My mental circus, inside and out.

chocolate

She cast off in a direction that seemed familiar, but as soon as she was out of sight of Wickham Hall, she lost her compass.  Small, narrow streets curved around in unexpected directions, the buildings had no identifying features that she could remember.  If she walked around enough, she thought, she’d inevitably stumble onto to the guesthouse, just by the law of averages.  But at the same time, she was in a panic that her path would spiral away, that she would end up wandering in the dark.  She kept going, her hard heels hitting the pavement, her knees and hips feeling the pain of the infinitely expanding journey. But there, in her desperate hour, she passed two women with sensible shoes and conference badges, chatting, walking with easy confidence.   Keeping polite distance, so as not to be observed, Emma turned and followed them.  They would end up somewhere, she knew, her unwitting guides, and, yes, they were turning into a brownstone set back from the road with two brick pillars, carriage lamps, huge wooden doors with iron rings, the bronze plaque, Banister House, her suitcase within.

Beyond the door, the place smelled of stale beer from the small pub on the ground floor. Despite the antique aura of the building’s façade, Banister House had been gutted and turned into a dormitory, the walls a dirty white streaked with black scuff marks of countless suitcases, the beige institutional carpet stained with tea, soda, curry sauce. The students who usually lived there were on break. Emma’s room held a single bed on a metal frame, a sink, and a pine desk where her papers lay in complete disarray, her conference talk with shuffled pages, unnumbered because she always forgot to set the format in Word. 

The sight of these pages filled Emma with performance anxiety.  She could barely stand to read them even to herself. She dreaded the sound of her own voice, its squeaking hyperventilation.  She sometimes dreamed of a world in which no one expected her to speak at all, and she could hide beyond a curtain and simply type her answers, or deploy them through an avatar like the Wizard of Oz.  “The great and powerful Oz has spoken!”  The pen was far mightier than the voice, for her anyway.  Infinitely richer, smart, evocative, innovative, polished, refined.  But when she was speaking, she was unable to say more than ten words without losing her train of thought, words turning into an incoherent mess of pauses, loops, and repetitions.  Fortunately, she had always found that in any gathering of academics, there were plenty who loved to talk endlessly, without pause, even up to fifteen minutes nonstop, and she only had to nod at appropriate intervals, for they seemed to care little as to whether she was actually listening.  Occasionally, she’d get caught.  A less opaque one would finally stop long enough to gauge her response, a rising tone in his sentence suggesting an answer was required.  She’d developed a technique for this, listening just enough to pick up a few key words and echo them. This usually was satisfactory, although every now and then she’d appear stupid, and that was a risk.  She feared sometimes that she was stupid, that she had a brain malfunction that made her incapable of the required concentration, some dendritic gap that caused her to be too easily bored or too inward driven. If she was smarter, she could easily hit the ping pong back, back and forth, and she’d say brilliant, witty things that would relieve her of social panic.

Thirty minutes until the conference dinner, but Emma unwrapped a bar of Frazer chocolate, spreading the silver open and smoothing it on the desk.  She sat on the hard mattress of the bed, leaning back on the unsuccessful pillow, and put one square of chocolate on her tongue like the communion host.  Her defiant pleasure, European chocolate, this one softer than most brands, with the texture of clotted cream, just firm enough to keep its shape, melting sensuously on the tongue, the intense sweetness of it overwhelming every other sensation.  Her body merging with chocolate, becoming chocolate for a few moments. No thoughts.

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 08, 2005 12:37 | link | comments (1)

Comments:

#1  31 May 2005 - 02:09

 

I enjoyed this piece with the way you captured a ceratin tension and feel with your descriptions.
I like the way this piece starts as a litle anxious, the build up and then the sense of release and calmness at the end.

Jackal

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