Biting Thumbnails. 2.

An occasional travelblog experience.  Part 2.

[Please refer to Pt 1 if you can be bothered]

We arrived at a station. There was no name attached to it as far as I could see. Perhaps the station master thought the war was still on and had removed the name? To confuse the enemy?
On the platform a girl was stroking her hair as though it was her fidanzato’s knee. The man in the opposite seat stretched his legs so far that it looked as though he was engaged in some sort of explorative operation. I could see the woman being probed by his feet was revving up for a fight and I hoped it would happen before we got to Parma.
I looked around the carriage. Nikolai the ponytail, (remember him?) had stopped picking his nose.
Ah! I thought. At least that was something concrete-given the heat and all.
And then we arrived at Castelfranco.
The man engaged in the explorative op looked as though he had given up on life. I wanted to say something encouraging to him but didn’t know how to put it. And then he put his shades on and boy did he look cool…
We were arriving at Modena. The war was clearly over here as the station sign was now up and running. And to make matters a bit easier there was another long sentence going on in the seat across the aisle. So I wondered if we should all be worrying about oxygen starvation.

Meanwhile the leg surgeon removed his probing feet and the woman he was interfering with relaxed. The fight seemed to have gone out of her. Which was, from my point of view at least, a pity. The leg surgeon looked dissatisfied and his sad, handsome Italian mouth acquired a hint of a tantrum. Handsome or not I was glad I wasn’t his wife. Imagine that mouth in the morning when the coffee was not quite right. No way! And then I saw he had two wedding rings on his ring finger. Why? Were there two of them, wives, I mean?
I decided I was obsessing a little and decided to look away.
But then, he looked straight at me and I thought, what the hell! He looked a different kind of bloke altogether. And when he yawned it was frightening. Seventeen fillings? All in one mouth? His dentist must have gone scuba diving in the Caribbean on the proceeds….

TBC…[maybe]

© Roma Tearne

 

 

Biting Thumbnails

An occasional travelblog experience.

They were Russian. And they were clearly not brothers. But in some peculiar way they looked like a couple of dead souls. So you could imagine how delighted I was when one of them addressed the other by the name Nikolai.
It was a Penguin Classic moment for me.
The man called Nikolai had a mouth that could only be called tight. That is, the upper lip did not exist, making him look ready for a fight. The other one (I never did find out his name) had dead fish eyes.
Imagine what their ancestors would have been like in the war that we were now close forgetting?
They were wearing the most awful clothes…sleeveless tee shirts.
I shuddered. As for their trainers, I did wonder how anyone could design something as nasty to encase feet in? I mean, someone actually designed them? And the colour! Grey seems to be a Russian colour.
I forgot to mention the fact that Nikolai had a ponytail.

And I forgot to mention that he was busy picking his nose with the intensity of a five-year-old street kid who had dreams of becoming a dictator. His mouth did not budge all the time he was engaged in this activity and I must admit it put me off the panini I had brought at Santa Lucia railway station. Yes, yes, we were all on a high-speed train called freccia rossa. There was no getting off, I can tell you. Not the way we were speeding onwards.
I was sure that the other guy, the one with no ponytail or name, had put kohl around his eyes.

The Malaysian opposite me was having a coughing fit and I wondered if he was about to die. So I looked around for the emergency lever just in case.
While the Italian out of my sight line had begun a sentence at Mestre that was still ongoing as we approached Bologna (more of this at a later date). Only the danger of asphyxiation offered itself up as salvation. I marvelled both at his ability to speak without breathing and also at the listener on the other end of the phone. Then again, perhaps there wasn’t a listener, and perhaps my Italian maestro simply liked holding something to his ear in order to hear himself speak? (I love hearing a language I can’t speak, don’t you?)
Anyway I forced my panini into the tiny bin near my seat as the carrozza filled up with the scent of stale aftershave and we sped through the spectacular Italian countryside….

TBC…

©romatearne

 

Small Portraits

Small Portraits is a new blog about writing and the visual arts. It is funny and sharp and sometimes rude. At least that’s what it’s meant to be. The posts, therefore, hope to entertain, even irritate, but more importantly they will be about writing and art, without recourse to the middle men: the agent and the publisher. It is also about the freedom that comes from not giving a damn about fame or wealth or ‘current’ trends in more or less anything. It isn’t even a ‘recommended’ read. And it has been set up with great difficulty. To do so it has been necessary to grapple with widgets and URLs, all things not commonly encountered in the daily life of the writer and the artist. But if the middle men are to be cut out, if there isn’t money available to set up a smart site this is what is needed. The overall title of the blog is Small Portraits but it could equally be called Writing Into The Ether. If you discover it, that’s great. If not I imagine it’s no loss. If it makes just one person laugh it will have achieved its goal.

The Wedding Guests. ©Roma Tearne. 2018.