Abcde BLOG

The Young Man and the Dark Patch

It was nighttime in the village.
Nobody was around and no lamp
posts lit up the street. It seemed
as if electricity had not yet been
invented. The young man was at
a disadvantage, for he could not
sniff his way back like a dog. The
blackness was perfectly natural,
but to him it was perfectly
unnatural. He wasn't used to it.
He was visiting the little village
from the city, and everybody
knows you don't need headlamps
to get from A to B in the city.
It was a perplexing situation.
What the young man wanted most
was to be with the woman
who was waiting for him about
a mile down the road. But he
couldn't see his own hand,
so how could he find her?
And he was uncertain of her
position. He decided to do it
anyway. He walked with careful
deliberation. It was hard to tell
how far he'd come or gone. He
lost all sense of space and time.
The blackness was so thick that
he imagined his feet were shovels.
He shoveled the blackness
out of the way like snow as
he walked. "It is absurd for
everything to be this black," he
said to himself. It made him
uneasy. He looked ahead and
thought he saw something in
the distance that was slightly
blacker than the rest of the
blackness. He walked toward it.
The young man stepped up to
the dark patch and stopped.
He put out his hand and touched
a woman's face! The young
man jumped back in fear.
He thought women were
women, not dark patches in the
night. It took him a moment to
collect himself. Then he stepped
forward again. He found the face,
and then he found the lips.
Then he kissed them with his
mouth. It's hard to say how
long the kiss lasted because
they both felt as if they were
on the moon, and time is
different on the moon. Then
the young man and the dark
patch walked together, arm
in arm, into the black future.

LINK

abstracts
03/2011 Joshua Abelow

there
was
a
line

leading
to
a
dot

in
the
shade

where
I
wrote
this
down