Le chateau de vent

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".

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.

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

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.

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 wh...

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...

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.

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. Sh...

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

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.

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.

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".

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 nigh...

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...

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.

"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 poss...

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...

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 s...

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....

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 li...

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 ...

"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. ...

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

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.

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 whispe...