11:24 am - Wed, Jan 4, 2012

1 note

Purple Prose

Oh mad reason
Oh pained and woeful life
Oh morning with your sadistic light
Oh night with your endless loops of thought
Oh in between hours of tears and melancholy scrambled eggs
Oh whisper soft memories that make one’s bone’s ache
Oh shouted dreams that make them break
Oh world
Oh life
Oh lust
Oh Lolita

It started one Spring, because I suppose that is when things begin. How to make every moment of this not seem as cliche as it sounds in my head?

She was a slip of a girl who slipped into my life, my heart, my madness. Five foot small, no bigger than a thumb, certainly not. Curves her innocent eyes could never know what to do with, but I assure you I had her instruction manual from birth.

Brown hair, as a brown hare, downy, soft in the way one imagines the clouds that cherubs nap on are soft. Eyes of sea foam green, wells of sadness and joy a staid man such as myself could not even guess at. Small feet, large breasts. Clumsy in the way a girlchild is when their bodies are far too luxurious for their carefree minds to control.

But her body demanded control that I was sure only I could give. I could; I know it! I watched her at play like a man watches a fine automobile being driven by a fool. If only I had her. If only I could wrap my hands around the reins of her horse powers.

Me? I was (am) a monster. I watched her sip some pink concoction at the soda shop down the street from me. Her black-as-my-soul Mary Janes (and who is the namesake of such wretchedly attractive footware?) click clacking on the tile floor of said establishment.

Click clack went the shoes
Tick tock when the clock
Pitter patter when the heart of dear old Jack
(if he had one, but that is another debate)
And so it went

Now comes the rationalization. Are you ready, dear reader? Now is when I will explain it all away and you will forgive me. You will root for me? (Ask your Australian friends what I mean by that.) I shall be a (n anti-) hero.

This was no nymphet, I tell you. For I am no pederast. I, your noble narrator, am merely a monster, not a demon. From the greek, ephebophilia: ephebos, variously defined as “one arrived at puberty.” Once arriving one must knock thrice on the door. Philia, as it is well known and documented means monster.

Is not love the beast that howls at the heart of the world? The monster that starts wars, ends lives, kills all productivity. Love, thou sick mongrel that is at fault for bad songs and cheeky candy and whole fields of useless flowers. If love demanded wheat instead of roses think of all the mouths it could feed!

I digress from the etymological and give you the practical: At her tender age of fifteen, in some lands, she would be stoned for not yet being married. I was certainly stoned as I watched her laugh with her oh-so-good friends at the counter of the drugstore-dimestore what ever the teeny tiny boppers called it. But what was it that made my knees buckle? My hips buck? My mind, for all of its skill and all of its serious tenor, give up on being a normal man and go the path of the monster for her?

If we tickle the question with the irregularly large feather of the scientific method we see that it was the way her pigtails curled. Not curly! Waves (as of golden planes, etcetera) bound into two small fountains of burnt sienna which danced from the sides of her perfectly symmetrical noggin.

No, I apologize, it was not the piglet’s tails, but the pink skin between her white sock and her dark blue skirt. Syrup sweet as Alice in a teacup, how could one not dream of ripping pretty gauzy fabric and hunting for decadent creases with hungry lips and eager fingers and the throbbing red poker between one’s satyr legs?

But no! It was not her honeyed thighs that cursed me with this desire, but her hungry hips. Her body was not that stick flat and coltish pupal stage of woman, but some lingering and nefarious diapause. Young in the eyes of the law but wanton in the eyes of men, and certainly monsters.

She was just about bursting. Her school uniform (I hesitated to speak of it because it is too perfect, too cruel, too much) was never built for the curves she had gained while wrestling with puberty. Her bottom jutting out and making the skirt far too small. The white shirt’s buttons as tense at my fists. Poor little opalescent buttons, I empathize with their need to pop.

And who, may I ask, designed these school girl uniforms? Is there anyone so perverse? Is he or she related to this Mary Jane person?

Come closer, reader. Do you see there is a metal grate between us? We are in a wooden box (not a coffin, not yet, no matter how deserved) split in twine and you sit, black frocked, and I am a lowly sinner.

It is not the first time I had sick thoughts about a girlchild lingering in liminal steps between the playground and wombly womanhood. My eyes are thieves like no other. My eyes are on posters at Scotland Yard and the F.B.I. Wanted: For stolen glances up to and above one million. Two blue cat burglars looking up skirts and down blouses and in windows (of the world, of the soul, of the house next door.)

Briskly, brusquely, I barged by the girlchild and her merry cohorts and oh so slightly brushed against her back with my over eager hand. No harm, no foul, just making way. Still in that minute moment of miniscule contact I sucked years from her life. I reached out with the ugly inner maw of my mind and lapped at the electric essence of her.

And doth the tiny goddess did turn and her eyes were on mine for a moment and her glossy lips did curve (up, not down, I swear it on my life!) and laughter bubbled over her like a freshly popped bottle of the wine what sparkles from that place in France and I was struck dumb, dead, down.

It is to sigh.

And by chance in her turning I saw a book on her lap. The thing she had been giggling about with her motley crew of pretty petite popinjays. And it was that bible most foul. I swear it. Ladies of the jury I swear it! None other that St. Humbert’s lament on her knees, between her dainty legs, the bridge bound and steadied right over the secretest of secret place between said pink legs.

Do I have charm? I do. I know this because even though my body and mind was failing, falling, I knew to smirk and even wag a finger.

Naughty naught! Those are not words for little girl ears.

Oh but gentle reader they are. They are the whiskey rubbed on the gums to stave off colic. They are the games played in basements and the tale told on swings. I saw it all. I saw her eyes, the pride of the wicked child. I saw my chance and my opening. Humbert Humbert was sheet music and I, dear old Jack, was the pied piper.

And indeed indeed my pipe was at the ready and her pie (pêche non?) was cooling on a windowsill.

And so all my old man graces were laid out and I was set to play the part I had trained for and she had taken the bait, primed by a book, and we would dance, oh how we would dance.

And so it was.