A day in the life of an oral fixation #6
9:45 pm - She arrives at her flat and kisses the man on the cheek to say goodnight. She fumbles with her keys and stumbles into the bathroom. She urinates heavily, then washes her face and rinses her mouth out. She brushes the bottom sides, then the front, then the top sides, then the top front, then the outsides, then the insides of all her teeth. She rinses her mouth again and examines her teeth in the mirror. She dries her face roughly with a hand towel. She gets a bottle of water from the kitchen. She places her lips around the plastic spout and drinks a quarter of the bottle in one, long gulp. She feels the cold water rush through her mouth and quickly down her throat, sloshing straight into the pool of wine in her stomach.
11:15 pm - She crawls into bed with her clothes still on. She yawns audibly, exercising the muscles of her cheeks and jaw. She stretches a lanky, 40-year old arm and shuffles into the duvet. She goes to sleep and dreams a dream of mouths upon mouths. She dreams of a mouth which is not her own that babbles on excessively. She struggles to understand what it is trying to convey. She drifts in and out of the dark, but the shiny lips never leave her. She feels she’s lost something on the tip of that babbling mouth’s tongue. She stares intently and then tries to look away. She’s both horrified and attracted by this mouth. She can see nothing but this mouth’s gleaming teeth. She drifts aloft on this dream that she will never recall.
Not I, Samuel Beckett
26 March 2008 at 11:01 pm
This is really making me anxious about my forty-five year old arms.
27 March 2008 at 7:02 pm
As I said somewhere else - but probably shouldn’t have done - the thing about this six-part post is how inventive and original it is. The use of Beckett at the end is appropriate, since he also broke boundaries in what was conventional and acceptable in his particularly literary form.
[And yes, I’ll come back later and add a gratuitous mouth-related pun to lower the tone, don’t worry about that]
29 March 2008 at 7:52 pm
(Beckett’s mouth has lodged disquietingly in many psyches, like one’s first scary episode of Dr Who, or Sparks on Top of the Pops in 1974. He really is a master, isn’t he? [And so is Ionesco.])
This has been an imaginative, entertaining series. I think you would be a good writer of short stories (i.e. longer than just blog-post length).
30 March 2008 at 2:16 am
Z: Haven’t you heard, it’s not the age of the arm, it’s what you can do with it. Or something.
AUW: Thank you. I am still waiting for my gratuitous pun, if you please.
Drodbar: Thanks to you, Neil. This was definitely a short story of sorts (broken up for easy blog consumption), however, I am never sure what length anything should be.