Love and the LP
by Rachel Lewis
The sound was somewhere between blowing a nose, crumbled paper, a dial tone, and the unscathed inner belly of a record winding out and off the turntable. The sound of love running off.
I was raised on High Renaissance Art, depictions of love as blind, as gentle, as courteous, or as an asexual snotnosed kid. Some pure naked unabashed dream. Botticelli-beautiful, all demure in her shellfish condominium. Venus with her carriage drawn with pigeons. She was just Poseidon’s nutsack and some seafoam. The aftermath of some cosmic EasyBake Oven. Blind. Love doesn’t blindly choose, but it does run out. Like a record baby right round right round. I can’t really blame her. 96% of the time, she bails right when she has to. Sells all her shares right on time and just hauls her quiver-bearing ass out of there.
Napoleon runs off to his wars. The dish runs away with the spoon. The drones run out on their squirming progeny.
You, however seemed to have been brought up on vegan, low-carb, freeze-dried Astro-Love. Dissect and decimate terms in a romantic Rolodex. From A to Z, every possible scientific study from An Accidental Blush by Antoine Bakerson to Zero to Hard-on in 12 Seconds by Waldo Yoder.
Any love-at-first-sight candidate needs to fill out forms in triplicate, mail them to 6 different forwarded addresses (paying full postage), prepare a 7-minute oral report on General Patton, and provide an extensive resumee complete with 8 x 11 glossy, bordered head shot, full sexual history, and your role in the 2nd grade’s production of Earth is Neat-o, Let’s Keep it That Way! .
There ‘ll always be a predetermined course of events.
The tentative descent into scratchy, fuzzy, misconstrued euphoria; the hurried bits of breath in number exchanges, finding a conversational rut with our social needles. Skepticism in a vagrant a C sharp, a too-good-to-be-true glissando. Scant first kisses and the careless urge to sing along punctuating the dizzy premiere rotations.
The soft, cushioned corners of regularity. Everything loud and clear and perfectly understood. The misplaced mindset, the wandering eye. Dust settling on volume knobs. The lull, the token ballad, the fictional break in cell phone service. Mystique and sex acts a mundane bass line.
The gently-treading helplessness of that last song. All scarcely daring to disturb the polyphonic complaints and whiny chorus bitching away. The unavoidable fatal scratch, the previously unnoticed warp. Reflections on the past, the physical assessment. Is it worth it to turn over, to start again? In the aftermath of relieved rotations, to bring about the next bout of blowing, crumbled, dialing, rolling bemusement.
There will always be a cataclysmic crescendo swell, a cacophony of passionate fury, a legato implosion, the swift cutoff or the lagging, repetitive dreary end. There will always be sound.
and then there will be none.
The End
January 2nd, 2006 at 7:07 pm
ooh. well done Ms. Lewis. I tip my bowler to you. you vindictive bitch you.
January 6th, 2006 at 8:43 am
Yep an excellent story!
January 8th, 2006 at 4:35 am
Hey James AniPUSS, stop hitting girls and go make out with a guy.
February 1st, 2006 at 4:55 pm
Did the paper really crumble? Or did it actually crumple? Maybe this is a stupid question. Maybe not. If it did indeed crumble… that would be a strange sound. I request that the author stop by room 220 to explain. I am waiting to know the truth. Truth does matter. Either way though… very nice story.
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