JANUARY FICTION

Fiction for January is The Kiss, Falling and An American Baby delivered expertly by Patrick Calinescu,Quirina Roode-Gutzmer and Jaime Martinez-Tolentino

The Kiss

By

Patrick Calinescu

He is white and handsome. She is black and gorgeous. They’re both supremely beautiful.

They are now about to cross one of the largest boulevards in their native town. When, technically, they’ve barely, one-leggedly got off the pavement forming that nice, and straight, and winding outline of the boulevard, they are being attacked by an individual of no precise pigmentary colour; of no precise reference to the sex stereotypically assumed to be violent.

The attacker is mainly a verbalizer; the attack this attacker is trying to bring into the criminal existence of attacks is mainly verbose.

“Who’s the négresse you’re strolling about with?” the attacker asks directly and in a pseudo-elitist manner.

The white and handsome man is almost invisibly clenching his fists. The white and handsome man is almost visibly knitting his brow. He is getting furious according to the crescendo prompted by the evil mouthedness of the attacker.

The black and gorgeous woman would stereotypically let out quite a helpless, and shrill, and voiced scream as she places herself behind the human fortress of her white and handsome guy. She, too, would stereotypically schematize the bodily mechanicity of the anti-feminist swoon, and cling to the human fortress of her white and handsome guy when, dramatically, she would be a breath away from falling onto the last cobbles of the pavement.

“So who’s the négresse, huh?” the attacker insists on being the best elitist he can possibly be.

The white and handsome man can’t be clenching his fists any more. The white and handsome man can’t be knitting his brow any more. He, finally, can’t be getting furious anymore. He is already steaming with highly compressed rage. And he consequentially erupts into a completely predictable volcano of violence.

He pulls a big gun out of one of his breast pockets. (The attacker fails to see which breast pocket the white and handsome man pulls his big gun out of.) He cocks it and points it to the attacker’s head in a fully overblown manifestation of manoeuvres. He violently shakes the arm and the hand in which he holds the gun as if to show the attacker who is in charge of the attack which the attacker has initiated. (The attacker fails, too, to see which arm and hand the white and handsome man so violently shakes.)

The black and gorgeous woman does let out one of those stereotypical screams, after all. She does indulge in one of those stereotypical swoons, after all.

“On your kness!” cries the white and handsome man. “On your ruddy knees!”

“Don’t shoot me, please!” cries the attacker. “Don’t kill me, please!”

“So what was it that you dared to say to my lady?” the white and handsome man demands to know.

“Nothing. I.” the attacker faintly replies.

“So you seem to me to have lost all your courage,” the white and handsome man says triumphantly.

The attacker, already on his knees, cowers into an almost perfect sphere on the last cobbles of the pavement. He bends his spine so dramatically that his back is perilously close to snapping off both cervically and dorsally.

“I want you to come crawling to my lady’s boots and lick that mud off their toes,” the white and handsome man says both hesitatingly and pensively. “I actually want you to come crawling to my lady’s boots and kiss that mud off their toes,” he adds conclusively.

The attacker, though severely mysophobic and agoraphobic, does exactly what he is told. He comes crawling to the boots of the black and gorgeous woman; and lowers his whole sphere of cowering to their toes; and says a few Amens in the silence of his fears; and tries, in vain, to be the best procrastinator alive; and closes his eyes not to see the hardened mud literally petrified in innumerable layers of microbial strata; and automatically if uselessly sanitizes his lips by means of a couple of saliva streaks smeared along their terrified skin; and rounds his mouth into the natural instrument of kissing; and inescapably begins to kiss all that mud off the toes of the boots of the black and gorgeous woman, one peel at a time, one peel at a time.

After a temporally imprecise while, all the muscles in his back are so tense that they can barely support the full weight of the sphere into which he has cowered. A reasonable while into the immediate future, all the muscles in his back feel so taut that they can hardly keep this sphere, into which he has cowered, from getting relatively flattened into an outward burst of unfolding verticality all too familiar to his species.

But the white and handsome man, always close by, would allow no party whatsoever to interfere in the attacker’s kissing that mud off the toes of the boots of the black and gorgeous woman. And whenever any slackening in the pace of the licking of that mud off the toes of those formerly shiny boots would come into the view of the white and handsome man, he would push the attacker to lick harder; to lick faster; to lick in a cleaner way; to lick in a more thorough way. He would really shove his big gun into the attacker’s face (on his ordering the attacker to discontinue his work, and raise his face straight in the direction of that big gun pointed gloomily to his face, and have his face ready to get shoved into by that big gun); and press it against the attacker’s still muddy lips; and force it into the attacker’s mouth; and rhythmically move it in and out of the attacker’s mouth as if it were a cold, and hollow, and metallic penis.

“Did I tell you to stop?” the white and handsome man would yell into the ears of the attacker.

“I wasn’t stopping at all,” the attacker would try to defend himself. “I was just trying to ease my back muscles by leaning more firmly on my hands.”

“So,” the white and handsome man would quite logically infer, “you were preparing yourself to knock my lady off her feet by pulling swiftly at her boots, weren’t you?”

The attacker was simply baffled by the possibility, which the white and handsome man had just exposed, in a certainly involuntary manner, to anyone venturous enough to act on it.

But the white and handsome man would not allow the attacker to think it over any more.

“Why are you still speaking with me?” the white and handsome man would suddenly break the cycle of repeatedness that had been running between him and the attacker almost to a fault. “Aren’t you supposed to kiss my lady’s boots-to kiss that filthy mud off the toes of my lady’s boots?” the white and handsome man almost interrogatively reminded the attacker of the unfinished job of which he seemed to have been the best procrastinator yet alive.

“Oh, yes,” the attacker, too, would break himself free from the lukewarm conventionality of the cycle of repeatedness that had only of late been cut off by the white and handsome man.

“Then start licking harder-and faster-and much, much, muuuch better!” the white and handsome man finally says in an ordering tone. “And be quick about it!” he adds. “And don’t reply to me any more!” he concludes his admonitions.

The attacker, being thus ordered to keep his mouth both verbally shut, and operationally open, cowers even more spherically into his fears-even more proficiently into that sphere of fear that has of late been relaxing almost to the point of relapsing into his species’ original verticality.

Notwithstanding the already failed possibility, the attacker keeps his back completely bent into a misshapen roundness of everything bodily, and, from such a position, resumes his licking all the more arduously.

The mud on the toes of the boots of the black and gorgeous woman is getting ever more invisible; ever less visible; solely by that unit of time which may only be divisible by time itself.

At long last, the mud is completely off the toes of the boots of the black and gorgeous woman. The white and handsome man looks more closely at the degree of light those freshly shiny boots can again reflect. The attacker is still very much afraid that his work won’t be appreciated as it should-as he thinks that it should.

The black and gorgeous woman does that culturally stereotypical tapping-of-the-heels thing; and consequentially disappears fully satisfied that she is disappearing with her boots spotless again.

When the white and handsome man remains alone with the attacker, he, having already analyzed the actual level of cleanliness of his lady’s boots and decided that it is satisfactory, avows to avenge the hurt feelings of his lady according to his own interpretation of what she may have actually felt at the onset of the attack.

So he pulls the trigger and shoots the attacker twice in the head. The two bullets kiss his lips completely viscerally off his still instrumentalized mouth, one lip at a time, one lip at a time.