Porridge

As much at home in the kitchen as in the parlor, Madame is a famous hostess. But there is not much entertaining to be had these days. Madame eats porridge. At one time she had spent the balance of her days pressing her nose and brow against the middle pane of the east window on the top floor of her tall house. Gazing out, she would simply subtract the mountains from the landscape so that she could see the sea. Madame had never thought about sailing on it. For her the sea contained neither port nor passage, nary a demarcation nor a beacon. The sea was what she saw. That body of water was what compelled her to clap her palms firmly to her thighs and rakishly urged her to suck shamelessly upon her sugared, peach and fleshly finger.

Now that their children had gone, she and he, had rounded out their lives. After years of subtracting the mountains it came, that inevitable day, the day when she could no longer see the sea. Gone. The sea had packed up and picked up, moved on to other, younger windows. Poor Madame, the loss of a good lover is a rough roll.

Madame eats porridge in the morning in the kitchen. She prefers her porridge hearty; her spoon standing at attention. She imagines her spoon is a soldier decked out with the most exquisite silver buttons.

On one irradiated white morning, Madame sits with her porridge and her soldier, searching for a spiritual sensibility in his metallic countenance, but it is the reflection of her own eye that she finds in him. And around the corner of her amber eye rests the finely crafted lattice work of a mayoral husband, the loss of her children and then her lover, the solitude of sunlight, the dryness of yellowing paper; in short, Madame makes acquaintance with the physical manifestations of loss. This, she reflects, is the whole of it all: her spoon soldier, Madame herself, a gas burner and a bowl of thick porridge. So she rises and to the stove. She grasps her soldier firmly in her fat hand above the blue flame. Lowering him inch by inch. She half expects him to speak to her as she believes God should have spoken to her. Madame heaves up her heavy skirt and presses her spoon’s whispering head to the cool flesh of her glacial thighs.

Once: a kiss and a cry.
Twice: a kiss and moan.
Thrice: a kiss and a wail.

As her eyeballs rollick back into her skull, Madame beholds the enduring grayness of her brain. Her life has seemed to go on as if one side of her face - cheek, ear, eye - had been perpetually ground into the pillow during the commission of a rough (yet boring and interminable) sexual position. It had been hot and she cold. It had been quick and she slow. It had been loud and she muffled. Life had stolen all her petty cash. It had, however, left her this strand of three remarkable jewels upon her thigh, a sin as blue and promising as a nest of Robin’s eggs. Madame is left the markers of this singular action, which she will forever call by the name of adultery.

The mayor at dinner:

There were warm traces of mint on his breath, Madame reflects as he rockets off her ample stinging thighs. At this instant it strikes him solidly both in the loin and in the logic – her hips quivering in wait atop the table – that her big bare thighs atop the table are not thighs. They are Portuguese Men-of-War compelled hither out of that green Hellenic sea to settle revenge upon him for his boyish fantasies of colonial invasion. His wife, a traitor; this very lovemaking contrition. She is a secret, trading in more than the pricks and pangs of duck serving and lace making. The red roast ebbing under the bridge of her arched back is no more a rare roast. The windows not windows; his bed is not a bed. His linens no more are linens; the forks and the flowers have made an irrevocable foray over metamorphosis’ border. He throws open the doors to the dining room, exits the house and heads up the mountain. The mountain is always and only a mountain.

She refuses to cry out. She bites down on the lining of her cheek. She has never been that type of girl. She longs for her soldier’s touch upon her thigh. She calls that touch by the tender term 'our Spanish sunset.'

Madame had always been a beautiful specimen, but these days she stands nude before her glass both day and night.