She sits content, reading.
Head slumped on open palm, elbow on arm rest, he smokes, fumes in fact.
She looks up, uncrosses her legs, resting the newspaper on her lap.
He has hand in pocket, cigarette on lips and gazes through the window. As if missing the faculty of direct speech, he adopts a posture that screams, boldly, in black, block capitals:
Her cold plate of revenge will best be served with crème fraiche on a crisp bed of comeuppance. We wait...
A black stain on the monochrome set that circumscribes her view, she sobs, belly down, elbows support head, hands hold back tears. Trinkets of material success provide the backdrop to a private carnival of despair. She is a broken wreck of a woman and will probably never find love again, life being a one-off, a handful of snapshots that maps a future narrative anyone idiot can read.
She switches pants for floral dress, heels, handbag; her stroll, confident. He follows; cravat, obedient pocket handkerchief, and cigarette barely on bottom lip. He stoops to submit to the inevitable triumph of the will over treads and brows long beaten down.
The spirit of the zeitgeist appears as a ghost on the dance floor, but he is immune.
His ex-domestic serf makes a stylish return to the narrative. Still in trademark black dress and pearls, she holds court in a fashionable, textured bob, revealing a rejuvenated, re-energized and liberated joie de vivre; a woman as content to sit and read as she is to dance and live.
Head slumped on open palm, elbow on arm rest, he smokes, fumes in fact.
She looks up, uncrosses her legs, resting the newspaper on her lap.
He has hand in pocket, cigarette on lips and gazes through the window. As if missing the faculty of direct speech, he adopts a posture that screams, boldly, in black, block capitals:
I AM TRAPPED HERE. HELP ME!
She resumes her reading. Her left pupil askance, her regard towards the hallway where he stands in front of the mirror, cigarette still in mouth, his overcoat draped over his left arm, much in the manner of a silver service waiter drawn by a famed French cartoonist.
He straightens his cravat, and passes into a space that offers release from the confinement of marriage.
She stays at home.
Cigarette on lips, left hand in pocket and, despite the void at the centre of his paper-thin existence, content, he shakes hands with the barman, whose dexterity is such that as he clasps the firm right-hand grip of the newcomer, his left reaches for a bottle of something French and pricey from which to pour a long tall cool drink, as Quelle surprise! a long tall cool blonde, totally at ease with her role in a middle of life patriarchal fantasy, moves purposefully downstairs in anticipation of her improbable hook-up with the dapper pre-morbidly obese sophisticate whose point of view predominates.
None of the assembled are rendered conscious of their status as bit-part players, on a swinging dance floor of limited scope, on p.145 of Doff, Jones and Mitchell's Meanings Into Words (Upper-intermediate). Despite their Westernized appearance, over-the-collar-length haircuts and glamorous attire, they display the rigid co-ordination of a North Korean choreography troupe - as if stick figures who lack actuality.
Nevertheless, love blossoms. The middle-aged monsieur encounters a lightning strike of such intensity that the young woman with the longest hair, the shapeliest form, and the shortest dress succumbs to his hidden charms and decides to pass across to the next frame to do le flirting.
He clutches his glass and smirks the smirk of a man whose pussycat has acquired cream, at great expense to his soul.
Then, the secretive phone calls start.
Swivel-eyed, hands clasped to chest, she and her string of pearls are no longer part of his story.
A single tear on her cheek in picture 8 is interminable. He looks like a man who is genuinely sorry he has regained his mojo, but you know how it is, ma cherie.
He straightens his cravat, and passes into a space that offers release from the confinement of marriage.
She stays at home.
Cigarette on lips, left hand in pocket and, despite the void at the centre of his paper-thin existence, content, he shakes hands with the barman, whose dexterity is such that as he clasps the firm right-hand grip of the newcomer, his left reaches for a bottle of something French and pricey from which to pour a long tall cool drink, as Quelle surprise! a long tall cool blonde, totally at ease with her role in a middle of life patriarchal fantasy, moves purposefully downstairs in anticipation of her improbable hook-up with the dapper pre-morbidly obese sophisticate whose point of view predominates.
None of the assembled are rendered conscious of their status as bit-part players, on a swinging dance floor of limited scope, on p.145 of Doff, Jones and Mitchell's Meanings Into Words (Upper-intermediate). Despite their Westernized appearance, over-the-collar-length haircuts and glamorous attire, they display the rigid co-ordination of a North Korean choreography troupe - as if stick figures who lack actuality.
Nevertheless, love blossoms. The middle-aged monsieur encounters a lightning strike of such intensity that the young woman with the longest hair, the shapeliest form, and the shortest dress succumbs to his hidden charms and decides to pass across to the next frame to do le flirting.
He clutches his glass and smirks the smirk of a man whose pussycat has acquired cream, at great expense to his soul.
Then, the secretive phone calls start.
Swivel-eyed, hands clasped to chest, she and her string of pearls are no longer part of his story.
A single tear on her cheek in picture 8 is interminable. He looks like a man who is genuinely sorry he has regained his mojo, but you know how it is, ma cherie.
Her cold plate of revenge will best be served with crème fraiche on a crisp bed of comeuppance. We wait...
There is a little arrow that points the way forward.
A black stain on the monochrome set that circumscribes her view, she sobs, belly down, elbows support head, hands hold back tears. Trinkets of material success provide the backdrop to a private carnival of despair. She is a broken wreck of a woman and will probably never find love again, life being a one-off, a handful of snapshots that maps a future narrative anyone idiot can read.
Bound to its random operations, chance is taken personally and mistaken for destiny.
Her life mate is to be slipped off the page, all his worldly possessions re-imagined as two box suitcases. Over his arm a trench coat, as worn by secret state officials in greys, browns and light beiges that, since her world lacks colour and variety, she can know in name only. Woe is her!
Nobody in her situation would ever be expected to sit the Ishihara test.
Aside from the leg and the three-fingered hand of a comrade, the only worker to feature in the entire composition takes on bodily form around a door frame. He carries an undisclosed past rooted in manual labour that points to further hair loss and nondescript furniture, cheaply fabricated in Stasi-run East German prisons, but re-branded as Nordic noir.
The young, attractive dancing partner from the nightclub wraps herself around the upper middle class gent's neck like a bike-lock...
In merely the twitch of a false eyelash, the conspicuous consumption of contentment congeals into ennui on her side of a sofa that she once lusted over. She sits, back towards him, an upside down squashed capital S.
In a scene that instils deja vu, she wears the trousers, shefumes, and distracted by what might lie beyond the black and white rectangle that passes for a window on the real world, she smokes.
Aside from the leg and the three-fingered hand of a comrade, the only worker to feature in the entire composition takes on bodily form around a door frame. He carries an undisclosed past rooted in manual labour that points to further hair loss and nondescript furniture, cheaply fabricated in Stasi-run East German prisons, but re-branded as Nordic noir.
The young, attractive dancing partner from the nightclub wraps herself around the upper middle class gent's neck like a bike-lock...
In merely the twitch of a false eyelash, the conspicuous consumption of contentment congeals into ennui on her side of a sofa that she once lusted over. She sits, back towards him, an upside down squashed capital S.
In a scene that instils deja vu, she wears the trousers, shefumes, and distracted by what might lie beyond the black and white rectangle that passes for a window on the real world, she smokes.
She switches pants for floral dress, heels, handbag; her stroll, confident. He follows; cravat, obedient pocket handkerchief, and cigarette barely on bottom lip. He stoops to submit to the inevitable triumph of the will over treads and brows long beaten down.
The spirit of the zeitgeist appears as a ghost on the dance floor, but he is immune.
His ex-domestic serf makes a stylish return to the narrative. Still in trademark black dress and pearls, she holds court in a fashionable, textured bob, revealing a rejuvenated, re-energized and liberated joie de vivre; a woman as content to sit and read as she is to dance and live.
Who would have thought it? Least of all her, bereft of synapses and interiority as she is.
It ends as it starts: desire thwarted, unrewarded, eternal flame of tobacco on lips he can never smack, puffing a cigarette he can never taste; another of many distractions from his living hell as a 2.45 cm-high pencil sketch of a man, waiting for the turn of the page.
Page 148 obliterates all.
Le fin.
It ends as it starts: desire thwarted, unrewarded, eternal flame of tobacco on lips he can never smack, puffing a cigarette he can never taste; another of many distractions from his living hell as a 2.45 cm-high pencil sketch of a man, waiting for the turn of the page.
Page 148 obliterates all.
Le fin.
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