Creative Thresholds

by William Michaelian

Am I truly limited by my senses, or are they, too, imagined? Can I prove my own existence? Is such proof desirable, or even necessary? What of my childhood, and everything else I am in the habit of believing I remember? Is memory a thing of the present? Is it a story told, and then countless times retold, changing and continuing of its own volition and accord? Drawing and writing; waking and dreaming; fiction and reality; life and death — I simply feel no need to know where, or if, one ends and the other begins. Does that make me strange? And yet what is strangeness, but the very delight of a beautiful, unaccountable world, ever the more vivid once we have learned to let it go?

 

 

By firmly gripping a pencil in grade school and beyond, I developed a callous on the middle finger of my right hand. It’s still there, to the left and just below the nail, despite the fact that I’ve been typing almost exclusively for decades.

When I was small, my father found a clump of white asparagus growing in the vineyard. He dug it out and planted it by our house well. It fed us faithfully each spring.

I remember my father
walking on the hard dirt avenue
at the end of the vineyard
rows behind our
house,

the cuffs turned up
on his jeans, the dust and sticks
and weeds, his impatient
stride, having to run
to stay beside
him

that hot July when I was four
and he was thirty-seven,

but I don’t recall our destination,
or what he did when we
arrived, what I said,

or his reply.

Once, on a hot summer evening, I aimed a BB gun at our old wooden basketball goal and fired. The shot bounced back and hit me in the forehead. I fished it out of the dust and put it in my pocket. I don’t remember what I did after that.

When I was about ten, I took nine snails from the irrigation ditch that ran alongside the east end of our farm and put them in the aquarium on top of my chest of drawers. A few weeks later, the aquarium was teeming with snails.

My first car was a bicycle. My first bicycle was a scooter. My first scooter was a tricycle. My first bus ride was in a dusty red wagon.

One night, my mother’s Aunt Mildred took out her teeth and showed them to me.

In the kitchen during a family get-together, with my mother looking on, I ate a piece of uncooked marinated lamb intended for shish kebab. It tasted good and I didn’t feel ill at all, but I never did it again.

We grew all of our tomatoes back then, and bought all of our onions and parsley.

Same as now, there were stars in those days that had no need of names.

If I were a lizard on a woodpile, I would still be able to write, but I would do it differently.

If I were a pumpkin on a vine, I would want to face east so I could watch the sun rise.

If I were a faithful old hound, my name would be Bill.

Late one night, driving home with some friends from the mountains, I pulled off the road, stopped the car, and told everyone to get out and look at the stars. They did, in amazed silence. I wonder if they remember that now.

I still feel thrilled when I find a marble.

Back in his heyday, Willie Mays lived near my cousin’s house in San Francisco. We rang his doorbell. No one answered.

My father used to chase them when he was a kid, but I myself have never seen a roadrunner.

The first thing I smoked was a nickel cigar.

To this day, I feel funny referring to myself as a man. A man was always someone older, someone responsible. My father and grandfather were men. I am still a boy.

I cannot blow my nose using my right hand. It has to be the left.

I always tie my left shoe first.

I kick with my left foot.

The first poem I remember reading is “O Captain! My Captain!”

When I first started piano lessons, I used to sing with every note. The teacher told my mother I had perfect pitch.

There are some things I will never write about. That, too, is how you will know me.

 

William Michaelian is an American writer, artist, and poet. His most recent book is the Tenth Anniversary Authorized Print Edition of his first novel, A Listening Thing. He lives in Salem, Oregon.

Website: http://www.william-michaelian.com

by Dimitris Melicertes

 

I slide the knife against her clit. She trembles, shivers. The stainless steel blade shines eerily over the pink of her flesh. Such amazing contrast. Her cunt is shaped like an upturned limpet. Strange. I don’t remember how I know the word, limpet. Limpet? Limpet.

‘Can I cum now, please.’ Her voice is begging.

‘No. Shut up.’

Maybe not like a limpet, more like a cantaloupe core, I think. Or the fold of a dried apricot? It tastes pungent sweet. I lick more, and do the alphabet on her.

Around C she begins to shake again. Eeling her waist about.

‘Now, please please?! Can I please finish now?’

She’s not allowed to, unless she asks for permission. Instead of an answer, I reach with my foot, my toe finds the button and I manage to turn up the music. Some pop hit, deafening. The disco ball above us revolves, sending multicolored rays everywhere.

I dip my tongue into her and suck. Blow. Rub lips against lips. Abscond tongue, tease with teeth. The knife present all the while. She takes more time to orgasm –it’s her fifth– and I get tired of licking the alphabet in repeat, so I start inscribing sentences on her labia with my tongue.

By line three, she’s done. Convulsing like an electric chair condemned, she wraps her thighs around my head, pressing. My ears start ringing. It’s hot.

She screams. Finally, someone who gets it.

Never before has my poetry elicited such a reaction.

*

The hazards of performing cunnilingus holding a knife notwithstanding, the whole thing is quite funny because I haven’t even watched any of the Batman movies. The Joker/Harley roleplay was her idea, she did my makeup. I just played along, smiling threateningly and operating the knife, as instructed. Being dominant, in general. Not my cup of tea, so I’ve no idea if I was a convincing Joker.

But she seems to have enjoyed it.

We couple a couple more times. At midnight she leaves the bed and heads for the bathroom, wearing what remains of the ripped Harley costume. She looks wonderful and I wonder whether I should start reading comics.

*

‘What was the last thing you wrote on me.’

‘You really despise the concept of sleep, don’t you.’

‘At first you were doing the alphabet, I could tell.’

‘Really?! You’re kidding me.’

‘Nope.’

‘No one is that sensitive.’

‘I am.’

‘Not to my need for sleep.’

‘What was it? Insults?’

‘I didn’t write anything, just the alphabet.’

‘Maybe you were writing someone’s name.’

‘…’

‘How ironic, making me finish with another woman’s name.’

‘It was a poem.’

‘A poem?’

‘A poem.’

‘You write poems?’

‘Nowhere in your self description did you mention ‘insomniac’.’

‘If someone finishes to something, don’t they have a right to know what it was? For all I know, it might have been a rape threat that did it for me.’

‘What are you, some Tumblr feminazi.’

‘Can I see the poem.’

‘It’s a draft. I never show drafts.’

‘But you’re okay trying them out on my vagina.’

‘…if you were that interested, you should have concentrated on reading it.’

‘It was exciting, I tell you.’

Silence.

‘Okay. What was the verse.’

‘Let’s never talk about love / just kiss me on the mouth / like a mandolin.’

‘Profound.’

‘You came to it.’

‘It’s mand-elyn, by the way. Not man-doline.’

‘What? I said, man-dollin.’

‘No, you’re pronouncing it wrong. Here, let me show you – put your lips upon mine.’

She mouths the word over my lips. Very wet, tastes of both of us. I can tell she’s aroused, again. I’ve observed the texture of women’s lips changes when they’re turned on, they’re somehow wetter or there’s more electricity in them.

‘Mandelin mandolin maudlin madline,’ she keeps whispering, becoming small under the sheets.

*

Around 5.00 am I sense her waking up. She downs the rest of her glass and returns, picking up my arm and putting it over her.

The sky outside is an immense blue.

*

It’s strange that I know her body inch by inch but almost nothing else about her.

But we talked about this, prior to meeting, and agreed to anonymity.

I know her from a 4chan rating thread. She’s an oldfag, I’m cancer. She rated me 8/10 and I gave her 2/10 purely for upsetting her and getting her attention. In reality, she’s out of any sort of rating. This creature, luminous with beauty, what makes her so dysfunctional as to seek out something like tonight’s business?

Both of us so desensitized. She’s expressly stated –and I concurred– that this won’t evolve into anything, despite our transgressions of curiosity for the other.

I guess her reasons are similar to mine, perhaps. I assume when your aesthetics differ vastly from those of the majority, you’re by definition classified as dysfunctional. Plus, pretty much everyone is dysfunctional in one way or the other regardless. Whatever; I never found communication anywhere outside written word.

So, this. We’ve both taken the day off work. She chose the hotel. Neither knows the other’s address or approximate location, habits or occupation.

A new romance for the age of reason? No, this is just sanity.

*

‘There’s no room really for a third in our relationship,’ she says stroking my chin.

‘I’m not shaving it.’

Lying on my back, I occupy most part of the bed like an octopus stretched out languidly over a rock. She, coral-like, is half-glued atop my side, face resting on my chest.

‘Then we should probably give it a name, no?’

‘I thought women preferred men with beards for stable relationships.’

She seems to think about it. I study her ass in the hotel’s ceiling mirror directly above us. Just like a peach. Until now, I’d found the idea of fucking before my own image rather tasteless, but a night spent observing our reflections tangled in serpentine windings has made me less platonic about the whole deal; perhaps in moments like this I like the phenomenon more than the noumenon, I conclude. Though I doubt either Plato or Kant would enjoy my limiting the application of their philosophical distinctions to Anon’s ass.

‘Who said I want you for a long time?’ she says carefully and moves, leaving the bed. I search her face and she’s grinning.

‘Then no reason for me to go through the trouble of shaving it,’ I remark and get up as well, following her graceful legs to the bathroom.

She squats artistically on the seat and fixes me with a challenging stare, unblinking even when her pee echoes tinkling into the bowl. I let out a sigh.

‘Feminists,’ I mutter.

‘What’s that,’ she says.

‘Objectifying someone isn’t bad when it’s mutual and exclusive.’

She continues pissing in response.

I turn to the mirror over the sink. ‘You know what,’ I say, ‘why don’t you do it? I’ve always fantasized having my beard shaven by someone else.’

‘Thus the profession of the barber was invented.’

‘By a woman, I mean.’

I can’t tell if her look is supposed to express sarcasm or pity. ‘Nothing to do with power between genders,’ I clarify. ‘I just think it would be… intimate, somehow, you know? A nice experience.’

Now she seems curious.

‘Are you really asking me to shave your face?!’

‘Look at it this way. Since we aren’t going to see each other again…’

She nods while wiping, not looking at me.

‘…then you might as well grasp the opportunity to make something personal out of this complete lack of futurity.’

‘Anon? I don’t find shaving your beard sexy.’

‘No other woman has done it,’ I offer.

I look so childishly ridiculous, she thinks, as I say this with such seriousness standing stark-naked in the bathroom.

‘Okay, maybe I find the idea a bit attractive,’ she says, flushing the toilet, and catches me grinning.

‘But would you trust me taking a razor to your face?’ she says incredulous, raises a brow.

Applying foam to my face, admittedly with unsure fingers at first, she finds herself thinking of this strange scene unfolding between us. What does it mean? She can’t visualize herself doing it in the past, at all. Nor has heard of anything similar for that matter, so unimaginable it is. Perhaps I’m right and this is primarily a male ritual that no one else had thought of twisting into an affection scene between a couple. Maybe it is intimate after all. Or the proximity it involves is.

As for me, I’d purr if I could. Standing very still, I keep big eyes fixed on her through the mirror, the mirror framing our picture in alternating stages: first as she notices the creamy bubbly feeling of the foam in her palms and decides she enjoys it, then as she kneads the now soft hair on my cheeks –that reminds her a bit of scratching the fur of a wet dog–, afterwards as she handles the blade, with slow, careful movements, and finally as she begins to uncover and map with her fingertips the geography of my face underneath. Concentrated, almost worried. At some point she’s kissing me. The foam tastes sweetish, leaving slushy, schmaltzy, tart air in our nostrils.

We laugh much, I keep licking her nose and she cuts me only six times.

 

Dimitris Melicertes is studying the PhD in Creative Writing and Practice-based Research at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has translated three books.

Website: dmelicertes.com