Cracked Paint

I wriggled into the building. Not through the boarded-up doors but through a raggedy hole in the cellar. I was immediately confronted with a mouthful of darkness, along with a fair dose of dust. It felt suffocating for a moment, then I swallowed away the impression. There was nothing threatening about the building after that. Quite the contrary. 

An oppressive silence hung in the rooms, proof that I could enjoy the place entirely alone. I pulled myself up out of the cellar via a rusty pipe, onto the broken-up street-level floor. I landed on bleached parquet that was sprinkled with dust. 

The worn wood creaked a little, but nothing else seemed to protest at my visit. As the sound died away, the silence returned. It took me by surprise, like a heavy blanket of dark-blue velvet, and I could feel its soft composition on my cool skin. It gave me goose bumps and I trembled, then I looked at the room for a long time. Art Deco, with that symmetry and those rigid, unrelenting lines. I tried to concentrate on the dilapidated interior, but it was hard to ignore the oppressive atmosphere. My eyes wandered along the discoloured walls, where black mould dripped in long, gratifying stripes. I could taste its forest scent as an oily layer on the back of my tongue. 

On one side of the room red paint was peeling, and I absorbed its mountainous structure, intrigued. Would it crackle softly under the skin, like fragile fallen leaves? Or would it feel more like the eager fingernails of a frustrated admirer finally laying claim? 

I fervently hoped the latter. 

I got to my feet, took off my clothes and went over to the wall. For some vague reason or other I often forgot what drove me to places like this, until my hungry body reminded me of my desires. The cold air stirred my breasts and my nipples grew painfully hard. That discomfort was soon crowded out when I pressed my naked, warm back to the wall, and for a moment I could feel nothing but biting cold and rough scratches. I hissed with satisfaction, laid the palms of my hands on the paint and stood like that for a moment. Some loser had spouted his tasteless graffiti on a panel beside me and I grinned derisively. Typical patriarchal behaviour, laying claim to a space like that. I didn’t let it trouble me any further and felt a hot tremor run up my spine. The oppressive atmosphere was making me sweat and my body tried to defend itself by shivering again. 

The floor attracted me too, appearing infinitely decadent with its golden-yellow surface covered in dust. I cautiously crouched down, before snuggling my upper body against the wood. Its surface was still strikingly intact and smooth, and I moaned with delight. I threw my hair aside and saw gilded dust particles fly about like a swarm of startled, glistening flies. I held still for a moment to let them slowly, almost serenely, drop down onto me and the floor. Then I turned over, pressed my shoulder blades to the parquet and swam great tracks through the dust. 

Slowly and tenderly my hand slipped between my legs and I took pleasure in the tracks that I’d made. If the worn-out building had been drowsy with sleep when I arrived, it was now definitely awake and watching voyeuristically. It creaked almost with approval when I lifted my hips from the floor and buried my fingers between my darkest lips. The heaviness of the space overwhelmed me once again at that moment, taking my breath away and making my nerve endings surge greedily up and down. 

I tore my shoulder open when I scraped across something – a rusty nail? – and a thin red line appeared in the trails in the dust. The pain made the experience even more intense and for a moment I was completely out of it, caught in the atmosphere of heavy, musty air and delicious decay, and in my body, which was somewhere in between, trapped and slavishly obeying. My climax unfurled itself slowly, like an uncoiling fern. Eventually everything came together, throbbing, moist and surging, a tangle of black threads and cracked surfaces. I let out a low groan and then indulgently rested my head on the dusty floor. 

It was only when the building creaked again that I spotted a silhouette out of the corner of my eye. The man from the neighbourhood watch had a torch, which was pointing aimlessly downwards, and he was looking at me open-mouthed. He couldn’t have been much older than I am, and with a look of such surprise he appeared far younger. It was a long time before he recovered from his astonishment. 

‘Wow,’ he said, and his disbelieving look had a spark of awe in it. 

I could only agree with him. 

This story is written by Heleen Sieborgs for Het Rode Oor 2018. Het Rode Oor (The Red Ear) is the annual erotic writing contest in the Low Countries, curated by the Flemish-Dutch House deBuren in collaboration with Company New Heroes, Hard//hoofd, ILFU and the Writer’s Guide (to the Galaxy). This story is translated by Liz Waters.