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Andrew Poff
2/15/05
Daphne and Marco
“Are you there yet?”
Daphne looked up from her newspaper and flatly addressed Marco who was sitting, with his head cocked back and his eyes closed, in the easy chair across the table.
“Almost”
Marco answered without opening his eyes. Daphne shuffled the paper and read on to the next article intently, underlining certain passages with a blue fountain pen. She occasionally glanced over her reading glasses across the table at Marco, who was now breathing more erratically and experiencing light tremors. She was in no rush, and was enthralled with the brief account of a downtown riot hidden on the third page. Daphne liked to underline the words she thought expressed a definite anti-student bias on the part of the editors. She took pleasure in the fact that she could pull out the subtleties that the editors of The Chronicle tried so tactfully to hide. Daphne underlined another subliminal passage and sat up straighter on the brown leather couch.
When she was through with the article she neatly re-organized and folded the newspaper and placed it on the corner of the table perpendicular to the rectangle of black velvet that sat in the middle. She bent over and moved a glass of water over to the other side caddy-corner to the velvet, and then proceeded to arrange the pills strewn across it into neat little piles decreasing in size in a clockwise semi-circle. She looked up at Marco again. His hands now clenched the arms of the chair, causing the veins to pop out on his knuckles and fore-arms. Daphne sat back up on the couch and stared out the window, absently tapping the pen on her lower lip.
“Okay, I’m there.”
“Daphne… I’m there”
Daphne pulled herself out of her day-dream and turned to face Marco, offering a submissive smile before placing the pen deliberately on the table.
“Good”
she said. Marco had stopped shaking and now looked at Daphne with a smirk. His hair fell across his damp forehead in mottled sweaty clumps, and the pupils of his light blue eyes had shrunk to pin-points. He leaned forward placing his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands in one another, smiling bigger, but still not enough to break the devilish aura around him.
Daphne always enjoyed Marco more this way. He was so boring when he wasn’t blitzed—always spouting off pretentious clichés about politics and organized religion. They could never have a conversation as equals. He was too much in his head and too righteous for it. On the drug, he seemed to reach a higher plane; beyond right and wrong… one Daphne felt she occupied all the time, if not for her studies, then by the sheer grace of her being a woman, naturally imbued with a different, less competitive brand of intelligence and compassion. Without the drug, Marco made love like a woman… His softness, and caring was almost sickening. Daphne didn’t want to be coddled in bed and dominated everywhere else. She tired of being patronized.
Marco saw red… infra-red. He laughed at himself in the back of his mind. He knew that the change in his visual perception was a manifestation of the latent desire he had as a child, to be like the predators in the movies—that almost always saw in infra-red. Daphne’s outline shined a bright white against a background of differing shades of red, black, and pink. Marco looked over to the coffee pot in the corner. For a second it didn’t register—but then Marco remembered that it was something hot and therefore should show up white… what he saw adjusted accordingly.
Suddenly he caught the scent of prey. Marco jerked his head around with the reflexive speed of a fox, and sniffed the air. Daphne had untied her pony tail and thrown her long brown hair back behind her shoulders, releasing a fresh wave of shampooey fragrance and pheromones. He saw her outline without any profile, and knew she was looking directly at him. He could pick up on her smile… Her image began to shimmer.
“You are incredible Daphne.”
Marco stated with more sincerity than he had ever applied to anything in his life.
“I know…”
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(C)SESEU (Sir Edwin Santos Enterprises Unlimited)
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Marty
