PodCastle

* Author : Nin Harris
* Narrator : Chang Yiun Yee
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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PodCastle 620: When Hope Is Lost, Touch Remains is a PodCastle original.


Content warning for violence and sexual content.


Rated R for steamy friction, physical and ethical.
When Hope Is Lost, Touch Remains
By Nin Harris
Chowrasta Market was where Maria had learned to love books — upstairs in the claustrophobic crush of second-hand book stalls, where the musty smell of old paperbacks was drowned in a panoply of aromas from the market downstairs: fish, the blood of poultry, and the musk-laden spore of murdered mammals. Her bookishness was all she was able to offer the men who occasionally fell in love with her. They drowned in her literary wit and her fragile insecurities until the time when, as with all relationships, one must drift away and make an end.
Sometimes the endings were congenial.
More often than not the congeniality masked a secret pain, a gnawing loss at the realisation that another hope had been proven false. Because what are endings but a betrayal of some hope? But then again, what are endings if they are not a culmination of choices made?
At some point you realise that all you have is this void. All you have is this emptiness, and that should be okay. All of the librarians, all of the words, all of the secret libraries that inhabit the books of the novelists you gorge yourself upon, could only exist in those worlds. They could never exist in yours.
Even when she drew men, Maria did not possess beauty of the usually celebrated kind. Hers was a quiet beauty with that keen edge of hunger, of roughness. Her skin rubbed against strange places and magnified each sensation to an unbearable friction. Her flesh grew strange upon her bones, transmitting sound and colour and light, becoming a silkscreen through which she could examine the world. When her eyes closed at night, her body abraded lightly against dewy sheets. At night, when all defences were down, her life evolved through the breathing of her epidermis and the attentiveness of her fine hairs.
On the public buses Maria occasionally took when she was sick of navigating the dangerously curved road that led from Tanjung Bungah to Georgetown by car, she sometimes had to work especially hard to keep her body sacrosanct. She did what she could to avoid touch so that the furtive rub of human bodies in the rush hour crush would not overstimulate her wayward senses. Occasionally she lapsed and allowed the movement of the bus to push her against a form, just so she could feel the purchase of skin against skin, allowing the impression of personality to permeate her soul. Gently, ever so briefly, before she moved away in faux respect.
One night, she discovered how to pull a man’s soul through his skin. It was an accidental, involuntary thing, birthed in a stray moment of hope.
Jakob was a civil engineer attached to the Penang state government, a widower. He commuted to the island every morning and every evening from his semi-detached home in Seberang Perai. Because these middle-class Malaysian households often ran like clockwork, Leonora, his bank officer sister would be waiting to give him updates about her day at work. There would also be detailed reports of how his three children and Leonora’s two daughters had fared at school.