Franketienne - Ready to Burst

— I know, Solange.

— So then why must you speak this way? Our love isn’t a fire, built on twigs, that the slightest wind can extinguish.

— Yes, I know that.

Raynand let his hands wander over Solange’s breasts, causing them to tremble more and more.

— Raynand, take me now. I want you to take me. I can’t stand it any longer. Sweetheart, my darling, take me. I’m your puppy dog. Your sweet little puppy dog.

— Solange, my angel, I’m the one who’s your puppy dog. Your faithful lapdog.

And with that, Raynand seized her in his arms. Encircled the excited panther her body had become. The vertigo of his mouth took over. The softness of her skin. The perfume of her neck. The breath of her heaving chest. He penetrated her slowly, voluptuously, in the soft, moist depths of her infinite flesh. She quivered and released a deep sigh, punctuated by little cries and lascivious moans. Two dogs in heat embarked on the unbridled coitus of love and death, they glimpsed a flash of eternity, the divine shimmerings of ecstasy.

Raynand spent several months living only for love, until the day he began to detect slight changes in Solange’s words and overall attitude toward him. From then on, he became consumed with worry, tortured by anxiety. Solange’s parents were less solicitous. He went to her house several times in a row without finding her at home. He began to have doubts, to picture … His imagination went over every possible explanation. His doubts became painful certainty, an intolerable torture, one Saturday night when he saw Solange emerge from the car of a certain Gaston, a regular at the house for the past couple of months. Raynand refused nonetheless to let himself sink fully into the quicksand of infernal jealousy. He gathered all his courage and forced himself that very night to speak to Solange without even mentioning Gaston — with his air of a self-satisfied pig, a true barbarian, powerful and arrogant. Raynand was so desperate to hold on to his love, his main reason for living, that he chose a more subtle strategy.

— Solange, why has making love become a desert, a loneliness, a barrier, a distancing — when it should be bringing us closer together? Why this exile? Why have I been cast away into this painful absence of you? I’m suffering terribly. I look for you, you run from me, you’re moving further and further away from me. Tell me, Solange, is the island so far away that it can only be reached with eyes closed, in the infinite rush of a dream? Such that upon waking, eyes opened, the very image disappears? You are a shadow that obsesses me, killing me slowly in the dusty mirror of my fantasies.

— But, Raynand, I’m right here, next to you.

— You don’t understand, Solange, For the past week I’ve come every evening and never found you at home. Because of you, sadness has enveloped me beneath her gray wing. My obsession, my misery — they circulate in my blood, clothed in your gaze. The wound of absence. How old is our love, that it has me so afraid of losing you? My heart already counts up to a thousand tremblings and still hasn’t finished. Is it possible that before I even met you, you were the sovereign ruler over the kingdom of my life — is this why I’m so weak, so vulnerable, so pitifully prostrate at your feet?

— Raynand, it’s like you’re insulting me. If you’re speaking to me like this it’s because you don’t trust me. What are you accusing me of exactly?

— Solange, why haven’t I been able to see you? For a week now it’s been like a conspiracy. I come here and you’re never home. I can’t take it anymore. My head hurts so badly. I’m suffering body and soul. You laid my heart in your lap, you undressed it. And now I’m completely naked. Nothing more than a wretched stray dog.

Solange moves closer to Raynand on the living room couch. She gives him a light kiss below the ear, making him feel as if some sensual and exciting little creature had just kissed his neck. Raynand stared at her, a rod of doubt planted right between his eyes, just above his nose. Solange dropped her head. They talked for more than a half hour. Kissed passionately. And left each other at about nine that evening. As always, Solange brought Raynand to the little green wrought-iron gate and said: See you tomorrow, my love, my tender lapdog!

That was their last tête-à-tête .

Raynand had no inkling that such a disaster was coming. Nevertheless, the following Sunday, through the open front door, he saw Solange in Gaston’s arms.

It was a violent shock. A sudden gust of wind. A cyclone. His head jerked back. He almost lost his footing. Out of modesty, he made sure he wasn’t noticed. He’d have felt ridiculous. Like a lapdog, tail tucked between his legs, he went away, all his limbs trembling. His skin felt like it had been overcome with a sudden fever, intense and profound. His stomach churned. His intestines writhed like a snake hit in the head with a rock. No, like an earthworm wound around itself, its head crushed under someone’s heel, every ring broken. I’m enveloped in shadows. The night is more present deep inside of me than anywhere else … than under the spherical cap deprived of sunlight … than in all things cut off from the light. I’m irrevocably draped in darkness under the sordid weight of an endless night. The beast is neither dead nor vanquished. It lies within me. Of one body with my nerves and my vertebrae. I am pity incarnate, misery itself. A pathetic human being. A sadness without greatness. The infected wound of a dog without a master. Just trample me, Solange. Spit on me. Crush me like an insect. Crush my worm’s head. Love turns bitter in my hands. It burns me with a voracious flame. It is without pity. It nibbles at my entrails, killing me slowly but surely. Assassinating me. It strangles me mercilessly. It’s the queen bee who, in a whirlwind, kills any male who comes near her. It’s the female hippopotamus who kills her partner on the bottom of the ocean while mating. My Solange! It isn’t her fault. It’s my fault entirely. I had the audacity to love her. I ventured into a no-man’s-land. And not by accident. But because I simply could not do otherwise. And so it is that now even retreat is painful. All I leave behind are strips of flesh caught on the teeth of barbed wire.

Raynand walked for hours without even realizing it. He was really just walking in circles, looping endlessly around the same block of houses next to Saint Antoine. He’d become a pair of walking legs in the wind, heading nowhere. He had the vague sense of being followed. He took off running. He ran without knowing where he was headed. At one point he felt like an invisible giant crane had lifted him up and flung him toward the stars. Having fallen back down to earth, he was seized yet again by clusters of invisible hands, irresistibly powerful — brutally restrained by long, sharpened claws skinning him alive. He lost all sense of space, of time, of the surrounding world, of himself even.

When he came to he found himself in his bedroom. Stretched out in his own bed. His head heavy. Bruises on his arms. He tried to sit up. His body, worked over by a cement truck, remained immobile. His mother, drained of color, sat at the foot of the bed. A grave-faced stranger was seated, arms crossed, just next to the door.

His mother informs him that the stranger is Paulin, the generous passerby who’d found him unconscious at the intersection of Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard and Fronts-Forts Street.

Paulin came to see Raynand through the whole time of his recovery, becoming his dearest friend.