A napkin falls, drifting quickly down with fluttering tumbles.
The Napkin in Close-Up: uneven surface of humped dunes, pasty white in uneven light. Ridges and runnels, sharp cliffs and crumpled ranges providing depths and heights to an otherwise two-dimensional landscape. Dark swathes of brown, sloping veins of blue, smudged regions of nameless washed out colours break the monotony of shadow and alabaster.
The napkin settles suddenly upon an open notebook. Crinkled ranges and splotchy colourations now bordered by unblemished white lanes and irrigation lines of pale blue.
Symbol of Man's Conformity: the unused sheet of lined paper. Forcing the most creative displays of words into regiments and parade lines. Providing structure and discipline to even the most unruly usage of language.
The napkin slides a bit on the gently angled surface of the notebook, comes to rest. Chaos falling into order, the antithesis of entropy.
She blinks once, slowly, deliberately. Eyes the overcast grey/blue of a sky about to storm, first occluded, than sliding upward to peer over black plastic frames. Thin sculpted eyebrows raise with them, both question and annoyance announced in one elegant motion.
Portrait of the Madman, In Reverse: twin figures, gently elongated over the barest of convex curves, matched dress, matched demeanors. Uneven grey stubble over pale flesh, unhealthily pale, maggoty pale. High foreheads unmarked by line or crease end at reddish-brown hair arched crookedly over sunken eyes. Eyes! Two left of clear winter sky blue, two right of forest at dusk green, all too bright, too clear, gleaming with an inner passion, crackling with an inner spark generally found only amongst children or the crazed. Eyes that that are bisected by small, twice broken, softly crooked aquiline noses. Noses shadowing thin twitching lips. Lips fighting a battle between solemnity and hilarity, tugging up at their corners, smoothing into pressed lines, darting into full grins before restraint can force them level again. Lips that yank and pull at four fever bright cheeks, pallid flesh splotching, spotting, burning in the midst of sharp cheekbones and vulpine jaws. Barest, sparest growth of reddish-white pushing through pallor and blush alike.
She blinks again, light diluting membranes of thinnest flesh shuttering over now puzzled, now worried showing retinas. A slightly nervous soul hiding behind the flittery quick blinds of its windows.
"Can I... help you?" Hesitation, uncertainty giving pause to an inherently unanswerable question.
One pasty short finger taps the resting napkin once, twice. Each touch changing its landscape, shifting ranges and gullies, altering the shape and flow of colours. Unlike the eyes. The eyes never move. Unsettling, over-bright mismatched eyes.
She looks down at the napkin.
Meandering creeks and curved streams resolve themselves into uneven ink-bled letters. Words. Sentences.
I have kidnapped your goldfish. If you do not let me buy you a drink, you will never see your beloved companion again.
A pause. She reads again. Another pause. Another reading. Soul's windows change their display from nervous puzzlement to astonishment to incredulity with each reading.
She looks up from crinkled and crinkling blue lines, disbelieving dirty blue eyes meeting expectant irises of pale blue and dusky green.
"Are you insane?" Shock and disbelief shading her words.
"I prefer to think of myself as being enlightened." Level, even, pleasant tones belying glittery flickery eyes.
"And this is how enlightenment manifests? Threats on napkins?"
A quick shrug, a long smirk, "Better this than giving away a kingdom or dying for the uncaring, don't you think?"
A moment, an eon, a single beat. She can only stare at him. And then she smiles, dimples forming in her cheeks, glasses shifting slightly up her wrinkling nose.
"I don't have a goldfish." Laughter dancing behind the words, unreleased, but unhidden.
A grin flashes over his face like the sun coming suddenly swift from behind a cloud. "Well than, if you say no you're going to ruin some poor kids day when they discover their fish is missing."
Shutter: astonishment.
Shutter: mirth.
She laughs out loud. A quick cough of merriment bursting from between her lips before she can stop it.
"Would that be a yes?"
Shoulders silently shaking, eyes smile at him over her glasses, "Sure, why not."
"Excellent. I wouldn't have known what to do with this if you had said no." Left arm emerges from behind his back and places a paper coffee cup in browns and tans amidst the clutter of her work. Wispy phantoms dance to a patternless waltz known only by the eddying currents of invisible particles. Each short-lived wraith gyres for a few beautiful seconds before vanishing in a smell of spicy cinnamon and vanilla, rich cream and tea.
"How did you know...?"
He jerks the now empty hand in a quick gesture over his shoulder. At the counter behind him, a grinning visage is supported by one coffee stained hand, the grin growing wider when she realizes she is now the focus of attention. She raises the unsupporting hand and wiggles her fingers in a langorous child-like gesture, haunted by undertones of innocent mischeif and devious sexuality.
"You have an awful lot of confidence in yourself."
"No, just a lot of confidence in the world."
"An attempt at modesty from a man who just compared himself to the Buddha and Jesus?"
"Wasn't that the point? Weren't they just trying to tell us we can all be like them?"
She shakes her head, smile spreading across her face even as she chides him with her movements. "I don't recall any parable of the threatening napkin."
He shrugs again, a spastic grin that never quite leaves his features moving from one side of his mouth to the other and skipping about between. "An emperor once asked the Buddha how he could acheive enlightenment. The Buddha answered 'I have no idea.' Outraged the emperor asked of the Buddha 'Have you not acheived enlightenment?' The Buddha replied 'What does that have to do with how you will acheive enlightment?' Personally, I think both of them would have been a lot more successful if they had resorted to threats a little more often."
She laughs again, an unrestrained burst of sound that comes out much louder than she expected. A flurry of capillaries swell and she blushes in embarrasement at her own outburst. Panic causes eyes to dart, a quick pan of her surroundings: bored baristas and uncaring self-absorbed patrons each trapped within the confines of their own tiny worlds and thoughts. Small mismatched tables, chairs, couches scattered haphazardly and piled with random assortments of books, laptops, cell phones, coffee cups, half eaten pastries. Large picture windows dominate two of the walls, forming a pair of perpindicular vistas of a cityscape at dusk. Cars and pedestrians move toward each other vanishing at the windows edge, or occasionally reappearing, as if by magic, now moving in a new direction.
Tickle of Memory: a magic lantern show projected in her bedroom as a little girl, overbright bulb casting shadow occluded light on cream coloured walls. Motion, fanciful figures (composed of not wave, not particle, most elusive and incomprehensible of physical observable phenomena) caper and play as punctured tin slowly revolves. As light flows, slippery sliding like luminescent fish trapped within aquarium glass, a quirk occurs, repeated four times within the manufactured box of her room. At each corner there is a moment, a blip in the perceptive field, when the various shapes and figures fold? fail? collapse? into themselves like tiny dying stars. The frail, eternal, mutable energy/matter/both slides into the angle seeming to disappear into the edges of reality only to slide back out of whatever sub-dimension exists where Euclidean geometry ends.
"Not sure that's a very good metaphor, honestly."
Faded blue eyes dart back from reverie to peer into fever bright green and blue. "What?"
"The lantern thing. S'a pretty image, but I really don't think it works so well in trying to describe those people moving about out there," arms wave in a jerky, dismissive gesture at the windows behind him, "I mean, how many people these days even know what one of those magic lantern things is anymore?"
"How can you possibly know about that?" puzzlement and the faintest stirring of earlier anxiety creeping into her words.
"I can read, of course."
"Read?" fear slides slow and thick into her words, "Like... minds?"
"Like text. Words strung into sentences. The story." matter-of-fact-tone, deadpan expression. Or at least as close as a twitching madman can get to one.
She gapes at him for a moment, glossed lips reflecting light wetly, perfect pearl teeth gleaming whitely with their polish of saliva, lithe red tongue moving spastically, silently in incomprehension. Words fight to form on her curling, twisting tongue, buffetted and roiled by the shock, confusion instilled by this strange figure before her. Seconds pass before she masters her traitor muscles, allowing her control enough to finally allow a sentence to cohere from her thoughts and congeal on her tongue.
"Twitch!" a feminine, throaty growl. Not hers.
Blue and particoloured eyes pivot in opposite directions, come to rest on the same scene.
Snapshot for a Rock Poster: they stand side by side, back lit and framed by the last red rays coming through the open doorway behind. She stands the taller, and a little in front, thick-soled, knee high boots wrapped and wound with straps and buckles perhaps aiding this height. Pale knees, flash of creamy thighs, marred by purplish-yellow bruises, half-healed cuts and marks, all cut off and shadowed by a dark plaid skirt, short and pleated. Thick chain belt, half obscured by a ribbed white sleeveless undershirt. One arm, one bare shoulder, hangs casually, listlessly at her side, well toned muscle moving beneath flesh scrimshawed with crimson lines and symbols. The left hand holds a guitar by its neck, a left handed '57 Stratocaster, slung over her shoulder so that the cherry red and matte black body sways slowly and rythmically in the space beside her head. Black polished lips and kohl darkened eyes offset her pale features, small nose with two rings piercing the left nostril, pale right cheek punctured by a single silver stud above the dimple of her smile. All of these features are secondary to the hair. Candy apple red shot through with blood bright crimson falls in dreadlocks and braids in a riot of cords and tangles, falls away from her face, excepting a few errant locks, cascading down her back in banded coils to quiver and jounce just a few inches from the floor. Beside her, almost lost in the punk spectacle of attitude and hair, stands her partner. Wide black sneakers, the tongues and laces lost beneath the faded blue denim of tight jeans, whose own waist vanishes beneath the untucked hem of a white t-shirt. Only a thin strip of the shirt is visible, the rest being covered by a short black racing jacket, a single white band running across the upper arms and chest. Light stubble of an indeterminate dark colour covers a boyishly round jaw, a mawkish aquiline nose supports a pair of large, mirror lensed aviator shades. Dark hair is cropped short on his head, ending in an uneven jagging line across his forehead, running into tightly groomed sideburns that end just below his ears. In his right hand is a battered Les Paul style hard bodied guitar case. Her face is a study in suppressed rage and kittenish sexuality. His of cultivated boredom and urbanity.
"'lo Fender. Gibson." a quick smirk, a sharp nod to each in turn. He is a creature of sharp jerking motions, like a sparrow scavenging an outdoor cafe. She continually expects him to hop from foot to foot, to launch himself into short flutters of regression and approach.
The duo move into the room. She stalks directly toward them with purpose and conviction, each step a statement of intent and ability. He slides through the coffee house like the spector of style, unnoticed and unnoticing, seeming not so much to approach as to sidle sideways from the edge of vision.
"You're wanted in The City." No premable, no pleasantries. A voice sultry and low, roughened by screamed vocals, unfiltered cigarettes, cheap whiskey. Her partner slides into place beside her, shoulders slumped, but the guitar case's angle never wavers, proving the hidden tension of the muscles. Even with his face obscured by the room's reflection, there is a sense of alertness. Watching him, she just knows he is looking everywhere, eyes quick and alert to every action and inaction in the room.
(C) Divers Hands
The Napkin in Close-Up: uneven surface of humped dunes, pasty white in uneven light. Ridges and runnels, sharp cliffs and crumpled ranges providing depths and heights to an otherwise two-dimensional landscape. Dark swathes of brown, sloping veins of blue, smudged regions of nameless washed out colours break the monotony of shadow and alabaster.
The napkin settles suddenly upon an open notebook. Crinkled ranges and splotchy colourations now bordered by unblemished white lanes and irrigation lines of pale blue.
Symbol of Man's Conformity: the unused sheet of lined paper. Forcing the most creative displays of words into regiments and parade lines. Providing structure and discipline to even the most unruly usage of language.
The napkin slides a bit on the gently angled surface of the notebook, comes to rest. Chaos falling into order, the antithesis of entropy.
She blinks once, slowly, deliberately. Eyes the overcast grey/blue of a sky about to storm, first occluded, than sliding upward to peer over black plastic frames. Thin sculpted eyebrows raise with them, both question and annoyance announced in one elegant motion.
Portrait of the Madman, In Reverse: twin figures, gently elongated over the barest of convex curves, matched dress, matched demeanors. Uneven grey stubble over pale flesh, unhealthily pale, maggoty pale. High foreheads unmarked by line or crease end at reddish-brown hair arched crookedly over sunken eyes. Eyes! Two left of clear winter sky blue, two right of forest at dusk green, all too bright, too clear, gleaming with an inner passion, crackling with an inner spark generally found only amongst children or the crazed. Eyes that that are bisected by small, twice broken, softly crooked aquiline noses. Noses shadowing thin twitching lips. Lips fighting a battle between solemnity and hilarity, tugging up at their corners, smoothing into pressed lines, darting into full grins before restraint can force them level again. Lips that yank and pull at four fever bright cheeks, pallid flesh splotching, spotting, burning in the midst of sharp cheekbones and vulpine jaws. Barest, sparest growth of reddish-white pushing through pallor and blush alike.
She blinks again, light diluting membranes of thinnest flesh shuttering over now puzzled, now worried showing retinas. A slightly nervous soul hiding behind the flittery quick blinds of its windows.
"Can I... help you?" Hesitation, uncertainty giving pause to an inherently unanswerable question.
One pasty short finger taps the resting napkin once, twice. Each touch changing its landscape, shifting ranges and gullies, altering the shape and flow of colours. Unlike the eyes. The eyes never move. Unsettling, over-bright mismatched eyes.
She looks down at the napkin.
Meandering creeks and curved streams resolve themselves into uneven ink-bled letters. Words. Sentences.
I have kidnapped your goldfish. If you do not let me buy you a drink, you will never see your beloved companion again.
A pause. She reads again. Another pause. Another reading. Soul's windows change their display from nervous puzzlement to astonishment to incredulity with each reading.
She looks up from crinkled and crinkling blue lines, disbelieving dirty blue eyes meeting expectant irises of pale blue and dusky green.
"Are you insane?" Shock and disbelief shading her words.
"I prefer to think of myself as being enlightened." Level, even, pleasant tones belying glittery flickery eyes.
"And this is how enlightenment manifests? Threats on napkins?"
A quick shrug, a long smirk, "Better this than giving away a kingdom or dying for the uncaring, don't you think?"
A moment, an eon, a single beat. She can only stare at him. And then she smiles, dimples forming in her cheeks, glasses shifting slightly up her wrinkling nose.
"I don't have a goldfish." Laughter dancing behind the words, unreleased, but unhidden.
A grin flashes over his face like the sun coming suddenly swift from behind a cloud. "Well than, if you say no you're going to ruin some poor kids day when they discover their fish is missing."
Shutter: astonishment.
Shutter: mirth.
She laughs out loud. A quick cough of merriment bursting from between her lips before she can stop it.
"Would that be a yes?"
Shoulders silently shaking, eyes smile at him over her glasses, "Sure, why not."
"Excellent. I wouldn't have known what to do with this if you had said no." Left arm emerges from behind his back and places a paper coffee cup in browns and tans amidst the clutter of her work. Wispy phantoms dance to a patternless waltz known only by the eddying currents of invisible particles. Each short-lived wraith gyres for a few beautiful seconds before vanishing in a smell of spicy cinnamon and vanilla, rich cream and tea.
"How did you know...?"
He jerks the now empty hand in a quick gesture over his shoulder. At the counter behind him, a grinning visage is supported by one coffee stained hand, the grin growing wider when she realizes she is now the focus of attention. She raises the unsupporting hand and wiggles her fingers in a langorous child-like gesture, haunted by undertones of innocent mischeif and devious sexuality.
"You have an awful lot of confidence in yourself."
"No, just a lot of confidence in the world."
"An attempt at modesty from a man who just compared himself to the Buddha and Jesus?"
"Wasn't that the point? Weren't they just trying to tell us we can all be like them?"
She shakes her head, smile spreading across her face even as she chides him with her movements. "I don't recall any parable of the threatening napkin."
He shrugs again, a spastic grin that never quite leaves his features moving from one side of his mouth to the other and skipping about between. "An emperor once asked the Buddha how he could acheive enlightenment. The Buddha answered 'I have no idea.' Outraged the emperor asked of the Buddha 'Have you not acheived enlightenment?' The Buddha replied 'What does that have to do with how you will acheive enlightment?' Personally, I think both of them would have been a lot more successful if they had resorted to threats a little more often."
She laughs again, an unrestrained burst of sound that comes out much louder than she expected. A flurry of capillaries swell and she blushes in embarrasement at her own outburst. Panic causes eyes to dart, a quick pan of her surroundings: bored baristas and uncaring self-absorbed patrons each trapped within the confines of their own tiny worlds and thoughts. Small mismatched tables, chairs, couches scattered haphazardly and piled with random assortments of books, laptops, cell phones, coffee cups, half eaten pastries. Large picture windows dominate two of the walls, forming a pair of perpindicular vistas of a cityscape at dusk. Cars and pedestrians move toward each other vanishing at the windows edge, or occasionally reappearing, as if by magic, now moving in a new direction.
Tickle of Memory: a magic lantern show projected in her bedroom as a little girl, overbright bulb casting shadow occluded light on cream coloured walls. Motion, fanciful figures (composed of not wave, not particle, most elusive and incomprehensible of physical observable phenomena) caper and play as punctured tin slowly revolves. As light flows, slippery sliding like luminescent fish trapped within aquarium glass, a quirk occurs, repeated four times within the manufactured box of her room. At each corner there is a moment, a blip in the perceptive field, when the various shapes and figures fold? fail? collapse? into themselves like tiny dying stars. The frail, eternal, mutable energy/matter/both slides into the angle seeming to disappear into the edges of reality only to slide back out of whatever sub-dimension exists where Euclidean geometry ends.
"Not sure that's a very good metaphor, honestly."
Faded blue eyes dart back from reverie to peer into fever bright green and blue. "What?"
"The lantern thing. S'a pretty image, but I really don't think it works so well in trying to describe those people moving about out there," arms wave in a jerky, dismissive gesture at the windows behind him, "I mean, how many people these days even know what one of those magic lantern things is anymore?"
"How can you possibly know about that?" puzzlement and the faintest stirring of earlier anxiety creeping into her words.
"I can read, of course."
"Read?" fear slides slow and thick into her words, "Like... minds?"
"Like text. Words strung into sentences. The story." matter-of-fact-tone, deadpan expression. Or at least as close as a twitching madman can get to one.
She gapes at him for a moment, glossed lips reflecting light wetly, perfect pearl teeth gleaming whitely with their polish of saliva, lithe red tongue moving spastically, silently in incomprehension. Words fight to form on her curling, twisting tongue, buffetted and roiled by the shock, confusion instilled by this strange figure before her. Seconds pass before she masters her traitor muscles, allowing her control enough to finally allow a sentence to cohere from her thoughts and congeal on her tongue.
"Twitch!" a feminine, throaty growl. Not hers.
Blue and particoloured eyes pivot in opposite directions, come to rest on the same scene.
Snapshot for a Rock Poster: they stand side by side, back lit and framed by the last red rays coming through the open doorway behind. She stands the taller, and a little in front, thick-soled, knee high boots wrapped and wound with straps and buckles perhaps aiding this height. Pale knees, flash of creamy thighs, marred by purplish-yellow bruises, half-healed cuts and marks, all cut off and shadowed by a dark plaid skirt, short and pleated. Thick chain belt, half obscured by a ribbed white sleeveless undershirt. One arm, one bare shoulder, hangs casually, listlessly at her side, well toned muscle moving beneath flesh scrimshawed with crimson lines and symbols. The left hand holds a guitar by its neck, a left handed '57 Stratocaster, slung over her shoulder so that the cherry red and matte black body sways slowly and rythmically in the space beside her head. Black polished lips and kohl darkened eyes offset her pale features, small nose with two rings piercing the left nostril, pale right cheek punctured by a single silver stud above the dimple of her smile. All of these features are secondary to the hair. Candy apple red shot through with blood bright crimson falls in dreadlocks and braids in a riot of cords and tangles, falls away from her face, excepting a few errant locks, cascading down her back in banded coils to quiver and jounce just a few inches from the floor. Beside her, almost lost in the punk spectacle of attitude and hair, stands her partner. Wide black sneakers, the tongues and laces lost beneath the faded blue denim of tight jeans, whose own waist vanishes beneath the untucked hem of a white t-shirt. Only a thin strip of the shirt is visible, the rest being covered by a short black racing jacket, a single white band running across the upper arms and chest. Light stubble of an indeterminate dark colour covers a boyishly round jaw, a mawkish aquiline nose supports a pair of large, mirror lensed aviator shades. Dark hair is cropped short on his head, ending in an uneven jagging line across his forehead, running into tightly groomed sideburns that end just below his ears. In his right hand is a battered Les Paul style hard bodied guitar case. Her face is a study in suppressed rage and kittenish sexuality. His of cultivated boredom and urbanity.
"'lo Fender. Gibson." a quick smirk, a sharp nod to each in turn. He is a creature of sharp jerking motions, like a sparrow scavenging an outdoor cafe. She continually expects him to hop from foot to foot, to launch himself into short flutters of regression and approach.
The duo move into the room. She stalks directly toward them with purpose and conviction, each step a statement of intent and ability. He slides through the coffee house like the spector of style, unnoticed and unnoticing, seeming not so much to approach as to sidle sideways from the edge of vision.
"You're wanted in The City." No premable, no pleasantries. A voice sultry and low, roughened by screamed vocals, unfiltered cigarettes, cheap whiskey. Her partner slides into place beside her, shoulders slumped, but the guitar case's angle never wavers, proving the hidden tension of the muscles. Even with his face obscured by the room's reflection, there is a sense of alertness. Watching him, she just knows he is looking everywhere, eyes quick and alert to every action and inaction in the room.
(C) Divers Hands
However...........you could only hope to be as clever or as crafty as a cephalopod