The Human Filing Cabinet

It was a suffocating Friday morning. Elisa Grant had kicked the doona off the bed and was having a vivid dream. The light cotton sheet that covered her was drenched and underneath she was masturbating wildly. Mouth slightly open, she craned her neck back as far as it could go and just as she reached what she thought may be her final ragged breaths, she released a fitful orgasm. After a long, slow exhalation, she made her way to the kitchen for a glass of water.



Elisa wasn’t quite sure what had gotten into her this past week. Every morning had been the same. She would have the most salacious and erotic dreams, like nothing like she had ever experienced, and would wake only moments before reaching a shuddering climax.



By powers of deduction, she was pretty sure that she had been "coming”, and considering she was approaching her eighty-ninth birthday this month, she wasn’t entirely sure how to react.The first time it happened was a week and a half ago and it left poor Elisa utterly astounded. She had awoken in a state of panic, madly clutching at thin air, speaking in tongues and dampening her undergarments to the point of saturation. She spent the rest of the morning dumbly staring into space before deciding that she did not care for the experience one bit.



The second morning was much the same - a siren-like wail, spasmodic contractions and incessant babbling like a woman possessed. Again, she was flummoxed. Utterly, utterly flummoxed. At lunchtime - whilst eating a cheese sandwich - she made a brief mental note to go and see that nice Dr Barton down on Park street at her earliest convenience. Instead, she chose to stay indoors and went to bed that night anxiously waiting for the morning to arrive...



She may have been in an opulent apartment in Rio De Janeiro or Paris this time. She lay on top of an exquisite looking dining table wearing a long, black evening gown with high heels and a silver necklace. In the room with her were three or four young men, all wearing finely cut suits and smoking cigars. They circled the table like Lions. With her head resting in her hand, she locked eyes with the first of the dark strangers and he silently moved towards her…



Elisa woke with a start - wet and a mess.



With each successive night, the dreams had become more detailed and her climaxes had become more pleasurable and intense. She often found herself in moments of reverie thinking about the fine gentlemen who had come and gone from her life. She inadvertently found herself taking a new interest in her own body, too. She cut up some of her old clothes and sewed herself some lingerie not unlike what she had seen in the movies. All that frilly corsetry and those silk taffetas made her swoon. She would glide around the lounge room, occasionally pausing to make some coy gesture into the body length mirror she had moved from the closet. She experimented with her breasts and nipples, pinching and teasing herself. She used a small hand held mirror to visually explore her vagina and anus for the first time too. How uncouth, she thought with a small rush.



She wondered what exactly had triggered this sexual landslide. She partly blamed it on the murderous heatwave the city was suffering through - but the rest she wasn’t so sure. She had certainly never put her hands into the “haberdashery department” before and the only other person who had been anywhere near there was... Franco.



Franco was Elisa’s dearly departed husband of almost half a century. He had been consorting with things eternal for over twenty years now and he now seemed like a distant memory to Elisa. Franco was polite, quiet and he never made a fuss which closely resembled his manner in the bedroom. Like clockwork, they copulated on the first Tuesday of every month. Franco would always turn out the lights, he was always in the missionary position and they would make love nowhere but on top of the bed. During, he would never give less than twenty-five small thrusts and certainly no more than fifty, and afterwards he would give Elisa a small kiss on the cheek before rolling over and going to sleep. She loved him very much. Not long after he died, Elisa had run out of the small amount of money her and Franco had saved together and was forced to move into a housing commission tower in the south of the city, which is where she still lived today.



The newspapers had described the building as a "human filing cabinet". Monolithic and impossibly bleak, it stood in the worst part of the worst suburb in the city. Elisa was trapped on the twenty third floor with not even a balcony to offer respite. Last month she sat through the sounds of a man in the apartment above beating his wife for ten whole minutes before help arrived. The woman later died in the ambulance on the way to hospital. A few weeks earlier she heard the gunshots of a double murder somewhere down on the fifteenth, and late last year someone had tried to smash their way through her door. Elisa frantically called the Police and they found her an hour later hiding under the bed. These were some of the more significant incidents, but the truth was that these sorts of things were happening every day. The hallways were littered with graffiti, needles and broken glass. The stairwells reeked of urine, and last time she was in the elevator, the floor was covered in vomit and the buttons were smeared in human faeces. Understandably, Elisa only left her room if it was absolutely necessary. Her groceries were delivered to her door every Thursday, her nurse came for a routine check up on the first Tuesday of every month, and apart from that she was completely alone.



It had been another long day and Elisa was getting ready for bed. Completely naked, she stood in front of the bedroom window and used the reflection to remove her lipstick. Beyond the reflection stood a magnificent view of the city skyline. It was a sultry summer night outside and the buildings sparkled in the distance. She peeled back the covers of the immaculately made bed and climbed inside. Her left foot rubbed obsessively against the other until the beating of her heart matched the rhythm of the ticking clock, and she slowly fell to sleep.