Editor’s Note: Freeline Media welcomes original works by authors around the globe. Here, we present the short story “Asking The Kiss” by author Joseph Aisenberg.
Barbara awoke, turned over in bed.
Silence.
Had there been a sound? Was someone breaking in? Come and get me Mr. Burglar, she thought with ironic dreariness, rape me and kill me so I can be on the news.
Barbara had a feeling that lay heavy on her stomach. She had experienced it for some time; having it, however, told her nothing whatsoever about its nature — she only knew the feeling seemed to have grown heavier with the slow passage of the nighttime hours, struggling like a fetus to be born.
Encroaching Darkness Above; a Sandwich
All along the flat ocean of the ceiling above her immovable head she watched encroaching darkness kept at bay by a triangular cast of light thrown by the lamp on the other side of the room, and lost herself trying to locate the exact point where visual values momentarily merged before sifting and separating to become either distinctly dark or blindingly light. She wondered what it would be like to be truly human.
Perhaps, Barbara thought, she should get up and splash cold water on her face in the bathroom. But if she were about to become a victim, a role she had resigned herself to, she supposed she ought to let her murderer discover her without any help.
Barbara stared in the mirror. Water hadn’t done much to clean up her numb mood. Her face was puffy, dead white, framed with long stringy brown hair — ought to pin it up or something. Her eyes, like small black pins, gleamed under the insidious glow of the vanity light positioned directly above the mirror. Strange marbles. Had the hard look of a mannequin’s glazed orbs. Pursing her chalky lips only seemed to augment the waxiness of her features.
It was, she thought, unfortunate no one had actually broken into the apartment. She was not going to be killed. Nor would she become a statistic. She sighed — what a cheat.
“Maybe I’m hungry,” she said aloud.
**************
She slathered mayonnaise on two slices of bread with a fat stainless steel butter knife filched dirty from the sink. Hunching over the two white cushions, laid flat on the counter between the scuffed stainless steel sink and refrigerator (which kept clearing its throat every fifteen minutes), a sudden sensation of baldness came over her. She felt her head shining vehemently above her eyes.
Meanwhile the dense heavy thing inside her belly seemed to shift subtly and kick.
The next horror came when she opened the refrigerator to change out mayonnaise for lunch meat and the little light inside, bathing its raw guts with a sick shocking whiteness, blinked, giving her a start. This did not stop her from removing several slices of bologna, though, slapping them between the sodden pieces of bread; nothing could have.
Taking a huge bite, feeling the sandwich’s fat pliant softness squirm between her fingers, Barbara thoroughly enjoyed the lavish tangy taste. Soon she found she had gobbled the whole thing up — not very ladylike, she knew, but then there was no one here to see her, those supercilious voyeurs intent on enforcing civilization’s silliest rules.
**************
Longing for Freedom; Kissing the sidewalk
Having pulled the curtains aside in the living room, Barbara now found herself searching out the window for a point of reference. Leaning her forehead against the cool glass, her breath blasted unpleasantly against it. She thought about how when she was a girl she used to wish she could somehow have her soul dispersed between all the glowing electric lights dotting the dark distance outside her bedroom, that velvet depth, cool, heavenly, a place where one might commune with passing trains and no one else. Now she simply longed for freedom. Now she knew why the caged bird sang. Laughter in the dark, please.
At this point she tried to open the window. Wouldn’t budge. She gave its lock an obligatory glance (wasn’t the problem) and heaved a second time without effect.
Back in the kitchen Barbara got the butter knife. Dousing it under the sink’s faucet, she watched spurting water break in fascinating veins all over its gleamy surface, streaming, splashing her hands. Water dribbled life-like down the drain in weird whispers. She listened carefully to its hushed sounds and was able to divine if not exactly make out continuous slishperings. They seemed to be giving her a warning about the deceptive quality of Time’s face. Pretending a perfectly placated present, they suggested, there lay concealed behind its smile the seeds of Barbara’s eventual doom. As these strange liquid voices squirted out of the phallic spigot they implored her with subconscious significance to keep probing beneath the falsity of happy spatial continuity and unearth the terrible design at the heart of Existence. Then she turned off the faucet and swiftly swiped the shiny utensil with a worn checked cloth hanging from the refrigerator handle.
**************
Lightly, Barbara re-entered the living room trying to catch it off guard. Everything about its demeanor had gone wrong. The walls, like four white stomachs, appeared to breathe in the dimness quite suddenly and stop. Her couch, a couple of chairs, the coffee table, and the end tables all sat mutely judging her on the rug. She hadn’t gone crazy, she knew; the things around her had simply begun to hate her. And why shouldn’t they? She was, after all, a cold and unlovable person.
But the window — that was the important thing, wasn’t it? She jammed the knife through the horizontal slit at its midsection, simultaneously pulling and prying from various angles. She imagined somebody outside watching her as she worked, causing her to feel embarrassed. She didn’t care. She had merely to envision herself sliding the window open with simplicity, touching the night sky beyond to keep her working. The plush, radiant, liquid black view unfettered by any glassy hindrance, she knew, would slake this thirst; flush this strange heavy feeling from her soul. After which, smiling, balancing on the window sill, she would lean out into the cool evening and seduce the sidewalk below, tease it, ask for a kiss.
A Startling Poster; Feel the Heat
Unfortunately her little epiphany was abruptly halted by the sight of a lurid blue and red movie poster staring at her from the fifth floor of the long low building directly across the street. Someone had hung it there in lieu of a curtain. The flat image glowed with a lamp placed directly behind. A comic book woman with tousled hair, in bra and slip, sat on the edge of a bed looking out over the neighborhood with an overwrought expression of horror. Beneath her a stream of shocking red words screamed out quite visibly: WHAT HE DID TO HER THAT NIGHT WOULD SCAR HER FOR LIFE! … EXPERIENCE A NEW THRILL WITH BRIAN BRETTON’S “THE VIOLATION.”
The presence of this poster only increased her feeling satisfaction waited on the glass’s opposite side. There, a passing breeze might carry away the rubbery falseness frozen in her face. If only she could get the damned thing open.
**************
Barbara had given up. The butter knife, now slightly bent near its thumb-thick top, lay on the window sill, a soft bubble of orange street light bursting along its shiny handle. She had for some time been sitting on her judgmental couch, lost in one of those empty reveries she remembered her mother drifting into before being swallowed into the hospital again. She wondered how long she had been looking at the clean, fat, goldfish-shaped ashtray on her coffee table. Swim little fish, she thought, simultaneously realizing this pathetic note of hysteria was the last banal touch, as ordinary as a body odor. And the crushing loneliness pressed down on her like her apartment’s low ceiling.
**************
“The thermostat was broken,” she said to herself two or three times. Barbara felt this line would make a wonderful first sentence for a story about a sad girl who, having recently quit her job and lost a boyfriend, had begun pointlessly plotting to steal some useless item from the old lady next door, a wrinkled hag awash in senility whose forte was forgetting to lock up at night. Or perhaps not. Barbara wasn’t a particularly creative type. Hadn’t her boyfriend said so?
But at least now she knew why it kept getting hotter and hotter inside her apartment. The heat, like her life, was broken; a red desert blew up from the bowels of the building through the vents on the floor. There was only the one window in the living room from which to seek relief; eternally jammed, it hovered before her, mock entrance to an unattainable paradise.
**************
Out of options, Barbara seated herself on the rug beside the coffee table with a big blue plastic tumbler full of melting ice. She smeared her hot neck with a cold, clear, oval chunk and dripped cool plops of the stuff down her cleavage.
The last time she remembered checking the clock radio on the floor next to her bed it was 1:43 in the morning. That was over fifteen minutes ago.
“God”, she sighed aloud, “I’ve got to get some sleep.”
**************
Eating the sandwich earlier had been a mistake. Her digestive track had become a volcano, gumming up, bloating; subsiding with a ridiculous fizzing sound. The interminable wait for its next build-up was elongated by the certainty of its return, as per the rules of storybook suspense.
**************
The bathroom mirror gave back a casual look. Barbara would have liked to lather its chipped glinty surface with soap and wash away the confident expression of indifference seen there, bearing no connection to her inner reality whatsoever. But she managed to keep from performing such a desperate act of irrationality.
At 2:30 A.M. Barbara began to suspect she had no feeling left — a curious effect of discomfort and sleep deprivation — that her skin had turned into something akin to plastic. Taking up a safety razor, she showed it to the mirror and made a small incision across her fingertip. She dropped the razor in the sink afterward, which made a nice little echoic click.
Her relief at the first sting of pain was incalculable, conclusive evidence of her actually being alive. She watched blood over skin; red drops staining the white inverted eye of the sink. She concentrated on the intense contrast between the blaring blankness of the porcelain and the ripe round plops of blood, so overpoweringly beautiful in the split second before the color began to run.
**************
The heat in the apartment had become a form of torture. Barbara paced around it like a desperate woman in search of some revelation. As long as the window remained closed, like an avenue or a path barred in life, she knew she would never find what she was seeking. And she couldn’t call the landlord until after daybreak.
**************
She took the problem in hand once more. Gave the window another horrendous shove. Its left side rose slightly before snagging in the frame; the right held willfully in place. She pushed the left back down and started the procedure over. Failure soon manifested itself in sweat stains spreading under the arms of her shirt, little streams trickling down her neck and forehead, causing everything to itch. In a burst of pure fury Barbara made a final attempt to wrench the window open, but its faith must have been more deeply rooted in spirituality than her own, for once this flurry of intense activity subsided the thing remained as firmly closed as ever.
**************
A Claustrophobic Hallway; Finding Dan
Barbara locked the apartment door, started down the dim hall, its white water-stained halls holding captive a chill empty smell. She hated these halls, abandoned, turning back and forth snakelike before reaching the stairs. The claustrophobic feeling was increased by the lowness of the ceilings and shadowy spots where the dim light of a single twenty-five watt bulb refused to reach, all of which nearly convinced her she was trapped in the belly of a snake.
Slowly she made her way down the slim dusty stairwell, always dark and always producing in her the low panicky sensation she was about to be attacked, a low grade fear which had spread itself to every nook and cranny of her life.
Suddenly, the hall of the floor just beneath her own opened in vibrant eye-popping red. A tall, brown skinned man wearing a black suit incongruous with the dilapidated setting of the building was in the process of propping up his date — a pretty woman with shiny dark hair, pale skin, wearing a thick white coat — against the throbbing tomato paste colored wall beside a door, so he could fish keys from his pants pocket.
“I don’t know how you could not like Repulsion.” The woman shook her head back and forth, obviously drunk. “Even with all the editing errors and cheesy special effects, to use your expression, it’s a haunting nightmare of repression and disgust — I read so in a book.”
Next floor down Barbara rapped on door number 305, Dan’s apartment. He was a person whom she spoke to around the building occasionally, while doing laundry in the basement, coming or going from the parking lot; either dragging herself up or descending the stairs. He was quite odd and always awake at night. The door cracked open revealing Dan in a pair of faded blue boxer shorts sprouting thickish thighs. His awkward male feet were bare. His t-shirt, blazoned with a huge gorgon’s head faded to gray, was slightly splotched with white paint. His black hair seemed wavy with neglect, yet his face had an attractively tired look. The dim room behind him flickered with the bluish light of a secreted television. It illuminated the household bric-a-brac huddling around his rumpled couch, each item dripping a distinct shadow. Trembling slightly these blackish blobs grew in the light of the television, which became brighter and brighter, then snapped back in place when the picture exchanged glaring enthusiasm for a gloomier scene. Somewhere in the deep of all this Barbara made out a kind of mechanical wheezing as well. A fan?
“Did I wake you?” Barbara asked out of habit, knowing of course she hadn’t.
“No, no.” Dan scratched his scalp slowly, pleased to see her. “Come in, come in. There’s this cool movie on about a woman who goes nuts and barricades herself in her apartment.”
“I can’t. I really just came down to ask if you could help me with something.”
“Oh yeah, sure, what can I do ya’ for?” He asked trying to sound like a good sport, a tone of voice that made Barbara want to slap him.
“The thermostat in my apartment’s sort of on the blink. The heat won’t go off, and the window’s stuck. I was hoping you could maybe get it open for me.”
“That’s cool.” Dan nodded and scratched his cheek. “Uh, just let me put on some pants.” The door closed and Barbara began pacing. She felt as if she were being closely spied on by the numerals hanging on Dan’s door: 3 … 0 … 5. She found herself wishing for a cigarette the way the jittery female protagonist of a grisly thriller might, but she’d stopped smoking two years ago, at her ex-boyfriend’s insistence. It struck her now there was a tawdry second-hand quality about everything in her life, something ugly and superfluous pumping like sludge through the oxygen starved tissues of her daily existence.
“Ready?” Dan appeared closing his door with a discreet click.
“Yeah, do you have a cigarette?” She winced at the question. “No, no, I don’t want one.”
The two made their way toward the stairs.
“How’s work?” Dan asked.
“Fine,” she lied, reflecting once more on the hall’s dreariness, which reminded her of padding through hallways in childhood; getting up in the middle of the night and stealing to the bathroom to play with her mother’s lipstick. This mental flash was a strictly one-way thing, oddly, accompanying ascents only.
“How’s that guy you were seeing, what’s his name, Chris or something?”
“You mean Brandon?” Barbara rolled her eyes at the dirt on the steps, Dan following close behind.
“Yeah, what’s he up to?”
“I haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks.”
“Oh,” Dan sounded surprised. “I thought you two were really it.”
“Well, things don’t always work out,” Barbara tossed this over her shoulder wishing the guy would shut up. She was also a little embarrassed by the triteness of her response.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. We just decided we needed space, you know, crap. I don’t want to talk about it, all right?”
“Sorry.”
By now they had arrived at her apartment. She stuck her key into the door and opened it.
**************
With effort Barbara rose from the tiled bathroom floor. She snatched a wet pink cloth out of the sink and wiped her sour tasting lips. She left this little cage, indecorously tugging down her skirt — it had ripped up her right thigh and adhered uncomfortably to its flesh. In the living room she noted the butter knife on the floor before the open window. She bent (movement slightly retarded by soreness), to retrieve it. With numbed casualness Barbara leaned out the unstoppered hole in her life, into night air (the breeze hadn’t helped as much as hoped); there she held the knife straight-armed over a grassy strip which skirted the building. Without deliberating, she relaxed her grip. The thick thing dropped five stories into a freedom she knew would always be closed to her and bounced from the turf onto the nearby sidewalk. It remained amazingly visible; the unexpected quirk cheered her. Emitting the kind of poignant sigh which prolongs so many empty, unhappy nights she finally accepted the fact she would never be able to get back to sleep. Not that night.
Joseph Aisenberg is an Oklahoma-based writer, film critic and historian. His noted works include the critical film analysis Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies in The Horror Film, which was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award, horror’s premier literary award. Aisenberg is also a regular contributor to film magazine Bright Lights Film Journal, has provided commentary tracks for Shout Factory’s 4K/BluRay steelbook special edition of Carrie, and is also the author of numerous other stories and novels. Freeline Media happily welcomes his contributions here.
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