Antiphony by Chris Katsaropoulos

Author:Chris Katsaropoulos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Luminis Books
Published: 2012-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

3

THE MORNING ARRIVES too soon. He goes to the kitchen and dumps a filter and coffee grounds into the coffee-maker, fills it with water. Already, the light is gaining strength—the digital clock on the coffee machine says 6:23, the ones on the microwave and stove say 6:24. No point in trying to go back to sleep now.

Dragging up the stairs, Theodore steps over the third step from the top, the one that yields a loud, groaning creak every time it is stepped on coming up the stairs. He skips the step and hangs on to the rail in order to avoid waking Ilene. At this hour almost any sound will be enough to wake her. And if he wakes her now she won’t be able to go back to sleep.

Gently, gently, he turns the knob on the bedroom door. It too makes a kind of clunking tumble of loose hardware from within the mechanism that he knows can be averted only by grasping the knob and turning it as slowly as possible. Once the knob has been turned to release the latch, he can push the door open and tread silently across the plush carpeting of the bedroom to the security of the master bath.

On his way towards the bathroom door he pauses for a moment to glance down at the mass of blankets and bedspread that signifies Ilene’s sleeping form. She would be very warm to curl up against, if only for a short while. The temptation to join her holds him there, staring at the pile of bedclothes that lifts with her intake of breath and then, just as unhurriedly, collapses, as if a fault line has slipped and given way. He sleeps in this bed with her less and less, it seems. The trouble is, she snores. Loudly. She is doing it now. A sonorous riffling of some pad of fleshy cartilage deep within her throat that keeps time with the heaving blankets. The nights he does sleep here he can lie awake for what seems like hours listening to this chorus of vibrating flesh, an unintentional and unlovely song meant for only him to hear. After a time, the sound will assume a new pitch or a less strident rhythm, fading away to nearly nothing, and he will drift towards sleep, but then, with a slight change of position, it will pick up again, gathering force into a huge volume of undulating sound. Amazing, he thinks, how much noise the narrow cavities within our necks and chests can produce. And what variety! Now, she is on what he thinks of as a mid-range arpeggio; interesting, in fact, now that he is standing upright and able to analyze it, that the sound goes down the scale in tone as she draws breath in, and stays at about the same pitch on the exhale. A low G, he would have to call it.

He watches her for another moment and envies her ignorance of this resonant song she never hears herself sing.

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.