The Great Lover by Rhys Hughes, Michael Cisco Read Free Book Online

paper flat; her sketch is only just begun, he can’t make out what it will be. He can see another, pinned down against the wind with what looks like a wooden iron; a still life involving a bundle of flowers against a dark background — the flowers are luxuriant, and a little grotesque. He notes one in particular, which has long wavering petals, yellow spotted with black like ripened bananas, and there in the shadows just left of center is her face, hidden in among the flowers, shadowed and drawn, downcast, intolerably sad.
    Some time later he sees her again. She had somehow been caught naked far off down the beach, and was running awkwardly back to the house over the uneven ground, her pale arms raised a little like wings, her hair not dishevilled at all but still pinned up neatly. She is uncanny without her clothes, like a figure in a painting. He is struck by the wind from her body, and it evokes in him a ghostly love, not for her, but for everything.
    “ I love,” he says flatly, his lips not far from the floor. The words are soaked up by the wood and deadened. “I love,” complete in the intransitive, like “I go.” He can’t hear himself say it. If he could have heard it, he would have turned himself into a cartoon again.
    She dashes into the dark house. He finds her upstairs in a shift, trying to open the window. The sash won’t rise evenly, and keeps jamming against the sill, requiring her to jostle it and pull it down again and again, trying to raise it level.
    When he fills his palms with her warm shoulders she stops slowly and sways back against him familiarly. Then she turns abruptly and flings her arms around his neck, kissing a face that is, for her, perfectly featureless and clean. This is not his body, as it crouches on the tile in the hospital, tapping away at the little tiles with letters on them; she embraces a puppet she improvised just now. He in turn possesses the puppet, without really choosing to. Now that they are alone together in this room, her intimacy draws me in like water running down the sides of a bowl to the middle.
    When she presses herself against his icy body he can tell the puppet is death at the same time, frightening but not threatening her. The puppet isn’t death it’s a harbinger of death drawn by her mortal illness, something like that. She is going to bribe him with her love, or that’s what this is turning into. She accepts his anonymous weight and freezing hands, pressing her down into the yielding mattress, and in time the walls become grainy with gathering dark and the windows have faded to pale blue smudges in the air. Her dream is agonizingly slow to fade, and her bed has become a hard tile floor under her back. There is a ring of candles, or candle flames, burning around her, and somehow a terrible smell — weird to smell something strongly in a dream. Death has cheated her, and she is at her funeral — in the morgue itself not even in a chapel — lying in her coffin, without even a single mourner in sight. She bitterly reproaches her friends in a sharp voice that simply appears around her without compelling her to move her lips. Still death’s weight freezes and immobilizes her, and still death seems to enjoy her, more and more. I am inside her and her dummy, in the overlap. Suddenly she shies away from the sensation, horribly cold and empty, spirals away in anger and disappointment toward her friends; she starts awake, fumbles for the light, and gazes woozily at her furniture, which rushes forward from the recesses of her apartment to reassure her.
    Everywhere an even radiation of pearly light direct on the gritted nerves. Unmoored, he drifts down the gallery, seeing through the windows the courtyard, the tree whose upper branches are lost in the gloom, the tall brick façades, and a confusion of colored lights and clustered reflections of lights, orange and violet. His reflection seems faceless at first, but this is the blur in his vision which is