evocative
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Left Bank Valentine. By Wayne H.W Wolfson.

 

 

Ah, our little place on the market street, above the café. I like how, when we took our afternoon nap, the click-clack of the dominos as the old men played.

Ravel. The times it was too hot to shut the windows and through the thin white curtains, they heard us. Silent nods of approval, later as I go down to get my coffee and write up my notes for the day.

Everything, everything is ruled by the scent. The scent of our street. Grilling meat, tobacco and Myrrh. The honeymoon scent, we called it in our secret language.

Even when everything stopped for the day, it would linger, an intangible sentry for this little part of the city.

I was doing my best work, but I wanted more. I had to, to take the place of what I was now murdering. This, this perfect moment. It was not that I was ambitious, I just knew the dead moment holes would become glaringly obvious if I did not fill them. It made you miserable. The violence of my drive or the murders?

What had I written in that card to your sister?

“Be thankful for what you have because someone may take that too.”

I knew she was too young to listen, but I thought it was too clever not to say to someone outside the context of one of my pieces.

Thoughts, a rollercoaster on its tracks of time. When we first met. It was always by accident, towards the end of the week, last call. All her drinks, pouts, gyrations and stolen kisses were somehow converted into a sort of night time faith, brought to her by hours of wings flapping in time to the blues.

I would watch until I got the signal.

Three saints upon the floor. She’s dancing. What I want, what she pretends to be, emptied glass, I follow, three saints upon the floor.

I light a cigar, I think of a girl, I want a woman. She is there, in the smoke, dancing. She is so beautiful, I have to defeat myself.

Always the same day, same style. Oh Thursday will your sweet kiss never come?

 Years later I was walking down a back street in London on a hot July. Just for a moment I got a slight hint of that scent. I had to run. I do not know to where or even why.

 



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