Sunday

The Bare - Part 1


Cultural note:

With diligence we teach our children the dangers present when walking the streets, though in each country these are somewhat different. In Britain for instance... but no, I shall let you see for yourselves...


The Bare

Looking back, I had always known that it was true, deep inside that dark unquestioned place in the mind where things reside unlearned, perhaps absorbed in childhood by some osmotic race memory.

Of course, if you had asked me on that spring morning I would have denied it. Now I am a man I have put away childish things and all that, so I gave it no heed as I walked the street in my home town preoccupied with other utilitarian adult notions.

The smooth tarmac of the pavement glistened with the diamonds of lately fallen rain, and a bicycle swished past, tyres slick with oily water, the rider glowing like some gaudy Christmas bauble; his fluorescent jacket stark against the drab dark day. A leaden sky promised more from clouds angrily jostling like louts on a street corner. All was normal, everything was as it had always been.

I pulled my jacket tighter against the threat of an invading draught and turned the corner into a road I'd not walked since childhood, since those times when I would have known better.

Replaying the scene now in my head, I'm sure the notion had flitted through my mind, but the way of memory is fickle. Perhaps I've merely imprinted that onto an ill remembered scene. Possibly not though, for I can see in my mind's eye the point at which the tarmac gave way to old fashioned paving with a shallow untidy ramp; a change in colour, in texture, and most of all, in pedestrian rubrics.

My mind has that instant frozen in a kind of stop motion, my foot hovering in the air, the forces of caution and rationality tussling before the latter rose victorious and my foot plants down like a cartoon ten-ton weight on the crack.

Through the settling dust which my febrile imagination provides she appears:

The Bare.

She was muscular and tall, six feet at least, and as I have said; completely bare. She was not grizzly, possibly only cross, but she was brown, her breasts had the soft smoothness of melted chocolate, with wide darker areolae around the nipples as if she were nursing. The hips swelled below a perfect navel adorned with a single silver ring which sparkled against her skin. Tight black braids fell in a cascade from her head.

I was transfixed.

To be continued...

1 comment:

Viola said...

'my foot plants down like a cartoon ten-ton weight on the crack'

*smile* Funny, yet a great image as well.

'I was transfixed.'
Me too!