by Nathan Coppedge
One summer he happened to pass through some revolving doors. He was in an airport, he was going to visit his grandparents for some family occasion. The thing was, there was this girl. She was also in the revolving doors. Something passed between them. Her dark hair was spilling all over the place. She wore an unconventional sort of jacket, with magenta patterns that looked Nepalese. And she walked like sex itself, a little taut, a little leisurely; there was power in those hips, he was drunk on that power. She also carried a bag of what appeared to be poppyseed bagels.
By the time he awakened from that dream, he had sunk into another: he turned over his keys, and wallet, and watch, and disposable pens, and sat in his seat, items collected, thinking about his uncle�s old house, which, come to think of it, was in a modern style. The white-washed expanse of a wall passed to one side so he could see into the back yard, he could see the Zen garden built there one summer, on that boundary where it might have been a dream. He followed the raked pebbles around and around, until he was fixated on a single miniature dolmen in the middle. It was pierced with holes, as though to say that rocks, too, are women.
He knew that it was an irony that the tool that fashioned the holes might crumble before the stones themselves. The whole garden was an idea, that even law is worn, but that besides law, what remains is an anomaly, or something so steeped in character as to be made like the stones.
What he had witnessed today in those revolving doors was an anomaly: something that stood for itself. He couldn�t explain it as a passing attraction. Those eyes were not fickle or easily cast aside: they were like the stones, full of a promise that could conquer death, full of the promise of transcendent meaning, something essentially, and substantially, different from himself, and yet with a weird, and undeniable correspondence. He was in cups with those eyes. He dreamed of them continually during his visit with relatives.
By the time he returned he was feeling morose, so that there was an aimlessness in his orientation: he needed some time to reflect, to get his bundle of nerves settled, to come to terms with the reality: that girl was probably just visiting, I mean she came straight from Venus to do a little sight seeing. Now she�s gone, he thought.
NEXT
Back to Short Stories