You sit alone with folded hands…
We were hunting sculptures and names, remember? Baudelaire with his family. Man Ray, do we know Man Ray? Ionesco, what did Ionesco do? We were wearing sunglasses in bright and lovely walls. We were wandering wide, promising paths. Look, here’s Jean-Paul the Existentialist! They leave a superfluity of stones and Metro tickets on his grave: he turns, nauseously. Then, splitting up, we combed the rows for Brancusi—not here, nor here, no sign—but found his Kiss. Remember school, the library where we drew abstractions of our hands? That was Brancusi. See The Kiss? Who does it remind you of? See them? See his two equals squaring up to one another, eyeballing and kissing…
But now you sit alone with folded hands. You sit alone with this arrangement of folds, which is folded at elbow, folded at wrist, fold over fold… and I want to kneel. I want to produce a perfect act. I want to make you the gift of a perfect object, while your folded hands go on configuring these walls, this sky, these sculptures, tombs, trees, names…
First printed in Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 1 (April 2011).
Dan Spencer, writer 