The halls were empty. Footsteps deafening. Left in a vacuum, I was the storm, trapped within its own eye. Chaos incarnate, walking a seeming still tomb. I started pulling posters off the attic walls, dumping boxes of old writings onto the floor, throwing old photographs into a pile of pages that I shredded and wadded into the embryonic figure of a mermaid. The kindling mass was wrapped in masking tape, smirked and squinted at, watching, waiting, for her to develop herself. I braced her against a plank and built up her shoulders and back as she lay across my lap. Turned up the music, drank a beer and watched her resting on the couch. I ran a stripe of silver warpaint down my face, painted my nails black chrome, danced around the room, and set back to massaging shoulder blades into her paper torso. Unconscious, my fingers knew her form. Knew every intricacy of her being, caressing living details into her. By dusk she hung a few feet above her birth, a slim Venus hanging raw and indecisive. I stood on the front steps of the Lair, music playing down from the open attic window, faint and ethereal over the traffic on third street.
(For additional reference material on the paper mermaid, see the footnote in Literary Bootycall.)
Andrew Tomacelli 