the jumble blog

That´s what the twelve men staring at me from the pages of that calendar seemed to say.

One of those where firemen, policemen, footbal players and the like are depicted half-naked, and that my workmate brought to the office today. Young men, glorious muscles, tanned bodies and the like.

My colleagues were watching them and commenting. “Oh, they´re soooo sexy”, “August is the sexiest”, “August? Nah, December is the sexiest of them all!”.

Their eyes must have some qualities that mine lack, because I could not see anything in them. January February, March, April, May… I saw nothing.

They asked me what I considered a sexy man. I closed my eyes and tried to visualize an image.

And there is only one image of a man that I have ever considered sexy. John Wayne, wearing a white shirt and getting soaked under the falling rain.

Not gloriously young any longer, not conventionally handsome, definitely not a body-builder showing off his muscles.

I wasn´t even born then. But John Wayne, when he played that scene, became the sexiest man on Earth for me.

The Quiet Man, 1952

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I live in a farmhouse pretty much at the back of bourke.

So at the back of bourke that my address is the Pinetree Forest, Willow Grove. All around my home there are forests, and roads are not even roads, but paths. One path leads to the river, one path leads to the main (main being the understatement of the year) road.

If I follow the path I reach the main road in about 25 minutes. If I take the short cut, in 15. The short cut winds through the old cemetery.

I usually take the short cut.

Last night I ran out of cigarettes. So I decided to walk to village next door, where there is a bar-post office-tobacco dispenser-general store-male meeting place. It wasn´t that late, but night had already fallen in the forests.

My dog was missing, so I took my i-pod, my keys, a stray garbage bag (everybody hates to take out garbage bags), some coins and set off.

It was not really scary. There were no lamplights along the path, of course, but moonlight was enough to see where I was going. And it was not really lonely. Night birds sang, owls cried, hedgehogs and squirrels scurried away, frogs sang, the occasional fox or deer gave a startled jump when I came near them, dogs could be heard barking in the distance.

And Lou Reed was singing about heroin and New York. So on I went, swinging my garbage bag to and fro and singing hey honey, take the walk on the wild side, when I suddenly realized there was something wrong.

The forest was totally still, not a leaf was moving. I switched off my i-pod and listened. There was no movement, and worse, there was no noise. The old white tombstones in the cemetery shone eerily under the moonlight, with piles of moss obscuring the long forgotten names of the dead. The smouldering crosses threw ominous shadows on the uneven path, and rotting petals laid on the broken marbles.

Everything was still and yet something was moving, something that I could not see in the darkness, but whose cold breath I could hear. Something that dragged its feet on the uneven path slowly and calmly approaching me.
I could hear so clearly its ragged breath but I could not see it, there was nothing to be seen… only the noise of the dragging feet in the dreary stillness of the cemetery.

Fear was gripping my heart when the shadow whispered in a voice that came from beyond the grave

What is doing a girl like you in a place like this?.

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