Untitled Project on Sibling Actors, Part 4: Marriage and Fabric Shears

Mr. Charles Yardley married Mrs. Yardley, previously Mlle Melanie Clement, on one of his business trips to France twenty-five years ago. She had been modeling for Lanvin's first haute couture collection in 1985 and Charles had a 1985 Porsche 911 Carrera convertible parked outside of the event. Both were bewitched by the other's presentation. Charles Yardley, ten years her senior, made the right choices in life and cultivated quite an astounding wealth. The soon-to-be Mrs. Yardley recognized a tremendous opportunity for financial security. She made the right choice and married Charles and, from that point on, never again had to worry about how she would come to take care of her parents, who, up until then, had been shoved away into a home, stinking and clinging, but more importantly, she would never again have to beat herself over the head on how she would manage to support herself. She got the whole Yardley package. Charles and Melanie purchased a mansion together in the Riviera and in came both Mr. and Mrs. Clement. Charles did not have to worry very long about the complimentary, weighty, and intrusive spin on his new and fragile marriage to Melanie, because Mr. Clement died of a heart attack two years later, right before the birth of Sister, and Mrs. Clement's departure from the mansion followed shortly after due to the stubbornness of her colon cancer. Her body began rapidly deteriorating, her organs, already discombobulated under the stress of Mr. Clement's death, were not for or against her, but they were dying. One day a rigid, iron grip that had mercilessly held Mr. Yardley pinned down to the floor, an inane nagging from the old who can smell their own death approaching, disdainful and made bitter towards all youth and beauty, was lifted; Mr. Yardley's estate--his accumulated millions in capitol--was no longer stretched to cushion what was soon to be a pair of old, pale French vegetables. Mrs. Clement had died. Mrs. Yardley mourned appropriately, but not for any longer than absolutely necessary, because she had her own life. The Yardley's could eat their duck consommé and live.

The Yardley family moved back to America, keeping their French villa staffed abroad in preparations for future trips of business and for other, more frivolous excursions. Then Laurent was born, crowned by his parents as the future continuation of themselves. A boy to grow up and become a man. Perhaps, even to continue in his father's footsteps and build temples with the Yardley name etched into their facades. He would grow up and become the shining cliff of life that Mr. and Mrs. Yardley will attempt to grab at when they, too, begin to shrivel down to their arid roots, their brains collapsing into an acidic mush. Mr. and Mrs. Yardley are not mush yet, though, so Brother and Sister must at least appear to abide by familial code and lend strong, promising hands when called for by Mr. and Mrs. Yardley. Brother and Sister must look as if they have ambitions, so that Mr. and Mrs. Yardley themselves may shine for some years to come....

The next morning the Cornishes take a taxi back to the airport to continue on their return to London. The siblings stand outside the front door, waving as the taxi drives away to the front gate, sister smiling and brother quickly relapsing into a dead pose of boredom. Martha, kind enough to bring the Cornishes' bags down to the foyer, announces to the Yardley siblings that brunch will be served in an hour and then opens the door for the siblings. Sister walks inside and Brother follows. 

Sister walks to her playroom as Brother diverges away to the back patio. Martha heads to the kitchen to assist the cook in the preparation of the Yardley's first meal. Usually, Sister and Brother do not wake up early enough to have breakfast. In fact, Martha might be able to count the times the siblings have woken and had an early breakfast together throughout the past two years on two hands, her two spatulate, white hands. While the lobster hollandaise sauce is being whisked and eggs cracked, Sister will be wanting her coffee with milk and Brother, his coffee with whiskey. 

Now we go into Sister's playroom. Photographs are scattered across the desks against the walls. On one desk, a pair of sharp, fabric cutting shears rests next to a green Tiffany table lamp. Pendant emerald dragonflies with bright orange eyes are spliced with black, smoldered copper that bolsters the glass pieces of the lamp's cone. The cutting shears blush green, glistening at the inner edges. There is a brown paper binder on the floor next to the desk. Sister grabs a couple tasseled throw pillows from the couch and tosses them onto the floor near the binder and then sits down on the floor. She opens the binder and reviews pictures she has collected over the past few months that have been cut out of magazines, art books, and illustrated biographies on actors and artists that are dear to her. She takes a few seconds with each picture. Marlene Dietrich in a white, two-pieced suit, leaning backwards against a stair railing in the street. Catherine Deneuve in a golden seventies' spread for Chanel No. 5. Tilda Swinton, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis... 

Sister holds the the last two photographs in her hands. My Mother told me never to speak badly of the dead. She's dead…Good! Her toes wriggle in her loafers. Davis' alleged icy epitaph, which she so graciously uttered for the late Crawford, sealed the famous actress rivalry in a state of titanic mythology. Two goddesses, one with melodramatically-thick eyebrows and eyes wide on the offense, the other with drunken cheeks, sagging and disdainful of other studio owned actresses. Their lips! Crawford was said to have had a nervous breakdown from the pressure her costar, Davis, hammered down on her head off-set. Finally, Davis sent Crawford off the stage, her insides writhing while her face worked as hard as it could to conceal the stench of artistic jealousy. No one could ever accuse the stars of being undedicated. 

Untitled Project on Sibling Actors, Part 3: Champagne and a Knife

Brother and Sister smile and stroke the rims of their champagne glasses. This is supposed to be a little party. Both siblings deeply inhale the aroma of the pistachio-crusted cannoli on their plates, the fruits of someone else's hard labor. Laurent is wearing a maroon cashmere sweater and gray wool trousers. His sister has a loosely fitted rose-gold dress on with a black dinner jacket she borrowed, without asking, from Laurent's closet that now hangs on her chair. Mr. and Mrs. Cornish find the siblings delightful and entertaining, as if through playing bystander of Laurent and Sister (There are others of a similarly vigorous grain, but these siblings grow out of a most particular earth that can be thoroughly tilled in preparation for a new crop, but will sprout and wither from its own unearthly direction, at its own leisure), they are able to preserve their own lives, much duller and halfheartedly sealed with tarnished silver lids. They are avid fans, albeit generally mettlesome company for the siblings, who have adored the Yardley family for years. 

Whenever Mr. Cornish talks about commerce to Brother, poor twisted and forlorn Brother, Brother, with his head bent towards his drink, fingers his glass to delve into the divine. He hears a choir sing the adventures and moods of Gyrogy Ligeti. The sound is clear, yet there is no clear chord or note. Whenever Mrs. Cornish speaks to Sister about the new street fashions of London that she finds appalling, Sister dips her finger into the bubbly Brut Réserve, looking around the dining room. Ten feet in front of where she sits, behind the chair in which brother sits, there is a stack of magazines strategically laid out, but in some array of incomprehensible order on a glass table against the wall. In front of the magazines, there is an olive-green china ashtray without ash, cleaned by Martha earlier in the day. There is a new Persian blue vase, detailed with tiny painted elephants in a tight, trunk to rear-end line, circling around the vase's pink peonies.  Sister's nose, her mouth--everything becomes an arrow pointing in one direction out of this dinner scene; her thoughts plow through the area, bounce off of Laurent as if to say to him (and herself), "keep moving." Sister longs, as does Brother, to break into the poison cabinet and really smooth things out. The Cornishes, the darlings (friends the siblings have incidentally inherited from their parents), cannot stomach much more than a few glasses of champagne, five tops. Forget spirits. They would not be able to keep up with the siblings. So the cabinet protecting the siblings's absinthe and marijuana remains closed for now. 

Mrs. Cornish:

--This new part you have--such ravishing news. Tell me all about it! 

Sister glows:

--It's a challenge. I'm to work on a Greek accent. My role is that of the friend to a Greek immigrant in France. Yes, France. We're both Greek. It's quite a demanding part to play. The director, as you know, has a way of breaking the actors down to get the most raw and visceral performances--

Mrs. Cornish interrupts:

--No! I do not know any names attached to the film, of course, who is directing it?

--(Mr. Cornish, aside to Laurent) Not that Michael Flasch-Fliescher?

Laurent:

--Fleischer and he is a god.

Sister:

--Yes, very "Cannes," very challenging. Anyway, she's a woman. Catherine Broussard.

--(Laurent, chesty and mockingly, with a critical finger directed at Mr. Cornish who scoffs in response) Catherine Brutal. 

Sister knows that, in reality, out from under Brother's stage pretense, he points at her to undermine her successes. This little display gives her also a generous window into the leaning stack of Brother's jealousy. Underneath the table, Mrs. Cornish rubs her left hand with the palm of her right in her lap. Sister feels this energy rolling over without direction and motions across to Laurent to grab the ash tray behind him on the glass table. 

Sister takes a silver rectangular case out of a front pocket from her dinner jacket:

--Cigarette, anyone? 

The guests thank her and take one from her case. Sister then slides the case across the table to Laurent:

--L?

Laurent shakes his head without word and Sister lights her cigarette, knowing that he would also love to have a smoke right about now. Cigarettes can compliment or change an atmosphere and, because this conversation excludes Laurent to some extent, he needs something to cover himself in to occupy his thoughts and hands.

--(Mrs. Cornish to Mr. Cornish) "Elle?" Is this a new nick name? Oh, you are both so "hip."

The word that comes out of her mouth is a contrivance.

Sister, while keeping her eyes on Brother, expounds on the name:

--I've been calling Laurent "L" for months now. As long as we are here at the house, he likes to go by "L." It's much shorter and doesn't call attention to itself. His full name comes off the tongue so languidly. 

Brother, nonplussed:

--Does not call attention to itself?

Ever since they had moved into the house two years ago, Sister had never once called Laurent by this double entendre. Sister has now played Laurent, but brother will claim this name as his own and attempt, in his best effort, to let Sister know that this condescension has now fallen beneath him and will not be able to move him again. 

Mr. Cornish, with an inelegant laugh:

--You two are so charming that it disgusts me. 

--(Mrs. Cornish, practically nudging Sister) Go on.

Sister:

--Catherine Broussard is a painter of nightmarishly real paintings composed from delicate strokes.

--(Brother to Mr. Cornish) Delicate as any strokes could be made by a knife, or so she would like to pretend she's wielding. (To Sister) Do you even like any of her movies? (After a halfhearted shrug) No, but it's a role that'll put her in a controversial spot light. 

Sister, as she flicks her cigarette ash into the tray:

--A knife, L?

trash, part one

A man in a slim black suit trailed the prison ward by fifty feet or so next to the highway. He observed thirty men poking at the ground with long metal rods, trash collecting at the base of their instruments, plastic, coke and beer cans, cardboard. Underneath the sun the men operated like drunken, aberrant ants, off the trail, poking here or there, seeking sugar. Every now and then one would pick up a cigarette that had been discarded prematurely from another capricious driver. The man in the slim black suit saw one inmate, large and overweight with maroon skin lesions covering his face, ponder whether or not he should tuck the remaining stem of a cigarette into his palm for later usage, but, the prison warden, disgusted and belligerent, shouted at the prisoner to put all of the litter into their plastic trash bags.

The man in the slim black suit was drunk himself, not deliriously, as these prisoners walking along the side of the highway were in their movement, but drunk off of creativity, off of his craft. He was an artist and he had found his landscape. The early afternoon sky, sparkling. Now, a sudden ubiquitous dimming of the light, the artist had crafted a cloak for the sun.

(The warden to himself) Must be a cold front coming in. Next to his foot there was a cigarette butt. The filter yellow and burned. The edges of the highway covered in trash. Bad enough that there are already animal carcasses to be removed. No caring community had adopted this section of the road, so here he is with his ward. It is good for them to be out and see the bright atmosphere of the world, but now, this sky, an errant observer of the scene, seemed restless. Soon enough the warden was influenced by the sudden purple of the evening (except it was two o'clock just minutes ago?) and he was disturbed enough in the transformation to take his eyes off of his ward. The trash once stuck out incandescently, but was now swallowed by the long emerald grass.

....

Icons

you do realize that all of the icons they have hanging in the church are not doing their job. there is no portal in the portrait that allows both parties on either side of the image to communicate. just an image. and you really should know by now that images are perceived and just simply are. there is nothing on the other side that can suck in your own image. don't cry for your reflection either. don't cry for all of the experiences it won't endure or the questions it will never ask. so maybe you observe the Sabbath. the image does not observe. [        ].

close your eyes and now no one sees anything.

a la moog

He is painstakingly careful in carrying each phrase to the moog synthesizer. There is love and patience in his handling of each note. Inside of the electronic music studio there is reverence for the virtuosity earlier master craftsmen had in laying out their works and also a devoted, caring irreverence in the structural transcription.

Carlos: there is a way to both laughat and pay homage to the structure. Carlos fervently tries to embrace hisCock in hand. The feeling of discontentment intensifies. How would his sex read through the moog?

The moog transcription is a cosmetic one, first requiring a translation in meaning of the composer's role  from one body to another. Inside the recording study, Carlos pokes at the buttoned, lit up boxes lining the walls: Is the framing of the older body already made to embrace that of the new? The inner physicality strangely resembles what he desires. 

His German love, Johann Sebastian Bach, is revived from the dead through this moog. For his technical command, Carlos reveres the late conqueror of many instruments. Carlos is delighted! The parts all interlock harmonically when played together. Isolated, one part--say, that of the violinist--is independent in its rhythm from whatever the cellist has designed. There are wires all over the floor, so the machinist is hard into his element. 

Bach's framework does not have many spaces for players to insert their own ornamentation. Carlos sees potential for a flourish here or there, out of reverence. 

Today his Love's compositions are often played through orchestras much larger than his originals. Already, the structure of the concert hall is expanding. 

Lightly, Carols pokes the dead into the moog from meticulous, obsessed strikes at the keyboard: love the loss and rediscovery of each phrase, love the surgery and the machine. 

A powdered wig, now electric blue. The machinist's sex left out of his trousers. Out of reverence. There is a phrase being transcribed. An incision down the shaft for ornamentation [a little, out of reverence (a little further)]. The dead is switch ed on, the shaft demolished, and the music breathes again. Hot and whirling, but not uncontrollably. Brightblue obeisance.

river panning children

The crookedly hinged man likes your perfume, whatever it is. It does not scape his debauched nostrils like a soapy washcloth, but its buttery base notes endure throughout the scene. He likes how your perfume is without rose petals. In fact, not one flower can be detected in the slightest. Again you do not smell soapy tonight, which is good, because they like their baths to be taken afterwards.

Go ahead and continue sobbing on the floor. This theatrical display looks to him like the cover of a great novella. His chums will be making an appearance soon. They are also handsome. Having business empires promised to them by fathers, they have commodity-reinforced confidence and big smiles.

The way they beam, the big boys, turns you on, but not one of them as invasively as Him. The others are fish chasing their own scents. He already knows his own scent. This is not to say that it does not turn him on, only that he does not swim in circles. Only that he does not swim in circles anymore.

They all enjoy this fairyland world of yours and how it is exceedingly fragile and forefront in your movements. They blow bubbles and scoop up the froth, tucking it away in their pockets like infantile kleptomaniacs set loose in a riverbed where gold has collected from a mountain vein. Mystified, they trade the scraps of joy, the precious nuggets.

He is inclined toward tracing back this music to the first wind.

You do not know, however strong the front from your angle, the delicacy in the way his muscles interact down his back and abdomen, underneath that dress shirt. His architecture buckles and twitches--not at all like a beast of virile maturity, but of a little child listening to the radio broadcasts at night that penetrate the living rooms of every home, addressing, maybe affirming all the whispers about a supposed dismantling of the empire. A child with his broken plaything.

His muscle face, it has been overworked. He was once an underwater infant caught up in a gold bed of his own. He had to be found out by his parents. It turns you on, the industry of it all. All of you now, shifting your pans from side to side in the stream, sifting out the unwanted. Back into the stream the pebbles plop.

In the room a train pulls out. With it goes the light.

drip-drop drip-drop.

Untitled Project on Sibling Actors, Part 5: We Now Go Into Laurent's Bedroom

It's been awhile and for that, I am sorry.


From his bed Laurent sees a dark figure walk through the frame of his open door and stop near the light switch. He pulls the covers more so over his face and pretends that he does not notice his sister. He was thinking of calling it an early night. She flicks the light switch on and off rapidly to get his attention:
--Laurent.
Laurent shifts his eyes toward her and grunts to let her know that she has been heard. Sister leaves the light on and walks over to his bed, the wooden floor creaking under her feet. She sits down on the sheets where her brother's legs are withdrawn back to his curled body. Laurent, the fetus. Brother hears her handling something glasslike in her hand. A silver clutch rests in her lap.
--Laurent, we've got some really, really good weed left over from yesterday. If you're not asleep yet, we should load my pipe.
Sister holds out a glass smoking pipe. The bowl of the purple glass is filled with ground up weed and topped off with the light green crystal remains sifted from the bottom chamber of his sister's weed grinder. Laurent sits up in his bed:
--Thank God.
He takes the pipe into his left hand and wraps his thumb around the carburetor of the bowl. Sister places her Zippo lighter into his right hand. Laurent lifts the pipe up to his lips and begins to flick the lighter, but stops:
--Shouldn't we use the vaporizer? I don't have any incense to burn and I don't want our friends to smell the weed.
--Their room is on the opposite side of the house! I suppose I'll go grab some incense from downstairs. I think you should finish this bowl and then load another. Beforehand, if you would, get a bathrobe on or something and then go put on a good vinyl.
Sister slowly pats the exposed calf of Laurent's leg and sets off to grab the incense. Laurent goes back to lighting the pipe. He enjoys the way the top of the mound in the pipe lights up and the way the ground up bits of green bud shrivel as smoked. The harder his drag of smoke, the brighter the bowl becomes. He sets the pipe onto his nightstand and ascends out of his bed naked, an action performed almost as a seamless stretch. He walks straight from his bed to his bathroom and stops in front of the mirror above his sink. He spends hours out of the year just gazing. The body looks so much better completely naked. He thinks to himself how when he wears his trousers little love handles appear at the waist. But now, his frame is smooth. He never envisioned himself having a "chiseled" physique. He appreciates how some fat sometimes obscures his abdominal muscles. There is something romantic to him about how little effort he puts into his body. His chest hair is perfect now. He turns around then peeks over his shoulder to see his backside. A few hairs poke out of his upper back. I'll have to remember to shave these later. He goes further down with his eyes to his rear end, one of his favorite parts to his body. Nice ass. He then throws on a black bathrobe and ties it shut, so as to be modest.
Brother and Sister share much of themselves with each other. They are not quite best friends. Siblings cannot ever declare themselves "best friends." No two people under familial obligations can shrug of that unconscious sense of duty and that tug-of-war understanding of physicality and touch. So there are flimsy boundaries that are hung up every now and then to remind themselves that this should maybe be done this way and that, that way.
Sister comes back to the room waving the incense around in her right hand like she might be wielding a magical wand. She walks in cheerfully, but also somewhat dutifully, because she is his sister as he is her brother. Laurent walks back to his bed as she sets down the alabaster bowl that will hold the incense as it burns onto his nightstand. While loading the second bowl, she asks her brother:
--Have you decided?
Laurent sits down on his comforter slowly as he points out the remains of the bowl in her purple pipe:
--On what?
--On a vinyl, you freak.
Laurent says to his sister that she should put on whatever she likes. She tells her brother that she is always having to decide upon everything. She rants, but she does like being the one to always select the vinyls for Laurent to play on his turn table, as well as the food and the company they keep. Sister sees how withdrawn and, sometimes, even reclusive Laurent has become over the past few years. His inability to act with confidence is often disgusting in her eyes. Some nights she is cast under the magnetism of Laurent. Then, some nights she is so repulsed by what appears to her to be a bizarrely resolute laziness that she throws down whatever her hands are occupying--a vinyl, a book, a DVD she was excited about viewing with her brother earlier--and storms off to bed or to the backyard to let off some steam near the swimming pool. Lazy Laurent. That is what she would think if tonight was one of those times. Instead, she gives her brother a few options from which he can make a decision. The way in which she lays out the potential musical geniuses for tonight's program is very airy and bright with dada-esque flourish:
--We have Miles Davis' Feeling Blue. Well, actually let's not, it seems we have enough of that color hovering about you tonight. Let's see, there's Bitches Brew. Perhaps, but there is also Duke Ellington, Serge Gainsbourg, Charlie "Bird" Parker…
--Put on Bird.
Sister looks up from Laurent's stash of music with some surprise to his ready choice:
--Bird it is.
Laurent receives the vinyl from Sister and places it on the turn table. Sister climbs onto Laurent's bed with the pipe as he starts from the top of the record's A side. Sister lights the bowl and inhales the smoke. She tilts her head back and lets the smoke escape. It billows out slowly and thick under her nose. She takes a quick breath and the smoke cloud is swiftly sucked back into her mouth. Brother looks at his sites and acknowledges her good form. Sister than releases the smoke again. She swishes her head from side to side under the unpredictable, wicked scat-play of Davis' trumpet.
Brother:
--Nice ghost inhale
The two of them take in the erratic scales of the saxophone and become a single unit. Brother and Sister, content.
Sister is both drawn to and repulsed by Laurent's inarticulate sadness. Also, she is fully aware of his act. Only, she is not consistently able to detect the mechanics behind each of his gestures. What is the cause for Laurent's melancholy this evening? Is it a lover Sister does not know about?
Now there are just ashes in the bowl of Sister's pipe. Sister loads the next bowl. The breaths they take from the first hits of the new bowl are clean and pure. As they make there way down the bowl of weed, they space out. Laurent's bedroom grows vast and bright. Sister is mesmerized by the spiraling vinyl record that seems to hover above the turn table. Brother notices a gaping hole in the crown molding that blends wall with ceiling.
We've go to mend that crack.
Sister begins to rouse out of her ritualistic high as the record player's needle, having already moved into the most inward orb of the B side to Laurent's Charlie "Bird" Parker anthology, lifts its beak from the vinyl. A scene comes to Sister's mind. One of thousands she has a day. Just like Brother. She has fun imagining where this little tableau will go. She looks at Laurent (Right now she will think of him as another man named Frank. Frank might be a mysterious acquaintance whom she always took for a very furtive peeper). She gives to "Frank" what she practices to herself every evening in the mirror--the LOOK:
--Darling, do you sometimes think a saxophone is really just a siren meditating from within a gold sarcophagus?
Laurent turns his head to meet her eyes. Is that really one of the lines from the script? He can see plainly that she is now acting by the way that she slings her arms behind her head to play with a sensual pose in her making. How many times must she have read that line to herself today? Laurent:
--Darling, I do not. I appreciate the saxophone because it's more enigmatic than that. Its art is built from caprice and improvisation. If not that, then it is a window for the suppressed, but it's not stifled itself. Nothing about it sounds imprisoned.
--Is that so? (Sister suspects that Laurent's lecture is muddled) You know so much more about these things than I do.
Perhaps, so that he he will not be upstaged, Laurent also assumes a front. He looks at Sister's direction a couple of feet away on his bed comforter, no longer into her eyes, but into those of another women. A woman without transparent craft. He holds this image in his mind and, in the eyes of this new women he imagines an ocean tide falling back, crawling back to its mother and revealing glistening artifacts of earlier motion. And what evidence does the water in her eyes hold? She seems to pull him in closer with each breath she takes. He looks and sees fragments pointing back to prehistoric nebulae caving in and exploding in starlight cadence, luminescent jellyfish stranded by ocean tide. She hums along to the velvet improvisations and he wonders. There is not one reflection, but always an infinite number.
Sister feels that Laurent is winning this scene. Laurent looks smokey and tortured. Sister hurls her effort into a new direction:
--There really is nothing like having a really reliable drug dealer.
This gets Laurent laughing for a few seconds. He nods his head and sinks back into his pillows. His mind is elsewhere, as if what he performs comes from something adrift, something dreamy and torrid. His participation in the conversation with Sister is only surface level. Sister wonders on and on about him. He is her brother. The siblings are masters of feuding and keeping each other in check, sporting against each other. When they go to sleep, their own gods play against each other to keep the action in motion. The impulse cannot die. Some occasions call for their warring dreams to come together, unite in fermatas of sibling truce, if, say, for example, something outside of the family threatened to take this life away from them, the life they began building for each other two years earlier when Mr. and Mrs. Yardley went back to America and allowed the siblings to remain in this mansion. The summer excursion of two years ago became a suspended reality for the two.The impulse cannot die.
Laurent:
--Now you choose the music and give me a cigarette, will you?
--You must have been going insane for these past few hours. I offered you one after dessert tonight, you know.
Sister sees Laurent's craft as him wanting to appear perpetually absent from whatever room he finds himself. Come on. This act only works for a little while. You can't play the mysterious card over and over. Everyone gets so tired with the whole thing. Sister selects Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson.
Laurent satisfies his craving for a cigarette and grounds his high. Serge speaks seductively into the lush night. If Laurent had a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost to drive right now, he might go off into the night looking for his muse (she would be riding her bicycle) and then he would crash into her.  He looks down onto the bedroom floor. A stack of his own jazzy travel fiction lies tilted, ready to tip over onto the floor. With one struck match, the sprawl would give into burning devastation. So he would like to fancy. He thinks of this not yet materialized muse across the sea of his cushiony comforter. These are the depths he wants to explore.
But the siblings know that there is just Sister and Brother here tonight and there are boundaries. Reared competitively against each other, they both love and hate the other.
Throughout the night little snid-bits of conversation come and go. But, more increasingly, there are suspensions of sound that wear on the siblings. They begin to lack any attentiveness that would be necessitated to keep a night such as this burning. Eventually there is closure to this night scene. Brother sinks into the fabric under his bathrobe. Sister sinks into the fabric under her white frock. Laurent walks down into the basement of the day, the space underneath the drunken, sleeping giant of summer. How grand is this framework around their bodies, gilded with dragonfly mint! They call out to the night, asking it to last. The ceiling fan spins. They sleep, they sweat down on the comforter below.