White, limitless - the paper - spread out before him, stretching and connected to the spool beneath the desk, its edge touching the desk's edge. Beside the bed: stacks of memory sheets wrapped with a rope in irregular sizes, almost reaching the ceiling, drenched with the winter water leaking from the wall, ink spots trailed onto the wall.

What he is thinking of doing after the initial hours of January - today - is moving the memories and the bed to the other wall.

He looked at the whiteness of the paper in his hands, delved into the day, the day moved before him.. letters and images, a mixture of colors he had never seen before, expanding and contracting, flashing and fading. He tried to capture them on paper, they fled in anxious smoky clouds, tense, he peered deeper beneath today's clouds. She appeared... brown as his duskiness, her lips blood-red, her eyes a sea... years ago his mother refused to let him marry her; she feared if he married her, it would anger her heart and her lord against him for eternity.

"And is eternity pleased with this?"

"There are many girls."

"I want Mariam."

Mariam refused to marry him without her mother's consent and disappeared. He hadn't seen her since, except behind the smoke, when she reappears on days like this. He searched through the piles of memories and found that the first sheet repeated the same form... she comes to him seductively, her hair spread out, with every detail of her body, swaying on the page. He tried to trap her between the lines, she lay down on the bed-page, letters overlapping on her body as if printed on her skin, a book with intermingled letters. He outlined the body's landmarks, followed the letters on the skin looking for a word, circled the pen around the page's borders, wiped it lengthwise and widthwise, her temperature rose encompassing the nib of the pen, extended from the pen to his arm and enveloped his whole body, the heat between them increased, reaching a glow he couldn't control, the pen became part of his flesh, embedded in it, writing with blood-ink connected to his whole body, the page with muscle circles sucking and violently swirling, pulling the pen inward, drawing him to the secret of the scattered letters, drawing things never drawn before. The circles narrowed and expanded, transporting him to a state of total union with the scattered letters, gaps on the page. He tried to decode the symbols, to form a single word. He focused all his senses. The letters began to form, swelling and stretching, writhing and gasping, screaming in his ear:

"Ahmaaaad... Ahmed." The call was a hammer striking on the glass inkwell of the pen, shaking the distance between the ink and the nib, sharpening his hearing, the sound: undrawn letters, completely clear, surrounding him, enveloping him.

"You, boy." The tones were old, fleeing across the shining ink on the wall of the adjacent mother's room.. What does she want now? He tightened his grip on the pen, the page pulled the pen strongly, the call struck his neck and the neck of the pen, his head - divided between the call and the pull of the nib - boiled, he pushed with the nib tempted to withdraw; to respond to the call, he continued to write and draw and sketch on the page.

"Boy." The call transformed into octopus arms wanting to pull him from above the desk chair, the page screamed and screamed, holding onto the pen, clinging with all its circles and clamps asking for the end of the drawing and the discovery of the secret of the scattered letters, the screaming and the calling escalated, ink droplets - in the pen's bottle - boiled jostling towards the nib's hole; they wanted to burst out, to be ejected, to escape from the belly of the pen.

Pull... Call

Call... Pull

Which one to let go?

The pen, laden with all his nerves, was drawn in and pulled out, the call and the screams pierced his eardrums, cracking them, volcanoes in the cells of his dispersed head exploded, he struggled pulling himself away from both, the pulling and the calling intensified, cell explosions continued.

He stood up, his clenched hand squeezing the pen, he pushed the chair aside, dragged the pen making a long fluid line on the paper, a droplet fell onto the floor, he raised his squinting and dimmed gaze towards the remaining letters from the call, her image was surrounded by a corroded golden frame, topped on the upper right with a thin black silk cloth.