Writing Exercise: Imperative, or Rada Imagines and Dictates

Wake at 6 am, get up at 7 – there is work to be done. Toss off the white comforter, slip feet into your slippers. Pad down the short corridor, along the cold tile, open the door to the bathroom. Take a nice, hot piss. Cold-wash your bristled face, brush your teeth to the sound of the toilet’s draining. Stare at the blank expression of the face in front of you, try to see what she sees in you; give up. Spit out the white stuff, rinse out your dirty potty mouth. Hork a loogy into the washbasin, watch it whirl down and in. Go back to your bedroom, hand over yawning mouth, pull on that dusty black shirt of yours, the one with the white paint and caulking spatters. The pants – grab the starch-stiff khaki-coloured ones and conform them to your long grasshopper legs. Slip on your jean jacket; pat the pockets for the cigarette carton. To the kitchen – ho! Flick the switch on the archaic white kettle. Unstick the fridge door, bend over almost double to peek in. Extract a hunk of red-crusted cheese, several slices of gray rye bread, a can of Pepsi. Wrap these delicacies in a rustling plastic bag, tie it up in a knot.

Shake out instant coffee crumbs into a mug, shake out some sugar, ignore the light brown rings along the bottom of the cup’s innards. Realize that the kettle is empty, flick on the stupid switch again. Rush back to your room at the sound of your cell phone’s raving. Say, “Privet, Mitrofanovich.” Hello. Listen. Nod, although he can’t see you. Respond. End the call. Go back into the kitchen, slipping the dense metal contraption into a breast pocket. Pour the hot water, stir, consume. Sighing sharply – you don’t sigh very often -, bag and keys in hand, get your ass into the van. With a pencil, trace some streets in the map-book.

Drive forever, getting not a little annoyed at the songs that keep repeating on the radio. Smoke a cigarette. Arrive. Open the van’s trunk/hatch, pull out the toolbox and toolbelt. Greet your boss and coworker. Focus. Work. Pound the soles of your feet running up and down the ladder, up and down staircases. Bake your neck and arms to crispy on the roof. Pull and grapple the sheet metal into place. Cut a red line on your forearm, by accident. Don’t notice. Push, pull, cut, sweat, step back and consider, shout an answer to someone at the other end. Pull and rest the ladder on your shoulder, walk and carry it like the kill. Rest it against another wall. Escalate yourself back up. Labour, toil, remember the price Adam had to pay for insight. Carry on his legacy; carry on. Recall, for less than a nanosecond, your life before you got involved, before you came to know her and she came to know you. Eye the thick glass bottle at your boss’s lips. See him eyeing you. Try to make the muscle on your jaw stop spasming. Forget it in the rumination of your lunch, in the tossing back of a shot. No time now. Back onto the black scales of the roof, back to the inferno in the sky. You’re a man. Muschina. You have work; Work. You Work. You Do. You Shape. If you ever feel, if emotion ever spills in, let it distill. Connect it to your arm like an intravenous drip. Suck up each drop and let it be an extra bit of hit behind the nail, another push with your foot against a metal rung.

~ by radachka on January 24, 2008.