Gentle Persuasion

[Steven Hunley]

Gentle Persuasion
by
Steven Hunley


I’ve been out of town and arrive late. She said she’d stay up and she tried but she’s fallen asleep on the couch, her head resting on a brocaded pillow. I notice her there when I walk in the door.
She’s small, she’s always been small. The fact that she’s small makes me feel more like a man somehow. Her waist is only 23 inches or so around.
I still have a chapter to do so I tip-toe around and make coffee.

I pour it and sit at the coffee table. I use a coaster. She always makes you use a coaster. I like how her crafts table, the one she uses for art projects, is wasted by her carelessness and has been so for some time. She says she’s going to refinish it. Careless and careful at the same time, that’s why she’s an enigma, a woman, same thing.

Halfway through the cup I turn to regard her. Her form is magnificent, a piece of white Carrara marble sculpture lying in repose on her sensuous red-cushioned couch. Looking at her form fuels my heat and my heart. If only to myself, I admit it.
She’s in shape and works at it. She runs every day. Her eyes can’t be seen, but are coconut brown, inherited from Portuguese stock. They’re the kind of eyes that can’t be denied, and kill your resistance with seductively gentle persuasion.

I still have work to do but can’t stand seeing her there anymore. I step over and bend down and scoop her up in my arms. Half-conscious, she wraps her arms around my neck and sighs. I like it when she sighs, it reminds me of when she makes love. Making love is something she’s good at. I carry her into the bedroom and place her on her pillow-top mattress with care.

Removing her clothes is no hassle. I always like removing her clothes. Her skin is soft and the color of porcelain on her thighs and her breasts where it hasn’t been kissed by the sun. There’s a slight imprint of a flower on her cheek from the brocade. I examine it closely because I’ll never see it again, it fades as I watch. Lucky for me her beauty won’t.
She slides between sheets of Egyptian cotton and I cover her up and make her comfortable with a kiss.

I go to her office and try to work on a chapter but all I can concentrate on is the fragrance of her wild dark hair. I give up, turn off the light and go back. I’m good at going back to her, in fact I enjoy it. She’s an enjoyable piece of work, and in future I know she’ll be even more enjoyable. That’s why I’m stuck with her. She’s a marvelous work in progress, a work that will never be finished.

I love work that’s unfinished. There’s something about it.

[hillwalker]

It's the little observations and just-about relevant details in this that make it work so well - since there's not much happening. A very reflective piece; subtle and with the throttle nicely under-powered.

H

[Delta40]

That was a really lovely journey Steve. Those little details and the shift of your focus is entrancing.

[Captain Pike]

My mouth watered a little there, "fragrance of her wild dark hair", just thinking of it -- the coffee I mean.

[loki456]

mate, goosebumps. All I can say. and stop looking through my window at my girlfriend. If i've told you once.... don't make me tell you again. haha.

[breathtest]

this is very nice. i like the parallel between the unfinished chapter he has to write and the 'unfinished' woman.

[AuntShecky]

First on the subject matter -- a love story, of course. When we attempt writing a story on that topic, we first have to ask ourselves what is it that we're contributing to the vastbody of literature about love-- what are we saying that is brand new? That's why love stories is one of the topics yours fooly tries to avoid.

HOWEVER-- to paraphrase Tolstoy, not every love story --happy or not so happy --is alike. A skillful writer can make the strictly personal resonate with the general.

What's different about this particular story? Between the lines I detect the glimmerings of a metaphor -- drawing a parallel between the speaker's love for his lady and the manuscript he's working on, both "unfinished" in a way. The story's open-ended conclusion underlines this aspect.

In its present form, this story needs a little bit more development, perhaps on that art of love/work of art parallelism.

The technique could use some smoothing. For instance, use of the present tense can be very tricky, especially when it comes to sequences of events, as in this sentence:
She said she’d stay up and she tries but she’s fallen asleep on the couch, her head resting on a brocaded pillow. In this sentence with a "mini" flashback, I think "has tried" would be better choice of verb tense.

By the bye, if you've read many stories from the 1980s, the
vast majority of them were all set in the present tense, perhaps in imitation of the highly-regarded Raymond Carver who flourished in that decade. The trend has seemed to reverse in the last two decades, back to past tense (in general.)

The other thing I'd suggest is varying the types of sentence structure. Reading a long string of simple declarative ("choppy") sentences gets tedious after a while. You can combine some of the sentences, delete some material, and so forth to make the narrative run more smoothly.

But when it comes to narration, don't forget to try to emphasize "showing" rather than "telling."

Thank you for posting this and reading my crotchety comments.

[Steven Hunley]

Thanks Auntie,
I actually did the entire thing in first person, then went back and changed it. Missed "tries". But I've corrected it. This first person thing you mention, seems like it conveys a certain sense of immediacy, but it's seems an unatural way to write, right? I mean, if you were writing that you are writing, then OK it's in the present, but usually, if it's biographical, you're writing about the past with some sense of time having past.

Anyway, it's corrected and reads better, thanks.

Not crotchey at all!