Brief

Brief, you said, handing me the flyer as I made a beeline for the door. Keep it, you said, not feeling the need to repeat yourself now, indeed never repeating yourself. Besides, the word brief was echoing in my head already, completing your sentence as I began to search for mine. I hadn’t written a paragraph in weeks, maybe even months, let alone a short story. Had I ever written one? Of course, you said, even if it never made it onto paper. We never stop writing stories, you told me, and I nodded, as I do, even if we never really start. You’d often told me it would help - setting things down in words. Fixing the imaginary in a visual, less virtual form. Pen and paper is best, you’d said, and I’d remembered these words, when I heard about the competition and reached for a medium to transcribe my own words, my thoughts, my tale. We all contain a multitude of tales, you’d often say, and I’d think about the reasons why not more of us were artists, what blocked some of us, maybe most of us, from becoming (or remaining) storytellers. Is the shame of the human race that powerful that our innate abilities, our innermost desires and drives, become a source of embarrassment, of pain, that our tongues and ink wells dry up rather than overflowing with beauty, vitality, joy? On the wall, I point to Adam and Eve, and you nod, as you do, and for a moment we both ponder on the melancholy that could so easily, so quickly be remedied, were we to undress, to take off these fig leaves and write on them. Book leaves. Pages. Tactile memories. Truths we can touch. Feelings unleashed.

I remember the day I set down to it, a setting down to a setting down. Spring was approaching, if not arriving, but the gentle, irresistible upswing in temperature was enough of a catalyst to encourage me to slip out of my pyjamas and dive into the pool of language. It was like giving in to a temptation, something illicit about it, something deliciously frivolous. A snow day in April. Chewing gum at a funeral. It is never the shift in sunlight that catches my attention in these transitional periods, but the mutations that manifest in the shadows. Just as a poem is a collaboration between white space and black figures, the latter resting on, emerging through, spilling out of, dancing across the former. The shadow on my face was not one. Only the shape of a leaf. An image. It left a wet, black pattern on my dry, red skin. Monstera. A form reached by consensus. Common unit. A medium. A sheet of trapped light, a dark green spine cutting my nose, mouth, forehead in two. Temporary marking. I take its inscription with me into my next life.

Is the weather so important? you ask, pulling me out of my reverie. Your pen scratches as if you are scribbling. I shake my head in such a nuanced way that I could be nodding. In German they have the word Jein that means both yes and no at the same time. Surprising, Germans don’t strike me as indecisive. You nod: a sharp shake of the head (up and down). Sometimes precision and indecision are indistinguishable, one of us says.

I guess not, I say, answering a question that has long since dissipated. Ambivalence takes many forms.

I shifted to the left and the shadow in my eyes shifted right, making space for the sun. It was raining notes. A faint music was playing from somewhere. A stray trumpet. A wandering bass line. The gift of busking. Shame dissolving in the guilty pleasure of street jazz. Who opened the window? Had I left it open? You’re getting distracted, you noted with more scratching, your itchy page echoing my itchy palms. You’re right, I didn’t have to say.

Clearing my throat, I push out more words…

Pancakes sweep my nostrils. An aroma of privilege: unoccupied mornings. KitchenAid. Fresh blueberries. In spring? You interject. Frozen, I counter. The odour melts, rematerialising without the sour drama of my original vision. Inoffensive, bordering on banal. I feel relieved. Absolved. For a moment I weigh up the pros and the cons of a white lie. I flash my artistic licence and dig into the pile of fluffy, egg-white pancakes. Blueberry juice dripping down my imaginary chin. A steaming mug of golden milk to wash down the luxury. Fraudulent moustache where mine obstinately refuses to grow. No alarm clock, it’s already gone ten, eleven. I lean back, and stretch, my slippers lifting off the tiled floor, weightless for a lifetime. No gravity on this peaceful planet. A light breeze wakes me up. A kiss on the cheek. The milk looks like gold, but tastes of turmeric. Earthy, implacable.

No one else had seen the flood coming. So you say, you say. The timing was unnatural, inconsiderate. I had pulled on my battered canvas shoes for an afternoon stroll. One of life’s little joys. One of life’s little duties. My spiritual metronome oscillating between these two poles, I’d not yet made it to the corner, although I’d passed the bakery, the off licence and the e-cigarette shop, when the cloud of currency blew into my face like liquid smoke, overpowering, scarcity made tangible. Zeitgeist. My heart sought out the rainbow, as my untrained fingers scrambled to gather together, to reconcile, these airborne offerings. Twenty thousand of them, falling like pregnant snowflakes. Precious leaves. Seeds of hope, seeds of fate. Black and green. No white on there, but so much white in there. It didn’t bother me that it was unexpected. Things come that we haven’t asked for. Do we ever know what we have called, are calling forth in the world? It’s the oil that makes the world go round and round and round and who owns the oil? Who owes the world? It bothered me that it hadn’t been deserved. A quick totting up of recent good deeds. No memory of a bird shit blessing. Pang of conscience when my sums come to nothing. Welling fear of forgotten debts, misremembered obligations, repressed covenants. A little jay chirping in my lumberjack shirt pocket, you don’t deserve this, you don’t deserve this. My heart is silent. Head thumping. My whistleblower has blue and black spots. But there was still no rainbow overhead. You don’t deserve this. He sees and sings what I cannot bear, could not dare to express. The truth of my living lie, poured from a beak like liquid gold. How simple it is to strangle a bird. Snuffed. As easy as closing the throat. Apnoea.

Mine. My windfall. A dark secret locked in a possessive. Grammar’s systematic denial of material conditions. Entrenchment: a solution to hostile weather, those bad thoughts, a climate of fear. It came to be, it came to me and that’s enough. All I had to do was make a claim. A little paperwork. We fill out forms every day, don’t we? You nod: a sharp shake of the head (up and down). Jein, no one says. Are we still in Germany? Were we ever? I was doing what had to be done. What ought to be done. The public, the people, demanded it. I was following orders. Ego dog heeding their whistle. I don’t make the art, the art makes me. And then, it’s a matter of taste. Quality can’t be questioned. Or it shouldn’t. Or it can’t. Or it would have been a crime. Truly, a crime. Not to accept the reward. It was a gift. It could have easily been given to someone else. Awarded, you murmur. Awarded to someone else. It was only chance that dropped it in my hands rather than theirs. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, they say. Your pen jolts sarcastically and I draw a wry smile on your face. Or maybe the other way around? Anyway, what they don’t tell you is that all gift horses are Trojan. Getting the prize was easy enough, given, well, my attributes. But getting away with it. That takes a whole vault of time, money, leverage. Getting rid of it, on the other hand…

Sriracha makes everything go down better. Even disgust. I keep coming back to it. Chugging it down like it’s my last supper. Four bottles and a drone. For domination. For weekends. That was the beginning of the spree. Belly fed and nosiness whetted, I set my appetites on more sanctimonious indulgences.

Nothing I can’t afford. Indulge me, I am an artist. I am a winner. Deserving is a fiction. When I write, money falls from the sky.

Spin the roulette wheel of charity, pat yourself on the tailored back and keep playing. So ephemeral, this throw-away wealth, so light, it barely feels like anything - I barely feel anything - so more must go. Play on, pay on, chase the feeling of poverty. Not enough to win once, pure luck, but to really authenticate my fortune I must ogle the misfortune. Take them with me. Open their eyes. Convert them all. The alchemy of art, luck smelted in consumable despair. And they want to feel it too, when they subscribe, when they step into my life, my eyes, my pages and want to participate in this expenditure, co-conspirators. Hell is a locked bookshop, a library. But the money won’t come loose - and the strangled jay won’t die, won’t stop dying - my imaginary fingers clasped around its imaginary throat. Why waste time with words when everything is a metaphor.

Everything is blood. Black and white. I don’t deserve this.

And it’s okay if I sit this one out.

Outspent, the child in me resurrects. Another, older life puts on my hands like gloves, slips in my teeth like dentures. All valuation stops. The stock exchange is closed. The blood will wash out of my empty pockets. Empty-handed, my words are free again. The birdsong has ceased. Morning has not yet broken.

You smile without a hint of sarcasm and I know we’ve made a breakthrough. Your pen hovers, for once, and this non-gesture pulls me back into the room. A table and two chairs. An awkward silence. But it’s okay.

It has to end somehow, you offer, you just have to find one. I nod and hasten to wrap it up. Memory: brief. Lips dry, spent, I reach for an ending. A final bill. Enough change for a coffee. Instant, of course. No change for the bus. More walking, a measly penance. Steps on pavement, butts, waste, hope, waste. Home. The heating is still on, energy burning like bank notes followed by silence. Did you get all that? I ask. You nod and close the small black notepad on your lap. Ready to submit. Peace in the embers. And sleep.