4

Of Women and Corruption

As Told By D.K. Lindy

Short Story by V.E. Silber

It’s one of those wretchedly beautiful mornings again. The sun is out and the sky is clear as a blind man’s glass eye. I don’t know why I complain so about it being such a spectacular awakening; I can’t stand the mornings when they are fogged and miserable either. Perhaps I merely do not like the morning. I have seen too many mornings in my day to like any sort of them. This I think and more as I peer with a sneer from behind the drab curtains of my drab chamber which shield a drab window. The world is occurring outside; but I have no time for the world, or it’s occurrences for that matter. I am far too old to bother about the young men which insist on vandalizing the wall besides the convenience store, despite the fact the shop owner covers it with fresh paint every Thursday afternoon. I am far too weathered to give a single care about that young woman of ridiculously high class who walks her dog every single morning, save Sunday, in front of this clouded window and is resolute to pick a fight with the street sweeper every morning for the fact that he dislikes her dog’s ill manners of urinating on the local trees. I am old and I am too tired to play childish games of trying to understand the world. I have been through that mayhem and survived that turmoil; and now I have no patience for such quests. Now I know. The end of my life is approaching, it is inevitable. Perhaps if I knew it was not inevitable I would not die, but continue on in a blissful ignorance that death is not inevitable. But I am too old to be idealistic. I pity those young girls who go through boys as if they were cheap shoes and stay awake for long hours wondering who Mr. Right could be. I have no such naivety. Yet, I do envy the boy who wakes up in a morning such as this and grins the grin that my sunken cheeks no longer allow me, just at the fact that the sun is shining down upon him and he will be able to ring his friend so they may travel to the park and engage in football. I have found that as the years progress the soul becomes dimmer, the mind becomes jaded, and the heart shrinks a size and a half. I have not felt my heart pound against my rib-cage in nerve, in fear, in love, or in thrill for far too many years now. What is it that makes our hearts so frail with time? It is not the process of aging, as you may undoubtedly think. It is the time itself; for the passing time brings sorrow, madness, horror, tragedy, heartbreak, love, death, fear, disappointment and inevitability. It is these things that come along hand-in-hand with time; they are conjoint twins, attached by the bone of the hip. Time, when I was a young girl, was exciting. I was in my prime and I awoke, much like that young boy, with a grin upon my face because spring holiday was only four weeks away; and oh help us how much I longed for those four weeks to pass with the haste of a winter wind. Now I sit in my great armchair in front of my fireplace, thinking of such matters, and I pray four weeks will pass as slowly as snow melts in early February. But time, as I have said, brings not hope for its end or the hope for its eternity, but cannot help carry with it these horrors which turn Dorian Gray’s portrait a deep charcoal. It is time that corrupts us. And I, a veteran of time, have long since been corrupted. That is why I do not pay attention to that women and her persistent poodle. That woman, though I insist I do not notice her, reminds me of my mother. A high-strung woman once, God rest her soul, highly bred, like her many dogs and her many children. Being raised in London is not as difficult as one would imagine when one lives off of Tottenham Court Road in a house as large as Windsor Palace; the house I live in now. I have watched within this vastness woman’s reality shift drastically. The twentieth century has been an age of most curious occurrences. My mother, once a lady of a manor and the juggler of a fortune given to her by a distant and handsome man, was eventually tainted by the pollution of time, and found her soul worn thin, like her bones, and her energy collapsed, like her lungs. She became an old and fickle, unbearable woman, much like myself now. She did not understand the changes of the time, nor did she care to change with them. Women, like slaves born of Africa, were freed and proceeded to flaunt themselves. I understood; of course I understood. But we did not care for this “liberation”. Time has taken the ability to care away from me. I have outlived all my siblings and, with no children or an heir, now I wonder, as the convenience store across the street lifts its metal gate and a boy on a bicycle passes by and that distasteful woman and her distasteful poodle come around the corner, if that shopkeeper that boy or that woman will ever remember my name. It is undoubtedly ironic, I amuse; a baby is born, she is a girl, she is free and then she is a woman and then she is oppressed; one day she is freed yet again and she finds that life is dull and writes countless books on the subject of present life being absurdly dull; a few critics believe her work is witty and thus young women who were born free buy it and do not understand it, yet they believe the critics for their trustworthy opinion and so recommend the book to others. Now she is an old woman with no patience for life or even for its tedium; and she will die soon. Who will remember her? Those trite young women who bought her book in some search for simple feminism? There is her irony. I am born and I live and I die and then I am forgotten. It is the true nature and reality of every human being. How can someone forget an entire life? It is tragic. Yet, perhaps there is my own irony. I myself will forever be forgotten, this is as inevitable as death; but I have written and I have published and these books will not merely evaporate upon my parting of this world. The name “D.K. Lindy” will be emblazoned in the subconscious of every single man, woman, child, youth who reads a book I have written. “Who is D.K. Lindy? Man, woman? Old, young? Was she beautiful? Was she handsome?”; “I do not know, but they have said this book is quite clever.” Immortality of the writer, what some famed men of the craft have dreamt, is an utter illusion. One fades, yet the name remains. The velvet of my dress is musty, and the air is thick with the stench of tobacco and nicotine which the doctors tell me are destroying my already inevitably decaying health; but why delay the inevitable? There was once a Roman man of the senate who killed himself and said to Cesar of his suicide: “They say choosing one’s own moment to die is the closest one will come to tricking fate.” I believe this blindly. The life outside that fogged window veiled by dreary coloured drapes continues, my pen is heavy and my cigarette is almost out. My life as a woman, the corruption of my soul and my nonexistent immortality as a writer are the last ideas which will ever grace my paper or these books. But, my dear impressionable reader, do not think I mean to convey that life is absurdly dull and not worth the living. On the contrary! Life is the most absurdly dull, pointless, uneventful, painful, long and most tedious event that will ever be, and it merits living ten times over. If D.K. Lindy could? She would dance this dance until her shoes were worn to the soles of her feet.