Julian took his camera and walked out into the quiet street, his boots’s soft thump hardly disturbing the peace. A few hundred meters up the hill, he entered the ancient woods; there, silence reigned, with a rare flutter of wings, and the buzz of insects.

  His women were in his mind. First, there was his wife Sarah, calm, athletic, her cool gaze over their life together, and his occasional antics – she, the mistress of his sexual fantasies, strong legs and firm breasts, dominating their relationship in a way he could not, and did not want to resist. Then there was his sister Jane. Jane who admired her brother, not without a hint of thinly veiled jealousy. Jane was sometimes in his dream, a fragile, yet reliable, alter ego, ever present, ever ready when he needed her. The third woman was Melissa, his long lost childhood friend, the girl he had all but forgotten, although perhaps not in the core of his soul. 

This mixture of human beings was whirling in his thoughts, erratically, looking for a direction. The temperature was rising as he walked along the shaded path; he judged around twenty eight degrees by now. It would be very hot in the afternoon. 

 Sarah had gone to the swimming pool with Jane. He imagined the two of them, the redhead and the darker girl, in the clear water, probably observed by a few eager local boys. 

 Away from the direct sunshine, under the shade of the tall trees, the path was dark. He was alone. He felt a sudden urge to be close to Sarah, to her fresh skin, to her long legs and smiling lips. 

 He was looking for some light angles for shady and well lit pictures. He changed the light settings and took some shots in the shade, knowing that he had also many editing options. Someone had told him once that there was no skill in digital photography, that it was all software! He could only disagree. Often he had spent hours editing a few pictures, only to abandon the edit and go back to the original version. Photography and writing were for him two facets of the same art: the snapshots, then the long period of trial and error, shaping, improving (sometimes), more often going back to what had already been done. Some writers think the most difficult stage was the first draft. Julian disagreed; for him, the first draft came too easily. What followed was far more painful: the doubts about style and content, the fear of cutting, not enough or too much. Above all, the uncertainty of really communicating his thoughts to the reader. Who wrote that “easy reading was painful writing?”

  Those relationships, that mosaic of faces and locations, Sarah, Jane, and Melissa, were in his mind like characters in his novels. They shared with his characters the capacity to make him change his mind, to make him see life and themselves differently. This brought him back to the call. Was it a hoax? But from whom? 

  He came out of the woods on the edge of a wide field of wheat that had already been harvested. Balls of straw were meticulously bound and stacked across the field. He thought about erasing characters from a story. Maybe himself had been recreated in a book someone was writing, another incarnation of himself, not quite the one he knew, but close enough, close enough to exchange a phone conversation.    

 He laughed, walking along the edge of that field, now in full sun. He took several panoramic shots of the distant hills: the Westerwald was bright and shimmering in the heat. His steps took him to another path, a road rather, not suited for cars, but for farm engines and tractors, meandering across several other fields. 

 At a small cross, he took to the left and got back back to the edge of the woods. Small wooden huts perched on stilts at the top of light ladders: possibly seats for bird watchers or even hunters in the autumn. A farmer was working in his field, late harvester, the sound of the tractor’s engine bringing back memories of Julian’s childhood. Images from his school years briefly flashed in his mind.

Walking back into the shade of the woods, he stopped, looking back, trying to rationalise his thoughts, the wild vortex in his mind. He would talk to Sarah about it; she was good at looking at confused situations and finding her way through them. She would show him what happened. The path was taking him back to the village. The sun was now much hotter; it was near midday. Back on the small terrace, he decided to write down his thoughts. 

One simple explanation was that he had entered a phase of introspection. He got preoccupied with memories of his youth, had probably mixed up several parts of it, the school, his friendship with Melissa, his life away from the town of his childhood. The call was a prank. Sarah would laugh… But something did not fit that reasonable story, something that left him a little afraid.

Photo ©2011 Honoré Dupuis

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