writing #3 - An Attempt To Be Sexy

Did a new 'thing'. I'm pretty sure it's a short story but some of the sentences in it are really like I was trying to write a poem. Please excuse the late night husky voice and the phone on which the recording was being made vibrating half-way through. Ta.

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AN ATTEMPT TO BE SEXY

“Hold still”
“yeah?”
“Yeah. Okay, I think I got it...”
“Right”
“Yes, yes, okay, got it”
“So can you hear me now?”

I stared through the window, my left cheek squashed against the glass. The once-cooling surface had, within a matter of seconds, become the source of a chill that prevented me from speaking to you.

“Hang on, I’ve lost you again.”

It seemed a shame that it was my jaw, not brain that had frozen over. My breath had by now clouded the pane and blocked any view. Hot air escaping from my nostrils began to thaw my mouth and the same gas waiting to emerge finished the job.

“Better?” I began to reply, until I realised that my body was trying to motion accordingly and the consonants scrambled in my mouth. I found the futility of this act entertaining enough to divulge my attention from attempting to distract you from the reality of the fact that we both preferred it when we had less in common.

As such I found it a blessing that tonight would not suffer the routine roll call of all the people I didn’t like, didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Nor off-the-cuff, semi-relatable (under analysis) remarks about the coincidence of being alive at the same time being vast and quixotic as it is and the subconscious setting of barriers because it always pays to be prepared. No: my mind went blank as you asked me to begin and a mental image of you seared itself on my mind’s worn-out eye.

“Um,” it began, disappointing even myself and starting over, “I manage to remove my socks with minimal fuss”. Politeness is an only half-desirable trait and was unfortunately the one of my few to find itself amplified by the telephone receiver.

“Speak up.”
“Can you hear me now?”
“Shh. Carry on.”

Something about the subtext encouraged me but a mistimed gulp between breaths interrupted my flow and startled, it turned into a belch. Time was, it would have passed with a laugh but the humour was no longer present and though the lack of reaction was in itself unremarkable it hit me with a jolt and I once again started to think. Trying to talk I spluttered outside of my shell and unchecked, half-formed thoughts mixed in the air with the organic waste and my lungs gave way to the great wave of guts.

It didn’t turn you on.


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