inspired by seating charts (a silent act of care: saving a seat for someone)
i could make myself smaller, but i worry that creates too much space for you. take a seat. pull out this oaken windsor chair, slide into the plastic welded grooves of this bench, crawl onto the plush velvet of this chaise. if i shifted, left or right, i’d concentrate too hard on the permutations of airless contact. this is the anatomy of shoulder to elbow to fingertip. sitting in this still-life. i will puncture it with conversation, a bad joke. dig my fingers under my cushion, drum to a rhythmic pattern and stop at a hard clutch. i did not know what it would take to impale leather, but i suggest i am also capable of tiny destruction in your presence. i could claw out tufts of microfiber, baby wisps caught in the split keratin of my nails. my eyes will dart upwards at the ceiling, bloom that unspoken thing beneath that undressed feeling. hope flush, immobile. (show me love; turn around your closed fist and open your palm and let me take a look at it)
new year, first fiction!
non-goal for this year is to write more pretty bits of prose that don’t mean anything. better here, in observance of evolving style, than treasure-kept by pen and paper.