Chapter 1: Whispers and Ashes
The wings of a hairy moth, seeking solace in the warmth of her skin, beat against Claire’s eyelids. She lifts up her hand to chase them away. The night is pregnant with secrets yet to be told. She puts her fingers to her brow to wipe off the annihilating headache. Fidgeting nervously about, she feels another body spread out on the crumpled sheets in the limp surrender of after love. The sweat of climax cooled off. All that stays are two bodies dry as Sahara sand. She swallows hard. She is choking with thirst. She rolls to the edge of bed. She reaches after the Evian water perched precariously on the edge of bed. It tumbles, spilling its contents on the sheets and she realizes she must find the strength to rise. No hope to get help from Marcel. His eyes are turned into his own darkness. His tongue is glued to his cracked lips in an aftermath of kissing. She touches tentatively his palm stretched out in search of her, the playmate of their last night’s rapture. She must get rid of him. His love, fragile as glass, only reveals its true forth in pursuit of an elusive dream. Marcel’s love is that kind of love whose strength is revealed in its full only after it had stopped burning and you can figure out its greatness by the amount of its ashes left behind.
She peels Marcel off her body and slowly, one move after another, creeps out of bed and puts on her clothes scattered about the carpet. She goes to the sink, fills a glass and swallows the lukewarm water, ravenous for a strong black coffee. She opens the door into the corridor empty of a living soul. Her fellow writers are sitting at their desks trying to build a meaningful sentence out of vacuous words.
“We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have, our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” She should have been warned by Henry James’s “Middle Years”. Instead she fell head over heels into her cranky affair with words, akin to a doomed romance with a man of fatal allure. Quickening her pace, she follows the beckoning aroma of coffee, a lifeline in the darkness of creation.
