Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

”Clinically dead?” ”Clinically dead.” “Okay. So – clinically dead, huh?” “Yep.” “But not a lot dead, right? Just a little dead?” “Yes, just for a few moments.” Oh jesus fuck. “You know I’ll be pestering your ass every day until you get back here? I’ll go nuclear with the phone, I’ll be like Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets, coming over to drag Helen Hunt back to work because he cannot function without her.” “Yeah okay. But please don’t call on the first week, okay? I’ll be out of it, so drugged I probably won’t even know my own name let alone yours.” “Yeah okay. But after that, man, it’s Phone City, I’ll be like what are you doing, get your ass back to work, I’m dying here!” “And I’ll be like yeah well so am I!” We both laugh hard at this. “And hey, your timing is most excellent, you’ll get to sit through the second season of Stranger Things right away!” I tell him as we browse IMDb’s latest poster art for the Netflix series. “An...

The Actress Alex races through the kitchen, the autumn sun in her hair. The large slice of the hawthorn hedge visible in the window is bathed in the kind apricot light of early fall. She is laughing, Mark is chasing her, laughing and gaining, and just before they reach the sauna, he catches her, turns her around, and kisses her passionately. Eggs are scrambling on the burner, and coffee is brewing, spreading the beautiful terracotta smell of fresh coffee in the kitchen. It is early, he has to leave for work, but she kisses him, as if in a frenzy, and perhaps she is in one, and presses herself tightly against his body, indicating that she wants to go make love. They laugh all the way to the bedroom, Mark pausing at the stove long enough to turn off the burner and remove the pan from the hot surface. As they enter the bedroom, in embrace, Alex opens her eyes and looks at Mark, his beautiful eyes closed, his light brown lashes resting on his cheeks. As they pass the three-way...

Okay I know I’m doing the It -thing to death now, and I swear, this will be the last one and then I’ll move on. Just a short note from my weekend -long dialogue with Swinton, my workmate for the first autumn rush hour. We share a lot of common ground, popular culture -wise, and when our superiors throw us together on a work stint, it’s pretty much all babbity-bab-bab until the bell tolls on Sunday night, and our colleagues are finally relieved from having to listen to our ramblings on the book versus the film, you know, insert the hot title here, or Buffy, or Neil Gaiman, or one of the three Davids; Bowie, Lynch, or Duchovny, et cetera. Since, quoting the one and only Lorelai Gilmore, our babbling capabilities are infinite, there was a whole chapter during the weekend concerning food and eating, what each of us had brought along as lunch, what went well with what, and so forth. Roberts had made Alexander pastries at home earlier in the week, and posted some photos of the mouth...

Mimou got lost for the first time in her life in her adopted home town, home already for many years, when she was done with her Friday shopping and trying to leave downtown on foot, her preferred means of transportation. It happened while she wasn’t paying attention, the way accidents and car crashes and muggings do. It was sort of amazing, if one stopped to think about it. How one can know a place, a person, an idea, by heart, and when approaching them from a different point of view, or angle, everything about them becomes incomprehensible and strange. She was talking to Sally, on her expensive Sony Hi-Fi kit. It was lime, and she had always loved how the headphones made her look like from a science fiction movie, all wired up, with knobs in her ears worthy of Rob Bottin himself. It was an important phone call, and she had shopping bags in both hands, so she was preoccupied and uncharacteristically absent-minded. She crossed the park by the church, and started for the other s...

I got a huge basketful of black currants from mother last week, when she and my father came over to oversee my window washing tactics. See, I can’t wash windows well, or at all, if she isn’t there. She possesses a powerful and absolute, unthinkable magic, and just standing next to me while I stand on the kitchen stool, scrubbing away in my ancient Minnie Mouse tee-shirt and ankle-length wear-around-the-house skirt, makes me a better cleaning woman. It’s not that she scolds me – never – if I wash them badly, or stands next to me as this astounding, perfect housekeeping woman to look up to or to aspire to, but there is a benevolent omnipresence about her, I think all mothers possess that certain something that makes their children want to make them proud as a rule. After making some midmorning coffee and quickly comparing notes on the weather and driving conditions, how everyone slept, and if anyone had any plans later so we’d know how fast we needed to be going, we got to work....