The Memory

winfry woke with a start. He was at his table. There was drool on what appeared to be… Was that the next chapter of his epic? Heifer, it was good! But he didn’t remember writing all this. Wait, what did he remember? isa's hair was down. And so was her new age Victorian blouse. Lacy black lingerie perfectly framed isa’s delicate white breasts and she was smiling coyly at him. He stood up and let his trembling finger trace her graceful arm up to her bra strap where he stopped to look up at isa. She looked down at her bra, returned his stare, raised her hand to his and started to slide the strap off her shoulder.

Wait, no, that was his imagination. Definitely his imagination. Or was it? No, it was his imagination. Had to be. Yeah, now he remembered; that was the dream he was having before he woke up. Thank God. That was terrifying. At least, it didn’t feel as real as the kiss otherwise he’d never have been able to figure it out. As it was, he almost had a heart attack from all the worrying. But if that wasn’t what happened, what did?

He remembered becoming increasingly more comfortable as they talked. While listening to isa describe all the sounds you could hear sleeping outside on the cafford quad, while watching her lovely lips waltz, he had forgotten that he was supposed to be nervous. It had been so long since he had talked to someone for the sole purpose of enjoying the conversation that he had forgotten that social interactions could be fun. Even reliving the conversation in his head was a blast. “Isa, did you really kiss me last week or is my imagination getting the better of me?” No! He couldn’t have said that. He was comfortable but surely not that comfortable. But why did he ask that then? If winfry were a betting man, which he wasn’t, he would have wagered his aortic valve that he’d never ask that. It was three steps over the line; there was absolutely no way he could have asked something so bold. But something strange and subtle had happened just like before the kiss; it was like what he imagined getting drunk to be like; you didn’t have to think about things at all; you just did. But you didn’t really just do. You did things that your super-ego had barred with 50 layers of barbed wire and a full-time security staff. Whatever was sneaking past all that was unnerving. Whatever it was, was terrifying. And then there were the after effects: memory loss and inspired writing? How many more times would this happen? Was he finally losing his sanity?

And so maybe this wasn’t actually what winfry was thinking because in case I let you forget, in spite of this pseudo stream-of-thought narrative, I can’t actually know what winfry was thinking. But he certain was on edge and unnerved; that was for sure. As he tried to sort out all this crazy out of his life, his legs became ADHD and bobbed at 2000 rpm, his hands ran through his sandy blonde hair like they were running a marathon and his shoulder muscles tensed as if trying to lift a ten ton weight off of them.

Where was he? Oh yeah, he had just asked her if she’d kissed him. What did she say?! Umm, she didn’t say anything? Oh yeah, she hugged him. That was a bizarre response. She looked at him and her eyes seemed to sign, “I’m sorry,” and then she leaned in her chair to wrap her other hand around him. It was the most physical contact winfry winster had with a woman since he stopped going to his doctor. He could feel her chest beating quickly against his, pressing her intricate silver spoon into…

But of course, the quilaire! Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Because he wasn’t a silly schoolgirl who believed in ghost stories anymore. But all this changed everything, surely.

According to the phylanix saga, the quilaires empowered the divining deities. Each deity was endowed with a tiny teaspoon, with which they would stir their ambrosia. It was the quilaires, then, not the ambrosia itself, that gave the gods their divinity. What’s more, the quilaires had strange effects on all of the mortals that came in contact with them: phelioba sprouted wings and a halo after just looking a detrium’s quilaire and legend has it that heraclitus was inspired to write the phylanix saga only after accidentally using thertian’s quilaire to stir his porridge.

But this couldn’t be real. The quilaires were mythology, fiction; they couldn’t actually exist. Sure, many people claimed to own one of the thirteen quilaires but none of them actually did anything. (NB: even though nilbmahians didn’t give a squirrels rear for the history of their country, they were absolutely obsessed with its rowdy, rambunctious mythology.) This was craziness. But wasn’t what had been happening to him also craziness? Come on, after fifteen years of stagnate writing he finally was able to produce, not just good, but amazing writing? That was truly preposterous and hadn’t he been looking for his muse up there on the fourth floor? And all these lapses in memory and inhibition?

No, it was all to just too weird. isa and her quilaire were more than just an oddity like himself; they were sublime. And all this non-sense was driving him insane. That was it. Enough of all this stress and confusion; he was going over to isa and make her fess up. Yes, he knew he was having another one of those strange lapses of inhibition, but what did he care? Once and for all, he was going sort it all out, out, out!