to push 3 fingers into me. Too short, bad angle. Does she think I can come like that? She doesn't even give me a fair chance.
I become frustrated and angry again. Suddenly I remember how she snapped at me in the bar. Bitch. I start to move faster and harder and rub my buttocks against her public hair.

Finally she starts to relax. I manage to get more air. She starts to moan and moves even faster. I can hardly keep up with her, but my arm is free now. With one big punch I can make her lose her balance. I hit her hard in the face. Her hands immediately cover her nose and cheeks. She clearly didn't expect this.

I push myself up, grab hold of her and throw her onto the bathroom floor.
She's still looking at me with astonishment in her eyes.

"So do you want to kill me or what?" I yell at her. "You don't even have enough feeling to commit a murder."

"Amateur!" She yells back almost immediately. Her eyes are shiny with anger, but the blow has weakened her. I grab her ankles and haul her through the living room, over the rough carpet, as far as the stairs. I use my shirt to tie up her hands above her head and strap them to the banisters. She doesn't resist and closes her eyes. She's saving her power for her next assault.
I fetch the whisky from the kitchen and quickly pour a sip into her mouth. That helps.

She starts coughing and slowly realises what situation she has gotten herself into.
The more she pulls and struggles, the tighter her cuffs become.
I can see her thinking. She desperately tries to come up with a plan, a trick that would make me release her. But if I would cut her loose now, she would humiliate me until I would do anything to make her stop.

(to be continued...)

Animal (2)

2005-08-28T23:04:00.000+02:00

Early sunlight is seeping in through the kitchen window. She breathes heavily into my ear. I can't move. She has me in a tight clamp. Her knees are pressing into my thighs. She tightens her grip and contorts my wrist until I yell out with pain.

"I hate you." I growl.

She bangs her knee into my side and I fall onto the floor, panting for breath.
Then she throws herself on top of me and pushes her wet hair into my face. I can't breathe. Whisky stings my eyes and throat. I grab hold of her thighs and she starts to move.
She stumbles to the bathroom, pulling me along with her.
She opens the taps and tries to tear off her wet clothes. Meanwhile she pulls me by the hair and pushes me into the bathtub. I try to bite and scratch, but she's strong enough to push me under the tab. Ice cold water pounds onto my skull.

"You miserable bitch...", she breathes into my ear. "I should have known. Why the hell did I come with you..."

"This is why." I answer quickly and bite her earlobe.

She tries to turn her head away from me. I can see her large brown breasts bulge out of her shirt. She has goose bumps and big, rock hard nipples.
I reach out to touch them, but she grabs my hair again and pushes me deeper into the bathtub. Her whole body is leaning into me. I lose my balance and fall flat on my stomach. My head bangs into the bottom of the bathtub.

She crawls on top of me now and pushes me down with her strong thighs.
I can feel her toes drill into the back of my knees.
She turns the tabs open full blast. I'm stuck. Water is slowly finding it's way under and around my body.
She is going to drown me.

"Well now, what about showing me what you can do?" she snarls.
"And hurry up."

(to be continued...)

Animal (1)

2005-08-27T12:23:00.000+02:00

The city has become a maze of unhappiness and loss. I'm tired of going out. I'm tired of the dark sleazy discotheques, the hard stares of strange women, the smell of old beer and stale cigarettes in my clothes. I hate the lonely weekends.

It's late and I'm sitting at the counter in a lesbian bar, observing 2 angry butches pushing each other around. They're ready to start a fight any minute now. I'm thinking about going home.

As usual, just as I reach for my coat, I notice her walking in.
She is out hunting. She's tall and strong and moving gracefully. Her eyes lock onto mine and I try not to reveal the mixed up feeling of desire and fear inside me. She lures me out of the bar, into the black night. I can't help following her.

We walk through the small streets in silence. We enter late night clubs, spy around and leave out of restlessness. Bar after bar.
I know she hates to be alone. She’s always looking for company. I'm almost sure she will come home with me later, but first she will humiliate me for her weakness. There will be no way to avoid her stabbing remarks and her arrogant stare. She knows I want her and that's enough for her to despise me.

She wears me out. She throws her head back and laughs like a wolf. She snaps and bites and ridicules. I buy her drinks and the more she howls the less I utter. We drink until the last bar closes.

When we step outside into the shivering cold morning, I am broken and hurting and I don't care anymore. I want to go home. No more thinking or feeling. Just end it all.

“What do you want to end?” she asks. I can see the corner of her mouth curling upwards into an evil grin. Sheis sitting at my kitchen table and looks at me. Now that we are alone and after she’s humiliated me enough in front of everyone, she finally looks at me.

This is the confrontation.
If she wants me angry, she'll get me angry. I grab the bottle of whiskey on the table. Before she even realizes what I am up to, I empty the bottle into her face.
She's soaked and furious. The poignant odour of malt drifts through the kitchen.
"You smell." I tell her dryly.
She jumps up and tries to grab me. I have to duck to avoid her waiving fists.
"You nasty cunt!" she shrieks. "I'll teach you."

(to be continued...)

Worried

2005-08-26T12:43:00.000+02:00

"Hussain Osman, one of the men alleged to have participated in London's failed bombings on July 21, recently told Italian investigators that they prepared for the attacks by watching "films on the war in Iraq," La Republica reported. "Especially those where women and children were being killed and exterminated by British and American soldiers...of widows, mothers and daughters that cry."

>> Read Terror's Greatest Recruitment Tool by Naomi Klein

"94,000 people -- over half of them African American --were on a "scrub list" in Florida, resulting in their being blocked from voting in the 2000 election."

>> Read The Nazification of America

Le bout du monde

2005-08-20T13:24:00.000+02:00

The end of the world. They have sheep there.

Madrid

2005-08-17T20:51:00.000+02:00

( note: this story is not new, but it wasn't on the internet anymore...)

Sophie and I we had always been friends and she had always know that I wanted it to be more than that. We had tried to imagine what kind of couple we would be, but when I’d get too seriously wrapped up in it she’d laugh and say that she would never be able to have a relationship with a woman. Not a lasting one. And certainly not with the first woman she would have sex with. “I would feel liberated probably, once I’d taken the step and I would need to experiment more.” She had said. Who was I to argue. She had her career, her boyfriend and big plans for the future.

I had gotten used to the idea that what I wanted I would never get. But some nights we’d go out and get tipsy and while we were talking and laughing she would become more beautiful and sexy every time I looked at her. At moments like that I was painfully reminded of my position as the rejected lesbian friend. But I never could give up our friendship for it. We had a good time together. She’d cry on my shoulder, trust me with her secrets. That was more important.
When I was with her I just tried to numb out that part of my feelings that had to do with sexual responsiveness. The part of my feelings that went in overdrive from the moment I’d see her. One night I had been talking about a recent business trip to Madrid and how I had fallen in love with this big city of icy winds and thousands of shoe shops. And she had said “Let’s go there together.” And so we did.

We had 3 days and 4 museums to visit. On our first day, we spent hours in the Prado. I don’t know how we managed to get lost in the tube on our way back, but it was near dusk when we got out of a metro station that wasn’t the one we expected. Traffic was rushing by and people hurried into tapas bars for a glass of cava and fresh squid. I was stunned. The grandeur of the enormous buildings and boulevards, feeling completely lost and almost threatened by the ferociousness and speed of the city in full movement.
“Isn’t this wonderful” I said, looking at the cars speeding by in rivers of noise.
“It’s unbearable. I can’t breathe. Get me out of here.” Sophie said.
She panicked. I took her to the nearest bar, so we could ask where exactly we were and lift up our spirits.

The bar was noisy, littered with paper and food rests. We asked the woman behind the bar for a glass of wine.
“Tourist?” she asked. I nodded. She smiled and yelled something at a group of business women at the counter. They interrupted their animated discussion to look at us and laughed too. She gave us very big glasses.

“Go ahead, sit here.” She pointed to two high chairs at the bar.
After a while the woman sitting next to us, who had been previously engaged in the noisy discussion, turned around, facing us and said: “You lost the way, eh? You took wrong metro from Prado. Wrong direction. Where’s your hotel?” She talked fast and loud, with a raw voice. Her eyes were dark and beautiful, sparkling with laughter.
I showed her an address card from the hotel. She looked at it and showed it to her friends, commenting in quick Spanish words.
Then she turned back and said. “You can go with me if you want. For free. Taxi is very expensive. But first you drink some more,” she grinned and pointed at the bar woman, who had been observing us and quickly poured us two equally big glasses of wine. I didn’t know whether to be thankful or not.
“Don’t worry,” the bar lady said, leaning in to me confidentially. “It’s all right. She will bring you to Plaza España, in the city centre.”

It took a while before the woman was ready to go. We had been keeping an eye on her and commenting on her looks. I thought she resembled Victoria Abril, but Sophie kept telling me Victoria Abril would never have such a short haircut. She was getting tipsy after the second glass.
I put her into the front seat, just to be sure she wouldn’t get sick and finally we drove off for a ride through Madrid.
Although we took the big boulevards it took half an hour before I recognized the surroundings again. Colourful advertisements of movies and theatre shows. Saturday night. The streets were packed with people. The Spanish woman didn’t talk. She just smiled at Sophie once in a while and I noticed that she kept looking in the rear view mirror, even when we stopped in front of the traffic lights, observing me with her dark piercing eyes.

After a while she turned into a small street and then a still smaller one and then stopped, only barely missing some trash cans and parking half on the pavement, on a street corner.
“I am inviting you for a drink.” She said, looking at me, then briefly at Sophie. Your hotel is right behind that corner this way. She pointed into a dark street. But drinks is that way.” She smiled. “Come on, it’s Saturday.”
Sophie looked at me and hesitated. I don’t know if she expected me to decline the offer or not, but I thought, “what the hell”, and said “Yes, We’d like to go for a drink.”
Then I noticed how pale Sophie’s face was. She shook her head. “I’m going back.” She said. “I’m not feeling up to it.” Before I could say anything, the Spanish woman had taken her arm. “What’s the matter? You had too much wine?”
She started walking into the dark street with Sophie. “Come, we’ll help you to get to the hotel. What’s your name? Sophie? Ah, nice. Nice name. I’m Victoria.”

I felt useless. Victoria walked Sophie all the way to the elevator, while talking to her and putting her at ease. All I could do was notice her carefully manicured hands on Sophie’s sleeve and her stylish long coat. She even left her card, so Sophie would be able to call her, if she needed help. Then elevator doors closed and I saw Sophie’s confused face disappear. “She’ll be all right.” Victoria said. “Come on. I know a nice bar.”
I should have known what I got into, but I was taken by surprise when we turned the corner and suddenly we were in a small street with bars everywhere. Rainbow flags, red lights: the gay district.

Victoria looked at me. “You like it here?” she grinned. She led me into a small cosy candlelit bar. The slow beats of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine were pouring out of the stereo. Several women at the bar looked at us when we came in. They looked gorgeous, cosmopolitan, wild.
Victoria was talking to the bar lady, she was a regular here, obviously. She handed me more wine.
“Let’s dance”. She said and dragged me to the small dance floor in the back.
“I’ve never danced to Massive Attack before,” I whispered. But she seemed determined and started moving, closer and closer, forcing me into the rhythm.
Her body was slender and firm, like a dancer’s and when I saw her move I amazed at how much lust her movements provoked in me. She was beautiful and strong and sexual. And so different from Sophie. She was a dyke and she was seducing me and the way she danced up to me about knocked me off my feet.

“You look like you need a woman badly, am I right?” she whispered in my ear. “And you know what? So do I.”
What could I say? So, I moved closer and kissed her. Softly, playfully. I tasted her lips and her perfume and it made me delirious. So foreign, dark and sweet. We kept dancing for a while and with every movement I felt my body stir, as if it was reloading itself. Every inch of skin was coming alive, hot and cold and shivering.
“You want to go somewhere private?” she whispered in my ear, slinging her arms around me and grinding her hips into mine. “I have a key. We can go upstairs.“ She saw my questioning look and said grinning: “Rooms to let here, you know.”

The small room she pulled me into was cosy and surprisingly warm. It had a big bed and a chair and if there was more I wouldn’t really have noticed, because she pulled me in and kept her face so close to mine, the only thing I could see were her eyes and jaw line and beautiful collar bones.
Her body was undiscovered territory. I knew from looking into her dark eyes that underneath those layers of clothing her olive skin was burning to be touched. She kept kissing me slowly, tongue and lips thick and wanting and delicately searching an answer. We were already establishing a rhythm and every time her tongue slowly slid into my mouth I could feel desire flowing into me like lava. Through the pit of my stomach and lower still down between my legs.

She dragged me down onto the bed, moaning a little when I answered her kisses with long thrusting movements. I tried to contain myself. I wanted to make love to her slowly, give her all I had, make her beg me to fuck her. But before I knew it she had me pinned down on the bed, arms above my head and her body on top of me.
She started grinding into me, slowly moving her hips, one leg between mine. Her breasts touched mine and I could feel her nipples harden.
I desperately wanted to take off her shirt, but she wouldn’t allow me.
”You first” she said, and she pulled up my t-shirt and slowly took off my bra. I needed to feel her skin . And when, after she had pulled out my jeans, she finally did take off her clothes and crawled back over me, naked and warm, I realised how much I had missed it. The taste and heat of someone else’s body.

Her breasts had beautiful dark nipples and in between her legs she was wet and warm. But I wouldn’t let her come. Not yet. I started teasing her, sliding my tongue along her breasts, her belly and down along her cunt, but not just there were she wanted it. Her pussy was just too beautiful to let go off, too juicy and swollen to give in to it. She moaned, giving me hints about where she liked it. She pushed her clit into my mouth, sitting on my face, but I turned her over quick and held her down with my legs. I circled her cunt with my finger. “Can I go in?” I asked. She didn’t hear me, just moaned and shoved, pushing my finger in deeper. With every thrust she moved her finger along my clit, although I begged her not to. And then I gave in to it. I fucked her and fucked her, two fingers inside her, thumb on her clit until I exploded into orgasm. My mind went blank and I couldn’t even cry, just feel happy.

She put an arm around me and started kissing again, long and deep kisses and she whispered something in Spanish. Her hand slid down again, in between my legs and deeper into me. Then she crawled on top of me, thrusting in her finger while sliding her pussy over my hand. With every thrust the orgasm slammed into my body again like fire. I thought I would pass out. And then she started to come. She moaned and shouted and I felt her breath on my cheek. We were caught in a rhythm together. My body contracting with hers, until she stopped moving an buried her head into my hair and neck and pushed her body close to mine.

We fell asleep for a while. I don’t know how long we stayed into that room. But when I woke up she was sitting on the bed, already dressed holding up a glass of cava for me. “It’s on the house,” she said, with a beautiful grin. She looked stunning. “We need to get out here now. It’s 5 o’clock. The bar will close.” She told me. “I will bring you to your hotel.”
She did. She gave me one of those long kisses and handed me a card. ”Call me, if you are around.” She said. Then she was gone.
I was tired and sleepy and tried not to wake up Sophie when I slid into the bed next to hers in the sad, worn out hotel room.
“Is that you?” she asked, just when I thought I managed to get in quietly.
“Did you have a good time?”
“Yes,” I sighed, “Yes, I did”, just before I drifted off in an oblivious after-sex coma.

If I'm lucky part 4

2005-06-02T13:45:00.000+02:00

Part1| Part 2| Part 3

She comes in and closes the door. I can see her eyes quickly inspect the room, like a cat. She must feel something is not right.
I'm sitting in a corner, knees up to my chest, silently breathing.
I don't think she has seen me. She walks through the room and pulls a lever or something. I can really see it very well. A door slides open silently and she disappears in the kitchen.
"Would you like tea or coffee?" she yells. There's no one in the room. The front door is closed. I start getting nervous.
"Hellooo there, I'm talking to you." Her head pops out of the kitchen and she's staring me straight into the face. "Tea or coffee?"
A feeling of uneasiness spreads through my stomach when I look into her stale blue eyes. She looks dangerous and tough and I'm invading her territory.

Mole hair people

2005-05-27T14:12:00.000+02:00

"You don't understand." she said. "It's not about beauty."
Beauty is one one small aspect of what is hidden and can be revealed.
"I need the imperfections. They function as gates to see something more than the flat reality of a moment."
"But an imperfection can also be beautiful..." I answer.
"Yes, exactly," She pauzed briefly, "but not necessarily. Beauty can make you experience things. Without the sense of beauty you wouldn't see, hear, feel or taste them. But beauty is not that strong. It's been abused, over-used, turned upside down, faked and forged. It's lost some of its power."
I sighed and thought of ancient greek art and how its beauty still touches me.

She continued, ignoring me.
"In Asia, people do not pull out the hairs growing from moles or birthmarks like we do. You can see people with a birthmark or mole on their face and a string of black or grey hairs sprouting out of it. I have seen mole hair that was more than 1 meter long.
That's what I mean when I talk about opening gates through imperfections. The hairy mole struck me as so unusual -it's an emphasized error- I had to reajust my definitions of beauty. After all, the hair is not really ugly, mainly odd.
So the hair became a gate that revealed. I could imagine how the mole haired people would look covered in hair completely. I wondered about how it must feel. The fine hair in the wind. On a bike. The mole haired people looked dignified. Maybe they felt different about themselves."
"But what is your point?" I interjected. "Something unusual makes you upset and thus triggers a train of thoughts?"
She looked at me. Rather sad. "I don't know. I just liked the mole people very much.
They made me think 3 or 4 thoughts at the same time. They made me feel I had a choice in life. You know what I mean, not just one flat, timed trajectory to death, while you are telling yourself: we are build of atoms, love is chemical, death is malfunction. I felt I could make loopholes, beat time. My pulse slowed down. The clocks stopped ticking. I was out of here. Really out."
She paused and looked at me.
"You don't believe me, do you? You don't believe it's possible. You are like them. Saying falling in love is only endorphins running though your veins and believing that hormones can explain every feeling or reaction." She was getting angry.
"No." I answered. "I'm not like them." I decided to remain calm and continued slowly.
"You know what happened when I was younger? Doctors found out that due to some unexplainable flaw in my brain, my body is not able to produce endorphins or certain hormones. But I have fallen in love. Several times. The clocks stopped ticking and my pulse slowed down. And then it happened."

Drag

2005-05-20T23:30:00.000+02:00

* He

When I was little, people took me for a boy. They always did and I didn’t really mind.
I wore boys’ clothes and played football. And then I discovered I was into girls. No big deal. My coming out wasn’t that hard. I had my first girlfriend and my first broken heart. The man of the newspaper shop still called me "sir", although I was 16 already. I still didn’t mind. Regularly my best friend and I would have these hilarious dressing up sessions in our parents’ bedroom. It was awesome. We would end up parading around the house as two gentlemen in suit and tie and mimicked all the men we knew.
Then my friend got seriously involved with a girl who told her she was behaving too masculine and she stopped dressing up. We still talked about it often though and I think she really missed our sessions. I never stopped doing it. It gave me a kick to invent a character and adjust my features until I resembled the man I had in mind perfectly.
I got really good at it and learned how to make sideburns and beards from my own hair, so they would look natural and real.
I always did it at home. Except for my friend, nobody had ever seen me as a man.
But tonight it was Saturday again and I had been fantasizing about dressing up the whole day and going out in men’s clothes. My first public appearance. Did I dare? I could try it. I had nothing to lose.
After dinner I started working on my face. I made the nicest looking sideburns I could think of and glued a small Mexican moustache to my upper lip. Then I brushed my hair back with gel. It really changed me. A whole new person appeared: a cool looking guy with dark piercing eyes. This was my best creation so far.
When I clenched my teeth together a strong masculine jaw appeared.
Now what should I wear? The tight running bra first to hide my breasts, new shirt, jeans, belt, boots, jacket.
I inspected myself in the mirror. But something was missing. The bulge in the pants.
I felt pretty unsure. Usually I stuffed a pair of tennis sock down my pants, but now it was different: someone might actually stare at my crotch. I tried the socks, adjusted them, crouched down and looked at them from all angles. It exited me, but meanwhile I worried. If I was really going out like this, women would think I had one. How was I going to pull that off? I grinned. I was already thinking like a man. Thinking I could go out, seduce a woman and willfully take her home and fuck her. On second thought, I might just change the tennis socks for something different.

I went to a part of the city I rarely visited. Just in case somebody would recognize me.
I looked at the men walking past as I was waiting in the underground, hiding myself from too much light. Walking like a man. Heels digging into the pavement. Shifting balance and hips. I felt scared and exited at the same time. This was for real. I needed to pass as one of them now.

When I entered the venue was pulsing with energy and people were moving and dancing everywhere.
Men in shirt and tie ordered cocktails at the bar. Next to me, girls were dancing to the new remix of an old Astor Piazzola Tango.

I found a place at the bar in a darker corner next to the dance floor and ordered a drink.
Nobody noticed me. It gave me a huge adrenalin rush. I clenched my jaw, remembering not to smile and sipped my drink.

*She

I had lost track of how many hours I had been dancing. It amazed me. I just loved the crowd. Maybe it was because I had been away for such a long time. I needed a small pause and that was when I saw him. I couldn’t help but stare. I had never seen a man like that. Masculine and proud, yet so feminine in his gestures. He laughed at the bartender. Was he gay? I wondered. He must have noticed me staring at him because all of a sudden he looked at me, straight into my eyes. Then he grinned and lifted his drink, moving his lips saying cheers. He looked fabulous. I felt his stare spiral down in my stomach. The dancing had made me feel light-headed and hot. He kept looking at me until I became embarrassed and confused and turned around.
Two years ago after a nasty break up with my partner I had taken a job in another part of the world. It had kept me busy day and night. There was no time for men or romance in my life. Today for the first time since, I was caught off guard. I had to admit I really like this man, but I was way too shy to ever flirt with him.
Rhythm was pulsing again and I needed to move, so I forgot about it all and danced as if I had nothing to lose.
Once in a while my eyes where drawn to him. I just wondered if he would look at me dancing, but every time I looked, I just saw his shady contours and I didn’t know if he was watching the dance floor at all or just dreaming and staring into the void. It did excite me though and I was surprised of all the energy soaking out of my pores. Other men were eyeing me, strutting their stuff, moving near me, but it was as if I couldn’t be bothered. I just smiled back at them and declined their offers to have a drink.

Some time later, as I returned from the bathroom a waitress came up to me with a cocktail. “It’s from that man at the bar.” she said and she pointed to the dark corner.
Before I knew it she’d handed it over to me. “Oh, he’s gone now.” She said turning her head toward the counter. “The guy was sitting right there in the dark corner.”
I just stood there with the drink in my hand and while I drank it, I felt it go straight to my head. It was something strong. Wodka probably. I walked around the club, but I didn’t see him anywhere. Not until I gave up my search and leaned against a wall to rest. He was standing near the back entrance of the club, smoking and looking at a man and woman dancing together right in front of him.
"What the hell," I thought. "I’ll walk up to him. I’m tipsy now anyway and I might as well talk to him, see what he is like."
He must have seen me coming, because when I managed to get through the crowd, I could just see a glimpse of him walking out through the back door.
"Hey!" I called, but he didn’t seem to hear me, so went after him.
I saw him walk into the dark corridor, open a door and then vanish.
I don’t know why I followed him. I felt fear and excitement, but I never thought about what could happen.
I did hesitate though, but he didn’t leave me much time. When I passed the door he had entered, I felt his slender but firm fingers slide into mine, pulling me in gently. I couldn’t see anything but there was a faint smell of beer so I figured we must be in a stock room. He was behind me. I could hear him breathing in my ear. His hands moved over my buttocks and up my spine and shoulders. In the movements of his hands was a tenderness I hadn’t felt for a long time. I wasn’t even sure I had ever felt it. My body yearned, every sinew in my back was awake and enjoying his soft strokes.
The he touched my breasts, squeezing them just right, slowly, his fingers caressing my nipples. He was winding me up and I couldn’t resist it. It made me needy of what I had missed these past years. This strange man seemed to know how to release all the desire I had so carefully stashed away all this time, hoping it would just disappear in a black hole of my mind. I couldn’t make him stop and he knew it. He was still behind me, out of touch, but moved closer and pushed me gently against the wall. I could smell his scent, an unknown brand and I could feel his hips move into my buttocks. I could feel his hard-on in his pants, but as he saw me getting tense and worried about what was going to happen, he leaned back and started caressing my inner thighs, barely touching me with his body.
It felt as if a coil of hot coals was slithering over my lower abdomen into my stomach. Whatever he was doing, he was making me feel horny as hell. And the way he did it was so gentle and kind that I couldn’t make him stop. My feet were glued to the ground. I had to give in to this. It was a shock when he moved his left hand into my panties. His fingers were exploring me deeper and deeper, playing with my pubic hair, and slowly circling my clit. He was teasing me. I moaned and then he hit just the right spot and I felt I would faint. I could hardly draw enough breath. I sighed and moaned, but I didn’t care. For such a long time I hadn’t admitted anyone that close to me, so near the point of abandonment, of total control.

The more I reacted to his moves, the slower and the softer he caressed me. Who was he? He pushed me to the limit. When I wanted him to go on, he stopped. When I begged him to fuck me, he just entered one finger slowly and hardly moved. When I wanted to turn around and kiss him on the lips, he pushed me against the wall and drew away his hands, as if to punish me. He was making me need it, expecting it and I almost felt afraid he wasn’t going to satisfy me.
But then, just when he had almost made me come and I was aching for more, he withdrew his hands and I heard him open his pants and unwrap a rubber. I never thought I would want to be fucked standing up in a dark storage room by a strange man, but right then and there I didn’t want anything else.
He moved into me slowly from behind, not pushing too deep. His hand was still there, holding my breasts and moving down, pushing my clit against his dick, playing with it.
It felt hot and great and overpowering. I was going out of my mind, just moving, thrusting and feeling him.
And then I came. With every thrust I felt myself slide away into oblivion. He reacted to every contraction by pushing his dick deeper into me, pushing his hand onto my clit, so I kept coming and coming all over again.
After a while I felt exhausted. I was so sad I nearly cried, so he kissed my neck and pulled out. He zipped his fly and held me in his arms for a while. He didn’t say anything and neither did I. I felt it wasn’t appropriate. He helped fixing my skirt and bra and after a while he guided me out of the room. I could hardly walk. My legs were shaking. I was dead tired.
Slowly I walked back into the club, but when I turned around expecting him to be right behind me, he was gone. I didn’t understand. He must have gone off through the back door. But why?

* He

I couldn’t talk to her or she would notice. I had to go, although I regretted it.
But she was a straight woman, I said to myself. She wouldn’t be into me anyway. And I liked her, so I couldn’t pretend to be something I wasn’t.
But I went to the club again, a few weeks later, as a woman. I had felt so frustrated after my escapade in drag. I couldn’t do that again.
I was sitting at the bar when she came up to me.
“Hello” she said. When I turned around I saw her startled face. “Oh, I’m sorry”, she gasped. “I thought you were someone else. I just saw your back and I ...” She hesitated. “Do you happen to have a brother, who comes here too? I’m looking for him.”
She was blushing. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t talk about it. She had to understand it. I looked at her and said. “No, I don’t have a brother, but would you mind if I ordered you a drink?” I didn’t wait for her answer, I turned to the bar keeper and ordered her a cocktail. “Please sit down”, I said, offering her a bar stool. She was unsure and didn’t know where to look. “So do you come here often?” I asked her, just to start a conversation. “Well not that much,” she answered, watching the bartender prepare her drink. “I’ve been abroad for a very long time,” she continued. She had the most beautiful eyes, dark almond, with long lashes. I just couldn’t keep from looking at her, remembering the way she smelled, the softness of her breasts. I knew I was staring at her. I had to stop thinking.
When her drink was ready I handed it to her. “Thanks,” she said. She looked at the drink, then back at me and for the first time she looked into my eyes. Long. “Oh,” she repeated a few times, after she took a big swig from her drink. “I think I understand now, about your brother.” Then she was silent for a while. I hardly dared to look at her, but then she slapped my arm. Playfully, not so much out of reproach and she laughed, pointing to her nearly empty glass. “I might need another of these though ...”

The hyphenated past

2005-04-26T13:04:00.000+02:00

"Sometimes I wish I was married." she sighed.
"Why?"
"I would love to be part of a dual entity. The hypenated combination of 2 names. The illusion that you are no longer alone in this world.
It's so easy to just give in. To give up all that you are and become part of that person you love. It's an almost religious belief, beyond all rationality: to trust another person with your life. To hand over the steering wheel voluntarily to a pirate.
To risk being pushed up a small wooden gangway and into the sea, after being stripped of treasures and ornaments."
"The hyphen is there for a reason." I tell her. "In our world only genes can unite. There is no everlasting, complete, balanced union of passion and love, only collaboration and support or hate and battle." I pause.
"I was married once, you know."
She looks me in the eye, surpised.
"I shoudn't have done it, I know. But I wanted the fairytale. I liked the beginning of the story so much, I wanted to live it."
"Although you had read the ending?"
"Yes," I answered. "It lasted 5 years. Then, one day, I found them together in our bed, all sweaty with lust and desire and an empty gaze in their eyes.
"Join us", they whispered. It's not exclusive. You are part of us. We don't lock you out."
They should have. I stepped back, onto the small wooden board. The fresh breeze of the waves brushing against my legs, lifting my skirts. And then I fell, along the boat with it's small portholes and big anchor chains into the wild ocean. In my hands the small bloodstained golden key that was my wedding ring.

Spencer Tunick

2005-04-26T10:44:00.000+02:00

Dear Mr. Tunick,
On saturday May 7th, you plan to photograph your new work of art in Bruges.
Coincidence, but that day is Gay Pride day in Brussels.
So - rain or shine - it's choosing between art or pride... What a pity.
I have this vision of 10 000 naked gays :-)

Participate in Bruges, Belgium for an installation by contemporary artist Spencer Tunick

Take advantage of this unique opportunity on Saturday, May 7, 2005 - rain or shine.

Participants will only be nude for a short period of time and in exchange for taking part, you’ll receive a photograph of the installation by the artist.

Participants will be contacted closer to the date of the installation with further instructions and arrival time.

Only participants will be allowed in the vicinity of the art event.

more info: http://www.corpusbrugge05.be/pages/start.asp

Dworkin

2005-04-20T10:14:00.000+02:00

Tuesday Apil 12, controversial an radical feminist Andrea Dworkin (58) died.
Check out the profile in The Guardian.
I started reading her website.
Dworkin completely opposes pornography. I don't watch porn so I haven't really thought about it that much. I never claimed porn was bad because I don't want to be regarded as a conservative or anti-sexual, but Dworkin is right. It's not about conservatism, prudishness or narrowmindedness but about how women are depicted.

Check this article, The Porn Myth, by Naomi Wolf. It's about Dworkin's views. (via bnox)

April is the cruelest month

2005-04-08T11:37:00.000+02:00

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land.

An ideal moment to reread this marvelous poem.
And it's on the internet, notes and all!

so when you have it, why not share it

2005-04-06T00:21:00.000+02:00

I took some time off last week, hoping to relax and unwind while finding my way through an endless maze of small and very old streets in a sunny southern town.
After some time I knew the maze by heart and could blindly find my way, but the more I strolled around and led my companions to unknown corners and hidden treasures, the more I felt it. The feeling. Inside. This wasn't me. A totally new feeling crept into my brain. A tormented, contradicting, ever-changing moodiness.
It started slowly and at first I thought it was just my brain getting even with my body, because I was neglecting my own personality, under the influence of my older and perhaps rather dominating companions. Because I was walking around with my hands in the pockets of my jeans for minutes without noticing. Usually I mind not doing the hands routine, because it's so cheap and macho.
So I reckoned the gloominess was an effect of neglect, of posing like something other then I was. But the feeling remained. Even when I was alone or when I slept.
It grew. It became sharp and pointed and it felt as if I was talking and moving in darkness. Torns ripped through my sentences, my look was cold and shiny like a blade and I could switch from laughter into venomenous spitting in two words.
It felt as if two alien powers were fighting a battle inside my head.
For days and days this continued. The more I tried to understand my state of mind, the more I questioned myself. What was it that I wanted? Was I in doubt? Was I unhappy? Did I make the wrong choices in life? Should I leave everything behind never to return home?
I couldn't think of any answer in my overcrowded head and every stingy move I made was followed by guilt. I was being nasty.
Who was I? Why did I feel as if someone was personally taking over part of my brain? My life, myself?
It took me days to realize what was happening. Someone was trespassing. Going too far. Someone was venturing in my territory, trying out a few things here and there.
Someone was making me feel... jealous.
I realized that when once again I was strolling around with my hands in my pockets without noticing. The jealousy was eating away at my common sense. It was making me bitter and sad and irrational. It made me do and say things I never normally would.
How could I possibly be possessed by such a demon? I believed in sharing happiness, in non-exclusiveness, in freedom, in ties of love and friendship stronger than petty feelings of possessiveness or envy or sexual dependency. I believed in never limiting someone's room to move. Everybody needs love, so when you have it, why not share it.
But this was all theory of course.
I found out that I could share to a certain extend. But even then I got jealous.
I got jealous of my lover and her former lover. The way they talked, the way they organized things, making me invisible, turning back time to a moment when I wasn't in her life yet.
Out it came, a burst of bile, bitter hate, humiliation, disgrace, weakness, shame and fear.
I tried to step out of their time, to run away, to get her back. I would have given anything not to have to be there. But there was no escape. I was trapped in my own maze, alone, while everyone else was enjoying a nice holiday.

Peaches

2005-04-04T20:26:00.000+02:00

Dust

2005-03-21T10:42:00.000+01:00

A reply to this: http://mastuvu.typepad.com/monuments/2005/03/dust.html

Home is where the heart is, they say. I never left home. Maybe my heart is stacked somewhere on the worn wooden shelves of the public library, where I work. Neatly classified under "medical".
I was born here and when my time will end, I know it will be here. I don’t care much about travelling or moving to a big city, like so many young people do now. I prefer a quiet life of candlelight evenings and walks along the coastline. After a storm you can find treasures there. Silver spoons with imprints of a foreign ship’s name, bones of seagulls tied up in seaweed looking like precious jewellery. And once in a while a bottle. Intact.

When I long for something more, I have my books. They are my children, my lovers, my companions on cold nights. Sometimes I read them tenderly, my fingers caressing the spine while my eyes gaze into an endless new world. Sometimes I devour them urgently, driven by a hopeless need, scratching at the words like an animal. I have read books hot with lust and illicit passion. Books that were scarred and scorched, almost igniting themselves with their content. And soothing books telling tales of romantic love so corny and fake they almost melted in my hands.

The books in the library. Every day, I talk to them. I mend them, I stamp dates onto their cards. I classify them and cherish them when they’ve been neglected.

But some time ago, while I was walking along the beach, I found the most precious book of all. I keep it at home. I’ve never ever shown it to anyone.

Shower scene

2005-02-25T21:12:00.000+01:00

Silver screen. yes. Another story (if you like the dirty kind, because let's face that's what most of you want...) at Dykes and the City's Free-for-all-friday. It's called "Shower scene".

If I'm Lucky - 3

2005-02-24T21:09:00.000+01:00

Inside it's cold. I can feel a draft streaming along my legs when I close the door.
I enter a small living room. It's still dark. The curtains are drawn. Everywhere I look on the floor, the walls and the sofa against the wall on the right I see carpets. Thick, wool carpets embroidered with the strangest motives of hunters and helicopters and colourful exotic flowers and riffles and baseball caps. Shiny black tattoo-like designs and ancient alchemist's signs on wine red ruggs. There is not a single space on the wall or the floor that's not covered.
Next to the sofa is a big rock, granite. I assume it serves as a table. There's an empty coffee cup balancing on it, cigarettes and a water pipe. There's a table and a rack against the left wall barely supporting all the books stacked on it. Some big and dignified with leather covers and in between and atop of them old worn and torn paperbacks.
There must be a door somewhere. I have to hide.

Just run? Is it that easy?

2005-02-23T23:59:00.000+01:00

Run away from all your boredom
Run away from all your whoredom and wave
Your worries and cares
Goodbye

All it takes is one decision
A lot of guts, a little vision to wave
Your worries and cares
Goodbye

Placebo - Slave to the wage

If I'm Lucky (Part 2)

2005-02-20T22:11:00.000+01:00

There’s a million questions I have asked her in my mind, but now I don’t know what to say to her. I’m slowing down, counting my steps.
Then, finally she opens the door, carrying a big crate of empty bottles. She curses when she can’t pull the door closed behind her. She tries to swing it shut with her foot but it bounces back again.
She starts towards the street with the bottles. She doesn’t notice me.
A man passing yells at her and she looks up. They know each other. He crosses the street and she puts down the crate.
It’s about 50 meters towards her front door. I do not hesitate.
She’s standing at the street corner and talking to the man, nervously hopping from one leg onto the other. Hands in her pockets. It’s cold. She laughs and kicks the crate with the tip of her shoe.
The grass is covered with ice and I hear it crack under my feet, when I approach her front door. Nobody sees me when I enter. All sounds are muffled in the grey morning weather.

If I’m lucky

2005-02-17T14:20:00.000+01:00

I’m not a stalker, far from it, but I must admit she's been provoking an unhealthy obsession in me. For some weeks now she makes me adjust my routines. For example when I go to work, I get off the bus one stop early so I can walk past her apartment, hoping she might come out so I can see her.
She lives in the apartment block next to where I work. It’s a shithole, a social welfare apartment of the worst kind. The car park is a garbage dump and the walls of the apartments look like they’re made of paper, graffiti tags scrawled all over them at eye-height and a bit lower imprints of dirty shoes from angry adolescents. The whole street is immersed in a feeling of desolation and hopelessness. It must be horrible to live there.

If I’m lucky, once a month on Tuesday, she puts out the empty bottles just when I pass.

She’s blonde, of average height. Her hair is short and spikey. She wears trainers and almost no jewellery, except for a series of earrings in her left earlobe. She's not what you call pretty and not exactly young. I bet she's well in her thirties.

Then why do I feel this urge to talk to her. I'd love to tell her to come with me and go somewhere nice. Away from work and the nasty concrete walls of her mediocre apartment.

I have planned to make contact today, should she come out of the front door when I walk past. Yesterday, before I went to sleep, I swore I would go up to her and look into her eyes.

It's 8:30, as usual, when I get off the bus. With every step I clench my hands into fists in my pockets, hoping she will be there.

Positions

2005-02-01T21:36:00.000+01:00

I’m on top of her, leaning on one arm and moving my hips and body against her so I touch as much of her as possible. Her skin is soft. She’s moving too, close against me. We’re rubbing harder, feeling the skin touching. Pressure shifting. She makes me sigh and breathe hard in her neck.
I know my hipbone is not in the right position to stimulate her well enough. But that doesn’t matter. I don’t want to fuck her straight from the hip. I want to slither along her body, slide into the curves and curl up in her arms. I want to be wet and sweaty and smell the sex.
I want to forget time. I can feel lust crawling under our skin, warm and glowing but making me shiver.

Is it because we fuck without dick that sex becomes such an experience of total freedom, of complete abandonment of everything we know?

I massage her lower back, press my fingers into her spine, where the Chinese believe the power of the dragon lives. Because fire and passion do not live in the heart but there between the kidneys above the pelvic bone: the point from which all movement originates, where energy is released, blocked or taken.

She watches my back. I love her to take me from behind, causing explosions, turning me into a warrior. She feeds the dragon from her hand, sending blood up to my cheeks until they are red and hot.

When I give her pleasure I am her. I do not exist without her. Inside her I am talking. The map of her cave is burned into my mind. I can find my way intuitively. I have explored and discovered every inch. Inside I can dance with her desire and feel what she feels.

When she parts my legs and puts in her finger, we form a perfect circle. We release the power, spreading out in waves one clashing into another, slowly radiating and flowing into irregular patterns. We are making a web of desire. Moving into space, not in a straight line.

She pulls me over the edge into nothingness. Into never been born and never existed. Into we.

Nuit Blanche

2005-01-25T10:36:00.000+01:00

It has been awfully cold last night in my cardboard box underneath the Gare St.Lazare.
The trains make a terrible noise because everything has been shrinking during the night, widening the gaps between the rails and stretching powercables. My poodles get desperate from listening to the high piercing sounds of trains braking.
When I take them out for a stroll in the fresh snow, they shiver and start lifting up their tiny feet as high as possible. That's ok, because so do I. We parade around in the snow like Arabian mares, ready for a horse-training championship.

Story

2005-01-19T13:41:00.000+01:00

The story doesn't end. What really happened was that a woman looked out the window of her office and saw 2 big apartment blocks. She had looked at them daily for years, several times a day. But that day she needed a story. To get her out. A dead body to clear away the guilt. To wash away - no - to prove that certain parts of her life were a fiction.
A fiction that disappeared in the powdered cracks on the faces of old women she watched at noon in the sandwich bar drinking coffee and talking. Widows. Always at the same table, in the shadow of the ugly concrete apartment blocks.
A fiction of things to come or things never to happen.
She watched the old lady with the black dog and dignified hairdo drag herself along the pavement with a walker. Slowly moving, struggling with clenched teeth. Nobody looked, nobody ever cared whether she would finally make it to the sandwich bar or not.
So every afternoon the woman who wrote the story nodded at the old women in the sandwich bar. She smiled at the black dog and the dignified hairdo and thought of death. She tried to imagine what the 5 last years of her life will be like.

But what about the story of Sarah and Claire? Did Sarah get killed in the line of duty, by a stray bullet, before she ever could tell Claire she loved her? Or did they get together again eventually?
What does it mean when someone tells you they want to spend their life with you? When someone whispers: "I want to stay with you forever"? Sarah always found it an idea too difficult to grasp. She used to run away from it without looking into her heart.

Back at her desk in the office the woman who wrote the story asked herself: "What do I prefer? Fiction or memory?"

The Stick

2005-01-13T13:29:00.000+01:00

Dykes & the City and The girlfriend threw me a stick.

1. What is the total amount of music files on your computer?
Less than 20 MB and all corrupt

2. The cd you last bought is:
Simultaneously: Superdiscount - Superdiscount 2
and Neil Young - Greatest hits (because rust never sleeps)

3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message
Horace Andy - Money

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:

- Prince - When doves cry
- PJ Harvey - The dancer (from: To bring you my love)
- Most songs by Patti Smith
- Tindersticks - Rented Rooms (from: Curtains)
- Buffalo Tom - Tailllights fade

5. Who are you going to pass this stick to? (3 persons) and why?

- Jo because she likes music
- My 2 poodles Jean-Jacques and Jean-Pierre

Horoscope

2005-01-06T14:38:00.000+01:00

Monthly forecast for January 2005 (from Yahoo)

The 1st, everything might be a little hazy. That is, things aren't quite what they seem. But what can you expect after that wild masked New Year's ball? If you went with a cat mask and somehow ended up coming home as a peacock .....

What are they talking about? I can't remember that.

Oui, oui, I'm writing. Still struggling with the dead body.

Funkstille II

2004-12-20T13:02:00.000+01:00

Two years you said of being alone. Two years of one night stands, how will that change you? How have you changed me?
We need a lot of trust. Trust without guts.
I went to a clairvoyant yesterday and after she had laid out my cards I asked her for some.
"You've been stealing from your partner, haven't you?" She laughed.
She could see right through me.
"You're trying to build a fortress on a vulcano, dear." She went into the back room and I heard her open a drawer. She muttered. "It's been done, though. It has been done."
When she returned, redheaded and a bit sweaty, she gave me an on old and dirty plastic bag. "Here you go, this is all I can miss right now."
Outside I looked in the bag. It was filled with flakes of skin. Thousands, maybe millions of yellowish and transparent pieces of human skin waste carefully dried and flattened.

Madrid

2004-12-12T01:23:00.000+01:00

The enigma of the dead woman's body is not yet solved, but meanwhile you can enjoy a new ( and complete) story at www.dykesandthecity.com.
Click here to read the story "Madrid".

Story X

2004-12-09T10:12:00.000+01:00

Who wrote the story? It’s hard to tell. I never thought of a beginning or and end until she came to visit me. I was staring out of the kitchen window when she rang the doorbell.
I do like women in uniform. You laughed at it sometimes and you’d call out "Oh, god, how can you find that attractive. A god damn uniform."
I know it’s only appearance. But that’s what makes it fascinating. You long to know what’s underneath. And I don’t mean purely bodyworks. The individual. Behind silver buttons and ill-fitting trouwsers. Worn-out shirts that show your bra when you forgot to put a t-shirt under it.
It was late when she came round. And she wasn't alone. A big police bloke followed her like a dog, writing down everything we said into a small notebook. She apologized for disturbing that late but they were doing a second round of interviews in the apartment block with regard to the dead body. She stood near the window in the kitchen looking out and asked me where I was the night of the murder.

Story IX

2004-12-08T23:24:00.000+01:00

Claire and Sarah had been a couple, not long after Sarah had started her career as an investigating officer. Claire had asked her out for a drink one evening and after a few glasses had boldly seduced her. Not quite what Sarah had expected. It had been her first time with a woman.
They had been together for a few months, but Claire was factual, intellectual. She liked long silences and quiet evenings at home. After a while Sarah started going out alone, looking for thrills, challenges, competition.
She needed to live on the edge. She loved darkness and felt most alive between 2 and 4 a.m. It had been just a small click in her head one night. She was hanging out a the wrong bar, drinking whisky cola to drown an edgy feeling of uneasiness. Flirting too much. She went home with the blonde tart sitting next to her. At 7 a.m. in the morning Claire had called. "Where are you? I just woke up and you aren’t in bed?"
She hardly remembered anything about the night, except that the sex was lousy and she had been uncaring and rough. She never could handle hard liquor very well. It turned her into a destructive egomaniac.
Claire had come to get her. It was awful and embarrassing. The smell of sex all over her. And all she could do was trying not to vomit in the car.
Claire hadn’t said anything to her for a while. Then: "You have to leave. I can’t handle this. I wish I could, I’m sorry."
The whole thing had made her so sad. Still did.

"So why are you telling me all this about Claire, Sarah?" Marie Rose looked at her with her terrible questioning shrink look and Sarah snapped out of her reverie.
"I don’t know." She stared at the carpet and the legs of Rose’s chair and felt even more embarrassed.
"Maybe I’m just feeling lonely."

Teaser (for Dykes and the City)

2004-12-02T13:21:00.000+01:00

Her body was undiscovered territory. I knew from looking into her dark eyes that underneath those layers of clothing her olive skin was burning to be touched.
She kept kissing me slowly, tongue and lips thick and wanting and delicately searching an answer. We were already establishing a rhythm and every time her delicious tongue slowly slid into my mouth I could feel desire flowing into me like lava. Through the pit of my stomach and lower still down between my legs.
She dragged me down onto the bed, moaning a little when I answered her kisses with long thrusting movements.

Story VIII

2004-11-24T13:22:00.000+01:00

"Erika." She said it out loud. Could that be the name of her daughter or of a lover maybe?
The blue-ish green tattoo looked like the work of an amateur. As if it were carved into the flesh width fuzzy blurry letters where the ink had found its way under the skin.
"Could be a jail souvenir," she thought. The scar on her belly looked bad as well. It wasn’t surgical, the report said. All organs intact. It must have been from an injury.
"Well, Sarah..." a friendly voice said behind her back."That’s some case we’ve got on our hands here." Claire, the pathologist had re-entered the room.
"I can’t read a lot out of that poor ladies’ body. Seems like a bad luck girl to me."
"A bad luck girl?” Sarah asked.
"Well yes, she was killed because she was at the wrong place, wrong time. Accidental victim. It looks like whoever killed her was after her wallet."
"And so they left the pearl?" robbery with murder was a possibility Sarah didn’t even want to consider, because a motive like that wouldn’t leave any chance of finding the killer. There had to be something more.
"Well, even if they thought it was genuine, Sarah, it’s too risky to sell. It’s too recognisable in the neighbourhood. And you wouldn’t just kill someone this way unless you absolutely needed money: quick and fast. I think it’s a crazed junk’s doing."
"The papers are talking about a possible serial killer," Sarah started.
"Yes, I know," Claire said quickly,"but absolutely not likely. No sexual assault, no obvious traces left, no trademark. This is definitely not the killing style of a serial killer."
"What about the scar and the tattoo?"
"Well, yes, that’s something else." Claire was speaking slowly, while looking at the corpse again. And sarah knew she was imagining every possibility, every surgical intervention and every possible injury that could have caused the scar with scientific precision.
"The scar was most likely caused by an injury, unless they cut her open somewhere in a field hospital in a third world country or something. But nothing points to that. The slash on her belly nearly spliced her guts. It’s an old wound, dating from years back."
"Here," Claire switched on a extra light and focuses it on the body of the dead woman.
"You can see," she pointed to a spot on the belly, "that the scar has been stretched, probably when she put on weight." Sarah watched Claire’s long elegant fingers move, stretching the latex gloves and touching the dead girl’s stomach gently. She noticed Claire was wearing nail polish. Dark red. "That means she’s not seeing someone," Sarah pondered. "At least not on a regular basis."
"What would cause a wound like that?" Claire was thinking out loud. "Not a knife. The edges of the gap were ragged, that’s why it left such an ugly scar. Look at that." Claire pointed to the small suture points along the scar. "Whoever did this did a really bad job. You don’t stitch up a big gaping wound like this with 15 stitches. No wonder it made such a messy scar."
"And the tattoo?" Sarah asked. "Was it done before or after the injury?"
"There’s no way of finding that out, but I would say before. It’s so close to the scar, in such an odd place..."
Sarah’s cell phone went of. A private number. "Hi, Sarah, this is Marie-Rose. You haven’t forgotten our appointment, have you? I expected you at 10:30."
"Oh, god, I’m sorry, Rose." Sarah started. Dr. Marie-Rose Solal was her shrink. Tuesday. She was supposed to be at her weekly session of soul searching, conscience digging whining. She hated it, but it had been Claire’s idea and she couldn’t refuse to try at least for a few months. "Don’t worry. Come over now and we’ll start. I don’t have anything booked until this afternoon," Rose said.

Sarah was disinfecting her hands and almost ready to go when Claire asked. "And what about you? How are you doing, Sarah? Are you still seeing that girl?"
She was referring to the bitch.
"No," Sarah said, "that’s finished."
"Oh, good," Claire looked worried. She was leaning against a cabinet cleaning her glasses. She looked soft and lovely, thick brown curls bouncing around her face and shoulders as if her body supplied them with a constant electrical current.
"How could I ever have let her go." Sarah thought.

Story VII

2004-11-04T13:51:00.000+01:00

It felt awkward to stand there next to the naked girl's body. She had been neatly stitched up and labelled Jane Doe 0165. The bruises on her neck, face and arms were the colour of rhododendrons.
The pathology report said she hadn't been sexually assaulted. No traces of violation, apart from the blows to the head. One blow had broken her nose and there were bruises on her forehead and imprints were a hand had gripped her left arm.

She wasn't really beautiful. She was short and a bit overweight, heavy around the hips. A pink blue lined horizontal scar from an operation divided her lower abdomen into 2 equal soft fat parts.

Her nails were dirty and black rimmed. Traces of tobacco, food and plain dust, corresponding to what they had found in her pant pockets. Nothing could be traced back to the place her corpse was left behind. The morgue smelled heavily of disinfectant. Sarah couldn't discover a smell belonging to the girl.

According to the report her stomach contained rests of a ham and cheese sandwich, eaten hours before time of death and several shots of vodka.

"Oh God," she thought. "She might have been killed in a domestic argument by a violent boyfriend. But how am I ever going to find out? I don't even know if she was married." She checked the report again. No wedding ring. But she did wear a small necklace with a pearl around her neck. Fake. And the report mentioned a small tattoo. She hadn't noticed it yet. It was hidden, only millimeters above the big scar that made a deep gash into the fat of her belly. It said "Erika".

Story VI

2004-11-03T23:12:00.002+01:00

She ran up the stairs to the office and heard a voice calling. "Hey Sarah, I’ve got something for you! Fingerprints of the victim and the full pathology report. Come and get it!" Chris disappeared into his office. He was more or less the only friend she had in the police force here.
He was sitting behind his desk eating a boule de Berlin. His hands and mouth shiny with oil and covered in powder sugar.
"Well darling, you look tired. You haven’t been out again in some sleazy lesbian bar all night trying to find true love now, have you?" There was a twinkle in his eyes. Obviously he was in for some verbal play. But she wasn’t.
"It’s my cold, Chris, I didn’t sleep well."
"Oh," he looked disappointed. "I could use a juicy dyke story today, Sarah. It beats filing these.” He pointed to an immense pile of files on the table behind him. "The boss is chaining me to the desk again."
"Well today the juicy dyke took a day off and sent the tired police woman to the office. And besides, true love is a lie. You know that as well as I do." she answered him.
"Oh dear, you are in a foul mood today. Let’s get you off to work. You have a meeting with a dead girl, in the freezer." He paused. "It’s an odd case though, isn’t it?"
"I’ve been thinking Chris. It’s possible that the killer wasn’t from around here and just dropped off the body and left. Maybe even left the country. That’s the worst case scenario. But even then, how’s it possible that no one noticed anything. There are about 200 people living in the apartment blocks.
All kitchen windows of the front apartments look onto the trees, where she was lying. There’s something not right about those blocks."

Story V

2004-10-12T21:51:00.000+02:00

It was still dark when she drove past the apartment blocks up to the police station. She had barely slept. A really bad cold. And being out at the murder site for hours yesterday had only worsened the coughing. She should quit smoking.
But it wasn’t really the cold that had kept her awake. It was the girl. They hadn’t found one match with any missing person’s case in the database. It bothered her that she must be illegal or foreign.
She’d bought a paper while picking up her lunch. Already they were hinting at a possible serial killer.
She should go to the morgue today and have a good look at the corpse. And write a report, then go to the 2 o’clock meeting, get her motorbike fixed.
She was driving past the bitch's restaurant and couldn’t resist looking. The curtains were down. Of course. The bitch had called yesterday, -after midnight of course- asking if she could come over for the night. She had refused. It made her so angry, she sat grinding her teeth in front of the wheel. The bitch gave her nothing but trouble, relying heavily on the fact that she was still in love with her for sex and an occasional night out (all expenses paid).
Talk was oozing from the radio. She switched it off.
"What a shitty day." She thought while parking her car too close to the shiny black BMW of the boss.
She took her vest and slammed the car door into the armoured black monster on her right. Hm, not a scratch."I’m going to have to try harder," she thought.

* spelling edit 16/10

blah

2004-10-05T21:32:00.000+02:00

That night I dreamed about us. It was our first date in a big café with loud music and people talking all around us.
"Let’s play a game," I say.
"Alright, what?"
"A conversation in which every word is essential. Nothing obsolete. Direct expression of feelings and thoughts. No hesitation. Are you ready for that?"
She takes a cigarette from the pack on the table and lights it clumsily, bending her head toward the lighter. Shy.
"Ok."she says.” You start."
Concentrate. Break the ice. It’s not as easy as I thought.
It flashes through my head. I want to spit out the passion, the complexity and the feelings I have for her in one clear moment, that will be remembered by both of us with the same intensity. It seems the most important thing to do: to create a memory that embodies everything we can be. We are both wounded animals, bruised by others. We bargain hard, knowing that every deception brings along more of that inevitable wisdom of life that leads only to death and end.
I can’t think of any thing to say. I look around at the people moving and talking and the more I look the more desperate I get.
When I look back at her, eyes down, she is sliding thumb and index finger along the foot of her wine glass nervously, anticipating. It hits me with such a blast. The delicacy of her, of the movement. I want her more than anything, that instant.

Story IV

2004-09-21T23:15:00.000+02:00

She would never return. I blamed myself for it, for asking too much.
She made up stories for me. Very small ones at first. Later she began to write them down.
I thought about it for a very long time: why she didn’t leave me a note.
She wanted an open ending. She wanted me to continue the story.

The next morning the police came to my door to ask me some questions about the dead woman and I wondered about reporting her missing. But I didn't.

They showed me a picture of the woman. Her eyes were closed, slack jaw, damaged and puffy face, red hair in plaids on a white pillow.

"Do you know her?" they asked. I’d never seen her."Hasn’t she been reported missing?"
"No, not yet." a policeman answered, looking around the flat.
"Do you live alone here?"
"Yes." I replied.
"Be careful. Don’t go out alone at night," the policeman said when they left.
I stayed in that day and thought about you. They showed the woman on the news at night and I wondered if you were watching.

Vermicelli

2004-09-16T08:04:00.000+02:00

"Eh,I have a sexual question," he whispers, while looking around carefully."Do you do them as well?"
"Mon dieu", I exclaim, "why is it necessary to talk about the details of your eh intimate relationships with me, an old clairvoyant. You should see a doctor, one of those young and dynamic types that go jogging every day."
"Let me explain, it is more a question of the mind that of the flesh." he continues, almost panicking, his forehead now blinking with sweat.
"Ok, *sigh* what is it my dear man?" I sigh, "Impotence?"
"No, no it's nothing of that kind. I am of Italian descent. "But," he hestitates, sighs and shrugs,"I have a fixation."
"A fixation? Well I must say I have never ever encountered anyone I knew to have a fixation. I don't even know what you mean, my friend." I just babble along, hoping to fill the awkward situation he is creating with pointless words.
"Let me explain, madame, you will see that the question I have for you is a difficult one. I have been advised by a hynotist to tell you about my problem."
It must be Charles Piquet the well know hypnotist and a good friend of mine, who has sent me this strange bird. It must be some kind of absurd poofy joke of his. He sure knows how to embarrass an old lady.
"Alright then, young man, what is it? Oh, and order me another vin de table please."
"I try my best to be a good lover. And I always look out for new techniques and experiences, so I read manuals regularly. I find it helps me to be confident and I must say -without flattery- that women tend to be very satisfied with my sexual performance. Now, My problems started the day I read a manual about cunnilingus.
You must know, that during sex I tend to think a lot. But this manual, well, it said that to bring a woman to orgasm with one's tongue, it was important to mimick all letters of the alphabet. Being of Italian descent, this is a nightmare to me. As soon as I start to please a woman down there, I cannot help but think of grandmother Carmelia's vermicelli soup. I've tried very hard to concentrate on the voluptuousness of the woman's body spread out before me, but all I can see before my eyes are memories of sunday dinner when I was a child."

"Mm,I see, mais, eh, have you ever tried learning Chinese?"

Story III

2004-09-15T23:15:00.000+02:00

She walked out the door and never returned. She was supposed to be home when I came back from work, but she wasn't. It came as a surprise to me. She was out of words and out of love.
When I walked into the street that night, I saw policemen moving people away from the tree near the apartment. They had discovered the body of a young woman. Strangled.
I imagined how they must have found her. Peaceful, frozen, bloodless.
I sat in the kitchen for hours, looking out of the window until nightfall.
I watched television crews arrive, trying to get a glimpse of the crime scene.
And suddenly I realised it was over. She would never return.

*Edited 2 times

Story II

2004-09-10T17:46:00.000+02:00

It was mid october when they finally found the body. It had been lying under a thick layer of maple leaves for some time. The woman had been dead for 12 days. She had been lying in a small trench on the strip of public garden near the appartment buildings, under the trees. Someone had noticed some cloth sticking out.
That day, when the police blocked the whole street, because people wanted to come and have a look at the rotting corpse, that day, in the freezing cold of the first winter, I left. I walked out in a grey coat and never returned.

Story

2004-09-09T13:00:00.000+02:00

You ask me about the woman's body. Is it still there? Undiscovered? Hasn't the wind blown away the leaves by now?
"No", I tell you, "it's not happening now. It happened a long time ago, Time is relative. She can be there for a very long time."
We are sitting near the window of our appartment and you are looking out to the patch of trees in the public garden.
"She's wearing a poncho, so I guess it happenend in the eighties. Nobody wears a poncho anymore these days."
You look worried. We've been having some fights lately. About time. Spending more time together. You want more time to yourself. I feel I'm acting like a whimp compared to your decision making. But I don't know what to do to win you back. You are already leaving me behind.
"She was pregnant." I blurt out. "She was 6 months pregnant when she died."
Your eyes become dark and shiny you are angry.
"You don't dare", you whisper. I know I have hurt you, but it's the only way.
You are going to take a bath. I suppose you will contemplate your counterstrike there and maybe cry a bit.
She was probably killed inside a house. Either drowned or killed while taking a shower or bath. Water in the lungs with remnants of soap.
I can't know all this because she hasn't even been discovered.

The house is quiet. I don't hear you making any sounds in the bathroom. I can hear the traffic outside and the wind against the windows.

Then the bathroom door swings open and you come in, angry, yelling :"When are you finally going to stop the fucking melodrama? Why can't you just play a normal game. Like other couples do. Create a fantasy and that's it. Why do you have to draw in dead bodies, unborn children and MY BLOODY FEELINGS all the time."
She leans against the kitchen door. Breath thick with anger and frustration.

"Games? I never saw it as a game." I reply, quietly. "So, what you want to say is that we don't connect very well together. We're not at the same level? You don't like the stories I make up? Do you like to play games?"

She sighs. "Darling, you know I don't want to make this difficult, but I like a very simple life, very clear. You know that."

"I don't trust you." I reply. She's a soft, beautiful intelligent, sensitive woman but I can't trust her fully. I've been trying for so long now. I can't get the idea out of my mind that if I give her everything, she will take it all and leave me. The way she left all the others before me.

"That's why I've been making up stories. To test you."

Cul-de-sac

2004-09-08T13:21:00.000+02:00

He's a thin boned man with carrot colored sandy hair. Thinning every day now. He blames his wife. Ex now. She was cutting off all social contacts. Keeping him inside the house all the time. Like a sheep, a little lam, reading his paper and watching a quiz. He always knew the answers to most of the questions. Why did he live like this for 10 years? Listening to her, putting up with her gloomy moods.
And now he resurfaces and suddenly feels his lungs fill with air. His body is older but his mind wants to return to the days before the wedding, before the mistake. Make up for the time he missed. He buys new after shave and men's magazines. He dresses adventurous and goes into town quite a lot, walking. He looks at himself in the mirror and decides he looks pretty ok after all. He'll go to the gym.
He feels reborn, young at heart and tries to charm younger women. He's ready to meet someone new. He reckons it's not too late to be a father.
But the women he meets politely decline his offers to go for a drink.
He's a recently divorced man and it's written all over him. He tries, desperately, to connect to someone, to get through to their mind, their feelings, but they won't let him in. They see a man grown old too fast. A clock that can't be turned back. And all these missing years. And he does all he can. To make up for what's not there. To show the vitality that's left, the humour and the skill. He's always clean, freshly showered and properly dressed, they think, like older men are.
No fun, no surprises. A dead end.

Restless mind

2004-08-18T16:51:00.000+02:00

She has an outer appearance of calm and rest that makes you doubt her abilities. What exactly is she capable of? Men past forty like to think she's a bit backward. That she could have had it in her to build up a decent career, but she just so odd that nobody trusts her. Imagine working with that woman and finding out she's smarter than you thought. She might upset the whole planning. We all know how women are. Stubborn.
So she just sits quietly, stares at their ties and shiny shaven faces. Fakes a smile once in a while. And eats. She tears apart the pieces of smoked salmon with sharp teeth. Unnoticed. In her mind she growls and claws like an animal fighting for food. Inside she is forcing her way through the thick undergrowth of the jungle.
She paints her body with fat strokes of red clay. And in her restless mind, she screams about how meaningless it all is. Because inside she is earth, fire, water and air. Only that, all that.

Missing XI

2004-08-15T09:09:00.000+02:00

When I recover my senses I feel pain shooting through my head. My eyes are hurting. There are no defined forms, only a haze of colour and light.
I have the impression I’ve woken up but I might as well be dreaming. Disorientation is complete.
"Exactement!" a voice says, very near. "You are dreaming. Since you were rather difficult to persuade, we decided to .. eh ...shuffle the cards, to change the setting so we could continue our conversation in a more suitable environment: a dream. You don’t mind do you?" The old mother’s voice has lost its softness. She doesn’t do any efforts to hide her annoyance and bitterness.
I’m opening my mouth to comment, but she interrupts. "Let’s face it, Edith, you just never shut up."
"But..."
"You see, now, don’t try anything. I am in complete control. Your powers are useless. I am delighted to inform you that I can seal up that busy mouth of yours anytime now."
I try to protest but it is useless. She can even make me flutter my eyelids or make me dance the French Cancan.
"At least give me an image, something to see, you old witch!" I manage to squeeze out after much trouble.
"As you wish." she whispers, distant now.
It gets dark again. I’m in the hallway again with Virginie. "Let’s continue our tour." she says and leads me further down the corridor. Piercing rays of light seep through openings, keyholes and crevices in the old wooden panes of doors and walls.
"What’s behind these doors?' I ask her. She seems to have waited for my question.
"Well, I guess you’ve understood by now that the matters of this house are very urgent and have to be conducted with utmost secrecy. Once someone has been introduced to our little business, there is no way back. In these rooms we keep what we call 'our vehicles'. They are lost souls, remains of people that are in one way or another involved in a disappearance. We can’t do without accomplices, but unfortunately we can’t keep them alive in society once their task for us is finished. So we offer them a temporary state of oblivion. We feed them on dreams and secure their happiness."
She opens a door. Light pours out and curls away like vapour in the dark, musky hall. In the room little shapes are dancing, floating around like puppets. They are humans wearing the most bizarre elements of clothing, from pyjama’s to elaborate 18th century embroidered dresses and hats. A wardrobe that must stretch over centuries.
"But something’s not right” I think as I observe them moving around blindly, like ghosts, oblivious of anything. And then I notice.... "But they have been shrunk!" I exclaim."They are as big as ten year olds!"
"Well, yes, that just a small detail." Virginie answers hastily, annoyed."Due to limited space. They are not conscious of their actual height, you know."
"But you are keeping humans in captivity here! It looks like a fish farm!"
"Oh Edith, Edith, dear…”Virginie’s mother butts in."Why must you always be so negative. These people have voluntarily chosen this state of being. They are completely happy. Just try to be reasonable."
I am astonished. “How many are you keeping here?"
"We’ve got about 500 vehicles in the rooms up here." replies Virginie."The building used to be a hotel once. Very fortunate. And another 300 in the basement and in the tunnel system under the houses in this district. The tunnels are a blessing. We discovered them 50 years ago. They were completely forgotten by anyone, but still in perfect shape." Virginie closes the door again. I contemplate what she has just told me, distracted. She is standing very close to me. I can smell the sweetness of her breath.
"I’m asking you again. Will you help me Edith?" she whispers."Please do. I assure you you won’t regret it."
She moves even closer, pushes her body against mine, her hand on my lower back, pressing. Then she tilts her head and gently kisses my neck and I feel her soft cheek brushing mine.
And suddenly, inexplicably, I say: "Yes, ok, I will." My lips produce the sounds but I am not really saying it. I’m forced. I know I’m trapped. And I can only smile faintly and agree that Virginie and her mother do have a good sense of theatrical decorum, setting it all up like this...

I don't remember much of what happened after that. I can still picture the endless hallways and doors I was guided through and the 24-hour dreams. I will probably never know what they did to complete their plan, but whatever happened, I didn't cause me any trouble. It is strange that I can not imagine how much time has passed since I entered the house. But eventually I returned to life, though some changes had been made:

I open my eyes. I am in bed. A strange bed in a hotel room. The clock on the wall says 5 a.m. but it’s not ticking. I’ve just woken up from a terrible nightmare and next to me is the shape of a sleeping body. In a chair I can see a careless bundle of black clothes. A golden chain watch rests on the bedside table. The initials E.F. engraved on its polished cover are flickering, trying to catch a faint ray of moonlight playing through a gap in the curtains.
The body next to me turns in its sleep and puts a naked arm on my breasts.
My new breasts, my new body. I feel it stir, eager to respond to this unconscious caress.
Right then and there I decide to stop thinking and put my arms around the creature next to me.

- Fin -

Indochine

2004-07-15T17:26:00.000+02:00

---Notice---
Madame Finistere is currently residing on a small island in the Gulf of Tonkin, Indochine. The internet connection here is a string of silk and they are using it for fishing too.
The last part of the missing story will be published as soon as possible.

It is true, they do eat cat in Vietnam 'Tit miao'.

Missing X

2004-07-09T16:57:00.000+02:00

Virginie brings me an elegant glass of sparkling wine. Champagne?
I notice her slender hands with elegant silver rings. No stones. When she leans over to hand me the drink, her cardigan slips from her shoulder and reveals two sharp and dangerous collarbones. They leave me speechless. For a moment I forget to breathe, then force my eyes to sink lower into the safe warmth of her décolleté and further down the black satin dress.
She knows I am looking, but she hesitates and for several seconds she remains absolutely still. Then she moves to a seat opposite mine and tries to catch my eyes while bringing a glass to her lips. "Santé".
I look away. Strange, I never do that. The feeling of uneasiness returns. What am I doing here?
"What do you want from me?" I ask her in a low voice.
A sigh emerges from behind the chair. Then the mother continues. "I used to be good at finding solutions for people who wanted to disappear. I went wrong once in a while but I took care of it all. But now my daughter is asking me to arrange her act and I don’t know what to do. I know she will go anyway, but she is my daughter. My own child! I cant’ think of any solution.”
She sounds sad and confused. It’s embarrassing. The chair is turning slowly towards me.
I can distinguish the contours of a very small old woman. The details of her face and body are still obscured by the darkness and the cigarette fog clinging around her magnetically. I’ m surprised to see that she is human, or at least seems to be.
Four eyes are staring at me. Two marvellous brown young and two old blind dark eyes. It feels strange, as if they are one and the same person, mother and daughter.
"We called on you to help me disappear." Virginie suddenly interrupts, impatient. "You have to help me. It is important to keep this secret hidden."
"But how?" I ask.
"You have to take her place."
"What? Take Virginie’s place? How?"
"It’s easy. We will take care that nobody notices anything. You will be her, look like her, live like her. Only you will know what has happened."
"But that’s impossible! It’s crazy!" I jump up, shouting.
"Don’t worry, you will keep your identity, everything you know and possess. You will be wealthy, without worries. But you will keep this secret." She pauses.
"In the beginning it will be difficult. You will be reminded of the situation very often. Every day. But gradually, it will fade, you will feel comfortable in your new life and take up old habbits. You have total freedom. You can change jobs, lovers, countries. It doesn’t matter. As long as you pretend to be Virginie. Gradually your life and the life Virginie left behind will merge."
"Look at you Edith. You are old. I know you will continue to live for ages. Clairvoyants live for more than 1000 years and you are only half-way. You will live on long after Virginie has died. So we provide you with a decent position in society, wealth, a beautiful body, a select circle of well educated friends, a lover. What more can you want, in exchange for a little bit of role playing from your side?"
"But how?" I ask. "How will you manage us to switch roles without anybody noticing?"
"Trust me," the mother answers. "I know how. It’s painless. I can give you Virginie’s body. She won’t be needing it anyway."
Virginie stares at me, again. I look away. Again. I’m ashamed about finding her attractive a few minutes ago.
"Why do you want to disappear? Where do you want to go?" I ask her, without much hope of getting an answer.
But she’s willing to talk. Her eyes are sparkling.
"As I told you, it’s an urge." she says. "I had it from when I was a child. Do you understand? It’s in my bones and blood. An instinct stronger than any other. It’s not a death whish. I know you think I’m going to die. You think I want to die. But it’s an illness, not a psychological condition.
I’m leaving my body. I know I can."
"Well, how then? Do you have an extra gene or something? Why should you be different ..."
I feel myself draining away. Dizziness. The room is turning. Curtains everywhere. And glittery glittery... glass beads ...and the mirror ... mirro ...

Missing IX

2004-07-02T10:33:00.000+02:00

"As a child she could quietly sit and watch out of the widow of a riding train, but when the train would slide into the darkness of a tunnel she would be gone when it came out again at the other side. Turn out the light for a second at a birthday party, just to enter with the cake and let her blow out the candles. Gone.
No schooltrips, no walks in the woods or hide and seek."
She pauses and then says dreamily.
"Our family has always been able to arrange things. We had money and were successful in keeping it.
We have also been able to remain beyond suspicion of police and detectives, although more than half of the family members of the last 2 centuries have at a point in their lives suddenly been involved in tragic accidents or simply moved away to desolate regions never to be seen again. It sure needs a clear intellect and lots of creativity to make up a respectful -and possibly happy- destiny for each of them.
Luckily there were the wars. It's easy to lose trace of a soldier on the battlegrounds of Verdun or Normandie, in Indochine or Algeria or in the steel factories of Dresden or Berlin.
You know, when I was young I had a steady hand. I excelled in the forgery of official documents.
My father used to call me l'ambassadrice, because I could be preoccupied for weeks working out a suitable disappearance act. I turned the attic into any location possible, took pictures, collected evidence, document, personal posessions, anything. I staged a battle in the desert once, and got in a live tiger to film the unfortunate end of my aunt Eulalie. Nobody noticed that aunt Eulalie was actually half of a pig with a necklace and one of my mother's wigs."

Entre'acte - Huis clos

2004-06-30T14:57:00.000+02:00

I watched her struggle with it from a distance. She was chocking, I couldn't help. Paralysed. Arms holding me back, anxious to catch me. And she took it in, gulps of it, big chunks of love. Of live bait.

"The inadequacy of not being able to show love immobilizes me" I told her. I carry stones in my chest. How can I run? How can I swim? How can I fly?

How can I give you what you want?

Break the mirror and walk through

Missing VIII

2004-06-22T13:40:00.000+02:00

We walk into the lobby, a big room bathing in red velvet, mirrors curly gold frames and lots of glittering crystal. Thick carpets cover the parquetted floors, the astracan wool moving under my footsteps as if it is alive and ready to engulf the whole room. Three strategically positioned chandeliers illuminate the bloodcoloured half moon shapes of antique seats. The walls are covered with paintings darkenend by smoke and dust.
"Sit down, please" says the voice from the darkest end of the room. "I'm sure you would like to know why you are here." I can see smoke curling up form behind a velvet chair,its back turned towards me.
Virginie moves to what seems to be bar. An exquisite art nouveau counter ornamented with big lillies finely shaped in wood and colored glass. Behind it rows of strangely shaped bottles and decanters.
"What was all the hocus pocus up there in the hallway?" I ask, a little bit vexed. "And you seem to know all about me? Well then, what do you want? A handreading, fortunetelling, hashish, an oriental massage?" I'm starting to lose my temper.
"Please let me explain," she answers calmly. "These precautions are absolutely necessary. I need a favour. Listen to the story.
My daughter has got a few health problems. She has probably told you.
Virginie is successful in life. She has a good job and earns lots of money. She's a consultant in the city centre. Her opinion is well valued everywhere. She lives in a nice house, wears stylish clothes, has good taste. And she tells me she has a really nice relationship going on too. No children though." She pauses. "I think it must be a married man, because I've never been introduced to this lover of her. She might as well make it all up." The chair moves a bit with agitation, but still doesn't turn around.
"Mother please!" Virginie looks up from behind the counter where she is fixing a drink.
"Allright, allright," the chair mutters, releasing cicles of aromatic smoke and continues: "What I want to say that she's a successful businesswoman. She takes cabs instead of the metro, needs to decline invites for parties, has seen more of the world than Marco Polo. She's supposed to be happy, to feel accomplished. But she has problems. Poor Virginie suffers from an extremely rare hereditary disease. It's been in the family for ages, maybe centuries."

Missing VII

2004-06-14T17:48:00.000+02:00

I glance to my right and distinguish a faint light, about 10 steps from where I'm standing.
"Go on," my guide urges me. Two very strange-looking ligthbulbs throw long shadows and bizarre shapes onto the walls and corner. I can see a shadow emerging from the dark corner: an ancient wooden cabinet decorated with more encarvings.
My feet are heavy, tired, hesitating. Instinctively my hand touches the heavy cold watch in my left pocket. Smooth silver, oval shaped and fitting precisely into my palm. As I run my fingertips slowly over the engraved initials on the back, suddenly the cabinet comes into focus. In a spilt second I can see every detail: the structure of the wood, the leathery, parchment walls behind it covered with drawings of human shapes, the wood carvings consisting entirely of human an animal bodies, turning, whriting, torsing, entagled. I can see thousands of different creatures. It' s horrifying, I have to avert my eyes. Quickly I open a drawer of the cabinet, intending to place the watch in it and leave at once. But when I look closely I notice that the drawer is completely filled with watches looking exactly like mine. I keep pulling at the drawer, stepping back into the corridor. It doesn't seem to stop. Until I bump into something soft, warm. I jump. It's the guide, Virginie. She is still standing in the corridor, watching me.
"What are you doing?" she asks.
"Well, I tried to open the drawer of the cabinet right there." I point into the darkness. "But it's terribly long."
"What?" She looks at me with disbelieve." Are you mad? Look at your hands. Nothing there but air."
She is right. I look down and see nothing. No drawer, not even the tips of my worn out shoes. Only blackness and night.
"Come on, let's go in." Virginie says, moving forward.
I put my hand in my pocket. The watch has gone. My hands are freezing.

Missing VI

2004-06-09T22:36:00.000+02:00

Her mother? I am baffled. I think I can barely distinguish a slender shape moving towards me. Or maybe it is what is left of my failing intuition that leads me to believe she is a tall and elegant woman.
"Enchantée" she says. It feels as if a cloud passes through the hallway. Obscuring every shade, movement or colour. Her voice is breathy, soft but supple, like a singer’s.
Instinctively I put out my hand and feel a soft palm and slender fingers pressing mine. She is wearing silk gloves.
"I’m sorry," she continues, "but I have a problem with light."
She has a peculiar Parisian accent not resembling any I know and speaks slowly, stressing every syllable.
"Let us move forward into the lobby." she pauses, breathes, but then decisively continues."But first I must ask you to leave your watch at the hallstand at your right."
I am seized by a feeling of general uneasiness. My watch is not a common article of use you find in the shops. I use it to calculating the position of the stars. Without it I am lost.
"This watch is the sole object of value I posses." I reply "I have been carrying it around for centuries. It’s worth is priceless to me."
"I know," She answers reassuringly, "but in this house it is a dangerous instrument."
I hesitate. Should I fulfill her request or not? Of course I am curious about what is going on here, but Parisian con artists are known for their skills of delusion and false pretence. I have heard stories of robbery and theft bordering on the fantastical.
As if she can read my mind she tells me. "Don’t worry, no one finds this place without being invited and few leave through the same door. However,the purpose of your visit is a different one. This will all become clear when I tell you my story."
Her voice fades and the thump-click noise starts again. She has turned away from me and is slowly retreating into the corridor. Meaning I have to make up my mind now.

Missing V

2004-06-04T13:34:00.000+02:00

Here I am in a dark house I never imagined to exist. I have to admit I miscalculated. This lady wasn't talking about an ordinary disappearing act. She isn't interested in a tarot reading or a symbolic tale to help her believe in the significance of her life, after life or love relationship.
I look at her and feel a slight tension building up. What if she's really older than me. But masked and mastering secrets of life I haven't found out about yet. I see her face in profile. She's very beautiful, ancient. Her ears are covered with silver earrings and milk white moonstones. Her pitch-black hair is held together by a very old ebony comb decorated with strange undistinguishable signs.
Maybe I have been still for too long, not to have seen this coming.
A sound is approaching. Rhythmic. A hollow thump followed by sharp clicks.
It must be the gatekeeper. No one on earth would keep a door like this unguarded.
"C'est toi, Virginie?" a sharp, breathy voice asks. "Is that you?"
"Yes, mother," my guide replies. "I've brought the clairvoyant, like you asked."
I peer into the dark corridor, trying to catch a glimpse of the creature approaching us. Thump, click click, thump. A smell of rain and another sharp odor related to gunpowder.
My guide clears her throat.
"Edith, I want you to meet my mother. She officially went missing 52 years ago."

Missing IV

2004-06-02T17:33:00.000+02:00

She takes me through an endless maze of little streets. We pass art deco signs of trades and crafts long extinct: silversmiths, a doll maker, manufacturers of enammel chamber pots, a freak show, a hat maker, rosary manufacturers, a bailiff's office consisting entirely of mirrors. And suddenly the sweet scent of tobacco in my nostrills when we pass a wholesale cigar seller. I'm never really lost in the city. My orientation is usually very precise. I rely on my instincts. But this time, all I feel is her hand pressing into my arm, pulling me ahead, further and further away from anything recognizable.
Merde. There's no one on the street here. Not one car. In the distance I seem to hear the faint sound of horse hooves on cobble stones. It will probably be the absynth pulling a joke on my imagination.
She walks fast, way too fast for a lady with varicose veins and a heart that's reluctantly pulsing an exaggerated amount of blood around.
"Nearly there" she says, focussing on the street ahead. I wonder how she can find her way in this unbelievable maze. We almost trip over what I think is a fat blind cat. How can it be possible that in 5 centuries I have not seen or heard of this place. How can it have been hidden for so long?
We arrive at a big wooden door. It's old and decorated with carved out figures. In the dark I can make out a scene with a man and a woman holding eachother in a forrest. And fish in a lake and animals with giant claws, rather fanstastical, dragonlike.
The door is open. I think she knew this in advace. She enters without hesitation, pulling me along.
We enter a dark corridor, full of noises. From gaps in doors further down the hallway I can see light piercing through, illuminating the dancing dust set in motion by our footsteps and long skirts.

Missing III

2004-06-01T17:23:00.000+02:00

Maybe she's been reading too much Paul Auster lately, I wonder.
"Listen," I say looking at her firmly "people go missing because they're dead, murdered or in an accident or they fall off a cliff. Just be realistic. It's a question of coincidence. You disappear because you've misspelled a streetname and get lost and run into the wrong person, or trip over a treebranch near a dangerous river."
Silence.
Then she moves, getting up from her chair.
"Rubbish" she says, she spits it at me like a cat with a bad temper.
"I thought you would be able to think beyond the daily pattern. I hoped you would use your imagination to teach me something. But ... you're just like the rest of them."
She's up and going, grabbing her coat, ready to turn her back at me.
"Wait,"I say, "Excuse me. I'm not what you think. I don't have the key to the next dimension. I'm bad with places and humans. Smells and sounds is really my thing. But if you could explain what you mean. I'll try to help you."
She looks at me disdainfully. "Will you?" and walks out.
On the street she comes up to me and as if suddenly she's made up her mind about something, she grabs hold of my arm and says angrily: "I'll show you where they are. The missing persons. Come with me." I can feel her warm garlic breath against my cheek. "You really don't know anything, do you." The words slither into my ears.
"Come on, let's go." She grabs my arm tighter, as if I would try to run away and we walk into the dark street.

Missing II

2004-05-26T09:04:00.000+02:00

Les artichaux were delicious, by the way. And so was she.
"It has something to do with not feeling whole sometimes." she tells me, while we drink absinth from little crystal glasses.
"In the heavy fog in winter, when watching vapour curl out of the dark oily canal against a cold grey sky, I want to break every surface, dig into the frozen earth, tear up the street to discover what's underneath. I want more."
"But are you not happy?"
"I can't answer that." she says decisively. "I feel like I am living at the wrong speed, at the wrong moment, on a wrong level even. My feelings do not belong to me. How can I say I am happy: I only feel happy when I catch a glimpse of a possibility. To depart. To disappear."
"Are You seeing a shrink?" I ask, getting a bit worried.
She stares at the hairy inside of her artichoque.
"Of course not."

Lighthousekeeping

2004-05-25T13:08:00.000+02:00

I went Lighthousekeeping yesterday evening. It was good. Confusing, personal, confrontational and most of all recognizable.
Everybody needs a lighthouse. A light to set the water on fire.

I revisited my lighthouse a month ago. Since I was young I have been circling around it, approaching, forgetting, calculating if I would make it there swimming.

Las Formigues

Missing

2004-05-24T10:05:00.000+02:00

"Can you help me?" a young woman of around 30 looks at me as if I am her only hope.
"I'm only a fortune teller," I answer, "but please do tell me your fears."
"Do you know the stories about these people who all of a sudden disappear and never ever show up again? Normal people with jobs and families and kids and hobbies, who walk around the block one day to let out the dog or get some cigarettes or walk outside late, under the stars to put out the bin and... that's it. Gone?"
"Yes, I've heared stories like that," I answer not sure what she means.
"I think I'm one of them." she says, almost horrified at herself, her voice faltering. I look at her questioningly.
"I have this urge, you see. I want to disappear. I've had it since I was young. But the feeling grows stronger. These last months it's been very difficult to resist."
"But where will you go?" I ask.
"I thought I could disappear into my lover. I mean I can, but only for a limited time. A few seconds, half an hour. But I long to be gone for at least a day. And after that maybe a month or a year." She's staring in the distance dreamily, but then she looks me in the eye and her voice sounds urgent, panicky again.
"What's the secret, Edith? How can I go missing?"
"Well,I'm no expert, but I've tried a few things... . Invite me to dinner tonight and I'll show you."

A la mode:
Coeur d'artichaux

Dream

2004-05-19T13:34:00.000+02:00

We are in your hotel room, getting bored. I don't know what to do with my arms and legs. Sit or stand. Where? It's been a while since I've last seen you and you look fresh, cool and alert. Younger.
I wish there was a swimming pool in the room. Anything to get rid of this sweaty, hot feeling. You seem as restless as I am, looking at me with dark shiny eyes, trying to get inside me.
I think about past decisions taken and start to feel worse and worse, unsure, arms still moving around without purpose one hand fidgetting with the other.
I blink and suddenly there's a swimming pool in the room. It looks old. We are in an extremely big old hotel in Romania. You have just taken a dive. I watch your body in the black swimsuit and it looks so good. I never expected you to have such a muscular, firm body with a nice even tan. I want to touch you but you back away. Hurt, because I have rejected you before. I try to kiss you and eventually you give in, hesitating but excited. I realize that all the effort I have put into avoiding this, is completely wasted. Because feeling is always stronger and sexual attraction is an animal instinct that cannot be tamed by reason. I tell you this. You reply that I am only playing with feelings, changing my mind all the time, caring only about myself. It's true. I only hurt others. But we make love anyway. You are me, everything is familiar. Every curve of your body feels like I have touched it before.
We have been waiting so long for this to happen. But when it does, I realize that it's just sex. Sex with someone you are close too: good and exciting. The kind that makes you continue your day whistling with a big smile on your face. And hot blushes when you think back of what you were doing. But it's not something life changing. I used to think it would destroy my whole life and yours. That it would make me long for you in such an acute way that I wouldn't be able to survive. A passion bringing us closer to death than to life. And we both want life so very much. We know we could be perfect partners in a world without time. But here we are out of sync. Here we both live at a different point in time. Stuck. Glued to minutes, dates and years.
I wake up crying, missing you or at least a part of you that I will never see again. Maybe it's only on a subconscious level that we can be synchronized and I can live with the fact that we can't make love outside our dreams. But I just wish it was next year. Or any year. Except this one.

2004-05-17T16:42:00.000+02:00

I woke up this morning to a serenade of angry muttering sounds produced by my bedpartner. Complaints because the birds are singing too loud. Especially at 5 a.m. Impossible to sleep with that noise.

Funkstille

2004-05-12T12:08:00.000+02:00

Sometimes I completely forget the reason why I'm not calling you when I feel like it, or sending you a birthday present, or writing you a pretentious e-mail trying to display my so-called literary capacities and trying to make you laugh. I forget why I'm neither responding to nor deleting your cellphone messages.
The reason is love.
I try to tell myself that as long as I do not forget this, you will be ok.

Monogamy

2004-05-07T13:13:00.000+02:00

A client asks me how long he and his wife will stay together.
I start to itch. An itching I always feel when a certain kind of questions are asked.
I take out my crystal ball - it always impresses- and frown. The crystal ball is a very useful attribute for a clairvoyant. You know why? I helps channeling negative energy into strong and friendly vibes. The client feels good around it. It makes my itching stop. I used to think my paranormal capacities were a veneral disease.
"It isn't going very well between the two of you, isn't it?" I remark, pretending to gaze into the inifinite wisdom of the crystal.
"Eh, no (*sigh*) ...", he looks at me then the crystal ball, "We're having a difficult time. I'm barely home, always working."
"2 kids?" I ask. He nods.
What am I supposed to do?He is looking for advice from a third party to decide whether or not to flush his marriage down the drain.
"She's having an affair", I say, trying to look surprised as I stare into the ball.
His shoulders stiffen. I can imagine his tows curling in his socks. He's shocked.
"With a woman."
Grinding of teeth.
That will do. He'll go home now.

Spring

2004-05-05T22:13:00.000+02:00

Spring is here. Blossoms are falling already. Leaves are open and amazingly green.
The sewers of Paris are restless and infested with flies and other insects. I'm coming up crawling out into the light. My varicose veins bursting with energy, sending a chill through my skin with every heartbeat.
Bois the boulogne is preparing for the high season. The lonely men at dusk, the lonely women with tiny babies during the day.
There's always someone to rob, to seduce or to lie to.
My pink poodles, jean-pierre et jean-claude are losing their hair. All of it. They are a highly aristoratic breed and have ancestors with incestuously blue blood. The hair loss is only a small disadvantage I have to reckon with. I'm making a nice wigg out of it anyway and I've put both of them in one of my old corsets. It's orderly, it's fine. I'm going for a stroll.

A la mode: baby birds

Stone collections

2004-04-13T21:31:00.001+02:00

I'm walking along the coastline. Fine stones rustling under my feet. Seagulls cry like babies in the distance on the rocks, but I look down at the line of seaweed, wood and stones.
'What are you doing?' a voice asks.
'I work here', I reply.
'So, what are you looking for then?'
'I'm collecting pieces of polished glass' I answer.
'I'll help you.' she says, looking at me, eyes lines squinting at the sun.
She's smiling, surprised.
There's nobody but us, the seagulls quarreling, sea anemones about to bloom and nosey shrimps in rockpools. So transparent they almost don't exists at all.
She hands me a small piece of green glass.
'Do you have to collect them all?' she asks.
'Yes, all.'
We've fallen in love.

A la mode:

2004-04-01T10:14:00.000+02:00

Magnolia

and nests nestsnestsnestsnestsnestsnestsnestsnestsnestsnests.

I see them everywhere in the naked trees. Some are only a start, a few twigs skillfully balanced in the crook of a tree branch.
Empty nests make me sad. They are so desolate.
I decided to collect them, but empty old nests fall apart when i try to lift them.

Do I need to wake up and make a nest?

Lazare

2004-03-26T16:27:00.000+01:00

I live in a cardboard box in the sewers of the Gare St.-Lazare.
It's no big deal. I'm used to it and once in a while, when the nights are cold, you can find a pretty warm place in the secret tunnels under the metro lines. It can be pretty cozy, with people lighting candles, playing 78 tours records on old wind up grammophones.
A week ago I found an amazing, extra large empty box on the street. The real thing: airy, heavy, robust cardboard with a soft upper layer. It read "Office supplies" in red capitals. I've been sleeping well lately, but I can't help focussing on the big office buildings with their frustrating mirrors sending you flickering beams of sunlight saying "you can't get in". Who works there? What are they doing? And why?

A la mode:

2004-03-22T15:04:00.000+01:00

bamboo shoots

2004-03-18T13:22:00.000+01:00

Gray rainy days are excellent moments to observe the human species. Everybody seems to walk slower when it drizzles. The traffic lights are always red and sounds are muffled by the clouds.
Rainy days make desperate people even more desperate, make them crawl out of their hole in search of a newspaper, chocolate, the presence of other wet coats in the bakery, the post office or the grocery shop.
Today I had the privilige to spot a genuine specimen of the "dux disoccupato" or unemployed manager.
I saw him in the street when I was going through the humiliating phase of descending a huge traffic bump with my car, trying to forget the ungracefull appearance I was making. He looked at me with desperation in his eyes. Hurt beyond feeling. Darkness and anger. What a specimen. Just my luck!
I could immediately picture him in the board room. The way he had looked without the greying, untrimmed beard, his cheeks cleanly shaven, Smiling confidently. Now he was cursing the rain, the clouds, the wind. And probably me, for having a car, for crossing the hump, for looking at him.

Gazelle de bureau

2004-03-17T17:53:00.000+01:00

My daily life. desert on the first floor. Scorching heat of the central heating. Emergency barracks with dusty carpets. I feel myself streaming away. But instead of a deep storage reservoir, all that remains is a small muddy pond in someone's neatly arranged backyard. with a plaster green frog in it. no it's not kermit no...

2004-03-11T13:56:00.000+01:00

à la mode:

cocquilles St.-Jacques

Story

2004-03-02T15:06:00.000+01:00

2004-03-02T13:48:00.000+01:00

La porte

La porte de l'hôtel sourit terriblement
Qu'est-ce que cela peut me faire ô ma maman
...
(Apollinaire)

allez! entrez! entrez!