Sunka

Here is a girl asking for change. It's the eight hundred and ninth
time that she's asked today.
A squat toad catching flies. She's not thinking these words. At all.
But there is a thought in there, allowing a slit for the slogan to pass
through; and she's dealing with this thought. Hauling an image into
view with something not too far away from physical strain.

There's a bluish light in a small frame and inside this frame are two
bodies - two torsoes - male and female. The torsoes are entwined. She
sees a hand on a shoulder, another on a stomach, and they are moving in
and out of shadows that are being thrown into the framed space,
probably from a television. She imagines a small black and white one
with rounded corners and high contrast.

It is a gentle movement backwards and forwards. A fluid thing. Like
rippling.

The couple skirt forward just for a moment. They are naked. Both seem
to have short hair. Facial features are impossible to make out, there
are only impressions, areas of light and shade. She tries to stretch
her vision to help her to define this couple; can feel both her senses
and memory tauten but the details will not appear. The smudge is all
that is available to her.

But it is not the faces that have made her stop here.

Her memory's eye moves out now. Tracks back gently. This framed space
is a window in an apartment block, one of many amidst a landscape of
baroque spires and red tiled roofs lit by a fat moon.

She is standing up high. Along the fortifications of Vysehrad in
Prague, Czechoslovakia. Fourteen years old. A school trip organised by
her history teacher and paid for by her Gran. Full of tightly
controlled excursions and precisely conveyed information. Mr Cook is a
comrade. They have cheese and sausage for breakfast. They have to take
string off the sausage before they eat it.

And she has got out of the hostel. Has climbed through a window and is
following this path. And in the midst of this view - of the big wooded
hill and the cathedral perching above waves of roofs, slashed open by
the river - is this window. And she is entranced.

She moves along the fortifications, left and right, trying to get more
involved in this, her movements not frantic but hurried. Trying to fill
that frame. To see more. To reach out and pull the couple towards
her.

She finds a point that she is happy with and now she focuses in again -
two pairs of hands sliding across skin; responding. In the middle of
the landscape it has come down to this. This touch. This contact. She
lifts her hand from the cold stone wall and strokes her face, just
below the right cheek, with her index finger.

There is such a tenderness there. Across this space.

And then she leans forward, pushing down on the wall so that her legs
rise up off of the ground and she is leaning out from across the wall,
trees some distance below her. And she starts to call out to the
couple, using the only Czech word that she can bring to mind. But she
calls out in a whisper. It is the intensity of the intention that is
important. An act of will. A word worming it's way through space,
skipping across atoms and fusing with the flesh in the frame. Sunka she
says. Feeling her lips move out, and then the bottom lip dropping
gently. Sunka. Sunka. Sunka. Sunka. Sunka.

Ham. Ham. Ham. Ham. Ham.

An old woman walks past with a small dog, probably a ritual of many
years, and stops for a moment, the dog yapping ridiculously, the woman
staring with a delicate curl on her lips before moving on again.

She begins to sway slightly, her eyes welded to these two people, that
are becoming younger now with each recollection. And then she sees, or
does she feel?, a glance and the frame moves into darkness, the bodies
and hands vanishing.

She raises her voice. It is thrilling.

Can you spare any change please?