/yesod

Tag: hair

  • the short

    We’re in the back bedroom, my wife and I. Fucking.

    It’s hard sometimes to find the time, the moment. Children, work, day-to-day life — these things conspire and distract and exhaust.

    But we find the time, when we can. We find the moments, synchronized, together. And it is good. Perhaps it is too brief, too short. But we know each other so well now.

    Like tonight. Together in the bed in the back bedroom — my absent son’s bedroom converted to a guest room for the time being.

    The room sits in the relationship corner of our home, according to my understanding of feng shui. So, I suppose, it’s good that we don’t leave it empty. It’s good we fill it, from time to time, with each other.

    As we fuck, the window rattles — the expected ice storm has arrived.

    Reaching the end, of our short time — doing my best to hold out as long as I can, to stretch the moment and the movement as long as possible — I look up at my wife’s beautiful face shrouded in shadow. A moment later there is a flash of light and she laughs, suddenly visible.

    The bedside lamp has turned on by itself.

    It flickers, then goes dark.

    This happens, more or less, five or six times before we’re finished.

    It almost seems to be an accompaniment to my wife’s final burst of lovemaking, a response to her rising and falling.

    After she heads to the shower, I inspect the lamp. I try to find a reason for the erratic interruption. Nothing I do will replicate the odd flashing.

    I unplug it, just in case there is a short.

    For the rest of the evening, even now, I’m fighting the feeling that someone is just behind me — quiet, waiting.

    Outside, the ice storm seems to have passed. It is cold. My hair is on end. I do not know if I will sleep tonight.

  • the new office

    …and I’m surprised to find out that not only are each of us getting our own office in the new building, but we’ll have an attached bedroom as well. A few of my coworkers even have bunkbeds.

    The gossip around the office is that this is to allow for a more Mad Men like atmosphere.

    “Aren’t we way too busy for a bunch of womanizing?” I ask.

    No one answers. They’re all too busy getting ready for the big new photo shoot with our latest client, Versace.

    The office is full of art directors, make up artists, and celebrities called in for the shoot.

    I pass by an office where Christian Bale is getting his hair dyed a brilliant royal blue.

    I trade quips with George Clooney in the hall. He is wearing a two foot tall jet black fright wig and sports an impressive handlebar mustache — perfectly suited to go with his leather chaps and Village People bondage gear.

    It’s going to be an interesting day, I think to myself.

    (For what it’s worth, the tag line for the advertising agency where I work is “Exactly like nobody else.”)

  • home invasion

    [This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated January 6th, 1997]

    I stand in the front window and watch as the car makes its second pass, making myself as visible as possible to the men inside . . . letting them know that there are people home and they’ll have to find someone else to rob.

    On their fourth pass, I make eye contact with the driver and I know then that this is no normal robbery. They want me to see them.

    We stand there, watching the pass and I realize that we’re being diverted.

    Misdirection.

    Someone is already in the house, I know. Someone came in the back — the car had been empty? The car had been full on the first pass, but the last few times, I could see that the men inside were not so cramped; one of them was gone.

    They were already in the house.

    Through the house I go, searching.

    Passing by my room I see that the french doors have been kicked in.

    Someone is in the house.

    In a back room, my teenage daughter’s room, I find them. He is sitting at the piano, holding a gun in her face. She sits on the bed, crying.

    With a broken crystal candlestick, I stab him in the back — just to the left of the spine — before he can turn.

    Push the splintered end deep into him, glancing off the shoulderblade, scraping against the bone.

    He breathes once, heavy, and then dies.

    When the car passes by the window again, I am there — his head in my fist, raising it high, my fingers in his hair.

    I see the eyes widen as they see his glazed, empty gaze.

    I meet the eyes of one in the car as it speeds off — that is the one, I know, who will return for revenge.

    The car drives off into the night and I drop the head, realizing that — for the first time — it is snowing in the Midlands.

    [2013 Addendum: This is a odd one to look at now. In 1997, I did not have a daughter. Now I have two. And, for what it’s worth, my bedroom (four houses and sixteen years later) has French doors. That’s not going to help me get to sleep any easier.)