2. electric blue, bathroom mirror
never one to shy away.
the mirror stares back, and in the dim blue light thrown by the toothbrush charger, it seems to be an utterly empty surface that he’s staring into.
he turned the lights off fifteen minutes ago because the bathroom had turned into an overwhelming typhoon of objects. at first the dark was calming, but his senses adjusted and now the outlines of shapes are coming into focus.
and a deep, hollow tone, humming beyond the door.
he’s dedicated to non-distraction though. he grips the edge of the terrazzo, and stares deeper into his absent reflection. only when he tilts his head slightly, allowing a fresh flutter of electric blue light, can he make out the blurred edges of his own features. they're nondescript. generic. his hands are trembling, the humming seems to grow louder, and his nails are almost being ground and filed by the stones in the counter.
don't look away
he tries not to whisper to himself
he reaches for the tap and knocks the toothbrush. a sheet of light hovers perpendicular to the mirror, an insect buzz and the clack of plastic on stone.
Not so long ago, K had sought out Allain. He found him sat on the concrete surface of the permanent levee, his back perfectly straight and tilted slightly towards the water. A dense cloud of water bugs swarmed a dozen metres down the shore, at the mouth of the river. Allain’s eyes twitched, and every other minute, he swatted at a straggler. K noticed him smiling then, as if glad for the company.
he closes his eyes; the throbbing gets louder.
arcs and swings like a digital marching band, a telegram stride.
wet tang of salt, decaying seaweed and swaying brackish water. no, not that; tile whitening product and clean porcelain.
fresh steam. that’s what he feels, that's where he is.
the perpetual drone grinds and leaps, it’s coming from every direction now, behind the bathroom door and behind the curve of bone below his ears.
he draws the frangipane and chlorine air down into his lungs, holds; blows mist onto the mirror, already cloudy.
he loses sight of his own eyes. they're brown, he remembers, light brown, like autumn
leaves when they…
It was getting colder. Bulbs of brown light, almost indistinguishable from the grubby linen sky above them, dotted K’s eye line as he was leaving a date. He thought of how freeing it was to share a drink with a stranger; and to skip away, unbothered by either the nervous shiver that it had really just gone badly, or the awful opening of something that would become difficult to cork.
Beneath him, all along the highway, headlights began to flicker on, sparkling, and a blemish of dark colour crept into the velvet-cream cloud cover. No suggestion of a spritzing or spatter in the air. From below, K’s name drifted up from the street as he was descending the pedestrian overpass. At the mouth of the exit ramp, three familiar shapes waved, their limbs swaying black branches before the setting sun. Greta trotted ahead, met him in the middle of the road, and arm-in-arm they swung around to the far side.
“Where are you headed,” the group asked.
“Nowhere especially,” was the answer, and so he fell in, directed toward the pub. Honey of decaying leaf litter and roasting meat drifted with them. An arid bitterness was settling on his tongue as the Cabernet afterglow dried in his mouth. They asked if he’d been on that date. He gestured yes, said he’d liked the wine bar and flicked his hand at the leafy avenue in the direction of the date spot.
“And the boy?”
“Cute"
They approached brewery-branded maroon barricades guarding the pavement outside the pub, and Greta sent him an inquisitive look. A light chorus of hi’s and hello’s rose from the gathering around a wooden bench. K’s returning smile was all mischief, and he slipped between the gap in the barricades to be swallowed by the throng.
swaying through wet, cloudy mist, he found his pupils again; worked backwards to the rest of his eyes,
then found the rest.
something of the memory lingered in his chest, bubbling and nervous; a buoyancy beneath his sternum that started to collapse even as he noticed it.
so drown it.
he spun the head of the tap, water gushing into the sink, the gurgle pulling him just so.
Greta was persistent, K simply had to meet Allain, who wore round, silver-tinted glasses that spat the outline of K’s features back at him, dusted with an effervescent patina. Little domes, they reflected in every direction, so whenever he spoke to K, K could look deep and direct into those frames. Or he’d gaze into the sparse foliage, as if seeking out the answer to some question in the curls of white beyond.
“Are you also an artist?” Allain asked, cautiously indifferent.
“I make furniture, interior objects, functional art pieces.” The glasses gave K’s cheeks the diamanté sheen of fresh sweat droplets. He put it plainer than he had earlier, at the date; less theoretical, less vague. He could remember choosing his words, a woven, angular syntax, leaping and tumbling in answer to a lifting eyebrow, a small nod.
Allain’s glasses did their job, hiding his expression. “So then, not an artist? More like… furniture design?”
K let himself laugh at that. He didn't answer and turned to Greta, knowing those sleek, silver bulbs were still looking to him expectantly. The conversation flowed on.
The night grew cold; people began to wander home. Finally, Greta touched him on the shoulder and said, “I’m off”. Now he was sat on a low, round stool opposite another low, round stool on which Allain was perched, sitting perfectly straight. K suddenly had the urge to stand up, to leave quickly.
and through the narrow gap below the door, the dancing hum slips into the room, leaps and tumbles through damp air. it hangs over his shoulder now. whispers. a voice in the crowd.
Allain asked to see him again. K felt his frozen cheeks unfolding, a gentle smile, as he said, “Maybe”.
the voice is familiar, tugs at something old, something sunk far below.
a speck of a creature floats into field of view.
a single bug, buzzing with a hundred clear voices.
For months after, a thread of these meetings, like a lush creeping vine. This unseen tendril structure
that burst forth only on occasion, unexpected and heavy with the suggestion of what might otherwise have been. Like Allain, arms weighed down with plastic bags shaped like cartoon boulders, hauling himself up the garage ramp as fast as his slim ankles could trot. The parking attendant shouting, “he looks like a pendulum”; arms dead straight, feet swinging between them. Visions of laughter, doubled over and gesturing to hurry up. The roller door released, dropping like a guillotine. There is a gentle snip, and light abandons the vision. Blink deep, until you see stars.
soft blinking blue. you are in the mirror. that face there? you; hold that.
you are K, he tells himself. you are a face draped in anodyne light; you are the pinpricks of black hair peeking through the pores of your cheeks. this moment, and no other moment. the mechanical buzz of voices are beyond the door. he considers switching the light back
on.
K wasn't feeling dire yet. Soporific sunlight flooded through the window, over his shoulder. It bounced off the table, tangling with the narrow grain of the pine that he himself had chosen, and he thought, I’m ok, but a catch, even just a bite, would be nice. No new work for months and nothing peaking around the corner. Every returning email, a polite rejection. The shimmer that once lay over everything he did had dulled now to this woody, Sunday morning vapour.
He let himself breathe. With warm jasmine tea in his hand, he watched his shadow, cast long over the kitchen tiles, as it lifted the shapeless form of the steaming mug to the outline of his lips. There was an email in his inbox; this was all he knew. He swished tea around his mouth and relished the naivety of it. The tea had been expensive, loose leaf, arriving in a fussy glass jar that he’d ordered online. That was right before his last commission wrapped up. For the first time in an age, he enjoyed this feeling of limbo, being positioned blindly between two chapters. Until the moment he clicked into his inbox, that was all he needed to know.
He picked up his phone, flicked away the email notification and searched Allain’s name.
“are you busy? want to get that drink later?”
He looked at the unsent message, hesitated with his thumb hovering. Then he quickly deleted, retyped.
“we should get that drink.”
he notices he’s been brushing his teeth obsessively, robotically. floral tannins are swimming in his mouth. he can no longer see himself, only a soft blue orb that wavers in figure eights. the room is draped in aromatic steam. soft, dozy notes punctured by the
Autumn sun. no hint of mint.
he tries again to place the buzzing amongst the clouds.
Firing off the message felt like rocking backwards, settling his feet into a comfortable stance. From this position, he considered opening his inbox again. Considered it, somehow already knowing that he’d been knocked back and the immediate future remained vast and uncertain. The phone chimed.
“Sure <3”
K’s disembodied eyelashes, like the tail of a pigeon, fanning over an electric blue sea. filamented and clumped. the bathroom beyond his shoulder has faded into grey tone waves, and he blinks, his lashes replaced by a memory of orange April sun dappling
between thinner, darker lashes.
K observes they’re like thin-spun pastry, baked and bundled in a tiny parcel. the spectral Allain nods, listening to him speak. he tells Allain how worried he is. it’s not about the money, it’s finding meaning in his work. a sickly feeling spreads in his belly, sticky and sweet, but he cannot stop sharing. an unreadable acid curve pulls at Allain’s features, the
curve of his mouth that sinks into a deep, alluring groove.
they’re sat in the back of the pub, under the open air, and the dipping sun has escaped K’s notice; until just now, when the orange candy light splashes on Allain. the hard angles of his cheeks open up; an inviting warmth colours their interior curls.
Behind him, the door creaks open and light floods the bathroom.
K blinks and the vision is gone.
Jake Wighton is a writer living in Naarm/Melbourne. He is an editor and co-founder of Varnish.