To the Artist's Page 
To our home page
To Don Caudill's next pieceFür Elise
She considered herself, after all, not a subject of finickiness. She held only one standard by which she would accept a husband. Only one. She was looking for a man whose nostrils worked thusly: the left one worked only for inhaling, the right one only for exhaling. After twenty seven years of filtering a cosmos full of potential applicants through this standard, she was left alone to cast her lot as she willed into the infinite star pool of the heavens to which she prayed vehemently, "Send me this man."
That was not to say that she had come through adolescence and into womanhood having not known coital pleasures and the arts and practices of Eros. Her encounters of this nature though, usually found her in the late a.m. darkness feeling hollowed and guilt ridden listening to the double-barreled snore of men of less than qualifiable traits. She would sit upright, there in the sheeted darkness and belittle herself due to her lack of patience and tolerance to her own convictions until ultimately tiring of her own beratement, she would pluck a group of curly hairs violently from the nipple of the sleeping embodiment of compromised principles and when he awoke with a start, exclaim, "I only need three more to finish!"
"Aoww! Finish what?" They would ask confusedly, rubbing their injured flesh.
"The serum." She would stand and stride nakedly to the jewelry box on her bureau, follicle offering pinched between her thumb and forefinger as delicately as one would hold a live butterfly and carefully and purposefully lay the curly hairs at the altar there beneath the tip toeing feet of the tiny ballet dancer inside and mumble unintelligibly to the darkness above the small box that now filled the air with metallic plinks that somehow assembled Fur Elise.
This practice usually assured that the parting would not be sappy and full of life long remnants of late night phone calls or violent name calling (she often marveled at the sudden transformation men undergo from rational healthy human being to a person suffering from what could only be identified by the symptoms as Tourette's Syndrome) when she announced that the end was definitely nigh.
Afterwards, she would sit in the darkness and fall into the melody that emanated from the jewelry box and submerge herself in deep contemplation. She had trouble deciding which school of thought was correct when it came to enlightenment; there was the school that advocated isolation and instructed that loneliness and suffering were the way to attain knowledge, especially knowledge specific to the self. And then there was the whole Blake thing about the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom. Could they both be right? How could they in such direct opposition? Was that present anywhere else in nature? Surely it must be, she thought to herself and fell asleep dreaming the peaceful dreams of two such very opposite things coexisting in blissful tandem.
When she awoke (which she happened to do on a daily basis) to the new day, she came to in a world of perpetually renewed mystery. She maintained the practice of having her morning coffee at varying degrees. She would pour the hot fluid into the cup and sometimes wait ten seconds before taking the first drink and sometimes wait twelve and sometimes even thirteen or longer as to assure her that today's cup was not the same as yesterday's cup, even if she had happened to find yesterday's cup perfectly warmed and delicious.
She was steadily working on a perfect way to eat a glazed doughnut from the inside out, sans flatware, without ending up with sugar inside your nostrils (this she knew was admittedly impossible, but insisted that it kept the doughnut interesting). She prepared her bus schedules not as most people do, with the primary purpose of getting to her destination so much as simply seeing and experiencing new faces, for what if she took the same bus to work everyday and the other half of her soul was taking one on a different schedule and because of a schedule they were never to meet? I mean can you imagine?
There are things that one knows because one has been told they are so. There are things that one knows because we have seen them. She knew she was a woman now because she had been told that she was. She knew that salt would melt slugs because she had seen it happen. She believed that she lived in a cosmos formed in a fungus beneath the toenail of an unsuspecting life form that she would never see because that was what felt like the truth to her.
That is to say, she knew the factual nature of chance or the chance nature of facts, whichever you prefer.
As it happens, (and most often it does indeed happen. I mean, if it didn't happen, what would?) the world in which she lived and breathed and thought and cried and laughed and fantasized in was currently running short of men who held her desired respiratory habits and practices.
"Woe, woe is me." She cried to herself. "Woe, woe is me."
What to do? What to do?
She kept, beneath her tongue, a coin of undetermined origin with a hole drilled through it near its worn edge as if it were to be sported about on a chain around someone's neck. Surely if that were where she put it, around her long and graceful neck, she would lose it. Best to keep it in a safe place. That is not to say that she had not lost it. Many mornings she had awakened to find it gone and she had waited patiently for her metabolism to return it to her.
A leap of faith...
At the window of her flat, she rested the coin on her tucked in thumb and then, with a flick of gold painted thumbnail, sent it into orbit. It lofted through the frigid winter air of the city morning and then stopped, there hovering, adjusted itself accordingly, turned to her and said, "You, too, mon cher."
She climbed out onto the ledge and stood like Julius Caesar on the banks of the Rubicon.
The die is cast.
To the top of this page
