I used to smoke in those days.
My first impression of him was that he seemed to be too slow – in movement, speech, gestures, mind. I felt a bit uncomfortable and irritated when listening to and looking at him.
With a coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she slowly declared that he was an interesting person and stared through the smoke vanishing between us.
I’d been single for several months already, and it was so nice of her to draw my attention to a man she thought might fit me. Eleven years later it became so obviously clear to me that she was talking about herself, not me. She was not suggesting him to me; it was she who was interested in him. But at that moment I didn’t feel it; my intuition remained silent.
“Do you remember the guy we were smoking together with, when I came to your office?”
“Yeah,” – she was trying to get what I was talking about.
“So, how is he?”
“Well, quite alright, I guess…” – With a shade of surprise and suspicion, she answered me. “Why are you asking?”
“I don’t know, just because.”
That night club was definitely notorious even for those times! Pole dancers, dirty performances and a crowd of people thirsty for bread and circuses and even more. I recognized him the moment we entered the main hall with strobe lights and hardly bearable music. The show, music, vodka and other people became still and flat and faded immediately. They were just the background, and he seemed to be the only thing alive and attracting my eyes and all of my self. It didn’t take me a second, a moment to choose him. I needed less than nothing to feel something I could not express and turn myself into a human female with all these tiny and implicit attributes of shemale I’d never learned from anybody and no woman had ever taught me of. The attributes which I dared to realize, recognize and became aware of only many years later came from the depths of thousands of generations of women echoed in my self. I had entered the club as a human and then transformed into a female with an imperceptible change of my mind, blood and body. All my being focused on there and then. Subtle and overwhelming feminine nature invaded and captured me, it penetrated all of me and became me. My gestures, glance, pose… all were breathing out softness, obedience, acceptance, responsiveness, grace and the internal call of propagation. I was staring at him with my glance full of billions of fires and the deepest oceans replacing each other with every blink of my eyes. Averting my gaze over and over again, I kept smiling with a touch of a hardly noticed secret in the corners of my lips and eyes, and mind still totally fixed on him. My swinging pose seemed to be promising something that can hardly be expressed with words. Gestures turned smooth and chary. No sounds, no words, no speech.
(…to be continued…)
In the Middle – An International Transposition (Fiction)
Introduction to In the Middle – An International Transposition, edited by Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey
January: Forgetting – Turkey, by Seyit Ali Dastan
February: The Unreal in Real – Armenia, by Armine Asryan
March: Catching Water – Argentina, by Javier Gómez
April: Unwanted – South Africa, by Toni Wallis
May: House with a Stucco Ship – Ukraine, by Gennady Bondarenko
June: A Girl Pedaling – Cuba, by Marilin Guerrero Casas
July: The Last Day – Poland, by Pawel Awdejuk
August: Through my Hands – Venezuela, by Veronica Cordido
September: Amelia’s Euphemism – Spain, by Jonay Quintero Hernández
October: Until Love Do Us Part – Uruguay, by Alejandra Baccino
November: A Journey to the Edge – Lebanon, by Rayan Harake
December: I Used to Smoke – Russia, by Kate Korneeva
Background – Context
Peripatetic Alterity: A Philosophical Treatise on the Spectrum of Being – Romantics and Pragmatists by Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)
La Syncrétion of Polarization and Extremes Transposée, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)
The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2018)
L’anthologie of Global Instability Transpuesta, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2017)
From Wahnsinnig to the Loony Bin: German and Russian Stories Transposed to Modern-day America, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2013)
More work by Kate Korneeva
One We – Kate Korneeva (transposing emblem)
Instability or Flexibility – Kate Korneeva (transposing emblem)
Emblems and stories on the international community
Perception by country – Transposing emblems, articles, short stories and reports from around the world
Credits
Cover photo: Chelyabinsk, Russia – Clubbing – Egor Ivlev (Unsplash)
Source: The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed