Memories

Memories


Like the Corner of My Mind

The couple slithered under the makeshift boudoir with the lustiness of teenagers trying to capture that desperate moment alone. The push and pull, the blanket moving more desperately, sensuously covering each stroke…each thrust. The two on the couch, hidden under a blanket, reminds her of the precocious baby playing peek-a-boo, reacting deliriously that they are cloaked with invisibility to the person in front of them. She watches, oblivious to the lovers. Is he fingering her? Screwing her? Are their bodies tightly entwined, from locked lips to curled toes? Are their mouths caught up in the intensity of passion, forgetting their surroundings? Vivienne stretches to hear a sound from the couch, yet it is weirdly absent. Are their clothes bunched and forgotten or a layer between skins? How does that work? Where do the clothes go when lovers become naked in that secretive world of darkness?

Welsh songster Tom Jones is crooning Daughter of Darkness, What's New Pussycat? and She's a Lady to the participants in the room. Grandma Elsie’s hand-me-down television in the living room casting a bluish light over Suzy and placing another layer on the couple. Six-year-old Suzy, sits cross legged on the wood floor, curls bouncing. Her face is rapturously watching the hearthrob shimmy and shake with her baby adoration that every male is a boyfriend, her back is perpendicular to the couple.

The rental house, not a home, became even smaller, tunneling the innocence narrowing in on the couple. Supper’s lingering fried food perfumed the small space lingering on the mismatched, cast away worn couch and chairs. Fried foods a constant, nightly ritual due to restraints of poverty. The dining room’s plastic retro orange cabinet doors cast an eery geometric light on the peeling wallpaper, creeping onto the couple. Not laughter, not horrow, but a sadness mixing with the décor and mood. Four people within a 100 foot space, all separated by making love, doing homework, listening to Tom Jones--one family unit. Simple lust? Mad, passionate, spontaneous, spur of the moment love? No. A selfishness of choice.

This ridiculous event is grounded as one of her strongest childhood memories. Her evening’s homework’s importance ruined by the events circling in front of her tender, yet aged eyes.