With Delilah by Nare Vardanyan

i’ll live by my pen., a photo by weepy hollow on Flickr.

“My 10th Sonata is a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun… they are the sun’s kisses.” Scriabin kept repeating that to someone irrepressibly and shaking his head arrogantly .
Delilah spilled a bottle of oil from the crust of the apple tree on her life …All was in a haze while she dressed and ran away in the rhythm of unsung blues … We had dinner at midnight and for the first time we had nothing to talk about. I only barely noticed that her skin looks fresh, and the body lotion given by her that says “Thinking of You”, inadvertently leads to believe that someone is thinking of me. No matter if there is a crowd of complete strangers who use the same product and with who I might become friends if they experienced similar feelings to mine while in the shower.
Delilah’s locks barely touched her shoulders, her facial expression was that of after a parachute jump, and her ethereal, but warm eyes reminded me of how I still loved her ..
Delilah was surprised that I had no curtains, and I reminded her also that there is no tablecloth, and other “essential” parts of life that are usually located in the residential areas of ​​people.
_ How do you live without the necessary things?
_ I miss you … forget the whole story, and let’s go get the distant cousin of Peanut tomorrow ..
_ Do not want a cat … I miss people
_ Do you still love him?
_ Don’t make me laugh … you know us .. self-preservation …
_ Yes, the shell is same .. we get pierced at first collision …
Delilah pretended to be Robin Hood, but stayed for the night nevertheless…
Didn’t have time to tell her that Rudo will live with me in the next room …
Bubbles slowly dissolved in the heart of darkness … I took shelter from the winds, preparing for life. Who knows when it might start…
Scriabin still hated to fly, if awakened by a brazen hum … The muse, preventing sleep, instantly disappeared …
Delilah’s blue dress embraced the chair, as if for the last time … I gifted a casual smile to the charming idyll of things …

20 of February, 2011

translated from Russian by Ani Boghossian

The Thought of a Title

Venezia, a photo by chrisaqua47 on Flickr.

The sky was such a smooth grey that Adam wondered if it was actually cloudy. It was not so cold in the town of Alding, but the sun was constantly invisible here. People could feel its presence but they have never actually seen a single ray of light. It was just the tone of the sky changing from deep indigo to slightly besmirched white and from dusty crimson to gentle peach. The silhouettes of the wet roofs rested upon this monotone air and it all seemed… perfect.

“Perfect” thought Adam and put his hands in his pockets. He squinted trying to find any lining of a cloud as it started raining… none. He started to feel at sync here and was rather glad he accepted (friend’s name here)’s offer to visit this freakishly calm town. Seemed the perfect place to write a story about …

“Can you feel it?” Adam turned around to find a rather sharp looking old lady who seemed as though to be one of those quick, trendy New York editors complete at any moment with a striking pen and a critical eyebrow-raised smirk.

“Feel what?”

“The dimness, the smells, the atmosphere of singular rain gnarled with roots of an epic tree smudged through with locomotive oil…” She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a thin lighter “…and still so naively fresh…”

“Care for a smoke?” asked she as though it was the logical continuation of her puzzling speech.

She brandished a sexy cigarette with her thin fingers and held it out for Adam.

“Err… no thanks, I don’t smoke.” He paused, about to ask who this woman was… but didn’t, oddly.

This encounter seemed fascinatingly, teasingly incognito and had to remain so, he felt a funny urge to stop her from saying who she was. He watched how she with delicate ease pulled out a single cigarette, clicked open the lighter and in no time blew out a long supple ribbon of smoke from her mouth.

“Bukowski smoked, Dostoyevsky smoked and even did damn Tolkien. What makes you so special?” The question was rhetorical.

“You know…” she flicked her cigarette, “you look like him”.

“Look like who?” asked Adam.

“Nein, darling, I don’t utter his name”.

She looked at him with yielding vagueness. Adam felt playful.

“Ok” he grinned. The woman sighed looking at the sky.

“He was my first love, my muse, my Allen Delon… you know what I mean?”

“Sure” said amused Adam.

“He used to live here…” she said as though to the blankness of the atmosphere.

“Oh…” dramatically added Adam.

“He was a poet…” she puffed out with smoke. “He used to put a little scrapbook and a pen in his pocket, walk all the way from Downing Street to Jung alley, lean against a wet wall in his maroon coat and he would smoke”.

“How poetic…” She predictably ignored the sarcasm. “He would smoke endlessly… when finally he would feel something like a far-cried inspiration.”

She inhaled some more smoke “then he would pull out his note-book and write. The smoke from his mouth would rise up and become clouds. Those clouds would bare in them the inspiration he had caught and when it rained, the sound of drops was like his voice reciting his poem…”

Adam straightened up a bit… yep, this was kind of inspiring. Crappy, but inspiring…

“I used to sit on a bench on Moss Street with my dark brown umbrella and listen for hours to his baritone smash around me… on the asphalt, on the bench, on the roofs, on the passing cars, on my umbrella…sometimes on me. This connection with him was so strong, so ambient… I spent five years on that bench, until one day the rain said nothing…When I looked at the sky and saw no lining of a cloud, none at all, just emptiness… like a blank paper.”

She blew out the last long ribbon of nicotine. “Not a single damn word”.

They both were silent now. The old woman staring at the flat heavens, her thin fingers squeezing a new cigarette and Adam staring at the woman with his hands in his pockets.

“Perfect” thought Adam and pulled his hands out of his pockets. He squinted trying to find any lining of a cloud as it stopped raining. He started to feel at sync here and was rather glad he accepted (friend’s name here)’s offer to visit this freakishly calm town. Seemed the perfect place to write a story about him not smoking for thirty five years.

2009 © Ani Boghossian

10 Things To Do To Become a Better Writer in 10 Days by Victoria Mixon

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
 —Kris Kristopherson, “Me and Bobby McGee”

(J B Priestley at work in his study, 1940)

Spend one day being a troll.

Be as obnoxious as humanly possible online. Go around arguing with people on their own sites, expressing opinions they won’t agree with, picking fights you have no possible hope of winning. Make a complete idiot of yourself. And no hiding behind “Anonymous,” either. Use your own name. Then go back at the end of the day and read all the responses, especially the ones that prove you wrong. APOLOGIZE SINCERELY. (This one doesn’t count if you skip that step.) Endure the shame. That’s your crash course in publication.

Alternatively, if your moral code won’t let you be a troll, go to the last three people you’ve hurt in your life and ask them to talk to you for as long as they want about how it felt to them. Don’t respond, just listen. Endure the shame.

This step is necessary to clean out the interior censor, the one who thinks there’s still time left to protect your reputation. There’s no time left. You’ve already long-since destroyed your reputation with the ones you love, the people who matter most. Welcome to the real world.

If you’ve never hurt anyone, put down your keyboard and go apply for sainthood. You are the wrong kind of liar to be a writer.

 

 

( Silence, a photo by noellosvald )

Spend one whole day being silent.

Don’t speak. Not even when asked a question. Point when your husband asks you where you keep the toilet paper. Smile and nod when your neighbor asks about your weekend. Don’t email or IM. Just be silent. Larry Hagman used to do this every Sunday, for years on end, and he said it was an extraordinary education in self-awareness. Of course, he informed his friends and family of what he was doing, so they wouldn’t think he’d lost his mind—you should too.

This step is necessary to clean out the interior egoist, the one who thinks what you have to say is the most important thing. You have nothing all that important to say. You can only record the world of your readers for them.

 

 

( photo by acid_dupe )

 

Spend one day as a student of reality.

Take a notebook and make a list of the most important locations of scenes in your novel. Then, beginning as early as possible, go to each location at the time of day your characters are there. Sit for at least an hour at each place taking copious notes. Note down every single fact you can about that location and the people in it. Not impressions. Just facts.

The sidewalk is pale grey with oval splotches of charcoal grey one-to-three inches in diameter every foot or so and, when the sun gets to about 60 degrees, almost invisible sparks of rainbow light from bits of glass embedded in the concrete, more reds and blues than yellow. The woman who sells fruit at the corner is in her fifties with a slight double chin ending rather sharply in premature dewlaps and a dress with huge pinkish-brownish-greenish blossoms and what look like spiders, which hangs on her as if there were weights in the hem.

This step is necessary to teach you to write in your reader’s world.

( photo by Ana Luísa Pinto )

 

Spend one day with the lyrics of your favorite songs.

Pick one, and annotate every single line with random details you can see or hear (or smell or taste or touch) from where you are. Make the details absolutely specific—not a book, but Brett Halliday’s The Private Practice of Michael Shayne lying open on its face; not a cat, but the grey-&-black striped nine-year-old James Dean wannabe or the carrot-tip Siamese who pees outside the litter box whenever he’s mad. Feel free to throw in gratuitous imaginary details so long as they’re neutral and not meant to sway the reader toward either positive or negative interpretation. If you feel the urge to sway the reader, use a detail bent in the opposite direction from where you want it to bend.

Do this with a handful of your favorite songs, then treat the annotated songs as Rorschach blots. Read them and take copious notes on what underlying connections you pick up. Swap the details around and do it all over again.

This step is necessary to teach you subtext.

 

(photo by Rachel Dowda)

 

Spend one day writing and re-writing a single scene.

Make it a scene about confrontation, and write it the first time as if you were the protagonist and you were indisputably in the right. Then write it as if you were indisputably in the wrong. Then write it as if you were insane. Then write it as if you were unbelievably boring. Then write two scenes about different confrontations and cut-&-paste the characters’ lines into the opposite scenes.

Read the first scene and notice how appallingly self-congratulatory victims are to read. Read the second scene and notice that you didn’t entirely manage to make yourself indisputably in the wrong—write that second scene over again more honestly. Read the third scene and notice how hilarious non-sequiturs are. Read the boring scene and notice how much you rely on action and description to illuminate boring dialog—write that scene over again with the same action and description, but only 1/3 of the lines of dialog. Read the final two scenes and notice how much innuendo is buried in scenes at cross-purposes.

Write the second scene over again, even more honestly. Write the boring scene over again with those 1/3 lines of dialog taken from one of the final two scenes. Write the second scene over again, even more honestly.

Write all kinds of confrontation scenes, swapping characters indiscriminately when you’re done. Keep this up for the rest of the day.

This step is necessary to teach you hard work.

 

Spend one day on research.

Pick a handful of topics you know a little or nothing about and learn everything you can about them. Read articles. Take notes. Collate your findings. Write essays. Compare your conclusions. Look for the essential truth about reality underlying two of your topics, and write an essay on that. Do the same thing for two others. And the same thing for two others. Do the same thing for three. And four. And five.

Write an essay taking the most fascinating fact out of each topic and linking them into a single theory of everything. Voila! You’re Einstein!

Write a counter-essay proving yourself completely wrong.

This step is necessary to teach you deeper understanding.

 

( photo by GK Sholanke )

Spend one day watching children.

Children are people confused by their world, without adequate skills to either communicate or function within the social norms of their tribe. Watch a family, preferably of several generations. Take copious notes on how they interact with each other—how they treat one child, how they respond to the child’s efforts to communicate and function, how they communicate with each other about the child, how they communicate with each other with no reference to the child at all. Take notes on how the child attempts or does not attempt to be involved with them. Now take the same notes on the other children, along with notes on why you picked that first child first. Sketch choreographic notes on how the members of this family move around each other in space.

Write a scene in which a character is an adult using the child’s tactics, only in adult language and with adult understanding. Read it, and analyze the subtext between the characters. Write it again with a different character. And again with a different character. And again with the same character but a different outcome. And again with the same character but a different outcome.

Write it as if it were your one chance in life to communicate what you need to communicate.

This step is necessary to teach you compassion for every single character you create.

 

( photo by L’esprit d’escalier)

Spend one day crying.

Face it: you’ve got a lot to cry about. Sometimes your life has sucked. And putting all the effort of not crying into your work will make it superficial and dishonest. Go ahead and cry as much as you can out of your system. Reach the anger underneath and go punch a tree. Reach the pain under that and go bandage up your hand. Take a good look at the damage while you’re bandaging it. You did this to yourself. You punched a tree. Don’t you feel like a prize idiot? Learn to love the prize idiot who punched the tree. You need to know how to love prize idiots who rush around getting themselves into trouble without ever feeling sorry for them or allowing them to feel sorry for themselves.

This step is necessary to teach you courage.

If you don’t have a lot to cry about, put down your keyboard and go apply for a job in a nice, safe cube somewhere. You’re the wrong kind of fantasist to be a writer.

( photo by lucas ottone  )

Spend one day laughing at things nobody thinks are funny but you.

This will feel like hysteria brought on by all the crying, which is what it is. Laugh until you can’t talk. Laugh until you can’t breathe. Laugh until tears are running down your face. Laugh in front of loved ones to whom you can’t explain the joke. Laugh in front of strangers until they raise their eyebrows and shy away.

This step is necessary to teach you to accept what you bring to the craft of fiction. Claim your own utterly unique and bizarre nature. This is the only new thing you have to bring to literature, the one thing—paradoxically—your reader comes there seeking.

If you don’t have anything to laugh about, go back a step and cry some more.

 

(  photo by Gibson Claire McGuire Regester )

Spend one whole day being grateful.

In our family, we used to do a gratitude ceremony around a lit candle at the dinner table every evening, everyone taking a turn to say what they were grateful for. Dinner guests would wonder if they had to be grateful for only important things, and we’d say, no, no, anything at all. We had one friend who was always grateful for football. Sometimes I was grateful for compost or fingernail clippers. Sometimes my son—when he was very young—was simply grateful for the candle.

Write long, rambling, specific letters to people who have made a difference in your life. You don’t have to send them. Just get them down in words. And don’t worry about making sense or communicating what you really mean. Just blither. Go up to people you love and look them in the eye. Tell them why your life is better because of them, in very specific terms. Mention football and fingernail clippers and candles, if they’re pertinent. Write letters to your characters. Write a letter to your imagination. Write a letter of gratitude to yourself about all the most dreadful aspects of your personality without which you would not be you.

Remember that 1970s chain letter where you were supposed to send cute underwear to the top ten people on the list and then sit around waiting for 500 pairs of underwear some total strangers thought were cute? Say, “Thanks for all the underwear.”

 

 

10. Put your hand on your heart and say to the world in general, “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me all you wonderful, insane senders of underwear.”
Then go keep your promise.

The Greek girl named Tethys by Eneko Paz

Never forget You, a photo by Cereal-Killer 72 on Flickr.

I once made love to a blind girl. We stumbled into my gray apartment after our mutual friends got drunk and took a taxi. It was a foggy April night. I told them I will take her home. I held her hand and felt she was calm like a hanging cloth still heavy with water. She wore a tea colored transparent blouse, a cinnamon colored tank top embracing her waist. Tethys. A Greek girl with dark eyebrows and ochre eyes. The color made me believe she went blind from staring at the sun. She said she found the sun when she was three.
“I loved the sunrays on my face. I could feel the light, even if I didn’t see it”.
I found her lips at 3 AM when we were walking on the bridge.
She touched my face before I kissed her. Glided her hand over my nose and cheeks, licking my eyelids with her fingertips. She uttered my name as though sketching my face in her mind.
After we made love we lay on our backs facing the ceiling. Tethys was smiling. She asked me to describe the room.
“I don’t know where to start”, I was lazy.
“ Start with the ceiling”, she told me.
I looked at it, gray and dull. I realized she didn’t deserve this.
“I see the stars. I feel their distance with my eyes.” I said suddenly.
She smiled wider.
“Tell me more.”
“We are lying near the poplar tree. There is no wind to rustle the leaves. Its like a guard behind your head.”
I turned my face to see her profile close to mine. Her eyes closed.
“There is a meadow, deep blue, surrounding us. Low grass. I can see the fog in the distance.”
“Are there birds?” She asked me.
“Can’t you hear their heavy wings? They are flying into the fog to drink the humidity. They are thirsty.”
I took Tethys’ hand.
“I feel the sun will come soon. It is near. He will come to kiss your face and apologize for your blindness.” I told her.
“I don’t need to see it.” She said and was silent.
“You don’t need to see it.” I said and confirmed her silence.
The dawn crawled into my gray room through the dirty window, first touching my toes then went to Tethys’ knees. The city beamed silently with light.

© Eneko Paz

Meetings with Carla Vanamo – Sarah

Point break, a photo by stefan mahé on Flickr.

“I can feel the night behind me.” Carla said after a pause of silence of exactly 42 minutes.

She sat right in front of me with her back to the noisy lights of New York. It was dark. We were sitting in her balcony. Our plates were scrapped of food, looking like abandoned palettes of unintended artists.

I stared beyond Carla, at the building behind her, windows of light like portals into other people’s lives: an Asian student in headphones nodding his head to musings I can’t hear , a yawning woman folding a towel, an old man in front of the television as his caretaker thumbed a book, two young girls smoking and laughing at a miss-led date. Theater of life, I adore you.

“I can feel the night behind me”, she repeated fingering her half glass of scotch.

I was sipping wine.

“I’ve seen that movie”, I replied. “Stealing beauty”.

She smiled at me.

“Did you enjoy the dinner?”

I smiled back.

“You know that you are a wonderful cook and you are asking for a compliment.”

“Yes, I know that I am a wonderful cook and I love being complimented, but I wasn’t the one who made the dinner.” She said and emptied her glass of scotch.

“Really? Then who made it?”

“My neighbor. He is a chef. A good one. I’ll introduce you to him. You should meet him. I mean, after all that you and he have been through, you should at least see his face…”

“Why? What have we been through?”

“You ate the food he has made.” Carla said. “It is of utmost intimacy… His fingers have clutched the small tomato that was carefully cut into tiny pieces and sipped into the hot pan full of vinegar and oil. His fingertips have embraced the tiniest particles of cayenne which he sprinkled oh so slowly. His eyes have inspected the whole substance so thoroughly… He has made passion which you enjoyed and swallowed today.” She grinned. “He has made love to you without you even suspecting it.”

“What about restaurants? Does that mean the chefs make love to all the visitors?” I laughed quietly. “Like an orgy or something”.

“Ah, you have a point but the chefs in restaurants do not know the people who eat there artworks, they don’t care either. They cook for money. They make love to money”. She put down her empty glass with a thud. “Like most people, so we should not judge them, right?”

I laughed, “Well, I enjoyed that love-making”.

I looked at my empty glass and then at her.

“Could you get me my pipe, dear?” she caught my eyes.

I went inside the living room and opened the drawer underneath the dim lamp. I took the wooden box and went back to the balcony.

“Thank you, jana.” Carla said taking the box from my hands.

I stopped. And looked at her.

“You said ‘jana’. That made me miss home…”

“I know.” she took out the pipe and a small bag of petals mixed with tobacco. “Do you want to go back?”

“I do. I will.” I looked at the sparkling city and sat down. “But not yet.”

“I know.” she said again and blew out a new kind of garden. This one I haven’t smelled before.
“New tobacco?” I asked.

“Of course new tobacco. Never visit places you’ve been to. What’s the thrill in that?” Carla inhaled the smoke.

I nodded.

“I’m tired.” she said and looked down at her plate.

“Don’t worry. I’ll clean up. You go to bed.” I said getting up.

“No,” she looked up at me “Not yet, dear. I want to stay awake for a little while longer… Scientists say I’ve wasted more than 6 years of my life on sleeping. Let’s enjoy music.”

I thought about scientists and how they waste time on calculating how much we waste time.
I went back to the living room again and opened the record player . I knew, of course, where it was. And the records’ shelves with unnamed records. Carla’s style. She always pealed off the names of the records. She liked the thrill of not knowing what could be played, where she would go, what would happen.

I ran my fingers on the line of records and randomly pulled out one. As if I had another choice than to be random.

When I was going back to the balcony with the bottle of scotch and another glass of wine, Sarah Vaughan was already saying “I’m gonna love you, like nobody’s loved you… Come rain or come shine…”

“Ah..”, Carla sighed with pleasure, closing her eyes as I filled her empty glass. I leaned back in my chair and drank the nightlights of New York. Somewhere there someone loves someone even when it rains.

2011 © Ani Boghossian

Meetings with Carla Vanamo – Janacek

chase01, a photo by Ф on Flickr.

Carla took my hand as if calling me to a prayer. A prayer of attention and awareness of things surrounding me: the piano, its keys, Janacek’s grief and laughter, the echoes against walls, the hushed conversations, impatient sighs falling on my lap, on my trembling fingers.
“Look at his fingers”, she whispered, “They control him”. And immediately I heard a“Sshhhh!” from a nearby seat.

When we look at musicians, we observe their music, maybe their movements at the moment, but never wonder about their lives, their past, their future. We never notice their pattern of existence, we don’t appreciate their joy and sorrow, their sins and good deeds, the trials they went through. Maybe when the music stops and they lift their fingers off the keys, curiosity might nudge us to check their Wikipedia page, browse their photographs online.

Did anyone ever resent or judge Karajan for being a former Nazi and directing music in front of the gestapo while he was conducting? Maybe after the concert, yes. But not while he was effortlessly sweeping the endless ocean of Beethoven’s 7th. They were transfixed by the music.

What we might wonder about when we look at musicians giving birth to music, is our own birth and meaning of existence.

Carla was not looking at me. She just squeezed my fingers gently and almost invisibly nodded when I looked at her.
“Thank you for bringing me here”, I said quietly. “Shhhh! Quiet!”, someone said again.
I turned my eyes to the stage. They were full of my thoughts. Suffocating my voice, tears threatened to fall. I didn’t blink so they would not roll down, tilted my head back to swallow them back into my eyes.
Carla looked at me. The audience applauded.
“And it seems to us that we are falling when we become attached and detached again during flight”, she said.
I thought for a minute and said.
“I am not attached.”
“Really?”
I remained soundless.
“Then you are falling.” Carla concluded.
“No”, I rubbed my nose. “I have fallen already.”
“And it’s the height of all things beautiful. That fragility. Don’t you think?”, Carla touched my hair, pushing it back.
People were fidgeting around us, not sure whether to make use of the interval to mindlessly go to the bathroom or remain sited and await Schubert.
“You know that feeling when you read a good poem and you wonder what if it was yours? Where is my life right now?”, I was looking down.
“I know that feeling”, she crossed her arms and looked up. “I write the worst poems but I would not exchange them with the ones of Rilke or Yeats. What’s mine is mine.”
“Of course”, I said. “Of course. I just wish I’d find…”
I looked at Carla wanting to finish the sentence, but never did. She was smiling like a mother. Carla, a mother who never was a mother. It made me wonder to where she directed her motherhood? Towards untraveled land? The stranger that she met there? The gypsies? The cooks? The musicians and artists? The homeless poets? Captains and refugees? Me?
“Nothing comes out if you push your soul out. You might not even notice how it would vanish. Better drink wine”, she said. “Let’s go get wine after this”.

“Agreed”, I said and looked around.
We were alone in the giant hall. The stage was deserted. The piano was open. Bags, coats and phones of the audience were still and soundless on the seats. Ever since I have known Carla I have stopped questioning the unusual happenings, the strange occurrences whenever I was with her. It seemed as though the strangeness of things was a part of her being, her spirit and followed her around. All you could do was accept and move on.
“Accept the truth and move on, Ani. You are here now. Might as well stay here for a while,” she said and petted my hand.

2012 © Ani Boghossian

Meetings with Carla Vanamo – The New York Times

Untitled, a photo by mister sullivan on Flickr.

“Every time I pick up the New York Times I remember my father,” Carla yawned and turned her neck to the grey window, rained on and cold.

“Why?” was my usual question. My elbows resting on the papers, the papers resting on the wooden kitchen table, the table on a floor which was as a roof for a Portuguese couple.

“He loved to read it?”, I asked after some silence of Carla’s mysterious smile. Yet again, she was staring at something I couldn’t see.

“No”, she turned to me. “He liked to make paper airplanes and gave them to me. We used to cast a paper airplane each Sunday out of our kitchen window. I remember the New York Times floating with maple leafs, then falling abruptly when a dew dripped on its wings. No one likes tears.” She concluded.

I laid my left cheek on the papers. It was early morning.

“Death is like a silent wind. That wind crept into my life and took away the maker of my dreams and the New York Times airplanes,” Carla looked at her hands, “My father was the one that planted the seed of travel inside me. I was in the village of Báránd in Hungary, when I learned about his death. Funny,” she sniffed, “I never really missed him so much as I do now when the fog and rain dampened my papers this morning.”

“What were you doing in Báránd?”, I asked.

“I was learning how to play a piano,” she said, “I had a friend there. He was the one teaching me. I first met him in London. He was playing at a fancy restaurant to earn a fancy dinner.”

I smiled.

“He was so good at it,” she went on, ” that he also earned dessert. At Le Gavroche!” She laughed.

“And you? What were you doing at Le Gavroche?”

“Ah,” she looked up, “I was just passing by. I entered when I heard his music. I stood next to him for about 47 minutes, I listened to him as he played . Then he stopped, turned and asked me to join him for dinner.”

I lifted my cheek and was aware of some words stuck on my skin. I gulped some of the bitter coffee. Carla tilted her head as she smiled at me. As though I was a puppy she found on the porch.

“Thank you for letting me in,” I said, embarrassed, “at such an early hour.”

“You mind telling me what happened?”

“I will.”

“I know,” she nodded softly.

“I’m sure your father was proud of you and your achievements,” I said that to break my own awkwardness.

“I’m sure your father is proud of you more, Ani,” she said ever so softly.

I looked at the open crack of the kitchen door. A glimpse of a Persian rug. Somewhere behind that darkness was the living room, still asleep.

“I want to travel, Carla. I need to get away,” I said. The rain didn’t seem to want to stop outside. “How did you travel so much?”

“Own nothing,” she replied, “Things hold you back.”

“I only have one suitcase.”

“And I’m sure it’s packed full with old thoughts,” she pulled the sleeves of her silk robe to cover her fingers. Surely, she was feeling cold. “Get lighter.”

I looked at her. A silence settled down like tea leaves in a tea cup. I circled the spoon inside that cup.

“Carla, you must be feeling cold. Go back to bed. I’ll clean up.”

“You must be tired too,” she said.

“No.” I answered.

“I have some tickets for a nice evening,” she said,”will you join me? Tonight.”

“Of course.”

I turned my neck to the grey window. Carla stood up. The chair screeched.

Ani Boghossian © 2011