Jon McKiel - "Quils". Something came over Suhrid as he was watching his fourth straight episode of Sportcenter. His body was resting half-embedded in the purple couch; a dirty plate was sitting guileless on the coffee-table's glass; the street's sodium night-light had blurred across the vertical blinds. But Suhrid felt an eruption of impulse, of action, from somewhere deep within him; an arrowhead of will, somewhere under his heart, beside his stomach, lifting through his blood. He didn't budge, at first, just clenched his hands. Bulky men's voices filled the room, like tooting birds. Suhrid sat with his clenched hands. At a commercial break he got up and stood, kinda thrumming, in the middle of the carpet. He didn't know what to do to himself. He did two pull-ups with the pull-up bar in the kitchen doorway. He rubbed his face. He checked his phone. He wanted to write to his former lover, Stef, but he knew that he shouldn't. He started to do another pull-up. He stopped and he went upstairs, into his study, really what he still thought of as his father's study, with his father's books and his father's exotic office chair and his father's old strong sturdy beautiful wooden desk, more beautiful than any other desk Suhrid had ever seen, all polished mahogany and faded brass, where Dad used to sit for hour upon hour, writing long stories in wide notebooks, tiny handwriting between sea-blue lines, with a fine-nibbed pen and india ink. Suhrid came into the room and sat down behind the desk. He covered his eyes with his hands. He still felt this impulse within him, this spirit, this jump. "No, Suhrid," he said out loud, to himself. Then he ransacked the desk-drawers looking for a blank pad of lined paper, one of his father's old pens, some ink. And when he found these things he arranged them on the surface of the desk, unscrewed the cap of the ink-bottle, the cap of the pen, dipped and began to write. Dear Stef, he wrote, I'm writing you from a feeling of devotion that is probably just fondness but which feels, tonight, like a fortune-teller's-- But Suhrid stopped and looked at what he had written, and particularly the colour of the ink, which was faded and brown, like a coffee-stain, like the text in a forgotten Victorian ledger. The sentence was not yet finished and already it looked bygone.

So he searched the drawers for other ink, for jet-black ink which he unstoppered and wrote with, but this too was faded, leaving letters that looked like insect-tracks. Another bottle and another, all oxidized or dried-up; his note was becoming a rainbow of tired shades, old ambers, and Suhrid sucked back a deep breath through his nose, to keep from crying. He leaned back in his dad's chair. Stef had a level voice, an unwavering look. Stef had thick eyelashes. Everything about their relationship had taken place in a present. Not a future or a past but a true, cruel present. Suhrid didn't want to write any more. He didn't want to be in this empty house. He wanted to be by the ocean, or in the forest, where the consolations were not as obvious, or comforting, or false.

[bandcamp]

(image by Sophie Lécuyer(