Another Excerpt

It's been a while since I last excerpted something from my writing; here's something else, then. It's from a short story called "Absinthe," and if you're familiar with Degas's painting then you know everything you need to know. The story came from my having this on my wall for years (erm, a copy, of course--a cheap print in a cheap frame, to be honest) as, slowly, it started to tell me a story. Oh, and by the way, the language is just a wee bit blue. But we're all adults, yes?

Blindness would come first.

First the dimming, then the fade then gone, and after it death. She always had known this but drank the drink anyway. It made no difference.

Alois sat next to her, smoking his pipe. Once he had explored her with its stem, but she had protested and he did not attempt it again. The other things, though, on these he would from time to time insist. It had been a long time and perhaps tonight he would wish one of these again. The scarlet cords or the kneeling with her eyes shut.

Suzanne wore her prettiest bonnet but that no longer meant anything to anyone but her. It had long ago gone as grey as her skin. Across the bar, in the smoked mirror, she saw her face, blank and grey and immobile, like a bust made of dead ash from Alois’s pipe. Or perhaps her face only seemed to wane when it was in truth her sight that was sinking. Was it possible that she still shone as once she had, only now she alone unable to perceive it?

She looked down to the green, almost viscous liqueur before her and even this effort was an effort, even this cost energy and seemed wasteful. No. She no longer shone.

Alois sniffled from his cold. In the heat of their fucking his nose would run and he would not notice. They had lain together so often that she knew this past doubt, and past caring. Everything was so vague, the edges indistinct, objects blurred together until even shape became difficult to distinguish. She knew of the painters who spoke of such things as a virtue but she could not see how or why. A painting ought not to make people feel as she always felt. Why would anyone wish this? Monsieur there in the corner—oh what was he sketching now?—, he told people he was a painter. She might ask him. But last week he had said he would paint her portrait one day, which could only mean he hoped to take her upstairs and pay with something else, with lines on paper. She had since refrained from meeting his eyes. The question was not so important.

The glass stood before her. She picked it up, sipped. Another mote lost forever, she thought, and sipped again.