PART 9: The Man Who Had Everything and The Woman With No Art

The Woman With No Art reached out a hand and The Man Who Had Everything flinched back. She stared at him, her face half light half shadow; filled with a childlike bewilderment.
"Are you afraid of me, Michael?"

"Yes."

She rose to her knees on the bed "But why? Why? I mean you no harm, there is nothing to dread."

"How did you get in here?" The Man Who Had Everything pulled himself further up the bed, gaining a few more inches of distance from the woman.

"Through the door...It wasn't locked!"

"It was closed. You did not knock!"

"Oh!" she giggled, an oddly young sound, "I'm sorry about that!"

"If a door is closed you knock! You don't walk in uninvited and unannounced."

The woman Mia reached out a conciliatory hand and laid it on his knee through the bed-spread.

"I'm sorry Michael, you are quite right. I am a little rusty on the niceties of protocol...Do you forgive me? Say you do..."

Her lips curved in a seductive flirtatious smile that shrivelled his man-flesh and filled him with terror. "Let's not quarrel...Let's be friends instead, let's kiss and make up!"

And she moved towards him with a swift catlike grace, and stopped, her lips a few inches from his suddenly averted face.

The Man Who Had Everything cried: "Just go, get out...Don't touch me! I don't want you, I don't want you here."

The Woman With No Art frowned. "I don't understand. You don't want me?"
Her eyes darkened somehow, and round shape of her face sharpened into a hardened triangular mask.

"You don't WANT me?" Her voice was softer, sibilant; somehow doubled, like a chorus and an echo all at the same time.

The Man Who Had Everything felt a slow trickle of warm wetness running down between his legs.

"YOU DON'T WANT ME?" The long stray curls tumbled on her shoulders stirred and rose as if caught in cross-currents of playful air.

"You disgusting little man, pissing on the bed, you dare lie there and tell me you don't want me? Would you rather be DEAD?"

Manuela Cardiga