Samuel Beckett

So you sit face to face in the little summerhouse. With eyes closed and your hands on your pubes. In that rainbow light. That dead still.

Can it be she is with child without your having asked for as much as her hand? You go back into your mind. She too did you but know it has closed her eyes.

The ruby lips do not return your smile. Your gaze descends to the breasts. You do not remember them so big. To the abdomen. Same impression. Dissolve to your father's straining against the unbuttoned waistband.

You separate the segments and lay them side by side. It is as you half surmised. The upper is the longer and the sitter's loss the greater when seat at knee level. You leave the pieces lying there and open your eyes to find her sitting before you. All dead still.

By day and by night. To that perfect dark. That shadowless light. Simply to be gone. Or for affair as now. A single leg appears. Seen from above.

How given you were both moving and at rest to the closed eye in your waking hours!

At this point assuming height of seat adjustable as in the case of certain piano stools you close your eyes the better with mental measure to measure and compare the first and second segments namely from sole to knee-pad and thence to pelvic girdle.

... For when bolt upright or lying at full stretch you cleave face to face then your knees meet and your pubes and the hairs of your heads mingle. Does it follow from this that the loss of height for the body that sits is the same as for it that kneels?

Now this window being flush with your eyes from where you sit and the floor as near as no matter with the outer ground you cannot but wonder if she has not sunk to her knees. Knowing from experience that the height or length you have in common is the sum of equal segments ...

Mainly blue in this position the natural pallor you so admire and indeed from it wholly blue your own. For natural pallor is a property you have in common. The violet lips do not return your smile.

But you have not made much headway when her light step is heard. Light for a woman of her size. You open with quickening pulse your eyes and a moment later that seems an eternity her face appears at the window.

Seven cubic yards approximately. This strikes you for some reason as improbable and you set about your sum anew.

But for the moment with hardly more than seventy American billion behind you you sit in the little summerhouse working out the volume.

You arrive in the end at seven cubic yards approximately. Even still in the timeless dark you find figures a comfort. You assume a certain heart rate and reckon how many thumps a day. A week. A month. A year. And assuming a certain lifetime a lifetime. Till the last thump.

She is late. You close your eyes and try to calculate the volume. Simple sums you find a help in times of trouble. A haven.

The years have flown and there at the same place as then you sit in the bloom of adulthood bathed in rainbow light gazing before you.

Sometimes you turn your head and look out through a rose-red pane. You press your little nose against the pane and all without is rosy.

That you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and tickled him greatly and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear you try to chuckle too.

You on the other with your feet dangling. When he chuckled you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too.

There on summer Sundays after his midday meal your father loved to retreat with Punch and a cushion. The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the one ledge turning the pages.