Occasional Random Paragraphs (open, feel free to insert your own randomness)

[qerasija]

Chaconne
Partita for Violin No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004
Johann Sebastian Bach

Eyes closed, bow arm rocking, the wood of the violin vibrates against my shoulder. The movements on the fingerboard are muscle memory. Every part of me knows this music. It is in my bones.

I have been working on the chaconne since I was eight. It is the purest music I know. There are twenty-nine variations on a four measure bass: fifteen in D minor, then nine in D major, then five more in D minor. The music fits on one stave. Much of the bass is left implied, but it is the foundation on which one builds. It is always there.

The arpeggios two-thirds of the way through are at the upper reach of my technique. They are meant to be light and airy, elemental and weightless. To shape them properly requires the utmost effort. I can do it. Sometimes. But then, once I have given everything there, how to play what's left? One manages only because one must.

My sense of Bach's architecture has advanced markedly during the last months. I play the violin because I am lonely.

 

[save_marla]

From a wacky Hallmark card I gave my boyfriend

Outside:

When our story is told,

and it will be told

in song and fable and interpretive dance

and puppet show, people will weep with joy

and, through sobs, say,

"Today we have witnessed love.

How can our lives not be bettered by this?"


Inside:

Okay, the puppet show response

may not be so strong.

People may not be ready for puppets.


This card was absolutely meant for me to give to the man I love. Awww...schmoopy....​

 

[Maid of Marvels]

Dominic Galluccio stood over the stove cooking ground round; he'd been awake since four o'clock, tending the new cuttings in the greenhouses. Jenny, his wife of forty eight years, was taking her lunch break also, though she would eat hers in the small room set aside for such things at her place of business. A seamstress of sorts, she had spent the last fifteen years in front of a sewing machine assembling cosmetic bags, garment holders and other accoutrements that were intended to save space in households and hold things for people who traveled.

Sitting down at the expandable tin-top table that was the centerpiece of the kitchen, and the Galluccio house, Dominic poured red wine from a gallon jug into a thick, footed Sau-Sea shrimp cocktail glass that was, he smiled, as were many things in their home, recycled by his wife for other uses. (Sometimes he used one that had originally held Kraft Pimento Spread.) A sliced tomato, some scallions from the last of the outdoor garden and a thick slice of fresh bread from Spaziani's Bakery served as further accompaniments to his meal. It wasn't fancy, but neither was he.

He listened to the radio while he ate; local news, some talk and music droning quietly in the background. They never turned it off. It was their friend in the corner, as it had always been. Finished with his meal, Dominic drained his glass and set it aside before washing the frying pan and his plate.

Putting on his gray button-down sweater, Dominic placed his hat on his head and went out onto the front porch where he'd sit in his rocker and smoke a pipe before walking the short distance back to the greenhouses. Jenny would be waiting for him to pick her up at four. The Galluccios were creatures of habit and neither of them would have it any other way.

 

[qerasija]

First Memories of Waking

A half-pulled shade on the window. A slat of sunlight and the floating of dust-motes. The shape of her hand ill-defined, its borders fuzzy in the sudden brilliance. The blinking away of sleep. Fingers. Her cunt.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

Alone

For months Sophia wandered alone in a city meant for lovers, staying in a quiet little pension on the outskirts of the city proper. She visited all the sights -- from the Arc de Triomphe to the Champs Elysees. She spent a day at the Louvre. An afternoon at the Chateau de Versailles. She ate dinner at Altitude 95 in the Eiffel Tower. Went to the Trocadéro. Cruised the Seine. All the things she and Jeff had talked about doing... together.

This evening, Sophia sat at a table for one at the Moulin Rouge. She'd barely tasted the Foie Gras or the braised Angler Fish "Dugléré" and the blood orange mousse might as well have been Jell-O with Cool Whip for all the enjoyment it gave her. In fact, everything about Paris was decidedly lackluster. Hype. Propaganda and story book nonsense.

Completely disillusioned, she gestured for the garçon and asked for her bill. He immediately became patronizing, asking what had displeased her and reminding her that the show would begin soon. She nodded and made some small talk to assure him that it was just jet lag, which he seemed to accept with an almost theatrical sigh of relief.

Leaving a tip, she made her way out of the restaurant, stopping to ask the maître d'hôtel, "Où puis-je prendre un taxi?"

The dignified looking gentleman surprised her by opening the door and placing two fingers in his mouth to whistle shrilly. "Là," he said with a grin as a cab rounded the corner. She thanked him and climbed in, giving the address of her pension.

She had made a mistake thinking she could do this alone. A big one. And she hoped it wasn't too late to fix it.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

Grianne

The rain has finally stopped in the wee hours before the dawn. Taking my basket, I wander into the woods to gather plants and roots. Untroubled by sounds, save for the trills of birds calling out their welcome, I return their greeting joyously.

Not being long in Ballinshruane, I am unfamiliar with the paths I follow, but that does not trouble me. I revel in the serenity and solitude that I find here. Humming softly to myself, I stoop to pick this plant and bend to dig for that root, comfortable with my own company.

As I move deeper into the woods, the sun begins to filter through the canopy of branches above, creating an otherworldly aura around me. Moving along as if in a dream, I take a step that finds me falling, falling... Goddess help me. It must be a pit trap, I think, as I hear the snapping of a bone and drift off into nothingness.

 

[qerasija]

Sleep

The Sleepers (1866)
Gustave Courbet (b. 1819, d. 1877)
Oil on canvas, 53" x 78 1/4"
Musée du Petit Palais, Paris

The vase on the shelf is soft paste porcelain, eighteenth century, from Sèvres. The bauble on the bed is gold, a family heirloom that her late husband presented her on the occasion of their wedding. The pearls on the bed are from Ceylon. They are rough to the touch and also smooth. She finds it pleasurable to run them through her fingers. On the nightstand is an expensive perfume from Arabia, an almost empty flask of wine from the provinces, dregs in the cup (Milanese). The tapestry behind on the wall is two hundred years old.

These are the clockwise details one might notice on a second or third viewing.

At a glance, one observes the tangle of limbs, and imagines the comfortable pressure of a lover's thigh, calf hooked over the hip, the recumbent arms. Perhaps you have slept on a cushion of shoulder? Perhaps you have felt the breath on your breasts, the suspiration soft as mercy, and smiled, grateful though unaware? It is a well contented slumber, this sleep of dreams.

 

[qerasija]

Dancer

Three Ballet Dancers, One with a Dark Crimson Waist (1899)
Edgar Degas (b. 1834, d. 1917)
23 1/4 x 19 1/4 in
Pastel on Paper
Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania
(Photograph by Charalambos Amvrosiou)

It is the left arm one notices first, and then the back, its broad musculature, the way her shoulder blades ripple. The light and shadows endow them with such exquisite definition. The eyes must then make a choice: to follow the trajectory of her right arm and the curve of the costume down the waist and back up the front, or instead to scale her naked shoulder and ascend.

I always step upward.

There is something about her face, which is seen from behind in quarter profile, something bracing and undefinably sexy about how her head tilts up, the point of the nose, ear and eye. I can't decide whether she is smiling.

I like what she's doing with her hair.

 

[qerasija]

Games Lovers Play (Part I)

She is careful to wrap socks around my wrists and ankles before she affixes the cuffs. The bonds are tight, but they do not restrict circulation or cut into the skin.

Her fingers extract my shirt from my shorts. Instead of unbuttoning, she uses the carving knife to slice through, from bottom to top. Her lips kiss my chest. The tongue circles my nipples. She works down to my stomach.

'Don't move,' she says, bending over my thighs.

Very carefully, the knife slits the inner seams of my shorts along the leg holes. She slips the blade through. The steel is cold. She presses the flat of it against my balls, then manoeuvres the tip out the other leg hole, and cuts through the shorts so that I am left with a skirt.

'I like you this way,' she says.

Through the fabric of what's left of the shorts, she presses her lips against the hard cylinder of my penis. The air is moist and warm. It sets me to shivering.

She straightens and places the knife on my chest. She sits on the brown easy chair and leans back, pulling out the leg rest. Switching on the reading lamp, she opens her book.

 

[Lady_Mornington]

"Do not tell me about the interests of the Service, sir" I replied sharply "Do not presume us to be so countrybred that we know nothing of affairs. My brother is only yesterday returned from the Continent, where he might have been killed on the field at Waterloo. Where you at Waterloo, sir?"

 

[qerasija]

The Hundred Days

'How far is St. Helena from the field of Waterloo?'
A near way -- a clear way -- the ship will take you soon.
from 'A St. Helena Lullaby'
Rudyard Kipling

For one hundred days, I was alive again. I conquered vast geographies. The hills of her breasts. The flat plain of her belly. The terrain of her thighs, low ground from which I attacked. The streams I followed led to the river delta. I laid long siege in that valley. The armies of my hands flanked her on either side. Fingers held the woods above. Lips seized the gates. Tongue shattered the dam. The land quaked when the levees burst.

I could not hold my triumphs. The rain, other hands, her desire for freedom conspired against me. I was unlucky. I was outmanoeuvred and badly beaten.

Exile. I live in exile now.

 

[wrytersyren]

.....

 

[qerasija]

Symmetry

The Satyr and the Nymph
Agostino Caracci (b. 1557, d. 1602), based on Marcantonio Raimondi (b. c. 1480, d. c. 1534), from I Modi.

It was not often that a nymph kindly offered. She had not said anything, but she did not need to. She took his hand and led him to a clear space in the woods.

He took his phallus and led her to a clear space in the woods. He had not said anything, but he did not need to. It was not often that a satyr kindly offered.

 

[slippedhalo]

Ayna knows resistance could bring swift punishment. Her mind whirls, trying to think of an honerable action to get her out of this mess and yet leave her unscathed by humans or her people. She could think of none, and it was getting harder and harder to think anyways, the way this human was touching her, bringing more blood to her pulsating, wet, sex than to her brain as she began to feel more pleasure and excitement from his touch than pain, even the danger of being treated as a slave was somehow a delicious enticement in the moment and Ayna didn't resist but instead gave in to her carnal impulses and her well-trained desire to please a man. She'd always thought the desire was to please a Havarnian man but apparently any man who had enough power to command her would do. She wanted nothing more than to feel this human's touch and to make him smile her way. It was decided. She would obey.

He'd found her secret shame. The moisture she'd formed during her spanking and she blushed and also shivered with the sensitized flesh caressed as he found it with his fingers, " You're so wet." he wispered huskily into her ear. " Do you understand all of your rules?" he asks her as he flicks his finger over her swollen clit and sqweezes her left breast tightly in his left hand.

Ayna nods mutely, afraid to make a sound for fear that nothing would come out but a grunt or growl as she felt so very primal at this moment. Finally, finding her tongue she hisses huskily, "Yes."

 

[qerasija]

Café Momus Revisited

In the café, he sits by the window. The light of the city streams behind him. The air is chill, inside and out.

He is unable to concentrate. The blare of the speakers is too much.

His eyes wander the room. They loiter past the girl at the counter with the neon hair and the stud in her nose. They skip past the two foreign men in the corner talking excitedly, gesturing. They detour around the husband and wife who attempt to coax their screaming child into silence. They settle on the girl with the closed laptop on the table, a half-finished mug of the brew of the day to one side, and on the other the usual accoutrements, headphones, iPod, mobile phone. Her folded arms cushion her head on the edge of the table. Shoulders rise and sink in the tempo of deep breathing. She is, incredibly, napping in this din.

The door of the restroom several paces behind her creaks open. The girl sits. She tilts her head and gives a feline yawn. Eyes meet. She smiles at him as he starts to pack.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

After winning a hare charm at the fair...

"Fertility symbol indeed," I murmur, with a quick glance at the sky. The west is streaked with pink and lavender ribbons, and I can't help but think of how the sky behind those ribbons resembles the color of her pale blue-white skin.

Picturing her with those ribbons capturing her delicate wrists and her shapely ankles, skyclad but for those streamers, I tighten my grip on her waist, hastening her on to our destination for this night. Andraste has smiled upon us and we must honor Her with proper gratitudes for the blessings we've been given. This is what I whisper in Eadon's shell-like ear as we hurry to race against nightfall.

 

[qerasija]

Dichotomy

Sometimes I think the best part of an orgasm is what comes after, when the sheen of sweat over my skin evaporates into the cool air of the night, and I gasp like old wood creaking.

Sometimes I think the worst part of an orgasm is what comes after, because there is no more to give and no more to get, for I am spent and spent, and so horribly alone.

 

[qerasija]

Madeleine

The ice cube clattered in the bottom of the empty glass. She refilled it halfway. Two halves add to one, she knew. She drank more by halves than by wholes. It wasn't good for her. Still, she couldn't stop. The catch of memory was too strong.

The taste of cognac is asperous, potent even when watered and cooled by the melting ice. Much later in the night, when neither watered nor cooled, the drink is never so strong as to drown the memory of the other tastes still heady on her tongue.

 

[qerasija]

Elle dit « au revoir »

There are things that one sees that one should not notice. There are public gestures that are most of all private. To observe is also to intrude.

Two women are holding each other. A hand of the one clutches the other's so tight the skin changes colour. People move about them, shuffling through the arcades of metal detectors and X-ray machines. Those far ahead are dimly visible. They walk or amble or race to the gates. They sit in the belly of roaring steel, those birds of metal, the engines of our world.

The embrace is like a nighttime photograph of the Champs-Élysées. The women are immobile, solid and present, like the Arc de Triomphe in the foreground. Cars travel past, their headlights insubstantial ribbons of light. The kiss is the fulcrum on which this world balances. My eyes cannot turn away.

I have been the woman who has said goodbye. I have been the woman who has left. Now I am the one who watches.

There is also a fourth woman: the woman that I kissed at the airport, the irretrievable rose of a summer that is gone.

 

[qerasija]

On Language

The best way to learn a language is to fall in love. Summers in Italy with my uncle, afternoons by the lake with friends, nights with strangers, dark nights brief as my immortality that initiated me to arts of lust, and then the mist of morning, which renewed me, the thick fog covering the Apennines, when I would sneak back into my bedroom by means of the plane tree in the back garden, the transparent fiction that I had stayed the night observed by all who knew better, but who had, in their time, been young. During my gap year, I fell in love with India, and with a girl who taught me how to throw on a sari, that skin tastes the same whatever the colour, the many uses of sandalwood, and a smattering of Hindi. A classmate from Leeds gave me the unlikely combination of her parents' Norwegian and Farsi. We would quote Shakespeare and Dante to each other, and twice a week after evensong, we played Beethoven in the practice rooms at college, rooms with hard floors and soundproof walls. Paris, a city that for a year I called my home, taught me the French that I never learned at school. Je t'aime, I would whisper at sunrise to the girl who lay beside me, and sometimes she whispered it back. The last year or so, I have been learning Chinese.

 

[qerasija]

Glossolalia

Certain sounds, I have discovered, are native to every language. Though they trip ineloquently from the tongue, these are my favourites.

 

[RockYourWorld]

Beware those that disguise self interest as concern for higher principles.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

MY RESUME by Penny Louffer; RN, MSN, ICQ, AOL

OBJECTIVE
Yes, I'm very open minded.

THEORETICAL ORIENTATION
11th Grade: "The Wizard of Oz" (Scarecrow - I can still remember all the words to 'If I Only Had a Brain'.)

12th Grade: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (The Wall - They wanted me to just play the 'hole' but I couldn't find my motivation.)

EDUCATION AND CREDENTIALS
I finally graduated last year!! I only stayed back three times in High School. The Principal, Mrs. Teasdale, actually had tears in her eyes.

Umm... I don't have any credentials. Visa said I needed a job to get one

EMPLOYMENT
Well, I used to take care of my neighbor's pets when they went away for the weekend, but one time the dog was chasing the hamster and they knocked the fishbowl over. It took me over an hour to find Goldie. She didn't make it, but I didn't want them to know so I duct taped her to a straw and pushed the straw in the gravel so it would look like she was swimming. I still don't know how they figured it out. I had to find a new job.

I used to babysit for Mrs. Peterson's little boy, Joe. She got mad at me. I only wanted to see if someone could really get their tongue stuck to something frozen like in that movie? You know the one. "A Christmas Story". (By the way, it DOES work.)

PUBLICATIONS
I like Cosmo a lot. I read a book once. It was "The Illustrated Classic Little Women".

PRESENTATIONS
Mostly Christmas and my birthday, but I LOVE presents.

SCOPE OF PRACTICE
No. I actually prefer Lavoris.

POSITION DESIRED
Oooh... From the rear, please.

AVAILABILITY
No. I'm not dating anyone right now. Why?

P.S. Hey, this was pretty easy. Do I get the job?

 

[MelancholyBaby]

Maid, that is so cute!!! It had me giggling over here, thanks for sharing!!

The dull ache in the hands is a necessary sacrifice to the gods of music. The blessing they bestow is a priceless gift that I would sacrifice much more for. The ability of my fingers to extract from a stationary object a dynamic and expressive form of art is one of the greatest joys imaginable. I have the power, the ability to use my instrument to form the exact, precise, and detached melodies of Bach; I can mimic the harpischord. I can equally evoke the passion and haunting melodies of Beethoven. It is my pleasure to play Debussy, a cakewalk a playground for the fingers. Equally as delightful the Gershwin preludes, especially the lazy number two. I have not felt the ache in such a long time. I must do more, make more sacrifices to be worthy of the blessings. I am lucky the gods are there to bless me.

 

[qerasija]

Sonata

Sonata in F sharp minor, op. 11
Robert Schumann

1. Introduzione: Un poco Adagio
2. Allegro vivace
3. Aria
4. Scherzo e Intermezzo: Allegrissimo
5. Finale: Allegro un poco maestoso

The music is an offering. The variations on her theme are a love poem from composer to composer, genius to muse.

I play it for you. I play it in your absence.

The music evokes your presence in my solitude. The transparent textures of the introduction, that achingly beautiful melody, summons one achingly beautiful memory, and then others. Schumann's fandango has two beats per bar instead of the three beats of a real fandango, but the music spins like Spanish dancers, or we two in bed in late hours of evening. The aria. That haunting melody again. Such anamnesis! The summer holiday in Algeciras, the days stretched out like a hopeful future. Warm nights and the serene sea. The scherzo leaves me breathless and bewildered, as I so often was. The heart palpitates as the fingers fly. The intermezzo. Alla burla, ma pomposa, Schumann says, and I try.

The finale. I can't play the finale.

It is too much.