All words and images by Elma Huskic
Curiosities
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In an intense darkness heavy heaving breaths slipped past my lips and brushed upwards towards my eyelashes. I realized you were beside me.
Everything clinched to a numbing boreal cold. Frigid and frozen, it spun into a state of crystallization. The air was concentrated, dense: almost alkaline. Dimensionless pools of thin unyielding unsubstantial stardust were the blanket we seemed poised to stand beneath. We were in a basilica.
I held out my fingertips. Where once sanguine fluid of claret like sweetness ran beneath my tissue and bones, was nothing but a void. Devoid. My skin however yearned for a tactile sensation as I willfully scraped my nails against a pillar. Before I could soak up the taction in front of me, your hands had somehow already found mine. You clutched me in a hungered touch. As if tangled in a ribbon, my body instinctively wanted to forgo the sensation of the inanimate marble in order to feel and fall into the warmth of you.
I smiled, I think. It felt like a smile as my heart understood one to feel like. Your hand glided up my neck. You burned like a pyre. You placed a blindfold upon my eyes….blood rushed to my head as the satin cloaked my vision within that sensual space of darkness.
Immediately, I heard water. Dripping, flowing, cascading, ebbing. Beautiful echoes resonating in a state of almost audible confusion. You wrapped my hands in lace. Stitching it against my starved skin you began to lead me.
Blindly enveloped in a dizzying array of sounds, I realized that the sounds were not an abstract distance but rather the echoes of our footsteps. They sounded like the most melodic raindrops, a composition of trembling vibratos and dulcet tremolos. I felt intoxicated. Besieged and bewildered. Surely. Profoundly so, I found myself lost in the beauty of its succulent illusion.
Suddenly my blindfold dropped to the floor. The dizzying sounds spinning around me were replaced by piano notes as we stood in the middle of the sacellum. Everything around us had turned to stone; gleaming, glistening, glittery rock.
You beckoned me to look up - we were standing beneath the vastness of the sky. Devoid of a roof, my pale skin was bathed in lucent moonlight as snow began to flutter and swirl from the darkness. I lowered my gaze and noticed that the piano sounds were coming from what seemed to be the alter of the church. In front of a reliquary, a man appeared: sitting. He played a keyless piano as snow flurried down upon him yet seemed to melt around him at the same time.
What I heard was the most enchanting melody; composing a soul out of those silent hours of unheard deafness that beat beneath the ribcage. It ached deep down in the bones where the cold can’t quite touch, and the chill cannot quite reach. He played in white gloves that turned his fingertips red as the notes flowed forth from his hands.
The light illuminating him was tepid, the temperature of warm blood.
Suddenly you grabbed my hand and lifted it up to your lips. Everything went blurry as I closed my eyes and felt your breath upon the surface of my skin. You whispered; “Look Elma, you are bleeding…” I looked down and saw myself standing in a pool of red. Blood continued to soaked through the lace you had wrapped around my hands, as I sighed deeply and woke up.
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