kamera obscura

saskiya reads a lot of nabokov. she tells anyone who asks that she has read his entire oeuvre. proudly announces her favorite: 'laughter in the dark.' privately, she imagines herself to be a version of the villainness, margot. she is flagrantly intemperate, and often petulant. sometimes she feels as though she is still a child, feels small within her skin; sometimes it is the opposite, she feels older than her twenty-odd years, expired somewhere inside of herself. this is a recent development, this secondary feeling, the creep of age. she becomes vain quickly, checking the mirror every morning, arranging herself as best she can. other days passion and impatience win out and she skips the reflection of herself entirely. heedlessly into the world she flies, often harried, biting her lower lip during any conversation with an acquaintance. on one of these days, as winter turns to grayish puddle and the sun strives through the thick blots of cloud, she is scarved and ambivalent, coffee quickening her towards the bookstore. she takes the same route she always does, secretly hoping she won't see henry on his way to or from the butchery he works at during the week. sometimes she passes there, stealing a glance through the front window. she can see him, aproned in white, sleeves rolled, hair hanging over his forehead. he wields a gargantuan cleaver, up and down, up and down. thrills run through her at the sight, but she allows herself no more than a scant minute, departing before he recognizes her looking.

the bookstore affords her a measure of relaxation. the man behind the counter resides in a haze of smoke, constantly perusing some paperback whose cover is hidden. he doesn't even look up when she enters, and this she's glad of. she slips quickly to the right and through the skinny passageways to the place she knows as Fiction, running her hands idly along the spines. she is immediate and ruthless with her judgement, which spines she plucks out - it's about the colors, which one looks riper, to her. like picking fruit or vegetable. sometimes the brighter the color, the more rotten the prose inside. she makes a face and returns it to its position, wriggling it back among all the others. such shifts of temperament come easily to her. after the judgemental phase passes, she feels maternal, holding such books as a tattered copy of Ibsen, or a Tolstoy, lovingly scarred with marginalia. these she wants to give a home on her shelf, already imagines where they'll fit in the ranks. she hardly ever buys hardcover. she has nothing in particular in mind today, no one book she seeks to acquire, and so lets her unconscious mind take control. she wanders back and forth in the aisle, roving over the selection. her eyes move slowly, then quickly, and fall on a title: HENRY, on a dusty, lined old spine the color of moss. the author's name is unreadable, smallish in print-size. her heart trips over itself and grabs for a hold on her breath. she grasps it and pulls it out. the front of it reads, in plain black font: "GHOST OF HAPPINESS" and the author, below, in italics; "JUNE HENRY." she smirks and replaces it, perhaps a bit more violently than she should have.

she leaves the bookstore a half-hour later, tucked under her arm a book of poetry by someone she has never heard of and The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares. her head is clear, filled with effervescence. she rides high on the feeling, savoring it, lighting a cigarette as she walks down the street. she lets her free arm swing to and from, allows the wind to rake its invisible fingers through her hair. she takes a different route home, having to hurry across a crosswalk just as the light changed. she smiled and waves at the driver who was about to lay on his horn - until he sees her face and then grumpily waves her on. she feels no guilt, could care less about traffic. her thoughts unravel to henry at his job, the gleam of the cleaver and the glint of sweat on his brow. the creases in his collared shirt, sleeves rolled up, just-so, to the elbow. he is focused, but doesn't appear at all angry or irritated as some people do - he seems in his element, at peace, a supreme machinist of his own body, as ungainly and lanky as it was. he was the kind of person who would fold his pants after having taken them off. would lay them neatly on a chair. fold his shirt the same way, lay it in a pile on top of the folded pants. watching him do it from her side of the bed, she ground her teeth & wished she could fold him like he folded his shirt, fold him and put him in a drawer. she imagines she can, imagines he's really just a piece of paper. she folds him into origami. his blinking, bemused eye, on the side of a swan. tugs his tailfeathers gently and sees his neck curve.

she blinks, shakes her head, realizes that she has lost herself in her reverie, quite literally, having walked all this way without realizing where she'd been walking. she was somehow by the water, at the foot of the hill, by the wharves. their stench is what shook her, that, and the bleat of the boats in the harbor. she stops suddenly, on the corner of the end of the street, and stares at the buildings. there are further roads, all leading down to the edge of the docks, crammed against one another, seeming to hold each other up with their respective collapse. someday there will come a giant freighter ship whose horn shakes them all down to dust and rubble, of this she is sure. she remembers a bar down here, something divey and of ill-repute. she took henry there. she observed him as they sat side by side at the bar, the radio crackling out the "top songs of the 80s, 90s and today" while the seagulls cartwheeled and shrieked gleefully outside. it had been a gloomy, wet day, and the damp floorboards seemed to heave as they walked to the bar. the bartender stared salaciously at saskiya, asking crude questions and lounging in front of them, pretending to polish the glasses with a filthy rag. a cigarette hung out of his mouth in defiance of every state law. saskiya asked if she could smoke. found herself flirting with him. henry fumbled to light her cigarette, but the bartender was faster, flicking a dented Zippo marked with an Ace of Spades. saskiya smiled and breathed out. his name had been Gerry, short for Gerald. henry heard the rumbling amusement of the fisher-folk around, clad in jaundiced slickers and squeaky boots. saskiya noted the discomfort clouding his eyes, and felt satisfied and guilty simultaneously. when they left, neither spoke. they walked, separated from each other. eventually, turning to cross the road, she violently seized his hand and walked intentionally faster, as if daring him to keep up. he did, but still didn't speak. it was this way the whole way up the hill and into her apartment, where they fell onto her bed and made savage love to each other, his clothes falling in a heap on the floor. she noted this. her hips pistoned even faster upon seeing him in such a state of disrepair, one sock barely clinging to his foot, the other in defeat next to the rumple of his pants. his shirt, half-on and half off. hearing a seam rip in the armpit, she moaned out of sheer bliss.

she stared at the wharves for a dismal moment, watching the trail of gray smoke escape upward from a stove somewhere, then turned on a heel, dismissively, hiking back up the way she'd come. the notion of home was far from her mind. she had nowhere to go and nowhere to be. she flirted with the idea of sitting in the park at the foot of her hill and sketching the easterly ocean. the islands in the bay. the white sails against the slate sky. the one-dimensional joggers and their one-dimensional dogs on the pathway around the park. she knew eventually she'd just start drawing him, starting with an eye, a black, hollowed-out circle with her pencil, vicious motions, as if flaying the paper with her instrument. it would become his face. he would look sad. he would look concerned, but for something beyond her, through her. as though something were falling down behind her and she lay in anguish, dying, before it. as though he were more afraid for the occupants of the falling tower, though she lay bleeding before him. knowing this, she altered direction yet again, and found a pub she'd never been to. entered, sat, and drank whisky for the next hour, let it mull her thoughts and numb her brain. one turned into two turned into three. before she left, the sun was setting. she had distilled herself into mumbling sadness, and staggered off home. she knew henry would ring her soon. she peeled off a layer, half of another, and fell face-first into the bed, the books she'd bought fallen messily on their pages on the floor.