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Storyteller

Posted on August 30, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

The wind had a high voice, like an opera singer about to hit that tremulous note that drove large-bosomed women with blue hair to tears. She snuggled up into the crook of his arm and leaned her head on his shoulder, in such a way that it prompted him to give thanks to all the deities he could visualize in a split second for having given him the good sense to do those sets of shoulder exercises that had given him the muscular yet contoured shape that cradled her head like a really good pillow. For a moment she simply stared off into the distance, a distance that comprised a near one hundred and eighty degree view of the city below them and then with a deep breath she said, “Tell me a story.”

He frowned, “Really?”

She nuzzled her head against his arm like a kitten or a small baby trying to get more comfortable in slumber and moaned a soft moan of affirmation. He took his chin off the top of her head and thought, stared unseeing at the local train trundling by far below them and asked, “What kind of story?”

“Something I’ve never heard before.”

“Do you mean a style or genre or do you just mean a story you haven’t heard before?”

She remained silent, her way of indicating that she was done perusing the menu and while she knew what she wanted she didn’t care to subdivide her preference any further. He tried to look at her face, perhaps gauge her expression and figure out what she was in the mood for but they weren’t arranged for eye contact and the feel of her against him was making him happy in his special place so he didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize the arrangement. He thought for a moment, nodded to himself and said, “Okay, this is a story of a princess.”

He waited for a reaction. There wasn’t one. So he continued, “She lived alone in her castle made of bead curtains and tinsel walls. Everything reflected everything else until there was so rich and layered a selection of colours in her world that it was almost impossible for her to distinguish anything solely from its colour. In effect, she became colour blind.”

She shifted slightly, “Are you sure this is a good story?”

“No. I just tell the stories. You have to decide whether they are good or bad.”

“Do you think it’s a good story?”

“There are stories. Their goodness or badness depends solely on the person telling it and the person listening to it. With an open mind, a story about a spoon that wanted to rule all spoonkind might be spell-binding. It’s not what you know, it’s how you tell it.”

She nodded against his shoulder and snaked one arm around his waist, “Then? What happened?”

“What? Oh right, the colourblind princess. See she was colourblind but she still knew what soap was or television or the difference between wedges and stilettos.”

She smiled, not that he could see, but the way her cheek spread across his biceps it was clear that she was either smiling or grimacing. “Nice insertion of a girlish fashion reference there. Kept me interested in the story,” she said and he nodded.

Good, the tone was right.

“So one day, the princess decided to go out into the world because she needed to stock up on supplies and the help was on holiday for the day. Now the outside world made her uncomfortable because it was way bigger than her bedroom in the castle and she would get nervous because of the implication of all that space. Not that day though. That day she had a plan and she was determined to stick to it. She needed supplies so she planned on remaining focused enough to get everything without worrying about how the world made her feel.”

“Was she an amnesiac of some kind?”

“No, not exactly. See she was used to her life in the castle. She got disoriented in the real world by the sounds, smells and the way everything looked.”

The girl in his arms nodded and he continued, “So there she was, going through her list and ticking off the items she already had in her shopping cart when suddenly, as if by magic, a handsome princess appeared by her side.”

“Did they have sex? Did she drag him into a broom closet and proceed to do things to him that no one in his kingdom would do?”

He smiled down at the top of her head and said, “You keep quiet. This is not that type of story.”

Her back arched indignantly for a moment and then she settled back against him so he continued, “The prince asked her out on a date. She was flattered but she had no use for a man in the life she led in the castle. She liked the look of him but she didn’t know that she wanted to spend more time with him than she was doing right then so she declined. He shrugged and walked away. When she returned to the task at hand, which was stocking up on groceries and other essentials, she found herself being overcome with the familiar feelings of disorientation and unease that she normally associated with the world outside her window. The fact that the feelings had rushed back in upon her made her realize that for the first time in as long as she could remember, they had left her for a while. She also deduced that the moment of ease had come when she was with the prince who asked her out on a date. On an impulse she went looking for him and spent twenty minutes searching the various isles until they crossed paths again. She gave him her number and asked him to call her.”

She shifted slightly but it was clear that she wasn’t about to bolt upright and insist on another story so he continued, “Over the next six months the princess and her suitor went on several dates. By the time he was ready to celebrate their sixth-month anniversary she realized that she didn’t fear the outside anymore. In fact she loved being outside. And it was all because she finally saw the world as beautiful and suffused with a million colours. For their six month anniversary they tore down the tinsel in her castle and before long she no longer needed to adjust her vision to the real world. All that reflected light might have dulled her senses but she wasn’t beyond recovery.”

The girl in his arms understood that in some ways the story was a metaphorical re-enactment of her own. Only difference was that she subsisted on a diet of Coke, Glenfiddich and a healthy disregard for love in all of its millions of permutations and combinations.

He, on the other hand, was smitten and didn’t care who knew it. So when he leaned down to kiss her mouth, her eyes widened with surprise for just a moment and then she closed them and gave in to the tingle in his kiss. When they finally came up for air she looked into his eyes and said, “Sweet story.”

He kissed her again before whispering into the thicket of her hair, “Now that we’ve talked about love maybe we should put some stuff into practice.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Sex?”

“Works for me.”

She took his hand, led him into the bedroom and flopped down on the bed. As he tumbled into the tangle of her limbs and tasted the thin film of salt on her skin, the warm moisture of her cleavage and the tart pungency of her inner thighs he realized ruefully that it was easier to talk her into bed than it was to get her to enroll into the punishing music program she had been accepted into.

As they surged towards climax he thought to himself, I still have four weeks. I should probably turn it up a notch (or two).

And then they were overcome by the rapture that accompanied well-synchronized exertion.

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