Excerpt3 From Pest
by Wayne Sullins
Like everyone, I learned to walk as a child. But in Paris I learned to love to walk, to get lost in the narrow sinuous lanes of the 9th and 18th arrondissements.
When I wasn’t buried in profit a predre, voir dire and cestui que trust, I put on my hat and took to the streets from dawn to dusk, rain or shine.
The French have a word for the idle stroller—un flaneur.
Over time, I noticed there were others. They like to look. They like to move. Among them was a woman in, I’d say, her mid-twenties. Fair-haired and free-spirited. A mole on her upper lip. She always carried a bag of apples, giving away the fruit to those least in need of it—bankers climbing into long chauffeur-driven automobiles; women in furs out walking the greyhounds; men who looked as though they probably owned an orchard, if not dozens of them.
Though I knew I stood no chance of getting one, I wanted an apple, too; the smallest of the bunch, the one with the most bruises, I didn’t care. But no matter what airs I put on, no matter how hard I tried to wear a smirk on my face, I was just a hapless student whose only good suit was stained in two places and needed buttons.
From the colonies, people whispered.
Then one day I saw her again. I was in Montmartre. According to my map I was on Place Saint Pierre. I looked up and there she stood in front of the Ecole Communale, her face to the sky, her bag empty. A stunning blue and green striped dress with matching gloves. She usually wore low black pumps with red buttons. Today, it was two-inch heels and laces, green laces.
When she looked at me I froze.
“Have you any apples?” she asked.
“Apples?”
“Yes. You know, the fruit. I’ve run out. Have you any?”
Her accent told me that she wasn’t Parisian, but I couldn’t have said where she’d come from—Lyon, Verdun, Chantilly...
I told her that I didn’t understand. It was she who gave away apples.
“Oh, I’ve given you an apple?”
“No, but...”
“I wouldn’t think so. You don’t look like the kind of person I’d give an apple to.”
“I know.”
“So, you get it?”
I didn’t.
“It’s Dada.”
“Dada?”
She said, “Dada’s quarrelsome, excessive, a sinking ship, Dada’s a harsh grating noise, rude gestures, Dada’s a black and white bird on fire, narcotics, release, a peculiar feeling in the palms of your hands...”
She made no sense. She was dangerous. No wonder I followed her.
Wayne Sullins is a 45 year old photographer/writer born in Houston, Texas. At twenty-one he escaped to Europe for three months before settling in Manhattan. He has since traveled to many lands, including Israel, India and Japan. His poems have appeared in the Quarterly, Poetry East, Compost, Quick Fiction, and other journals.