Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: in public

  • her wild laugh, like birds

    My date took me to a bar that was open late. We sat round a splendid banquette like pashas. At the table one tier down, a girl sitting with her friends unfurled a really strange laugh.

    It was high and sort of squeaky-grunty, very loud: within moments she had drained the whole place of its attention. People began to smile at each other over her head. A drunk guy tottered up to her, plump like a teddy bear, his arms comically held out, a skewed fishermen. The one that got away was this big.

    “Can I have a hug?” he asked the laughing girl, somberly. She couldn’t speak for squeaking but held up one hand for a high five. “Hug,” he said, nodding, insisting, reasonable. Drunk. So she opened up her arms and hugged him over the table. All the while her maniacal laugh was rising over his shoulder like a series of photos of the moon. Her male friend said, “She’s allergic to you.” Her female friend giggled. The drunk guy straightened and slowly smiled and only even slower realised, a bit hurt, a bit taken aback, “Really?”

    “Nah,” said the girl’s friend. “That’s really her laugh.” The girl’s shoulder’s shook and her honking squeals kept coming. By now everyone was laughing: the cute girl wiping the bar counter, the drunk guy’s drunk friends, my companion and I holding our sides, leaking tears. The hugged, drunken guy turned a sloppy somersault on his way back to his mates: an unforeseeable magical item.

    There was quite a lot of moon left in the high sky on the walk home but now these cold clouds have dulled it over. The exhaustion that comes from laughing too much is not like any other form of tiredness that I know of.

  • May Day, May Day

    Two people made fuck, out on the concreted area in front of the apartments. I recognised the act by her cries. He had her sprawled over a car bonnet with his hand around her throat, and for a few minutes I watched clenching my fists. Were those cries of despair? Is she ok? Do I need to rescue this woman from rape?

    But then she got up and staggered before him for a minute and lifted away her skirts on either side like a ladybird’s tissuey inner wings. The pale curves of her bottom and thighs were perfect with youth, like two slices of soft long pears from a can. She presented to him her hindquarters and bent herself forward with yearning. He drew her back into his lap and then, skewered, she twisted herself round to kiss. Now and again someone walked past them and they simply froze in place, his place just now being immemorial. A couple of girls strolled by with their cell phones lighted and I feared a filming, an aggression, a posting which would attempt to shame, but the girl walking just ahead lifted her phone and continued a conversation without, apparently, noticing the two there who were holding down the fort. He lifted her jumper to cup her breast. It is cold. They rearranged themselves again and she spread herself on her back on the shiny car, her legs like searchlights. Next morning I went down to buy bread, because we are Germans now, and passed the chalked square for a parked car where they had set each other alight. The big sprawling dark car was gone and in its place a tiny blue and silver rechargeable, as though the yelping congress in the night had already borne its fruit.

  • nasally responsible

    On the subway I sat down next to a guy who was remarkably good looking. Tall and well set up, he sat at his ease, one leg crossed over the other and his knee splayed. I glanced sideways at him as I got my work out of my bag: Mmm, cute! Well dressed, too, in an unfussy way. Ah well.

    Next moment a movement had made me look up. There was his index finger, earnestly engaged in a twirling wiping motion, sunk in the nostril nearest to me down to its second joint. He wasn’t just foraging around in there, either: he was after something specific. He found that something and drew it out and rolled it. I felt myself stiffen and flinch. Was this man about to engage the public flick? I was right in his path. He had not glanced up, he was reading. Oh god. Then he did something far worse – and unconscious, and clearly habitual – he stuck his hand under the raised seat of his trousers and wiped his fingers onto the cloth under his thigh.

    Without planning to I had cried out, “No!” I gathered my stuff and struggled to stand. The train had taken off and was rattling through the old tunnels so fast it was hard to get past the vortex of our own movement. Gathering my long umbrella, gloves, hat, scarf, notebook, and pen I got clear of the long bench and began to walk in comical slow motion away from this beast, this monster, this person who behaves as though we none of us exist around him and he is disporting himself in the playground of his own world alone. I was crying with laughter and disgust. The train seemed to grow more crowded as I plunged slowly down, curled forward with effort, swaying at every corner, and I found a ‘sit place’ as Germans call it between a Turkish woman shrouded in her scarf and a young African man sprawled around his phone. Both of them contracted themselves very slightly, out of habit, to make way for the arrival of a fresh human. Thank you, Germany.