the touch

I dropped my trousers, underwear too, and plonked my bottom over the loo. Sighing like it was the first sit down since breakfast, I propped my elbows on my knees and lifted my phone to my face. It was not the first sit down since breakfast. In fact, since breakfast, I had done little more than sit down, but there is something arduous about sitting for work purposes, and I had been working for well over three quarters of an hour.

The screen lit up, sensing my readiness to engage. Or disengage. Depending which side of the equation you were looking at the situation from. I gazed for an eye-glazing moment at the beaming faces of my family wallpapering my home screen, and opened Facebook without piercing the glaze in the slightest. Advert, meme, advert, someone I don’t know, on a group I don’t recall joining, asking if anyone has been to Disneyland with a three year old and whether it was it worth it, meme, advert, acquaintance from the job before the job before this one pressing cheeks with a stranger and grinning, meme. I was sinking so far into the glaze that there was a risk of smothering brain cells.

As the sticky ooze of my voluntary dissociation threatened to close over my last spark of interest, a small black dot appeared in the corner of the screen, a thin rope extended to a drowning soul. I grabbed it with the one finger of motivation left to me.

“Maryam Dern published a new story”

Disappointment skulked across my mind, but briefly so. One always hopes a little for “Maryam Dern commented on your story”, after all, but a new story by Maryam was itself something to be glad of, and I navigated to the tale on automatic pilot.

Athena’s Wrath

Cold comfort

By Maryam Dern

Published 1 minute ago. 1 minute read

I thought, momentarily, of the report open on my laptop at my desk and decided one minute would be neither here nor there, and I would rather be here than there in truth. I started to read.

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

My thumb hovered over the screen. The piece was short, far less than a minute, but with a punch that had made me glad of the privacy of my situation.

Great poem, loved you……delete delete delete.

Nice one. Delete.

I sighed and allowed myself to feel again that sorrow that had licked at my diaphragm as I read the second stanza, that zip of recognition, electric across unknown distances, crumpling swathes of earth and life to momentarily bring me to within one arm’s length of this woman I had never met, and knew like the tendons of my keyboard spread hands. I touched again the awe that had covered my mind, a gauzy silk, sheened to reveal in glistened hues the wonder of another mind even as it hid from view the heft of it, fingered the green embroidered border between simmering self-doubt and admiration. Again, I passed the rhythm of that opening line across the ceiling of my mouth, the back of my teeth, the bounce of my lips, delighted in its synchronicity with some internal metre that beat within me. And again, I felt the gathered wet in my eye, the stinging spring of remembrance of something yet to cloud my sky.

“Maryam, this was magnificent writing. You’ve made me cry!”

I wondered how I could be so inarticulate, in the face of this beauty painted in twelve rows of printed letters. I wondered how I could feel more alive, after one minute with another’s words.

*

Somewhere else, across a river, and past the hills, and over the sea, Maryam noted the little number 1 pop into being over the picture of the bell on her screen. She clicked on it, ready to read now she had finished her poem. “Hannah Moore commented on your story”. She was surprised, it had only been published a minute ago.

“Maryam, this was magnificent writing. You’ve made me cry!”

Maryam felt her heart, still laying in shredded strips inside her ribcage, begin to coalesce. Barely perceptibly, she smiled. Perhaps, today, she might get dressed.