To Assume a Pleasing Shape by Joseph Salvatore

Author:Joseph Salvatore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Published: 2011-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

Man on Couch

Something inside me had died. While something else, something other, was dying to be born—dying to bloom and plume, there and then, as I sat in my sister’s newly purchased luxury-loft condo in South Boston at her nondenominational Winter Solstice holiday party in her white semi-glossed living room in the Seagrass Honey Weave Wingback Chair that I had shipped to her as a housewarming gift last summer from the Pottery Barn around the corner of my apartment on West Nineteenth. Sitting alone, I, just weeks before the turn of the millennium, trying to put Y2K out of mind, contemplating my sister’s party guests and her hollow sheet-rocked walls and veneered entertainment center with a TV monitor playing an image of a yuletide log burning inside a fireplace; above the fireplace a wreath of holly in the shape of a pentagram and her green and red table-clothed table with upside-down red and green plastic cups, and a big glass bowl full of eggnog and ladle; and plates of chips and hummus and salsa and dips of white and yellow and green, just sitting there, I, alone, taking it all in, and drinking my Absolute Appletini, in the Seagrass Honey Weave Wingback Chair next to my sister’s beige, somewhat stained, solid birch, obviously Ikea, couch. And there on the end of this couch was seated a man about my age, late thirties, but with a boyish face. Boyish, I say, as compared to my own ravaged, flesh-domed visage: a face that has had much toll taken, a face that has had all the boy blasted out of it. The body I am in, however, is strong, as anyone can observe under this leather vest; it is massive and sculpted and striated and hard; my crotch is full and heavy and hangs in two kidney-shaped bulges over the seam of my leather pants; my pectorals’ nipples are pierced and fleshy and thick as a pencil’s eraser, but my egg-shaped head and cracked-shell face is how my sister comes to call me Fester. My eyes dark and drooped and wrinkled, skin pocked from sand storms and Gulf War Syndrome and GWS-related eczema resulting in hairloss of scalp, eyelash and brow, which this smudgey make-up and all the king’s greasy brow pencils can’t paint back together again. And then there was adolescent acne and several hospitalized bouts of alcohol poisoning and liver infections and some of the angry little cutting things I used to do with the sharp end of a drafting compass to these pustules. But despite all this hairless-headed dark gauntity, I still hold out the hope (out of reach though it may be, but what’s a heaven for?) that someone somewhere might find something to adore in all this wreckage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.