384: After Mark left . . .
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 18 continues
After Mark left, Lorna began moving around her kitchen, following her accustomed patterns, clearing the dishes, washing them. Herb went through the house in his accustomed pattern, turning lights off, turning the radio off, locking the doors. Everything they did was familiar, habitual. But tonight there was something odd about all this homely activity. They were making far too much of it, and the little sounds attendant to it, each click of a lock, each creak of a door when Herb tested it, each clink of a plate on the counter, the slosh of the water in the kitchen sink, the squeak of Lorna’s towel when she polished a glass, echoed in the house like amplified recordings, hyper-precise, hyper-audible, because the only background for them was the echoing silence of people wholly preoccupied by their thoughts.
Lorna was recalling her mistake of so many years ago, when she had told Ella that she had to do the conventional thing, that she had to choose between Buster and Bert, but she was also imagining the pleasure of carving that handsome Mark, those beautiful Glynns. Though the mechanical question of their intricate entanglement aroused and intrigued her, it also made her head begin to ache, and so she set it aside and concentrated instead on sculptural details: the girls’ smooth necks, their plump lips, their breasts, ripe fruit from the land of youth (and four! — a bountiful harvest!), their bellies and thighs, where she would be able to show off her skill at suggesting the strength beneath the curves, an effect like rocks softened by snow, the smooth muscles along Mark’s back, the lenticular concavities in his tense buttocks, the venous ridge along his erect penis, its jaunty cap — She caught herself breathing hard, clutching the edge of the sink. Her heart was all aflutter. In her belly she felt the old familiar ripples, and between her legs the eager wetness of —
“An interesting problem,” said Herb, and he was about to say more, but Lorna flinched and cried out, “Oh!” She hadn’t been aware that he was standing there, at the back door, looking out, into the dark. She blushed, as if somehow Herb might know what she’d been thinking, might know how elementally she had responded to what she’d been thinking.
“You scared me half to death,” she said. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“Sorry,” said Herb. “I thought you heard me come in.”
“That’s all right. What did you say?”
“I said it’s an interesting problem. Mechanically, I mean,” said Herb. He coughed.
“What — um — ? Oh, you mean Mark — and the girls?” She pulled the stopper from the sink, and the water swirled away.
Herb cleared his throat. “Yes.” His ears reddened.
“He’s a nice boy. Nice looking.” Lorna looked at the dish cloth, lying in a wet lump in the sink. She rubbed her thumb along the porcelain.
“An interesting mechanical problem,” said Herb. He looked at Lorna’s reflection in the glass. He felt his ears and cheeks burn. He reached into his pocket and tugged at his shorts to make room for his erection. “Lots of moving parts,” he said.
[to be continued on Thursday, November 17, 2022]
In Topical Guide 384, Mark Dorset considers The Habitual, the Familiar, the Customary, versus the Extraordinary, the New, the Exceptional from this episode.
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