Everything or at least woman
by Ryan Robert Mullen
[ fiction - october 02 ]
He was not a pervert. Just loved women, not the woman you can see. Not the woman you can see not the woman in a pink dress with make-up and perfume not the woman who dances and smiles and talks and eats and goes to the bathroom. Not the woman you can meet to shake her hand or mind or body or self-confidence or conception thereof. It was the rest of her, the edges of her body the invisible lines in space which dictate the movements of hips and hand. The woman unaware. The woman you must catch. That is the woman he really loved, and she lived in every one of them. Easy to find, but so difficult to capture. His favorite part of sleeping with her was laying awake and letting her slip into automatic, to let her slip into her natural body, spinning frictionless and free - he liked to watch her sleep.
But it was not the same. Her movements too restricted, the palette limited to turns, sighs, words spoken from a dream. He wanted the real live woman when she wasn't wearing his eyes. Everybody is different when nobody's looking. Al was tired of the movie, he wanted the red meat between his teeth. He wanted to watch the most beautiful woman in every woman, he wanted to know how she moved in the dark. An unseen movement as the ultimate expression of personality - the grand equation of WOMAN. Like us all, he just wanted to understand some big thing. Al didn't want the actress, he wanted the character herself. He wanted to see a woman totally nude and pure or impure, whatever she may be.
Al didn't think he was being crazy - as he punched his pen through drywall with that neat and satisfying crunch and ran his little wire through each side. So this is how cheap modern office architecture really is, he thought, I could rip this place down with my bare hands. He didn't think he was really being that strange as he placed the tiny black camera in the Styrofoam soil of the plastic palm in the corner. The precise placement of the plastic palm couldn't have been better. Yes, the corner: what an excellent and inspired place for a plastic palm. From there he could get the door, the desk, the entire room. From there he could record the movements behind a locked door and sit in his office watching secrets more stirring than the Aurora Borealis. Truth! And his secret of that secret would in turn make him beautiful, would grant him beautiful knowledge. Would explain everything. Or at least woman.
