Another Six Sixes by Grace Andreacchi
sixsentences.blogspot.com
2
CONTENTS
In Love with the Look …… 5 This Face …… 6 Stupid …… 7 Into the Dark …… 8 Thought Experiment …… 9 Friedrichstraße Bahnhof, Berlin …… 10
About the Author …… 11
3
sixsentences.blogspot.com
sixsentences.blogspot.com
4
In Love with the Look
For my birthday my father took me to FAO Schwarz to buy a doll. There were all sorts of dolls - big and little, Eskimo and Chinese, baby dolls and lady dolls and bride dolls in fancy white, and this one: a boy doll in full, oldfashioned evening dress, complete with top hat and silk-lined opera cape. I picked him up, he was damp to the touch. “But he's all wet!” I said, laughing. “He was damaged in the flood,” said the salesgirl. “Well, he may be damaged, but I'll take him anyway,” I said, thus beginning a lifetime relationship with men in evening dress.
5
sixsentences.blogspot.com
This Face
This face is handsome but weak, especially the mouth, something indefinable in the slightly toobroad space above the upper lip, and the smile which is often conciliatory lost childish confused and the way the eyes slide away from you. It's a delicate, a striking face, the face of a boy who never grew up but is already growing old. It is, perhaps, a pathetic or a moving face, a tragic countenance. It is sometimes ambiguous, womanish, soft, and sometimes hard and almost ugly, the face of a peasant. Or refined, the face of a prince. Among the billions of human faces each different each in its own way beautiful this face alone has the power to make me suffer.
sixsentences.blogspot.com
6
Stupid
I kissed the cold smooth glass of the television screen - I know it's stupid, I don't care, I want to be stupid and I am stupid, I will be just as stupid as I like. I am determined to reach the absolute outside limits of possible stupidity. Nobody can see me, after all, nobody knows how stupid I am. But he knows, because I tell him. “Last night I kissed your face, your sweet face, your dark secret infant face...� I am stupid, I am shameless, I am utterly mad, I am grandiose, I am beyond everything at last at last at last...
7
sixsentences.blogspot.com
Into the Dark
He took me in his arms and began kissing me, pressing his long, hard body up against me as if he were trying to merge his flesh with mine, his face a little stubbly, and the stubble scratched my cheeks while he kissed me deeper and deeper, so deep I thought – I am falling, falling off a cliff and I’ll never hit the ground. With his hands he caressed me, my back, my arms, my hair, while my hands wandered over him, the back of his head, grasping his thick, spiky albino hair, feeling the tense muscles at the nape of his neck, the strong flat surface of his back, his hard little ass while he kissed me and kissed me. Later he pointed a camera between my legs and took a photograph. “For your collection?” I said, and this made him very angry. “You don’t understand - there’s no collection - I need this, need to have it with me all the time.” We got on his motorbike and rode very fast across the Brooklyn Bridge into the dark.
sixsentences.blogspot.com
8
Thought Experiment
Sometimes when I’ve had an argument with my husband I go online and look up my old lovers. I gaze at their photographs and read a few words of their biographies, I remind myself of their various advantages. This one was a great kisser, could make a girl’s head spin in three seconds flat, that one had a line in unusual, darkly romantic compliments. I try to imagine what my life would be like if I were with one of these old lovers still. And I have to admit that among these crazy and difficult albeit nonetheless attractive, indeed only the more attractive for all that, men I have known, my husband is the least objectionable. Which is only one of the reasons why we’re still married.
9
sixsentences.blogspot.com
Friedrichstraße Bahnhof, Berlin
Somehow we ended up about three o’clock in the morning at the Friedrichstraße Bahnhof. Nobody around but the rats, a couple of policemen in drab green, and the two of us – the Doctor and I. The rats swarmed over the empty tracks, tearing bits of discarded food packets with their sharp little teeth. The Doctor pointed to a giant Coca-Cola sign that hung directly above the railway tunnel. “In the old days a guard used to sit right there, with a machine gun,” he said. “They’d shoot anybody who tried to get on a train – bang! – no questions asked.”
sixsentences.blogspot.com
10
About the Author Grace Andreacchi was born in New York in 1954, but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years – sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Full 6S Catalog: sixsentences.blogspot.com/search?q=grace+andreacchi
Website: graceandreacchi.googlepages.com
11
sixsentences.blogspot.com