Moving Parts Read Online Free

Rectangular marks on the wall are mementos of frames that must have held pictures; but of what? The punctured remains of a colored rubber ball will be lying in the corner beneath the stairs, until the sale of the house summons new owners; but this is foreordained, and so the floor will seem to show through the rubber integument. The lighter things are, the easier it is for them to disappear, as if they were blown away by a gust of wind produced by the difference in air pressure between future and past tenses; in recesses they last longer. It would seem that when buying, for instance, such a solid thing as a grand piano, one could count on its weightiness, on the boundless durability of its black lacquer, and on the immutable laws of harmony. But it was placed, as sometimes happens, in a draft, and so the piano passages, volatile shoals of triads that cannot entirely be taken seriously, died away first, before the murmur of voices, and even before the smell of coffee had dissipated. The perfection of a silence capable of containing all sounds will no longer soothe any ear. The furniture has vanished, along with a colorful mist in which life was pleasant and imposed no thoughts about itsdirection or its meaning. Even the umbrella stand has gone, and so water drips onto the floor, onto the perfectly maintained beechwood tiling, while the female figure turns in her hands an envelope taken a few moments ago from the mailbox. It can be surmised that the trick involving the juggling of passions worked perfectly for her for a very long time; the golden balls of love, jealousy, and longing, obedient in her hands, passed through the emptiness of the spheres as they described their giddy, collision-free double and triple trajectories high over the depths of despair, far from the misery of ruination, leaving no trace other than streaks of light. Ink can stain; a mark has been imprinted on her index finger. It’s a capital F from the last name of the addressee, turned back to front. Stubborn, it managed after all to find a way to appear. The first letter of the sender’s name, also smudged from the dampness, tries to squeeze into the next sentence, but without success. The forwardness of these capital letters has gone too far, thinks the narrator. In any case the woman still tears the envelope into shreds, along with its contents. Now she needs to get rid of the pieces and doesn’t know what to do with them; she ought to throw them into the toilet and flush them away. After all, she must know where the bathroom is. While she’s at it she ought to put the red umbrella in the bathtub. But whatever she does now, it will not satisfy the narrator, who has already allowed the insidious word ‘ought’ to take control, peremptorily imposing its weight on the sentences. And thus, because of the last name beginning with F,probably her husband’s, out of wifely loyalty she ought to stick to the metaphor of life as a sea voyage, and especially avoid the circus images associated with the character in the black sweater. Either way, little here depends on the opinions expressed by the narrator. All he can do, and that only to a certain degree, is to govern grammatical forms, an essential element, especially as concerns the verbs, which are constantly striving to escape into open space, of their own accord taking on the forms of the future tense, without any obligations. Brought forcibly down to earth, while they still can they steer clear of perfective forms; they thrash like kites and drift toward waters into which one cannot step twice, and even at a distance it’s evident that as the lesser of two evils they prefer to spin in the eddies of the present.
    In the narrator’s view the future tense doesn’t give facts the necessary grounding. It’s as shapeless as clouds in the sky, and if it brings any order whatsoever it is only an ephemeral and unimportant kind. On the periphery of the landscape the clouds