Rose & Thorn Journal - Spring 2011
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Nevine Sultan grew up in various countries of the Middle East and Asia. In her mid-teens, she returned home to Cairo, Egypt, for a while before moving to Europe and then the United States, where she and her husband currently live. Nevine’s work has appeared in The Copperfield Review and in the Notes from Underground Anthology. She blogs at Dreams, Deliriums, and Other Mind Talk.
Nevine Sultan
The instant before realization happens is the most uncertain of moments. It’s like driving down a narrow road where a hairpin bend is coming up. You wonder what’s just beyond that angle. You’d like to think there’s wide-open road, but you don’t know whether or not you should allow that thought. Because once you’ve allowed it, you can’t un-allow it.
You say you want to see me again.
We meet.
You stand to my side as the waiter holds out a chair for me. You observe the back of my neck, the tender skin ornamented with renegade wisps of black hair, its delicacy trapped by the cling of my white dress. You study the creamy flesh of my shoulders beneath the pinch of thin straps. The writer who is creating this work of fiction makes my hand brush you intimately, accidentally, as I set my handbag down. I apologize, she makes me say. You open your clasped hands in an acquiescent way. An act of decorum? The writer demands it.
We talk. Our conversation is thin ice, inch-deep. But only for moments.
I say something you find intriguing, fascinating. You give me a weighted look, a whiplash assessment of who I am. Your look does not faze me. I know who I am. I know who you are, too. I figured you out the first time I met you, before I gave myself permission to see you again, and before the writer allowed me this permission.
The moment of our first encounter, something about me possessed something you lack. But the truth is I am not so extraordinary, though this is not happening in any true world. The writer decides who we are, how we think, what we do. The writer decides how this story ends. And there are so many stories without happy endings. This could be one of them.
Cerebral, isn’t it? I ask you inside my head. But I know you will hear this communication. The writer wants it that way. And though you hear, you are distracted.
My skin shows through my sheer dress. My hands are delicate. My eyes are alive. I am tracing invisible circles on the tablecloth with the tip of my index finger. Your eyes are on my finger. Your mind is somewhere else. You are wondering if I’m wearing anything beneath my dress. You are imagining me sitting on your knees, naked, my legs wrapped around your waist, my arms encircling your neck. You are imagining me torturing you with my fingers, my lips, my tongue. You are imagining the fullness of my breasts kneading your face, and the heat of my sex rubbing against the flesh of your abdomen.
You fall in love so suddenly. Not with the person. But with who your mind envisions the person to be. You fall in love with the twist of a head, with the falling of eyes where they fall. You fall in love with fantasy. Here, love is a two-sided coin that gives with one side and takes with the other.
You watch me. You hold my eyes with yours. You challenge my eyes. I take the challenge. But I can’t hold your gaze for long. I look down suddenly, though I am quick to alter the look: defeat to mock-penitence.
You’d like to know a few things about me. You’d like to crack the ice. But the writer who’s writing this won’t allow it. It would break the spell. Ruin the fantasy. De-fict the fiction.
What was that word? You ask me.
Poetic license, I say.
This telepathy, the writer makes you say. Her fingers skip lightly across the keyboard. One word. And another. She thinks, What will this story mean to those who read it? Is there a sense in writing the story? It’s all happened before. But all stories have happened before. The writer knows this. Her fingers skip.
Do you know what a schizophrenic is? She makes you ask me. It’s when you’re one person, but you think you’re two, or three.
I smile to myself. I think, We all want to be happy, and we’ll do whatever we must to make this manifest as truth, schizophrenia or not. I’m the sadist. You’re the masochist. I dispense the lash of the whip. You receive it. We fancy ourselves happy. But these are elusive fantasies. The desire to taste forbidden fruit makes the blood rush through our veins. But social parameters bring us hurtling back to pedestrian reality.
The writer keeps us at our table.
We pretend we’re calm. We pretend we’re enjoying our evening. We order Dom Pérignon. We handle our flutes with affected delicacy. We select dishes with French names from the menu. We exchange idle chatter in suave tones. We savor the crispness of the white tablecloth at our elbows. We revel in the fragrance of flowers selected to perfume our air. We wear savoir-faire: black tuxedo, scooping décolletage. We tell ourselves this moment is beautiful. But the name of the place we’re in escapes us. We’re two anonymous people in a restaurant filled with other anonymous people who don’t exist in this world the writer is creating. Until she decides to give life to one of them.
A man swishes past you. The cold breeze in his wake traps you. In an instant, your agonized thought is relieved. In the next instant, the fantasy abandons you. You are transparent, a ghost hovering in a dream. I say something. You respond absently, as if you’re seeing me for the first time. With a confused and baffled look in your eyes, you tell me I’m beautiful. My smile enters the realm of self-conscious. We try to joke. We laugh with one another as though we have no worries.
If you tell the same lie enough times, even you start to believe it.
You say you want to dance. I let down my hair. I glide into your arms. I allow you to lift me and bring me down. I allow you to lead. We dance. The dance floor is a kaleidoscope, an illusion that looks back at us. An illusion of disorder that orders itself into an abstract arithmetic. We take measured steps. I fall back rashly. You grasp me. We are like two who are playing the trust game. I fall. You grasp. Your eyes are locked on my lips. You feel the heat from my body filling you completely. But you do not realize the truth between your arms. Instead, you are searching for an imagined truth. Yet, there is no truth more truthful than this naked, savage, elemental truth.
This frightening physicality you feel for me . . . , the writer makes me think. But you do not finish my thought. The writer suppresses your voice. My presence enters the inky darkness of your eyes. My hand seizes yours. Your breath is warm on my face as your turn to kiss me. But you hesitate, as if your lips have turned to dry flowers, as if you’re listening for the sound of clouds sprouting in the sky.
Who is he? The man you were fantasizing about? You ask me.
What man? I say.
You spoke his name.
I did?
Who is he?
His face changes every time I imagine him, I say, but only to myself.
What is it you find so fascinating about this man? You say.
I don’t reply.
You are standing on a bluff that fills your eyes with the breadth of the sky while blinding you to the cheat of the fall. Extract me from this text, this scene, this story, you mean to say to the writer. But you say nothing.
You want to tell me things. To ask me things. And I want to ask you things, too.
But.
You do not ask me, Who are you?
I do not say, I am a woman in love with the dream.
You do not tell me, Love is an incurable loneliness.
I do not say, And I am a lonely woman.
You do not ask me, What is the secret of this mute world of yours?
I say, Tell me a story.
You are the storyteller. You’ve deceived me! You want to say to the writer. But the words dissolve on your tongue.
You would like to go back to wondering what I’m wearing beneath my dress. But the writer delivers a backhand slap to your brain, blinding your eyes, your tongue, your imagination. Your mind sees a truth it can’t unsee.
Time moves like it does in padded panic rooms.
You stand on the dizzying dance floor and stare at the walls that seem to be growing taller, wider, tighter. Your eyes crumble like shattered glass. The joints of your legs settle like heavy bricks.
I stand beside you. I smile at my triumph.
Your flagrant worship of the flesh, your shameless veneration of love, weave fiction inside my head.
I write. I stitch. I pull the strings.
And tonight, I will want you, with a hunger that is beyond hunger, with an impatience that is beyond time. And I will pull a little harder, tug a little stronger. And I will say, Come. And you will come. Drowning. Gasping. Grasping for an elusive savior.
Strings
The instant before realization happens is the most uncertain of moments. It’s like driving down a narrow road where a hairpin bend is coming up. You wonder what’s just beyond that angle. You’d like to think there’s wide-open road, but you don’t know whether or not you should allow that thought. Because once you’ve allowed it, you can’t un-allow it.
You say you want to see me again.
We meet.
You stand to my side as the waiter holds out a chair for me. You observe the back of my neck, the tender skin ornamented with renegade wisps of black hair, its delicacy trapped by the cling of my white dress. You study the creamy flesh of my shoulders beneath the pinch of thin straps. The writer who is creating this work of fiction makes my hand brush you intimately, accidentally, as I set my handbag down. I apologize, she makes me say. You open your clasped hands in an acquiescent way. An act of decorum? The writer demands it.
We talk. Our conversation is thin ice, inch-deep. But only for moments.
I say something you find intriguing, fascinating. You give me a weighted look, a whiplash assessment of who I am. Your look does not faze me. I know who I am. I know who you are, too. I figured you out the first time I met you, before I gave myself permission to see you again, and before the writer allowed me this permission.
The moment of our first encounter, something about me possessed something you lack. But the truth is I am not so extraordinary, though this is not happening in any true world. The writer decides who we are, how we think, what we do. The writer decides how this story ends. And there are so many stories without happy endings. This could be one of them.
Cerebral, isn’t it? I ask you inside my head. But I know you will hear this communication. The writer wants it that way. And though you hear, you are distracted.
My skin shows through my sheer dress. My hands are delicate. My eyes are alive. I am tracing invisible circles on the tablecloth with the tip of my index finger. Your eyes are on my finger. Your mind is somewhere else. You are wondering if I’m wearing anything beneath my dress. You are imagining me sitting on your knees, naked, my legs wrapped around your waist, my arms encircling your neck. You are imagining me torturing you with my fingers, my lips, my tongue. You are imagining the fullness of my breasts kneading your face, and the heat of my sex rubbing against the flesh of your abdomen.
You fall in love so suddenly. Not with the person. But with who your mind envisions the person to be. You fall in love with the twist of a head, with the falling of eyes where they fall. You fall in love with fantasy. Here, love is a two-sided coin that gives with one side and takes with the other.
You watch me. You hold my eyes with yours. You challenge my eyes. I take the challenge. But I can’t hold your gaze for long. I look down suddenly, though I am quick to alter the look: defeat to mock-penitence.
You’d like to know a few things about me. You’d like to crack the ice. But the writer who’s writing this won’t allow it. It would break the spell. Ruin the fantasy. De-fict the fiction.
What was that word? You ask me.
Poetic license, I say.
This telepathy, the writer makes you say. Her fingers skip lightly across the keyboard. One word. And another. She thinks, What will this story mean to those who read it? Is there a sense in writing the story? It’s all happened before. But all stories have happened before. The writer knows this. Her fingers skip.
Do you know what a schizophrenic is? She makes you ask me. It’s when you’re one person, but you think you’re two, or three.
I smile to myself. I think, We all want to be happy, and we’ll do whatever we must to make this manifest as truth, schizophrenia or not. I’m the sadist. You’re the masochist. I dispense the lash of the whip. You receive it. We fancy ourselves happy. But these are elusive fantasies. The desire to taste forbidden fruit makes the blood rush through our veins. But social parameters bring us hurtling back to pedestrian reality.
The writer keeps us at our table.
We pretend we’re calm. We pretend we’re enjoying our evening. We order Dom Pérignon. We handle our flutes with affected delicacy. We select dishes with French names from the menu. We exchange idle chatter in suave tones. We savor the crispness of the white tablecloth at our elbows. We revel in the fragrance of flowers selected to perfume our air. We wear savoir-faire: black tuxedo, scooping décolletage. We tell ourselves this moment is beautiful. But the name of the place we’re in escapes us. We’re two anonymous people in a restaurant filled with other anonymous people who don’t exist in this world the writer is creating. Until she decides to give life to one of them.
A man swishes past you. The cold breeze in his wake traps you. In an instant, your agonized thought is relieved. In the next instant, the fantasy abandons you. You are transparent, a ghost hovering in a dream. I say something. You respond absently, as if you’re seeing me for the first time. With a confused and baffled look in your eyes, you tell me I’m beautiful. My smile enters the realm of self-conscious. We try to joke. We laugh with one another as though we have no worries.
If you tell the same lie enough times, even you start to believe it.
You say you want to dance. I let down my hair. I glide into your arms. I allow you to lift me and bring me down. I allow you to lead. We dance. The dance floor is a kaleidoscope, an illusion that looks back at us. An illusion of disorder that orders itself into an abstract arithmetic. We take measured steps. I fall back rashly. You grasp me. We are like two who are playing the trust game. I fall. You grasp. Your eyes are locked on my lips. You feel the heat from my body filling you completely. But you do not realize the truth between your arms. Instead, you are searching for an imagined truth. Yet, there is no truth more truthful than this naked, savage, elemental truth.
This frightening physicality you feel for me . . . , the writer makes me think. But you do not finish my thought. The writer suppresses your voice. My presence enters the inky darkness of your eyes. My hand seizes yours. Your breath is warm on my face as your turn to kiss me. But you hesitate, as if your lips have turned to dry flowers, as if you’re listening for the sound of clouds sprouting in the sky.
Who is he? The man you were fantasizing about? You ask me.
What man? I say.
You spoke his name.
I did?
Who is he?
His face changes every time I imagine him, I say, but only to myself.
What is it you find so fascinating about this man? You say.
I don’t reply.
You are standing on a bluff that fills your eyes with the breadth of the sky while blinding you to the cheat of the fall. Extract me from this text, this scene, this story, you mean to say to the writer. But you say nothing.
You want to tell me things. To ask me things. And I want to ask you things, too.
But.
You do not ask me, Who are you?
I do not say, I am a woman in love with the dream.
You do not tell me, Love is an incurable loneliness.
I do not say, And I am a lonely woman.
You do not ask me, What is the secret of this mute world of yours?
I say, Tell me a story.
You are the storyteller. You’ve deceived me! You want to say to the writer. But the words dissolve on your tongue.
You would like to go back to wondering what I’m wearing beneath my dress. But the writer delivers a backhand slap to your brain, blinding your eyes, your tongue, your imagination. Your mind sees a truth it can’t unsee.
Time moves like it does in padded panic rooms.
You stand on the dizzying dance floor and stare at the walls that seem to be growing taller, wider, tighter. Your eyes crumble like shattered glass. The joints of your legs settle like heavy bricks.
I stand beside you. I smile at my triumph.
Your flagrant worship of the flesh, your shameless veneration of love, weave fiction inside my head.
I write. I stitch. I pull the strings.
And tonight, I will want you, with a hunger that is beyond hunger, with an impatience that is beyond time. And I will pull a little harder, tug a little stronger. And I will say, Come. And you will come. Drowning. Gasping. Grasping for an elusive savior.
