Invisible Lines, part two

 

Here are the second set of stories in the series. Katy chose Edward Hoppers 1940 painting 'Gas' and our interpretations are below.

Thom Kofoed

End of day

His wife was dying.

The sky was turning pink to violet to grey and his wife was dying.
He put the coins into his pocket and wiped his oil slicked hands down his overalls. They had been a brilliant blue once but now they were streaked black, days and weeks and months and years painted across his chest.
The wind sighed and took a struggling breath behind him and Eddie coughed and spluttered like an engine and weaved the chain through the door handles and buckled the padlock and shook it three times. A light shone from inside the building and cast a shadow onto the gravel that looked like a Cathedral. The trees whispered and then shouted.
He heard music as he pulled into the driveway; Irving Berlin or Cole Porter or someone. His wife was singing and stirring a pot of something and the sounds and the smells tumbled out of the open window. He felt a lump rise in his throat. She was singing. Even now.
He threw his keys down onto the sideboard and sat on the stair, untying his boots as if untying a corset, each movement gentle and caressing. Slow.
His wife swished through the kitchen door and into the hallway with one hand above her head and the other across her stomach; her dance partner an invisible man. She looked at Eddie and pirouetted on the spot. It made him dizzy. Fred Astaire wouldn’t be dizzy, he thought; a pang of guilt like a punch in his stomach as Judy Garland sang through the open door, her voice heavy with woe. 
She pointed at Eddie’s feet and then at his face and danced over to where he sat and grabbed at his hands and pulled and he was a dead weight and she pulled and he was a dead weight and she pulled and he was a dead weight. She made a face like a small girl and he buckled and stood up and they held hands above their heads and wrapped around each other and she laid her head against his chest and they swayed from one foot to the other and back again.  
“It only happens when I dance with you” sang Judy, sang Eddie, sang his wife; their voices filling the room like vapour and then disappearing.

Robert Dennard

 The air felt hot, too hot, with an uncomfortable stickiness. A dense wind came up from the South and caused the Old Man to gasp in its humidity. Nobody should have to work in these conditions, especially when few ever notice the effort made. The Old Man’s tidiness and proficient upkeep of his business holds one in a pitiful thought, as he is only ever at the sport and sight of circling crows. Positioned too close to city, yet not far enough into the forest for most travellers to need gas or refreshments; his days were quiet and poor, but thankfully peaceful, just the way he wanted it. Oh sure, everyone desires plenty of money to live comfortably, and even treat oneself now and then. But for the Old Man, who runs a gas station, easy hours and peaceful surroundings suited him down to the dusty grey concrete ground of the garage forecourt.

                To the local’s in the neighbouring towns and villages, from all corners of the forest, he was somewhat of a household name, though nobody could ever decide on what his name actually was. None could settle on one, even told from the same tongues his title changed as often as the moon moves the tide it would. Jackson or Jimmy, Old Tom, Gareth at the gas station, Mickey or Mervin, Paul, Peter, Pat even Pablo – which was still feasible, in our highly integrated modern society, but realistically, his years rendered it unlikely. Some said Stu or Sal, Oscar, Richard, Dickie, Dustin or William from way down yonder; the list goes on, but for you, dear reader, it matters not. The Old Man at the gas station cares not for your title, or what others name him. For he is content, sweeping the dust from the front step, the fortnightly polishing of the nozzles, organising stock and making orders, which sadly gets more and more difficult for the old boy by the day. His mind isn’t as keen as it once was; he makes mistakes. Along with that his legs are bowed and his back crooked. His hair has thinned, leaving a sparse grey halo round a peeling and sunburnt scalp. The unrelenting heat pierces into his energy more easily as he no longer has the head of hair to shield him, thus sometimes leaving him dizzy and exhausted. Nowadays, when he looks eastward along the road, he can just make out the green channel of the woodlands tapering down into a dark indistinct hollow over looked by a blurred blue sky. Nowadays his hearing is muffled so that once he hears a passing vehicle, all he can register is the dust it leaves behind in his lungs, and the fading tail-lights as it heads into the forest. Nowadays he often forgets things, and under orders stock, leaving the odd empty row here or there in his refrigerators or on the wooden shelves in the shop – shelves, might I add, he built with his own two hands, even after they’d started to succumb to arthritic kinks in the knuckles, like that of an ancient trees roots. This makes him angry as he has always taken pride in his work and can’t suffer insubordination. All throughout his long years, in all the various and exciting jobs he’s had, he has always done so with the upmost care and attentiveness; good old fashioned pride in the work place, stemmed from his working class roots down in Dixie.

                The last few days leading up to this one have been, to any onlookers, absent as they might be, entirely repetitive; though to the Old Man who runs the gas station, he has started each with a vital new task every morning.

“My O my” he says walking out to the pumps, “Those nozzles need a right good polish; I haven’t done them in weeks.” Hobbling back out into the September haze, after fetching his polish and cloth, one thing puzzles the Old Man: how can he be running so low on polish? He’d only used it once, months ago. It’s as though it was used yesterday. Even the lid was slightly loose and as any good worker knows, if the lid of any tin has been left on for a good long while, it’s a right chore to prise it off. But the Old Man’s feeble arthritic grip managed to pop the lid off no problem, none whatsoever, which he wasn’t expecting.  And even queerer was that, though they had not to his mind, been cleaned in so long, the pumps nozzles shined up something wonderful, after barely touching them with the cloth.

“How odd?” the Old Man thought as the humid air and sun’s strength bore down upon him, causing dizziness and a sudden nausea. A sharp pain stabbed him in the chest, as if his heart were now a pin cushion for hot pokers. This is a very odd morning the Old Man finally thought as a near empty tin of polish fell to the floor, gently followed by the flutter of a dust cloth which had been used daily for the last few weeks; “very odd indeed!”

But at least the sun was shining on that morn, and it shines still. Rather a lot in this area of the state. Harmful to productivity or not, the weather is always beautiful down in Dixieland. What a beautiful day to leave a business. Left untouched until the lawyers can find another poor sucker to run a gas station, in such an ill advised location, with its former owner now buried in the yard behind the shop.

Katy Park

This place is a fucking waste of time. My hands press and screw and hang useless. Screw loose. I'm done with it. How can anyone get past the mundane humiliation of walking, talking, shitting, fucking. People that say they have are lying.

I had an idea once. A great fucking idea that I liked and wanted and gave a shit about. Ideas mean nothing unless other people think they do. I'd buy a giant ship in a bottle if I had a million bucks.

I have this recurring dream that there's a fire big enough that it burns through safes, leaves the sea an ash map with curled edges, doesn't stop until everything is dust and fucking grey.

I read a book about 'mindfulness' once. Some American bullshit. It's all about learning how to make your mind aware and focused on the present moment, not letting reality slip by unnoticed. I hate it. I hate that we are born with such inept mechanisms in our minds and no way of knowing how to deal with any of this. Joy is something I scrape from the dirty fucking windows I can't see through.

I think I've worked it out though. The point of everything. Fuel. Fuel, consumption and emptiness.

It's not all bad though. I really love my cat. His dumb face makes me smile.

Kitsune, illustrated

Company, illustrated

Night, illustrated

                                    

A new writing project

Katy Park, Robert Dennard and I have started a new writing project called Invisible Lines. Each week one of us will select an Edward Hopper painting and we will then each write a short story in response to what we see.

Our first selection is Night Windows, 1928. Our stories are below.

Hettie before dinner

Thom Kofoed

 She had spent twenty minutes looking for her knickers, the pink satin ones with the lace frill around the top edge. She was wet still from her bath and her towel kept slipping down below her breasts. She pulled it up, tucked the corner back in on itself and carried on looking through her drawers. She hated that chest of drawers, heavy and stern and dark, a gift from her Aunt. It looked like a School Mistress and stared at her from the corner of the room, its arms behind its back.

Where were her knickers? She was running late now, the clock above her bed chiming seven thirty, and she needed those knickers. They made her feel sexy, a secret beneath her skirt. They made her walk differently and her bum wiggled and jiggled and men stared as she past and she liked that though her mother had always scowled when it happened to her. Truthfully she had always thought her mother liked it; her eyes would change when they whistled as if a light came on, as if somebody had woken her up, as if she suddenly remembered she was living.
Her knickers weren’t in the bottom drawer. They weren’t in the middle drawer either. They weren’t next to her bed or in her closet or balled up inside the pencil skirt scrunched into a heap on her vanity table chair. Thinking about it she hadn’t seen them for a week or so, since she went to the movies with Walter last Friday, when he had pawed at her and squeezed the tops of her thighs and grunted so loudly that a fella three rows in front told them to shush. They hadn’t gone all the way but if that picture had run any longer she couldn’t be sure what would’ve happened. Her face flushed at the memory. She picked up her compact and brushed her cheeks with powder, the moon reflecting in her vanity table mirror. The phone began to ring in the hall and the girls scuttled like crabs to answer it. The ringing stopped and after a few seconds she heard doors like dominoes close one after the other.
“Hettie” it sounded like Barbara calling.
“Hettie” she said again.
“Walter is on the line,” she said.
“he sounds hot and bothered.” she said.
She started to laugh and Hettie imagined Walter, his dress shirt undone at the collar, embarrassed at Barbara’s jibe, small in his seat, squirming at her bravado.
Hettie checked her hair in the mirror and pushed her forefinger around her lips. Wind blew in from the open window and her curtain danced like an empty dress on a hanger.

The Perks of a Top Floor Flat

Katy Park

Shelly could not believe her eyes. A cigarette burn on the carpet. She knelt down, bending her mottled lace legs and folding her brow in a grimace. Shelly did not smoke. She did not smoke, and she did not entertain those that did. She ran her hand over the burnt scar, listening for a clue in the silent room. She breathed.

Hours later, and the city darkness had brewed to a deep brown. It was hot, and the flimsy pointless fabric at the window coughed and steamed. Shelly lay thickly on her silk sheets. Her skin was busy sending bubbles to the surface which popped and ran in rivers to meet with the small balls of carpet still clinging to her knees. She looked like an animal. Oozing white into red.

When Shelly woke, she felt happy and alert. She bustled into the bathroom, running taps and squeezing tubes, erasing the stillness with sound. Her body and mind found solace in movement, and by the time she emerged she was entirely human again. As she walked, the soft pink skin of her foot brushed against the brittle burn on the carpet. She glided oblivious to her wardrobe. Today was potato salad and bus route 9. Cardboard folders and 5.15.

Keys, sandals, bag, glasses. She left with a slam, announcing her departure.

The window was left open, and only an occasional hot sigh disturbed the room.

Robert Dennard

Jazz. The ripping and writhing toe-tapping root toot toot of sax wailing jazz billows from a blue curtain of a second floor apartment on the corner of 114^th street and Eight Avenue. Inside Edith bops and jives about her room to the swinging step of her gramophone. She pays no heed to the sounds of the street outside, carried in by the cool night air from the open window. Dancing round her room, Edith felt as though the world was hers and anything and everything was there for the taking, just as long as the jazz kept playing. Just as long as she kept dancing, nothing mattered. While her hips keep up a convoluting shake, and her feet a steady step, she bends down to take a sip of wine whilst reaching for her cigarillo tin. Smoking with her head back, her arms undulate to the quickening beat; she spins and swings, taking her shadow as a partner in the ecstasy of the dance. Her partner takes the form of a strapping young sailor, returned from months at sea. Months spent longing to be back on land with Edith in their arms, spinning and jumping as they are now. The pace quickens of which Edith can only just keep up, but her partner copes, violently kicking out their legs, clicking their fingers and throwing about the arms. They coil together in a frantic embrace. They spin and spin until the wine renders Edith’s head a miss. She can’t cope, it’s too fast. Her faceless partner cares not and continues to spin her in the squeaking ether the sax has formed around them. Round and round they go, Edith’s stomach tightens into tenderness as she trips, her arms flailing to break her fall, she crashes into the gramophone, causing the needle to shriek across the wax as it topples of the table.

Down on all fours with her head hung, Edith pants as she catches her breath. Her partner, now returned to the shaded silhouette of her own form, has left her spent in silence, and alone once more.

She lifts herself and sits back on her feet with her hands on her knees. She pauses for one more moment of recuperation then stands, crosses her pokey apartment room and sits down on the bed. She lights another cigarette. The night air brings in more screeching of tires and sounds of the city outside. Suddenly angered, Edith slams the window closed, trapping her blue drape in the latch. Slumped back on the bed in silence, Edith exhales her cigarette smoke with an exasperated breath, cups her head in her hands and starts to cry.

Sixteen

It's quite possible that in the decade that has passed since the Summer I turned sixteen the sharp edges of the weeks I spent about town have been made smooth by the passing of time, leaving it all, all of the days, all of the hours, as a round, flawless stone. I don't think so though.
We had just finished our exams and the four of us, bonded by the idea of impending adulthood, had grown inseparable, almost interchangeable, in the months leading up to our freedom from school. We had found one another haphazardly. A zig zagged line had jutted out from each of our social circles (mine decidedly smaller than theirs) and, like the darts that hunters sometimes use to paralyse their prey, jabbed us all in the sides and reeled us in, in, in until we were holding hands and laughing. So much time spent laughing.
We really were an unlikely group though. Two boys. Two girls. Two blondes. Two brunettes. One boy so filled with confidence it bubbled out of him in long, excitable, attention-seeking prose. The other, gay and hiding from everything. Two girls who had lost their fathers. All of us looking, finding something in each other that made it a little easier, at least for a while.
We would sit on the roof and some of us would smoke cigarettes and all of us would look across at the hill that rolled and tumbled into the cliffs and down into the sea and we'd talk sometimes about where we were going and where we had been already.
The things you think you know so much about at sixteen.
The things you're sure you'll never understand.
Cameras.
We spoke about cameras a lot in fact.
In the final weeks and days of school I had grown desperate to be a great photographer. I lacked any patience or real understanding of photography of course, and I completely hated being at the beginning of a journey that felt like it would take the whole Summer, an eternity in my eyes, to get to the end of.
He carried his camera everywhere, hung over his shoulder as though his heart beat from within the lens and would stop if he and it were separated. He snapped pictures with an ease and effortlessness that I envied and documented our days with such viveur and a joy so contagious that I am smiling a wide, wonky, brace filled smile in every photograph he took of us then. I loved him for that.
We spent most of our time in the roof of his house, through a small cupboard door always covered in freshly pressed shirts on hangers. We would climb up and into the room we had claimed as our own (to the chagrin of his Grandfather) and eat crisps and soup and sit on the cushions and pillows we had stolen from the rooms downstairs, away from the light outside, away from time passing.
Once, each laying out on the floor, our hands and arms wrapped up in one another, I played a CD I had bought by some Canadian guy with flat hair and soft, round eyes who promised to teach us how to be a more confident version of ourselves. Confidence was something I had been looking for for as long as I could remember and had hoped could be taught through exercises and bar charts; I thought it was like an expensive suit you had to earn. I hadn't yet realised that when I grew into myself it would come. Slowly and in its own time but it would come all the same; the others knew this already, their howling made that quite clear. I didn't try again to make us any better. Things were already pretty great as they were.
We set about redesigning our roof hideaway, boxing up old, toy train tracks and other things that had been stored there over the years. We assigned spaces for certain activities; eating was to be done in the corner by the cool box, playing computer games in the cushioned area by the door.
There was a junk shop near his house and we went there almost every day we were redecorating. The owner, a lady who always wore sweatshirts with collars and anchors or dog motifs embroidered on the front, would say hello at first and then soon started regaling the four of us with stories from her past. 
We convinced her, and I don't remember how it started now, that we were two young boys who had fallen in love, whose parents wouldn't accept the relationship, who had taken it upon themselves to climb into the world and fight.
"Love is worth fighting for isn't it?" we would ask.
"Sometimes it's all there is" she would say.
And so we told her we were living in some crappy loft and we had a mattress and one cupboard and some plates and each other and she would give us lamps and television units and small bedside tables for free and we would thank her and she would smile and then go about stacking chairs and piling up magazines, one after the other, after the other.

Grasshoppers

Ashes

He took a cigarette from his coat pocket and tucked it, unlit, between his lips. He was standing in front of me and I noticed his sleeves first and how long they were, covering his wrists and going all the way down to the middle of his hands. Long and impractical.
I thought about touching his wrists, I wanted to feel his heartbeat there with the tips of my fingers.
Ba-booming, ba-boom. ba-boom.
And then in the same breath I worried that when lighting his cigarette he would catch his sleeve, long and impractical as it was, and how quickly the flames would travel up his arms and how all at once he would burst into a ball of molten, orange fire and I could hear him screaming above all the other noise in my head and I could see him flailing and reaching out and trying, really trying; and my heart felt like a fist in my chest and I knew then that we were doomed because I cared too much and he would most probably die some violent death leaving me alone and surrounded by all the ashes. 
Somebody's always leaving.

The middle

She had already jumped to the middle, where the two of them were waiting, the big and difficult questions answered by then. The things they had carried over, the things from their lives before, piled neatly between her and him. There but not there; the intangible physical somehow. A glowing orb, a blue light bobbing up and then down, a quiet buzzing, a hum. A hum growing louder and louder still, he and her stood facing one another somewhere off in the distance, that hum a symphony of stories. Their stories. Echoes.

She wished they had a beach house where they could spend nights wrapped up in one another, the sea crashing outside the window like plates, sand spiralling up and up and up; tiny tornadoes whistling through and across seaside winds. Inside and against the crackling of kindling and fire, choruses of do you remember when's and I love you. I love you. I love you.

Night

It is late.
It is dark.
The wind outside is hard and noisy and sounds like pages being torn out of a book.
I am in bed.
I thought for a second how nice it would be to come home to someone. Somebody who had been waiting, their arms like two pillows.