The blue lantern of her mind

The blue lantern of her mind

15 July 2016

 

He never knew love. It equated to another four letter word branded across his virginity when the backstreet whore had laughed it off him in a wink. The brief thought of heaven that crossed his mind in ecstasy taken over by the stink from her fleshy body. Heaven had closed shop that day and nothing could make it sway in his favour, not even once, not even on that special moment lost in masses of fleshy odour.

 

His father had taught his mother to love and to count the pennies after they had left to make sure that all the love spent equated to the right amount. It was tantamount to their daily pittance filling empty rumbling voids with hard-earned bread or perhaps just hard. It was hard to say really as nothing was quite what one expected in the backstreets. It was all the opposite of the upper streets with their meets and greets as the gutter boys came up close for some dimes showing off their feats.

 

It was there that he found her, oozing something indistinct that made him want to faint and throw up all at once. She was pale and frail and very much like a fish out of the pond. He wondered how she could breathe in all that mud. He stepped forward, she backward and fell with a thud. He fell too, not out of imbalance but merely to be able to follow her wherever she wanted to walk. He opened his mouth but seemed quite unable to talk. She slowly nudged out from underneath him yanking pieces of his heart away as she did. Under her balcony that night like a thief he hid, waiting for the moon to rise and oh did it rise, right up there high in the skies. There she was singing a song from when he was little, a time when each morsel was brittle and the blood lay low. Her words invented as she pretended to sing on the rhyme not quite catching on in time as she had never learnt them by heart. The servant they had had once and she on very bad terms did depart as her mother threw the poor girl out six months pregnant and she never learnt the song to her heart’s content. All those words just taken out now from thin air as she watched him watch her in the underbelly of the backstreets hidden in plain sight as she sang to his heart’s delight. It trickled like light, flowing right out of the blue lantern of her mind.

 

He never knew love. Neither did she. Now they do and fools say it is true

 

Reading of the story: 

Sohe Saha – Zeb Bangash Alia Bhatt