Where Are You?
Daphne Buter

I heard the birds disagree in the garden. I was trapped between two windows. On the right side of me I saw the sapphire sky. Little birds were soaring there, like bacteria under a microscope, like acne on the face of God.

Soon thin clouds hung stationary above the naked trees that encircle the patio of a school. A little later voices of children rose above the voices of the birds.

I went outside and met an old man with a wise face. His frame shook under his skin. He wore a black leather coat without a zipper, and a loose pant with an open one. His upper body looked skeletal under his shirt full of food spots. Pink and yellow and green spots; a shirt like the painting of a molested child.

My fetish is 'old people.' I couldn't resist this one. He was so old he should have died years ago. Walking in something that looked like a big circle of the past, he couldn't pace. It was easy to walk up on him. I stretched my hand out and tapped him on the shoulder, saying, 'Hey old man! Where are you going?'

The old man had a beautiful face. A face like a medieval painting. A face that would fit into a painting of hell by Heronimus Bosch. His hair looked like tinsel, surrounding his anxious expression, and his nose was yellow and curved. The rest of his skin was pale and colourless, apart from some rusty speckles. And his blue eyes - with the mud of time covering his eyeballs - gazed at me with the suspicious look of an incarcerated bird.

'I'm going nowhere. I just stay where I am.'

His lips had the color of the North Sea on a rainy day. The aroma of an urinary wafted from his body.

'I think you might be right. None of us is going anywhere,' I said.

When the old man smiled he exposed his porcelain teeth. Between the teeth I saw some fibres of meat.

'I am somewhere,' he said. His eyes gazed at me with an unexpected happiness.

'Will you tell me where you are, old man?' I asked.

We just stood there for awhile, face to face. I rose my hands to his head and touched his cheeks. I noticed he liked that. His eyes blinked a few times and he didn't ask me to take my hands off his face. I felt his chin-stubs stab my fingers.

'I know an old sofa in a park,' I said, 'let's walk there.'

The old man and I walked to the couch in the park. The couch was hidden under greenery. I think some children must have dragged it in there.

Some children that are grownups by now, because the couch was old and rotten, and between the pillows little insects built their home. I've

never been afraid of insects and the old man was too old to see them.

We sat there, and the sun came out, turning the world into a blond marble.

'Where are you?' I asked.

'I am in love,' the old man said.

He examined his body with his undernourished hands and when he tapped his chest above his heart, it sounded hollow. I heard the birds gossip in the trees. I felt them watching us.

'My chest is a cupboard for my heart,' he said. 'My skull is an attic were I keep old stuff, and that is why I'm still in love.'

I took the hand of the old man, saying, 'I know you are in love. We are sitting on a sofa in a park in 2004, but we aren't here. We are in love and that is where we are and where we will stay.'

We just sat there, the old man and me. We were in love. Insects crawled over our fingers and we let them.

Daphne Buter lives in the Netherlands and has published two books with The Bezige Bij publishers (De Blauwe Prins, a novel – and Alle Vogels Van De Wereld – short stories). Her work has appeared in Snow Monkey, Cadenza, Frigg Magazine, SLQ, Edifice Wrecked, Sleeping Fish, The Beat, Dicey Brown, Smokelong Quarterly and Noo Journal.