Femmes: The Flamethrower (Alice) Semioli

She has an old gold digital watch and hair dyed blonde some months ago, and a wonderfully patterned rouge scarf, it's Paris after all. Denim jacket and doe eyes when I catch them. Her full lips parted for just a little teeth to show. She's beautiful. We're alone now in a familiar room, familiar now like an old dream on repeat, an old scene on repeat with different actors, similar do-overs, and a tap in her foot as she thinks of some new thing to feverishly write in her notes, we're racing now it seems. She's Italian.

"To the end of a brief episode
make it one for my baby 
and one more for the road."

Femmes: More Black Cat

Well at least the last scene, which I guess can always be a wonderful place to start. It ends in death of course, just like all things: two strangers set at a cafe, one man, one woman at St. Michel, two stupid tourists maybe. They see a black cat. Our guy sees the black cat, he's at the curb with his love. The black cat draws him across the street, into the path of a bus.

The same crossing where his love saved an old woman from the path of a bus a year before.

The cat is let out by the landlord. The door is not locked because the cat broke something as a patron comes in with her bottle of Chambord from the store downstairs. The patron is never satisfied. She dies a slow death of poison in a bare room trying to get to her treasure of jewels with her black cat looking on. It's the last thing she sees.

The last thing our guy sees is his love. He's finished the unfinished script with the other girl, he's fulfilled the passion with his love, he's complete.

The patron has amassed all these jewels for sale, but hasn't sold them, she's even priced them and imagined the holiday with the money. She loves money. She breathes it in when she sells something.



*******


OPEN on a BLACK CAT from a flat looking down from a terrace window, looking down at a coffee shop where GUY and GIRL work.

CUT to GUY and GIRL working on a script. It's ambiguous, not related at all, but the GUY suggests that a character kill himself in the final scene. And the cat looks on.

GIRL: "What are you doing tonight?"
GUY: "I'm gonna see about a girl."

LOVE, she's going to see love not for dinner, but for a drink. There's a back and forth of wild eccentric friends, one, well, you'll know.

GUY: "I love the fat pigeons here, the elegant ones.

CUT to an old French lady, PATRON, alone in an auction house, for a live auction, an estate sale. The auctioneer is a little confused, or maybe pissed off. PATRON buys what she pleases on the cheap and thanks the auctioneer.
<<OR>>
PATRON and a senile old woman are to lunch at an old lavish country home. PATRON has a notebook and she's interviewing the old lady. PATRON checks her watch, they're talking about Weimaraners for a periodical. And then the senile old lady's head lolls back. PATRON, much quicker than she looks, gets up, shuffles quickly into the house. Two Weimaraners come up and she gives them treats and goes through the house emptying jewelry boxes. There's no one else in the house.

[SENILE had kept calling to her husband for tea. They talked of her children. They visited every other weak and called regularly.]

PATRON doesn't take all the pieces, just the ones she wants, which is most of them, maybe half. She goes to the kitchen and procures a tea-bag with a gloved hand from her attache and puts it in a tea-tin with an evil smile and an air of devilish pride.

CUT to CU of SENILE. She comes to in a drowsy fluster and looks around. Across the table PATRON is scribbling feverishly in her notebook with her eyes down. Without looking up she says something to the effect of: "That just about covers it. I'll mail you a copy of the article okay?" SENILE walks PATRON to the door. PATRON thanks her and her husband for the tea. She shuts the door, calls out to her husband who isn't there obviously. There're pictures of him in the hallway.

SENILE: "She was nice."

CUT to PATRON at a train station in Marseille, on the platform. We see the train is going to Paris. With a rush the train is off.

CUT to bus rushing by to reveal GUY on curb. He checks his watch, and crossed the street, turns a corner to a corner cafe, and a young blonde with daring eyes takes notice as he walks towards her. They talk about, you know, each other, if she's working at the coffee shop tomorrow.

LOVE: "Why? Will you come by?"
GUY: "Maybe to flirt with you some more."

She's English. They talk about spritzers and the difference between Aperol and Campari, if there even is one. The bartender's a dick. After a spritzer, they go somewhere else for dinner, maybe talk about belief systems and politics, right and wrong.

GIRL: "Have you ever stolen anything?"



*******


More than anything, questions ask people. The more people a question asks, the more interesting they are. And remember everyone farts.


*******


CUT to PATRON in a familiar-looking apartment, that of the cat. She's reading a newspaper, the obituaries, and she farts.


*******


They put menus behind the crosswalks in Paris.


"How about here, how about here and here. Here. Here."
     - The Avid Father Photographer

Femmes: About the Black Cat

There's a curious duality on the plane with me back to Paris in the form of two Russian twin flight attendants; deportation. Something strange is happening to me. I started and shuttered a book in one day, all in Russia, Russian author too, and for the first time ever I might say, but then again I'd never been deported either. It could possibly be the subtle insanity of fluorescent that hasn't escaped me since Paris, since going under at Temple. I was sitting with Olivia and her friend Nate and an acting acupuncturist not long before that, and like the color sinking with the lines into a Polaroid before my eyes, I see the image now crystallize.

Black Cat, second story window.

Olivia jumped with delight as I pointed it out, all the while that slow still sinking feeling flooding over me. I thought it'd merely be the layover.

I think it was Elizabeth of Lili and the Dirty Moccasins who said she once considered the thought that we could be cursed; said she thought she was at one time.

It's important though to know that for her it was a passing phase. She didn't believe it anymore and maybe because of that, the lack of a strange maybe misguided belief, because of that she was better off.

Maybe she was. Maybe it's safer to think that, but really a rejection of one belief only leads inevitably to another; in this case one of coincidence; a belief in randomness after all is still a belief. It's to believe that the things in our lives are not connected. And then that's how is has to be. A belief above all things no matter what it's in, is absolute. It has to be, otherwise you don't really believe it, do you.

For example, I haven't abandoned my cursed nature, not yet. I believe in the connection of things, in their meanings, in the meanings of everything, everything that holds in my mind. True, sometimes I choose to ignore it (which specifically isn't to say that some things don't mean anything), that simply means to me that I was too lazy to grasp the meaning. Do you know what I mean? It makes sense to me. I'm a very lazy person when I choose to be.

And yet, I was just deported back to Paris. There's a reason for that. I cut my finger with my old razor today, and there's a little red scar on it, my finger, the middle right, and it looks like a tear-drop or a rain-drop or maybe an eye.

I wonder what it means.

Femmes: Elena/Ellen

I wonder if she, in reality, is two people, one for each name. Maybe I met them both, the one in the black dress, the one in the flowers. I wonder which one loved me, if either of them did, this English girl. In all the ways, she said yes. She let me kiss her of course, with regular frequency before the very end, before she left me for good on the metro. But I didn't see her look back. She didn't watch me off, no, she turned away. It was quick, with a rush of wild blonde and blue eyes turning quickly gray. The wild flowers of her dress blurred at the squint of mine as the train pulled away. I'd be her's, the both of her, always.

She'd be my favorite
song if she took me
as her own.

I'm the kind of man that can throw all of me into her, easily. And I shall. It's the best thing I could possibly do, truly. She's true beauty, body and soul, and in her smiling whisper comes the waves of adoration, undulation, admiration.

I'm always impressed by a girl from the Isle with a love of hard drink. It's the curse of me, among more sporting things.

Femmes: Jac Capra

This shall be called Jac Capra And The Curious Premonition of Over-Indugence And No Control.

I simply can't say no. One of these days it's going to get me into trouble, like real trouble.  So far the worst has just been awful morning-afters and head-splitting hangovers.

Real trouble?  Hardly.  A few questionable decisions, sure.  Heartache, of course, but always tied to the best of times and the craziest of times and the most memorable and I hate to say defining, but it's true.  So many sleepless nights walking back home or biking back fast in pace with the sunrise.  This never happened when I was with Claire.

(That's a lie.  There was that prime acid on a Wednesday night with that fucking wildcat drug mule Andrew, but they were so few and far between back then.)

God, I love flirting.
I think I might like it more than the sex on some occasions.
Maybe it's just been so long since I've had any worth writing home about.

She tells me, "Maybe the anticipation is better than the fact."




********



It's raining in Paris on my last day. They're playing Fleetwood Mac in the cafe; Australian cafe in Paris in the Marais.  Je sais.

"Thunder only happens when it's raining."

Why
Do I always love to dive
Into girl's minds

Whatever happens to you over the years as you change and things fade and time slips away, never, never, never forget these moments and the feelings you had in Paris, especially now in the rain on this last day and the deep surging from the pores and the flashes white of what comes of doing everything you can for a person; the wonderful weight of anticipation, like I could explode into light at any second and that would be all right.  There's no name for this feeling, I know it, not in any language.

Femmes: James Joyce Nigga

I told Olivia I'm drowning in a sea of women again.
Like a favorite old record, this place is.
What a wonderful repetition of the soul,
Let's say.

God, that's so cliché.
What would James Joyce say?

Maybe "Mother-fucker, it's crazy this life!"
And "Even our little histories tend to repeat themselves."
They certainly do in mine.
It's divine, the invisible hand of chance.
It's beautiful to recognize.