Stalk

by Tommy Wallach

In the corner, a ball of girl, rolled up in a chair. Why do certain images strike us? Her face is lighted by the blue of a laptop, so that she looks to be in an entirely different world from her friends, their faces open in wide bright rictuses of laughter. She has been typing up until now, but at this moment she is just reading the screen. The tan of her skin mixed with the blue seems to suggest some kind of black, like the kind of dirt you buy at a hardware store. But of course, I have seen her in the light. Merely a shade of light brown. Unspecified but exotic provenance.

It is of her back. Hair long and brown, in constant motion like a waterfall. She notices the flash and turns. Just a crowd of coffee-drinkers, reading books. I am hiding behind Heart of Darkness, which she studied last semester. ‘The colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her,’ I read, occasionally glimpsing the sway of her back receding, the pendulum of her hair, ‘as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.’ The unknown, symbolized by Africa, by the back of a woman’s head, will always be a wilderness. I know this now, as I have read Heart of Darkness numerous times. I take it to bed with me, and fall asleep with the spine open over my nostrils, as if the book were redolent of her.

Read on at The Orphan…