Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 17:52:44 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: The City of Blue Rain

			  "The City of Blue Rain"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


Miss Remembers looked at her children, and once more hated
the juvenility of her jokey name, but it was only in that juvenile
jokiness that she had her being, that she had some bearing and
stasis.

They knew nothing about her, her children, her school room
students who dutifully looked at her snaps of France and Paris
and the countryside wild with flowers and blue with summer
sky. They considered it nothing more than brain notes for their
next test, not as though real people lived there in those little
square photos, or in the films from View Finders in the
Travelogue series that gathered dust on the shelf in the supply
closet smelling of oil and destiny and dust gone wrong, dust
gone backward, as though within it, it had a clock, and in the
clock of Deidre.

Who was a long time past, in a city of blue rain and crooked
stair cases and cobbled streets, where horses pulled wagons
and the sky was still and coming on toward winter, and the
Seine was close and comfortable, and the Left and Right bank,
coincided with the artistic lines of the American expatriate
writers and painters and lovers still as the white mountains at
either end of Miss Remembers world, and that was Deidre,
sweet fellow (?) (so odd, the English language; so stifling and
stiff and foreboding, like it was a secret club and only the most
dowdy and the most damaged could get in it) school girl of
brown stocking and smock dress and free fall of black night
hair and she, Miss Remembers, when she was the Melody of
the song, instead of an antiquated, rapidly aging dowager who
did not know anything about life or sex or love or the other
corsages reserved for young girls and young boys alone,
always in the metier of now, always in the present for those
who do not know how rapidly the present fades to end of day.

Her students, Miss Remember's, fidgeted in their Christmas
school room, counting the snow flakes falling leadenly past the
tall prudent prudish windows on the left wall, and Miss
Remembers grasped her hands together, at the back of the
book she was holding, and it took all that was within her not to
remember, as her name implied she could do with shocking
ease (so not true) of a little girl of knobby knees who liked to
nuzzle Melody Remember's lips with her own, there in the
quietest darkest corner at the top of the crooked stairs, late at
night, crawled from their respective trundle beds of feather
pillows and tears only young girls can ever weep, there on the
landing, in the cold or the heat, far past even the time when the
concierge spooked about the rooms in the moment of life
where the moon is always blue and the hands are always
reaching out for hands that reach back.

And touch. Miraculously touch.

The story she was reading was by Colette, and the students did
not approve the translation, not even if the story could be
adapted into their heads and their hearts, in a brazen world
where words shared by school girls in that lilting diphthong
that softened the flowers of affection between two girls who
clutched at each other's brown smocks or off white tattered
nightgowns, there in the garrett of rooms all round them, the
doors closed and still with a kind of angry sleep, a kind of a
city sleep, and towers round, and the Seine flowing calm and
courteous, there in a city so cramped and so oddly spacious at
the same time, as flesh found flesh and it was as friendly as the
sky of night, with the sun not needed, the sun an archipelago of
work and service and school teachers nattering shrilling in the
girls' heads about the guillotine and Marie Antoinette and the
true meaning of Les Miserables and how one loaf of bread
could send the literary world reeling for generations untold, the
need, the lust for food, the need for sustenance.

And the secret of the book?, the teacher said, was that we have
to continue to have sustenance, we suck at our mother's teats,
we gobble porridge, we drink milk or wine, we delve into
ourselves and find ourselves quite wanting and needing love
which so few of us...and then the teacher's flingy voice would
trail off into a distance and the work horses would be clopping
down streets and men would be shouting at the docks and
there would be the sound of commerce all round, as the
teacher touched absently at her lorgnette and then moved out
of her reverie to something else entirely.

Leaving the class hanging, dangling, leaving the class filled
with a sort of meatball area of food that would not sustain, of
food that would taste bad and roaches in the distance sniffing
and sniggling their antenna waiting to take over, while husks of
the world performed for a time as human beings and love, for
that was what the teacher was getting at; love, whatever that
was was not in the cards for so many, and the children had
never thought of that before. There were always mama and
papa. There were always their little friends. There was always
use and a day without calumniate and boisterousness other
than the kind that children can founder and be part of and lay
claim to a piece of its cherry pie now and then.

Which may have made Melody and Deidre cling more to each
other that first night and the second, the finding of each other,
one on her way to the water closet, one coming from there,
and they circled like apache dancers who knew the fragility of
time, suddenly aware of it, as though both of them at the very
same moment heard the moon bark, and knew without
question, the bark was a pinch at their souls, at their thin
wastrel bodies, at their faces with eyes like hollow church mice
holes, with eyes that had very old generations old fevers in
them that had banked and burned low and to nothing
generations ago, and framers of constitutions moved under
their finger tips as they reached little pods of whorls to each
other's face, and considered the move in their bare feet and
their bare ankles and knees something of a flimsy ghostly
expanse of conjoining before the world littered with the old
people they had come to think of as giant trees by a brook of
time that fed because it had to feed, not because it was a gift to
us, thought Miss Remembers, thinking further, it is a gift that
we can't endure, it is not pain or loneliness or hurt or evil, it is
when someone gives us a gift that bars us against them the
most, and considered then the stupidity, the complexity, the
mad fear of the human heart.

A past middle age teacher talked, and students drawing
Christmas bells and Santa faces and house trees that were not
peculiar traditions, could you bring hedges into your house?,
could you bring alley ways into them as well?, if someone said
it was all right, could you drive your Nash Rambler into your
living room, and be so very content?, if it was for a holiday and
was a tradition, then mostly of course.

 They know love is waiting for them, Miss Remembers noted,
they know love is there with its arms already stretched round
bout them, and they will never be sad and never look to the
past, for their Deidre will always be there by their side, and
their Deidre will carry the clock in her tummy, so there will be
no need of remembering how it felt so long ago when the
world seemed so remarkably so unrememberedly young and
two girls lay with each other and explored, and felt the tears in
the back of their eyes and put their hands under each other's
gowns, and the side of Paris that existed in gentler streets, not
in streets with iron ways beneath, not in pits covered and
covered some more where massive amounts of bodies were
buried, to rid the plague of its rapacious appetites, or the
torture chambers, or Madam LeFarge knitting and knitting and
nooses falling and blood spilled in sewers as an old man has his
life eaten away from him by a young girl who uses him
shamelessly and he knows it and lets her.

All rapacious appetites, as two hollow eyes glanced into the
hawk dens of two other hollow eyes, and there were the lips
that brought together as though they were filled with iron
magnets attracting them together, as their bodies attacked each
other, as though they were trying to devour each other, their
toes struggling with the other's toes and the other was not
another at all but them, Deidre was Melody and Melody was
Deidre and they were somehow someone else besides it all as
though they were warm chestnuts conjured up out of the
country of a grille by hands that had gloves that had holes in
them that leaked out fingers, and the girls were to be devoured
by someone with an extra franc or two in their corded pants,
and it would be fine to rest from winter rime and trees frozen
and bare of leaves as white horses went round the park again
and again--

--with little girls in rich blazed red coated comfort of clothes
and well to do parents as the little girls laughed and brocaded
the cold wintry air with a kind of diction that said Melody and
Deidre and Deidre and Melody.

And the fog came in and was made of ice lace, and time
needed to hide for time was being eaten by the night and by the
day all the time and it had to run to escape, and it escaped into
Deidre and Melody and would be there for time eternal.

Clock works, Melody thought, as she uncovered bare Deidre
and sucked at her left nipple like a cold hard seed in a ground
that was gloriously warm from their touch of field to field of
flesh and imagination and dreams and hard for planting and
hard for love to find its way out, to a world where a man was
destroyed for stealing a loaf of bread and poets went to jail for
what they were and what they were was not what everybody
else was and that made sense to Paris Match and idiots in cafes
and dance halls and walking down the streets and considering
the lay of the land that was surely there unmixed and specific
for them, no need they, for the misty muzzy side of Paris; no
need they, for the strength to let go of everything around them
and bid time find a home inside their far too aging far too
quickly bodies that they would simply deny like a kitten hiding
its eyes, only they were not kittens anymore.

And in the cold of the landing, the girls found each other's
vagina, found the little lips, the little mouths down there and
extended their trembling blond blood fingers in the light of one
intruding small landing window far above them that hobbled
most of the moon save for a few forgotten moon rays, and the
girls entered their fingers and they tickled and they put their
heads side by side, and their mouths were open O's as hollow
as their eyes, and they were enemies now, though they would
not know that for some time to come, for it was as if someone
had struck a match on the coldest day in the park there could
ever be, with wind chap and winding down day caught at the
key in the backs of everything and everyone like a marionette
show of tired hands and tireder strings--

--and all the love and all the devotion and all the honor there
was in this side of the world, along with fleeing time came into
the girls and held into them and made them their protectors
and their progenitors, and the girls gifted each other, and loved
each other and hated the gift, because it was mortal now, not a
fairy tale told to each on their own mother's comforting lap
while the night whittled down the ships of long distance away
and the ocean called out all blue eyed and frolicking that was
at the same time mysterious and deep and forlorn, for all the
ladies and all the laddies who danced by the quay to have heart
and to join in the roundelay and find the pearls in the first
locker you come to of sweet dear boy himself Davy Jones.

Miss Remembers words to the class had stopped now, and the
children glad that the words beating their ears had halted. The
boys and girls were sitting slumped in their desk chairs, they
were dawdling their hands, some with pencils, some without,
on their open text books; some were turning their rings round
and round; many were yawning; all were bored, and Miss
Remembers felt as though she and they were in a kind of
bubble, not an American soap bubble or anything like that, but
a French bubble from her own childhood, where you could
imagine yourself in a huge bubble, you and Deidre, flying over
the dark city with its passionate shadows, its silent love making
from all the quiet dark shaded windows and the promise of
croissants and coffee in a few hours as the dew fell and
collected and grew on the grass and on the tables of the
outdoor cafes and the railings of the houses and it was all so
still and taut and quiet in this bubble of a school room in
Springfield Mass. this last day in school before blessed two
week Christmas break--

--and it was like love inside this little room, it was Miss
Remembers finally not sad that she remembered too well,
making love to all these children, without a touch, without an
awareness, without a sound, and without movement or one
shred of clothing removed, which meant that for the first time
since Deidre she had felt those yearnings for someone else at
last, an irony that had far too much iron about it that it fell
about her shoulders heavily, and she knew she would hate
these children as much as she had come to love Deidre.

And hate her as well.

Their "affair" (they giggled behind their hands as they said the
word; it was so big and grown up and important and so
deliciously wrong sounding; so very cellar cave dancing and
bitter liquor, and darting frames of body parts in dimly orange
lighting, with music like cat gut strung the wrong way on the
violin, and played to ear gritting unbearability and strangeness)
was a light of fire far more violent and confligrating on the end
of that match stick in the cold park on the coldest day ever
while little girls ran their crotches up and down on white
horses proudly prancing and being held by the leads and hands
of dulcet men who were only doing their job at the tag end of
their lives when derbies were worn pulled down deep on their
heads and mufflers round their necks and their bodies thrust
down into heavy coats for it seemed the knifes in the wind
wanted to eat them as it wanted to eat time but it could not
because time had been gifted to Deidre and Melody who had
gifted each other with themselves, and the match made warm
and you put your hands over it like the embers of a
cumbersome coal and it felt so ineluctably good to your hands,
it tickled and burned and blackened them with summer's
hottest rage--

--like two girls throwing their legs over each other and rubbing
their mounds on each other, like two girls totally naked this
night and the next and the next and the next after that, till the
discontent started, and the fire made them cold and rigid and
filled with mountains there was no climbing, mountains there
was no umbrage or bright pigment of sun to make pink and red
and bold the blazing banner of morning.

But heat that made the girls cold; heat that made them risible;
heat that stoked the frigidity in them, and the gift was all
wrong, because they wanted to devour each other and their
mouths grasped tits and their tongues stroked naked flanks and
marveled at the warm paleness of them and the fever down
deep in those hollow eyes dead for generations now caught at
the caves of lifting something so terribly heavy that it was all
the torture that the heart could stand; as Atlas shrugged off the
world from his shoulders, not because he hated the world but
because he loved it so; because he wanted it to cling to him
forever; but it made him and it mortal; it was the eating
mechanism of life gone into this private place, and that backed
with the teacher's fatal admission that love is for few...

...even as her voice faded out and she could not bring herself
to say the rest...not to protect them and their innocence; not
because she was a kindly woman, for she was not, and beat
students every day for not minding her; and for someone that
cold, that cruel, that dyspeptic to be afraid of admitting love
comes to few, and that meant love had never come to her and
is that how we will turn out? oh please god let it not be so....

And the joke; the man who ran for his life because he had
stolen a loaf of bread; a man the girls had seen one late winter
day at a street book stall, a man tall and sickly looking with not
nice clothes, as he was examining a small thin book with blue
edge pages; the girls not close enough, but one or the other of
them, they were now sharing each other's bodies and minds
and souls enough that the eating down deep had begun, just as
they had eaten each other's vaginas though not swallowed,
though not digested (the terrible awareness they were given;
women had two mouths; one to devour, and one to ingest, in
between bouts of  urine excretions, which was sad and sick
enough in their minds; how hopeless is love when it must exist
in the triangle between the legs, and down there in the same
community with the piss hole and the back hole, and the
always fear, what if a boy, there were to be boys of course,
neither of them thought ever otherwise, were to put his penis
in the wrong hole, for the right hole they had been told hurt
enough, but in the wrong one--sacre bleu) and woman hood
was to be devoured by men, to be eaten and poked but never
fully digested, regardless of all the cannibalism of that current
lurid ridiculous Todd Slaughter (yes, clever name, rah, rah)
film..

The one about the demon butcher and his taste for certain
types of meat pies, but would being fully eaten, and swallowed,
for the stomach to digest, would this be better than to be
leavings, leavings that were in times stale table scraps
hardening and discoloring on the oil cloth covered kitchen
tables? Might as well be a throwaway kitty than that.

Someone might love you then, finding you down the torn
alleys of the world where a drunk singer in the distance pissed
against a brick wall and tried to find his sweetheart in this last
heartless release. The flame burned. The night of the soul and
the heart and the mind grew cold. The song was at its fullest
flower. The song became so lackluster and feeble and warbling
and dank and wrong somehow as the very flower of it
unfolded and extended and their tongues touched at the center
of each other's flower, the one in front and the one below,
sometimes, that stark acrid piss hole, not touching the back
hole in any other way at all, unthinkable, but still in the climate
of airy poetry that had some how picked up earthiness and had
sunned it against the time heat that grew into each of them,
pushing away pushing forever and completely and totally away
and fine broth of a boy Davy Jones laughing his sea anemones
off at this foolish pair.

But not foolish, for love makes most foolish, makes most live
on the outer edges of giddiness and non acceptance while they
think they are accepting and are quite romantic about it, but
not so; and that is their unwitting salvation, their undeserved
blessing, Miss Remembers thought, now, sitting in her hard
back chair behind her desk, the children warm in the heated
room, thinking Christmas Eve night or Christmas morning
would be the second coming, would be heart's desire laid out
perfect and fine and richly colored in front of them all those
bright gay red and green Christmas wrappings they expected to
find their true loves and their true hearts so contained and the
joyous jump fest in their living room as body and mind and
future and day after tomorrow work out fine and they don't
have to face any more skinned knees or bruised shins, or heart
break because for example it is four thirty five on Jan. 2 and it
seems no one loves me and the snow in all its hearth and depth
and breadth that was to take me to new lands.

To lands beyond beneath or above, all of it is crushing me,
because it is exactly what I want it to be, and snow and cold
brings frigidity and gloom and dark and it in these freezing blue
rime elements of scoops of itself on fence posts and conicals of
itself on the roof and its eaves, in perfect reproduction on top
of whatever it covers, it brings a fire and fire melts and fire
warms and it feels so fretfully so fractiously so fecklessly good
and you are a traitor because you want to leave winter behind,
because you want to say adieu to your love and break the
Seine of its ice, and toss away poetry books and not care if
great art will ever come from your pen or your brush or your
heart, you want to be warm again and you want the sky to be
blue....

And love comes only to a very.....few.

The clock ticked down and the last bell of the day rang. The
students suddenly animated themselves and left like a shot,
corpses let out of the ground and hurrying with such tear
making  (in her, certainly not in them) deft firm footed
assurance back toward life where there was absolutely
everything, because they were there and where they were how
could there not be absolutely everything?

Miss Remembers sat by her desk for a time. The sounds of
them in her ears going already gone. The snow fell. The sky
grew darker and Melody punched Deidre in the left eye, or
Deidre punched Melody in the left or maybe the right eye,
perhaps her name was not that much of a joke after all, the age
that was on it and all; these girls who had brought each other
to rushing come with their tongues and their fingers who had
kissed and walked their fingers on the other's abdomens and to
the skillful conjunction of worn too big panties and then
underneath to their secret girl hoods that were caught with
time being in them and time made them devour each other
because time is a coward, the biggest coward in the whole
world, and that last night in the end of spring, going on two at
the morning, the concierge, an immeasurably old woman with
white thinning little bobs of hair--

-- and a heavy and thick cabbage smelling body, cold cream on
her face smeared, fat pink worm like unneeded curlers in that
hair in a vague attempt to make it more than it was please god
by morning, had stood at the bottom of the steps, and then had
lumbered up them one at a time, the girls caught in passionate
love making, their crotches hot and tight against each other,
their hands rubbing at each other's highly curvy butts.

Their lips locked into place each on the other, not hearing
pigwoman coming, not feeling her silent railing wrath up the
stairs in the dark up the stairs in the dark that the forgotten
moon rays revealed, further and further, they like a mad pianist
in that Peter Lorre movie, caught in the arpeggio of finding
time in each other and desperately fighting without knowing
they were so warring, wanting time to get to the other and stay
there and away from me because I cannot accept the terrible
burden of such a gift and I cannot accept the terrible burden of
you...

And the girls pinching each other's breasts and their heads now
back and their mouths open in ecstasy that was anything but
mock childhood play, and the old woman reached her scaly
hands down to their shoulders and they looked up at her like
the troll from under the bridge had finally got them, the lovers
by the bank of the river had been upended by the monster
unlocked by the silent quiet quick love of students on holiday
in the city of hopeful always 3 coins in the fountain love, and
one or the other girls; Melody remembered so it must have
been she, but she could not say if it was her or the other, or a
dream the other one remembered or that the other one planted
the memory or dream in her, Melody or Deidre; and they were
screaming, the little girls, locked like two dogs having sex in
the school yard while the teacher sprayed them with water
from the hose and the children laughed and laughed.

And the girls screamed and she pulled them up like sardines
who had escaped from the tin, like escargot that were trying to
sneak off the plate or off the griddle for they were still alive,
time had to keep them alive until it could find another host,
and the woman held naked girls in each hand and kicked on
their parents' doors and they were puppies held by the scruff of
the neck and trembling and pulling and trying to yank
themselves free, and squirmy and the concierge called their
parents' names and all over the floor, doors opened, lights
clicked on, and the embarrassment as time made a run for it
and the girls were free of it as they were right in its grasp more
than ever as a drunken man would sit in a pub and hold his
glass of red liqueur flowing more and more freely and he
drowning in the thing that was to free him but was not of him
and that was lament and salvation all in the same breath of hot
smelly flames that he tossed down to his stomach.

 That then belched the residue gasses out of his hoary mouth
that needed more and more sustenance of what was killing him
and twisting his head and muddling his brain and dying him as
he thought it was living him and in this he would not be totally
wrong.

And the girls glad they were caught. And each one blaming the
other. And the poke in the eye, and the parents and the talking
to all night and the pain and the shame ("oh how could you!
my precious little dear girl, oh my god, how could you?,
unbelievable!") and the tears and the glares and the stark bare
glare of lights and the unrepentant slimly painted green walls
and being bare with all these people staring right at them that
made them sexy feeling again, go figure, and Miss Remembers
sighed and broke out of her reverie, and her parents were long
dead and everybody moved from everybody.

 The girls  then went to different schools and words were never
mentioned about again though the slattern concierge had
looked hard and hot at the girls as they and their parents
departed the premises,  as each girl looked back at her and
then at each other angrily, and almost said thank you, but to
the concierge, not to each other; the flame had done its cruel
winter magic, or the winter magic had done its cruel flame
trick.

And it was over. And fleecy clouds of summer never seemed
like pillows you could ease down on and stretch out on
comfortably again.

Miss Remembers remembered for a time.  She put on her
heavy coat. Buttoned it up. Then she put her books and papers
in her satchel, closed it, felt the secure grain of the leather, got
up, turned out the lights, closed the door, walked down the
oily smelling hall, said good night to the crookbacked janitor
who was mopping the floor, and he scowled up at her greeting
as he always did and did not say a word. Miss Remembers
stepped into the night. She had made love to her class this last
30 minutes or so and she wished for all of them love and
Christmas heart's desire and wealth of colors and feelings and
burgundy wine as they winded their way through life, and no,
she would not tell them love was only for a few if even for that
many, for they would not believe her, except some would, like
Deidre and Melody and a few of their classmates had, and
perhaps it had been a teacher fulfilled promise, what occurred
from the offshoot of it, the terrible confusion, the horrible
mingling of love and fear and angst and haunted dreams that
she knew Deidre--

--Poor dear Deidre (how could she have had any kind of life
either?) dreamed too and the always pulling apart from each
other, even now, still pulling, like a wool sweater that will not
stop at all not for a minute until it totally unravels itself and
then it will find something else to unravel in its place.

She walked into the chilling wind in the already come night.
The wind cut her hands and face and almost toppled her over.
She took a moment before she could breathe the dagger air.
She dreaded the first lung full of it. How she had used to like
winter so. She no longer had the strength to fight back against
any of it. Fight back at what she once loved? When did this
change happen?

No, she would not tell her students what she had been told.
She already hated them because of her feelings this last forty
five minutes and she refused to let that happen again. Or let
time once more find a worm hole into the apple of whatever
heart she still had remaining.

Fuck, she thought, as she went to her car, her shoes ticking
hollowly on the pavement, and unlocked the door and got in to
its bleak dark tunnel; how cold everything was; had it ever
been colder?, she asked herself, turning on the car and the
heater; fuck, she thought, putting the car in gear, love.