Other people’s children.
Place Capitole, Toulouse, France
Over and over, the fountain at Toulouse Capitole leaps to surprise and delight the children who run through it. Parents don’t care if their kids get wet. Excited screams are louder than you could imagine.
A very little girl, for whom every teetering step is something new, is wearing a dress almost down to her shoes and a diaper underneath. She staggers over to the water then back to her beckoning father to rest hugged to his massive thighs that are bigger than she is.
Prepubescent boys give manly punches and thrust their pelvises forward at the rising streams to show, something.
A mother entices her timid son to the water by throwing handfuls at him, then he does the same at her and then at her companion, running away screaming with joy at the water and the grownups.
A muscled, aging man wears a tight black T-shirt and holds a big black camera to take pictures of the playing children and of the slightly slutty teenage girls who are smoking cigarettes nearby.
A fair haired young man who was only recently a boy grips to his cheek the head of baby who is so small that I marvel it was even born yet, while his girl friend pushes an empty stroller.
I flirt with this joy as though it were mine and then walk away in the warm afternoon, in the sunlight, alone and childless.
Sept. 2014
Sept. 2014
Sex texts
A late summer day at Place Président Thomas Wilson
Toulouse, France
He sits on a fence and she stands in front of him, pressing her body very close to his.
He nuzzles her ample breasts that are exposed to the sunlight, turning his head and rubbing his cheek against her warm chest.
He uses his left arm to encircle her legs and pull her closer. She uses her left arm to hold his head tight.
During the embrace, each of them looks sideways, in opposite directions, gazes at an outstretched cell phone and texts messages to – each other?
I kid you not.
Sept. 2014
Sept. 2014