The Non-Partisan: A Scene in Twenty-Five Sentences

Brazen, bold and brightly blazed, our vixen sings a shrieking squeal. She exits the room with eyes ablaze, her skin seemingly sinking into the vacuum of her skull.



"Madame," the porter interjects, "why do you seem so sad?" Her beautiful, untainted complexion, fluorescent with inconsolable wetness, is pitiful, yet alluring. He seems to care but his eyes fail him as they slope towards her breasts. She covers them indiscreetly with her descending towel and wipes the cooling drops of dew from her eyes. Perverse nature unveiled, he quickly springs his gaze back upward to her face. "Is there anything I can do for you, Miss?"



"You can leave me alone," says she, "Just leave me the fuck alone."



Turning on her bare naked heel, she starts to run into an adjoining hallway - a run inspired by the way the women in movies run - and he turns his face away. This isn't the job of a porter, he thinks; this lady needs some other kind of help. As he starts to absent himself from the scene, the click of the lock behind him acts as if someone had put a fish hook in his nostril and pulled to turn him around. A man wearing similar attire vacates the same room. He is maybe ten years older than she, but his virility and determination is instantly comparable with the drama of her youth. She being gone, he looks both ways for clues as to her escape route. He turns to the porter for assistance and gestures an interrogative, yet friendly sign. The porter points straight ahead and receives a second semiotic gesture - a rudimentary thumbs up - from the semi-naked stranger. The perception of the stranger, whose dominant strides thunder with questionless self-confidence, obscures into the distance as his lover's had before him.



There is a feeling of emptiness in the hallways once more. Their relationship, however volatile, is, at least in the simplest sense, human. Once both characters have emigrated from his presence, the porter thinks about the importance of each action. How a small encounter can make such a massive difference to the lives of others. They may have only informed his story, but he played an active role in theirs. The thought enters his mind and then dissipates into nothingness - thoughts sometimes do that as quickly as they coagulate. Then, picking up his stride, our disinterested protagonist walks on, unchanged and indifferent, as a man who has seen everything, yet still knows nothing.