Image for Musing

Musing

A short story
by Rebecca Mueller

I close my eyes and drop to dreaming and he’s there. I don’t know what to say next, or how to describe him without sounding all literary and highbrow and artificial, but—he’s the monk who writes the history of the world.

Fair-haired and filthy-minded, in robes that he tosses back from his thin wrists like a sorcerer working magic
          and it is magic. I touch the shelves of the books, feel their soft leather spines, he says
          don’t smudge the ink and his voice sounds both absent and terse and echoes
          in the dank dewy darkness of this little hideaway room
          where half-burned candles flicker
          tall white candles, not like my round red one that smells of cranberry-mandarin and covers the myriad sins of an ancient, un-cleaned apartment. I lit it before I went and he must smell it on me, on my skin, because I come closer to his scarred desk and he looks up from the book
          that is the history of the world
          a thousand volumes sprawled around me, lying sideways and chained and rolled into scrolls
          most of it made up.
          he’s like that.
          and if he didn’t make it up, you know he stepped in and whispered
          a change
          plotting the world like some kind of
          real Author.

He looks up, eyes me approvingly. How’s it going? he asks. The writing gig, I mean, he says. We speak Author to author, and I wonder how much of my story he’s written in his black cursive hand. I asked for a fox drollery next to my name, but I wonder if he’ll do more—trace the letters with his tongue, lasciviously—and how many long-haired beauties and brilliant minds are ranked above me in his head, and how small my typeset is to be, and whether he’ll love me before I die.

No good, I tell him. I’m not in the mood to write tonight, I admit.

Then make love to me, he says, and on the old stone floor I couple with this fair-haired, monk-like thing, with his thin, bony wrists and green-glass eyes. He’s rotten to the core and smells like dirt and I moan into his ink-smudged neck as he thrusts into me, filling me with the inspiration
          to be lost in something that you cannot control and let it
          split
          you up
          and
          take
          whatever
          comes . . . .