Chapter Thirty-Two
Enid could not kick that kiss out of her thoughts. It was everywhere: behind her eyelids, framed in windows, in the profiles of married couples she watched in the lunchroom. The haptic electricity that proceeded, as she still saw it, from the touch of those four lips contained within it all the potential hinted at between Michelangelo’s fingers in the firmament. It was an earthquake, demolishing millennia of civilisation built up by families of men with women, and in the freedom of a rubbled metropolis, where all was levelled to smouldering dirt, a whole new existence could be endeavoured. The dominant half of humanity, by which history had been for so long defined, could now be discarded like a torn glove that wasn’t worth the time to darn. Enid’s own body, as she considered it, now, in her mirror, when no longer birthed into being, Pygmalion-like, and recorded in the codex of reality, by virtue of the male ogle, yearned itself into a verdancy it had never known, or been allowed. It was Mother Earth, striving after itself, barring itself from the exploitative mining of men. The image absent the male was like a family suffocated by an abusive patriarch who’d finally been hauled off to jail; or a modest hamlet at the foot of a mountain so monstrously bloated as to have blocked out the sun for aeons, now, thanks to an unforeseen collapse in the earth, cleared away. Aesthetically, emotionally, psychologically, and, yes, she dared think it, spiritually, the image of the two women embracing offered an ouroboric wholeness the likes of which Enid had never known or even dreamt could be. It was an image on which to meditate, to carry within her breast, to model herself upon, and with which to balm over her body.