B L O C K

BLOCK
By Thabet-Abbas C. Burias


The air conditioner hummed loudly in the corner of the small room – the only sound in the night, as far as he was concerned.

Getting up from his bed suddenly, the man rushed over to his bag and took out his two good pencils. Then, placing them on top of his pillow, he tried to think of what he could write on. A quick glance around the room revealed nothing: a chair, a television set, some dirty laundry strewn about at odd angles, and a guitar case.

“I have got to get this place cleaned,” he muttered to himself as he continued to search the room, seeing for the first time that it looked like something out of a disaster story. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes wearily, sinking to his knees to reach the twin drawers under his bed. Left or right? The first phrases were leaving his head fast.

He had had first paragraphs of stories occasionally pop into his head as he lay half-asleep on the lower bunk of the double-decker. Most of the time he would simply dismiss them with a sigh, too lazy to write them down. Why did they always come as he was falling asleep, and almost never on demand? This time, however, he chose to put them on paper.

“Aha!” He smiled as a prospector would smile at the sight of a gold nugget, only this nugget was the corner of a green folder, buried under tons of accumulated laundry. Making a mental note to get the clothes washed soon, he pulled out the folder and pushed the drawer closed with his free hand. A small checklist ran through his mind by reflex.

Pencils – check.
Paper – In the folder, check.
Coffee –

“I can do without that,” he thought as he sank into a comfortable position, seated on his bed. Excitedly, like a child on Christmas morning, the man clicked the folder open and rummaged through its contents until he found several blank sheets of writing paper. Then, taking his pencil and a giant breath in one grand gesture, he wrote

The night was quiet in the…

His thoughts trailed off.

He tried to recall what had gotten him so excited in the first place, but couldn’t find it in his head. Frustrated, the writer took another deep breath and put down the pencil. He checked the watch on his right wrist. The date was just about to turn from 28 to 29. It’s going to be tomorrow soon, he thought.

The sound of the air conditioner seemed louder than its usual hum, bordering dangerously close to annoying. On an average night, it would have helped him relax, like a car engine to a baby. He had read that somewhere, babies fall asleep faster in a car because the engine’s purr is similar to the sounds in the womb.

Then he remembered. He was thinking about the sound of the appliance and how it would make a nice first sentence to a story. Once again he picked up his pencil and wrote under the first line

The night was quiet in the…
The air conditioner hummed loudly in the corner of the small room – the only sound in the night, as far as he was concerned.
Looking at the three rows of letters, he decided that the second one rang better than the first, and proceeded to cross out the unwanted line.

---The-night-was-quiet-in-the…---
The air conditioner hummed loudly in the corner of the small room – the only sound in the night, as far as he was concerned.

That accomplished, he began to organize the random thoughts in his head, but thought it better to just write as the thoughts came.

He remembered how he had thought about writing about writing, and then later on, about the act itself of writing. He pictured writers in their medium, going through the “pre-writing” rituals. He saw them tense, like coiled springs, arrows sitting in a taut bowstring, waiting to be released.

However, as he sat there drifting, the thoughts never came. The blank piece of paper he had been so excited to fill just a few seconds ago remained blank, except for the few lines he managed to squeeze out of his head. He thought: Oh, well, there goes another story.

With that, he put away his pencils, folded the barren piece of paper and slid it inside his folder...

derek

Looking through the clear glass windows of the nursery the father saw his newborn son stirring under his blankets, obviously uncomfortable with the intravenous tubes attached to his tiny foot. For the past three days he had taken that post, watching his child, wondering when he would finally be able to hold him and welcome him into the world.

A glance at the clock on the wall of the nursery told him that he should probably be getting some sleep already. He stifled a yawn and wiped his eyes as the baby began to cry, hungry. Worried about the baby’s crying, the father started looking around inside the nursery through the windows for any sign of the nurse. As sigh of relief left him as he saw movement in one corner inside the tiny room, but he could not see what it was. She came into view a moment later, his son’s baby bottle in hand, as she walked calmly to where his child was sleeping. She lifted up the baby and laid him on her lap, the back of his neck resting on her arm as she carefully put the nipple to the baby’s mouth. Instinctively the baby opened its mouth and moved its head around urgently, trying to catch the nipple. The father heaved another sigh, not one of relief but of awe, fogging the window and momentarily hiding the suckling infant inside from his view. Wiping the mist off the glass, he saw that his son was fast asleep as the nurse returned him to his bed, careful of the dextrose tubes as she tucked him in. Walking away from the window, he whispered goodnight to his son, then started towards the stairs leading to their room in the hospital.

His wife was fast asleep as he gingerly opened the door to let himself into the dimly lit room. He walked over to the bed and sat down beside his sleeping wife, this time finishing a yawn. He felt a shiver run down his spine and decided that the air-conditioner was set too high, but went on to lay down on the bed, too sleepy to care about the cold. Pulling gently on his wife’s blanket, he covered up part of his leg and drifted off to sleep amid thoughts of carrying his son in his arms.

Silent Chorus

Silent Chorus
Thabet-Abbas C. Burias

It’s 2:05 in the morning and I can’t get myself to sleep. The stars outside are blinking a silent chorus, causing me to remember that night when the stars also blinked a silent chorus for an audience of two.

The sun was still a long way from rising on Wednesday, February 5, 2003. A cool breeze and a slight drizzle kept us company as we talked for hours on the open terrace, oblivious to the rest of the world, taking time off only to notice the star ocean above us. Topic upon topic came and went, but still we refused to admit that we were getting sleepy, tingling all over almost as if sensing some big event about to happen, like the night before your birthday and you can’t wait to open your presents.

We had been sitting there side-by-side since early that night, rubbing elbows, enjoying a conversation that was there solely to relieve the tension from what we both knew was coming. For the past few days our schedule had been the same: after I worked, I could come and pick her up, and we would go wherever we felt like going. We almost never planned our gimmicks, and the one time we did plan to go to the movies, we arrived too late for the last full show, and we ended up in this small, but cozy café near her place.

By 2:30AM, the breeze had turned from cool to cold, and we had to lean on each other’s side for warmth. Although we had sat beside each other so many times, it was the first time I had ever been that close to her. I had never even held her hand, and yet I might as well have been hugging her tightly, because the surge of emotion you get from simply feeling the bare skin of someone you are attracted to against yours is so overwhelming that to hold her hand would just be icing on the cake at that moment. The tingling I was talking about had now intensified to the point where I had to hold myself back from blurting out how I felt, and I could tell that she was going through the same ordeal. I could no longer hear the words she was saying, since all my thoughts were focused on the warmth of her shoulder against mine. Nothing else mattered during that moment. It was just her and me in our warm bubble, surrounded by the cold predawn breeze and the tiny drizzle drops that touched your skin as if to remind you that there really still are beautiful things left in the world.

All my senses were screaming inside me as I looked into her gentle eyes and her soft, Katie Holmes mouth. I LOVE YOU! CAN’T YOU SEE?! I LOVE YOU! Please let me hold you. I have been wanting to hold you since you first smiled at me and knocked me out of my senses. My chest was pounding right then and there. I am thankful now for the dim light of the terrace, which hid my deep-red face. My only thought was to try to find a way to get her hand in mine. What happened next, I will never forget. Either I was too transparent, or she had read my mind.

I had been telling jokes a lot that night, trying to hide the nervousness I was feeling to the bones. I started to notice that as she laughed, she had begun to hit me playfully on the arm at the same time. I took this as my cue. I gathered up my guts and, as I finished my next joke, caught her hand with the skill of a trapeze artist as it hit my arm. Surprisingly, she made no attempt to get it back. Later, as I turned my head towards her and looked, I saw that she was smiling at me. She had seen through me. She had read my mind, and she liked what she read. I found myself caught in her gaze as we looked deep into each other’s eyes.

Surrounded by tiny drizzle drops, we kissed our first kiss under a silent chorus of glittering stars at 3:00AM.



If you are ever wondering what her side of that night’s story is, you can ask her yourself, or I can ask her for you. She is now my wife, and we now have a son and a daughter.

finally

after a year of inactivity, i've finally gotten off my lazy ass and decided to update my blog. expect some changes here in the coming weeks.