Sex

There had been a time when he could barely stand to brush his teeth and thus wash the taste of her out of his mouth and after lunches like this he'd go back to work wrapped in the scents of her body and revel in them and surely she still did it all for him physically but now as much as he was conscious of trying to appear to be staring at her body as she moved above him he was also quite sure that he was tracking the pattern of hairline cracks that spread south-east to north-by-northwest across the plaster ceiling.

A shallow river carved through the dry parts of his brain, lubricating lost sensations, letting a riot of life loose in still pools that gathered on newly black mud, his sight now having rushed beyond her stomach, breasts, neck, face, arms, hair, and found its way to safer places, the way he had driven discretely imagined cars down glorious boulevards that ran in the cracks between classroom floor tiles in order to escape life as a student.

She moaned orgasmically and the combination of her muscle contractions and his decision to relax and then run let him go off as well and he lay there as she sprawled across him and thought only about the old joke about the statue of the famous Russian-Roulette champion: On the pedestal, underneath his name, was his record, "73-1."

Was that really a joke?

On his way back to work he stopped at the Barnes and Noble. Went into the bathroom. Washed his hands and face with antiseptic smelling liquid soap. Bought odd French mints, a container of frighteningly bitter Starbucks coffee, a two-dollar discounted book about the Nile.

She took a fast shower, as she always did. Got dressed. Went back to the school she worked in. Spent much of the afternoon flirting with the math teacher who also coached wrestling.

© 2005 by Ira Socol_____________________________

Comments

Adriana Bliss said…
A brilliant piece that I found opened up even further when contemplating the picture - I love the analogies, ira. I can just feel that rush back to real life after such heated love-making. Amazing how lovers bind to one another.
11:01 AM, April 05, 2005
Adriana Bliss said…
A brilliant piece that I found opened up even further when contemplating the picture - I love the analogies, ira. I can just feel that rush back to real life after such heated love-making. Amazing how lovers bind to one another.
11:01 AM, April 05, 2005
admin said…
Hi narr or, A real enlightening blog. Don't stop now. No better time than now to stop No more
Raymond
4:34 AM, November 19, 2005
admin said…
Hi narr or, A real enlightening blog. Don't stop now. No better time than now to stop No more
Raymond
2:41 AM, November 20, 2005
Hawthorne Energy Audit said…
Very nicee blog you have here
10:18 PM, November 30, 2022
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A River Runs Through It

Image
I stand in the Winter Garden looking down. My back toward the grand stairs and the vast room and the palm trees and the mirror-like polish on the floor and the Hudson River just beyond. It is the 12th of September, four years after, and I stare into the vast site that once held the World Trade Center - now just an odd-shaped concrete tub with trains sliding through a loop inside. Between that place and I West Street buzzes with traffic and this glass wall, so consciously engineered, stands. When this was first created it looked directly into the gap between Tower One and the hotel. A taught skin wrapping an urban panorama. Now it seems more a hastily erected barrier. Crime scene tape rendered in the architecture of our post-industrial age. It is almost four centuries since Henry Hudson first sailed past this spot on a vast, wide salt-flavoured river that seemed as if it must connect sea to sea. In fact, he might have sailed on this spot, for it was river then. Looking into the Trade C...
Read more

The Beach

Image
With the Hudson River at my back I sit and eat two slices of acceptable "Famous Original Rays" or whatever it is pizza as I stare into the pool below the Irish Hunger Memorial. The koi swim in calm arcs with a few manic direction shifts, which seems just about right. Whenever I am here I think of this sick joke that I can make big money by opening a "Famine Fries" stand in the shadow of this monument, but I try hard not to mention that to anyone. Long ago, when I was a kid, this whole area west of the Trade Center was just a giant beach. They'd filled all this land in, out beyond the old pier lines, when they built the towers, but then they'd argued about this place called "Battery Park City" for two decades. So it sat there, vast and empty and cool in the summer and icy in the winter and all we had to do was hop the fence and you could do anything out here, soccer, or stickball, drugs or sex, sunbathing or music – it was the most un-Manhattan ...
Read more

Kilmainham

Image
On a shockingly sunny Thursday morning I took Caitlin to Kilmainham. We went because I needed to and I discovered that she had never been. "You've never been at'all?" "Never, I've been to Guinness though, and to Jameson's." "Not quite the same." "I live more in the present than you." "Still." "I've been meaning to, it's just out of the way." I told her to call in sick and we caught the bus and rode out, yes, past Guinness. "But you've been to the Contemporary Art Museum?" "Of course, you've been there with me." I remembered that, I'd harassed her two months ago about the same thing as we rode a bus back from an opening. We were alone up top and she silenced me with an absolutely teenage snog session there in the front seat that carried us all the way back from the western edge of the old city to College Green. "It's right across the street," I'd said...
Read more