![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/robinson-banner.jpg\")
<\/p>\nBy Benjamin Robinson.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Young men of talent and ambition follow many different paths in life. They imagine themselves inside of all sorts of things conducive to their perceived potential. The young man this story is about imagines himself inside a museum caf\u00e9 cushion. This is not somewhere you imagine yourself overnight, or wake up one morning thinking it might offer you an interesting perspective on life. It was more like a corner his formative years had backed him into, a series of reductions and diminutions that defined his life\u2019s purpose as accommodating the comfort of others.<\/p>\n
Outside the cushion he\u2019s isolated and frustrated, but inside it he imagines the perfumed, animal odour he emits as being not only attractive but sexually arousing to anyone in the cushion\u2019s vicinity. When he pictures himself inside the cushion, a soft white square embroidered with the museum\u2019s logo, nestled in the caf\u00e9\u2019s somber gunmetal grey decor, he imagines women\u2019s crotches dampening and men\u2019s penises beginning to stiffen. Having your potential channeled into accommodating the comfort of others is a perversion against which this particular young man is compelled to rebel in kind.<\/p>\n
The interior of the cushion is as white as its exterior, a space only someone with neither talent nor ambition would consider inhabiting. It was as if someone had taken the modernist white cube and put it in the hot wash to soften its cough. The young man in the cushion knows that men of steel, talented men of blood and soil, who refuse to serve, would not condone a transformation that turned the modernist project into a lily-livered faites comme chez vous<\/em>, an impuissant mi casa es su casa<\/em>.<\/p>\n A female artist of international repute, who has one of her buttocks resting on the side of the cushion, has a pubis so moist it could be monsoon season. As she adjusts the cushion to make herself more comfortable, the heady aroma releasing in abundance, the man at the table next to her feels his penis begin to fill with blood.<\/p>\n The young man explains his position inside the cushion to himself as a function of the fluidity of fallen lives, a fluidity both malevolent and benign, where the systems of inclusion have broken down, and the functions of social relations, technical formalities, procedures and regulations, are no longer tenable. Those who reject this interpretation probably think it\u2019s more likely that he imagines himself in the cushion because, from a mixture of anger and shame and resentment, he just wants somewhere to curl up and die. Accommodating the comfort of others in a cushion in a museum caf\u00e9 is no doubt the least of his worries.<\/p>\n After an exchange of glances confirming their shared arousal, the couple gaze plaintively out a large window upon a clear, unclouded sky. The man is immersing himself in the pleasures of the flesh. He sees pouting lips and buttocks so round and firm he wants to bite into them, to discover what\u2019s hidden beneath their spherical sensuality.<\/p>\n The female artist imagines muscular limbs draped over an ornately-carved gilt frame, athletic bodies drenched in sweat, ready to do or die. Together their thoughts, hidden from one another, conjure an ambience unencumbered by the formalities of craft and technical ability, made possible by the aromatic largess of the cushion\u2019s hidden inhabitant.<\/p>\n The staccato clamour of stags rutting leaches from the caf\u00e9\u2019s gunmetal decor. Hunting horns sound an acerbic throb and thrust. Coffees are variable but the chocolate \u00e9clair\u2019s interracial phallic concerto of dark chocolate, golden pastry and butter cream filling is the weapon of choice and the caf\u00e9\u2019s signature indulgence.<\/p>\n The walls of the caf\u00e9 are dotted with reproductions of the artworks the museum prides itself on owning. Static and mute as corpses, sumptuous in their bondage, these possessions, a litany of dignitaries and luminaries, a glut of fruit and meat and naked flesh, are there to guide the museum\u2019s hordes of visitors across thresholds of empathy and understanding.<\/p>\n If you inhale deeply, as the female artist does with gaze fixed upon the clear, unclouded sky, a faint smell of rotting flesh can be detected, wafting through the fragrances of dark chocolate, vanilla and buttercream, which gives the atmosphere a lick of malignance that stretches back through the dignitaries and luminaries, the glut of fruit and meat and naked flesh, to a place <\/strong>where suppressed potential is a perversion that compels rebellion.<\/p>\n With the air of a conquistador picking his way through pools of blood, stepping confidently over the broken bodies of defeated adversaries, looking self-assuredly into their soft, quelled eyes, the caf\u00e9 is impervious to the ghosts of the conquered and subjugated who loiter within its walls, under its floorboards, and in the amorphous neonatal interiors of its soft furnishings.<\/p>\n The female artist knows the man sitting next to her wants to strip her naked, to tie her to a bedpost and do unspeakable things to her, so she feels his imperial heft, an engendered indemnity that comes bearing a riding crop, a bridle and a set of reins. The man foresees his anger unleashed in waves of searing retribution in which lines are crossed and safe words disregarded. He shudders as he intuits the hot breath of a feigned disgust, of denunciations charged with animal aggression that only the deployment of a riding crop, a bridle, and a set of reins can satisfy. Together they evoke the abasements and degradations of their feral co-dependence.<\/p>\n As he has taken to doing at this stage of the process, when his ability to emit a sexually arousing aroma has worked its magic, the young man in the cushion pushes his tongue through a tear in the cushion\u2019s fabric. First, the intrepid tip, worming a space for the volume to follow. He imagines it as a shoot in springtime, glistening with mucosal lubricity, pushing gallantly up through the soil into the frosty air. The warmth of the sun, midwife of subservience and rebellion, of things wholesome and things unwholesome, transforms it into a curled up piece of paper.<\/p>\n Looking down, the female artist sees the piece of paper and picks it up. She unrolls it, then stands up and reads aloud what is written on it:<\/p>\n Young men of talent and ambition follow many different paths in life. They imagine themselves inside of all sorts of things conducive to their perceived potential.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n While only some of the caf\u00e9\u2019s clientele recognise the female artist and know of her international reputation, all of them know or suspect that the intervention has been sanctioned by the museum.<\/p>\n They like the sounds of the sentences, their acuity and lightness of touch. They find the notion of young men of talent and ambition fulfilling their potential admirable. The sensual undertone, what young men of talent and ambition tend to imagine themselves inside, adds a frisson of sexual tension to their coffees and chocolate \u00e9clairs.<\/p>\n As the forks go in, piercing, slicing, and impaling the phallic concerto, young men are imagined cutting a swathe, with haircuts and handshakes and sharp suits, through the social niceties, pugnacious saplings asserting their superiority in a forest of pansies and daisies. Double espressos are thrown down like gauntlets. There is the sound of a suntanned chassis, the brittle bronze skin, of a cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e being cracked open and the custard beneath the skirting greedily consumed.<\/p>\n The author of the lines must be very famous, the female artist having collaborated in the past with writers of international repute. The caf\u00e9\u2019s clientele gorge themselves on speculations as to the writer\u2019s identity. It might be Sally Rooney, thinks one woman, wiping chocolate from her chocolate \u00e9clair from the corners of her mouth.<\/p>\n The female artist smiles at the man sitting beside her and hands him the piece of paper. With a nod of her head the man gets to his feet. Another nod sees him reading aloud what is written on the paper:<\/p>\n Young men of talent and ambition follow many different paths in life. They imagine themselves inside of all sorts of things conducive to their perceived potential.<\/em><\/p>\n The repetition is compelling. The delivery, the man rising manfully to the occasion, is an echo more forceful than the source and sets up the intervention\u2019s coup de gr\u00e2ce.<\/p>\n The female artist takes back the piece of paper from the man, who does not need to be told to suigh s\u00edos<\/em>. This is a man who knows his role inside-out, a role he\u2019s been playing for the female artist since she was a twinkle in the art industry\u2019s eye. His creative potential was a rung on a ladder that led not to interiors that compel rebellion but to the externalized embodiment of a conspicuous, sacrificial ornamentation, which is to say, instead of imagining himself inside a cushion, he had become one: a pin cushion.<\/p>\n Holding up the piece of paper, in an inadvertent tableau-vivant of Neville Chamberlain at Heston Aerodrome, the female artist smiles with a confidence and pride that belie a burgeoning lack of conviction that sees her eyebrows knit, her expression become quixotic, her eyes haunted by betrayal.<\/p>\n The caf\u00e9 goes silent as she begins tearing the piece of paper in half.<\/p>\n She\u2019s tearing up the patriarchy, a young woman whispers, excitedly.<\/p>\n Her facial expression, pursed lips, tongue in cheek, conveys a degree of pleasure that the weight of the moment requires her to suppress. The sound of the paper being torn resonates around the caf\u00e9, in the minds of its clientele as, variously, a breaking wave, a vexed post-coital sigh, a vocalised snarl, a fly being zipped up, a person being choked. But in the main it resonates as the sound of a piece of paper being torn in two.<\/p>\n She places the two halves on top of each other and tears the paper again. She repeats the process until the stack is too thick to be torn, resentment and anger gradually replacing enjoyment and gratification as the jumbled sentences grow stronger than her desire to repeat the process, to carry on stacking and tearing, stacking and tearing, forever.<\/p>\n The female artist drops the stack of fragments into the man\u2019s coffee cup. The mixed-up words, talent, ambition, paths in life, perceived perception, all sorts of things, like a deck of playing cards, soak up the dregs.<\/p>\n The abandoned residue penetrates deep into the fabric of the paper, into the stack of mutilated sentences, into the tangled words and half-words, the syllables, the single letters and half-letters, as these things take into themselves the liquid\u2019s cathartic fluidity.<\/p>\n On one of the walls of the caf\u00e9 there is a screen. On the screen a young man and the female artist are engaged in a dispute. The female artist is beating the young man with her fists, administering a hard truth, that in him talent and ambition are irreconcilably unequal. There is a sense that the grounds of a relationship are being thrashed out, a power structure put in place, the young man\u2019s ambition stacked and torn, stacked and torn, until it is commensurate with the talent he lacks. For all the notice the young man is taking of her well-aimed broadsides, she might as well be pummelling a cushion.<\/p>\n Frustrated that her efforts elicit only juvenile bemusement and, tossed with the ease of a seasoned tosser, a breezy excusez-moi?<\/em> the female artist picks up a knife and slashes the young man across the cheek.<\/p>\n The skin on the young man\u2019s face splits open, releasing what looks like molasses, bitumen, crude oil, and jets of foaming cola, which drench the female artist\u2019s white dress, turning it gunmetal grey. Against the grey of the room she is in, similar to the caf\u00e9\u2019s decor, her clothing disappears, so she appears as a ghostly, disembodied head and arms.<\/p>\n The female artist drops the knife and begins acting out exaggerated states of pleasure bordering on religious fervour. With her eyes staring upwards and her mouth hanging open, the detached arms move slowly around the isolated head in interlacing, overlapping loops. These are interspersed with increasingly fraught gestures, which take the form of a series of concentric circles that transcribe an invisible buttock or breast.<\/p>\n It\u2019s as if she is trying to bring herself to orgasm while at the same time critiquing the Judaeo-Christian tradition of feminine oppression and subjugation. The young man joins her, performing various dance moves from the 1970s\u2014The Bump, The Hustle, The Funky Chicken. He finishes with The Disco Finger, thrusting his hips from side to side while moving his outstretched index finger, from his hips to the heavens, back and forth across his body.<\/p>\n The protean cornucopia of meaning contained in these scenes is not lost on the savvy museum caf\u00e9 clientele, some of whom had got wind of the fact that the female artist would be carrying out an intervention. Word had gone out to the female artist\u2019s devotees, who puncture the solemnity of the occasion with a spontaneous round of applause beneath which can be heard calls to \u201cpeg the patriarchy\u201d and \u201csuck my lady balls.\u201d<\/p>\n Following the dance sequence, the camera glides over lush farmland towards a church steeple beneath which the inhabitants of a village are lounging in soporific self-possession. It\u2019s an autumn evening and the village has collectively withdrawn itself from the cares of the day. The screen splits in two and beside the lounging villages we see the female artist repeatedly vomiting into a sink. The young man from the previous scene, his cheek sporting a large padded bandage, arrives with a bouquet of wild flowers. When he offers the female artist the flowers she smiles knowingly and points to an uneaten chocolate \u00e9clair in the sink, similar to the interracial phallic concerto of dark chocolate, golden pastry and butter cream filling that the man in the caf\u00e9, who no longer has an erection, has just consumed. While the female artist arranges the flowers in a vase the young man puts his head in the sink and starts eating.<\/p>\n For the young man in the cushion, this fact is but another confirmation that his ability to emit a sexually arousing aroma has depths beyond anyone\u2019s comprehension. Like a chocolate \u00e9clair that can be vomited up uneaten so it can be eaten again, to understand this young man\u2019s predicament is to enter a circle where consumption is always doomed to return as an oppressive surplus, a surplus requiring further consumption.<\/p>\n Back in the caf\u00e9, arousal abated, the man and the female artist are now deep in conversation. The young man in the cushion knows how these things work, and that it\u2019s only a matter of time before desire once again supersedes contentment and gratification. Their flights of carnal fancy are harboured in the shallows of reminiscence, the artists they love and the places they\u2019ve seen them: Van Eyck in the National Gallery, Rembrandt in the Louvre, Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to name a few. They have travelled widely together and experienced the very best of what the cities of Europe and North America have to offer.<\/p>\n Though the young man in the cushion likes to listen, he does not understand how they talk as if they are intimately connected to the artworks they\u2019re discussing, how they feel part of a world where repression and ornamentation are indistinguishable. Do people not go to the museum\u2019s caf\u00e9 for refuge, he thinks to himself, to re-establish a distinction between pleasure and pain, suffering and domination? And is it not precisely because the museum\u2019s artworks are in such close proximity, physically present but out of sight, that this is possible? Like the feeling of sitting on a comfortable cushion, the distinction between your body and the soft furnishings disappears until you adjust yourself and become aware once again that you are sitting on something. Up until then you and the something could be part of the same thing, part of something outside of your control that spirals, like the drill bit of a creative co-dependency, into the earth\u2019s dwindling fertility.<\/p>\n The smoothness of the female artist\u2019s flesh beneath the folds of her clothing, that labyrinthine web of impulses and caprices, tantalises and horrifies the young man in the cushion in equal measure. The immutable grain of the man\u2019s erection, its mutant heft and cryptic ignition, also attracts and repels him, proportionately.<\/p>\n The couple\u2019s presence is a source of misery and vitality, the fabric of something that demands of the young man in the cushion that he communicate what it is that gives rise to his need to emit a sexually arousing aroma. Is this the reason he pushes his tongue through the hole, to articulate his fate, and the reason the spring sun transforms his tongue into a piece of paper, to give him a voice?<\/p>\n The cushion\u2019s warmth and amicability, but also the feeling of obscurity and claustrophobia it imparts, are a bulwark against everything the young man thinks of as alienating, the orifices and appendages of his body, the discharges and ingestions, the excrement that is a daily occurrence, a forced engagement with the technicalities, the shifting tectonic plates of creation and destruction, generation and elimination.<\/p>\n At this point in proceedings he likes to imagine that the couple in the museum caf\u00e9 are on fire. Flames rise to silence their incessant chatter, the roll call of cities and prestigious cultural institutions that they\u2019ve visited together. Insatiable tongues lick their ashen faces, flickering erratically, like a lightbulb on the blink. Blazing heads turn slowly upon blazing bodies, stripping them naked, down to the bone, their souls consumed by the silence of those bearing witness to their impotent conflagration, the residues of their sexual arousal soaking into the caf\u00e9\u2019s walls, neutered and mutilated, thoughts and half-thoughts, transgressions and deviations, the flames of their dying passion absorbed, as they discuss Raphael and Piero della Francesca, into a sea of gunmetal grey.<\/p>\n Now the spaces between their legs glow brightly, with an intensity that even the young man in the cushion finds surprising. He is taken aback by the ribbons of smoke that pour from the cushion\u2019s soft white surface, like a waste product being excreted, like the molasses, bitumen, crude oil and jets of foaming cola that poured from the young man\u2019s lacerated cheek, smothering the caf\u00e9 in a restorative embrace, revealing the shifting tectonic plates of an ambience unencumbered by circles where consumption always returns as an oppressive surplus.<\/p>\n While the museum curators are still deliberating as to whether or not the cushion from which the piece of paper miraculously appeared will be added to the museum\u2019s nascent contemporary art collection, the female artist\u2019s intervention, in conjunction with her video installation, is hailed as groundbreaking and will be the subject of a forthcoming symposium, with an accompanying publication.<\/p>\n What was written on the piece of paper is known to anyone who was present in the caf\u00e9 at the time of the performance, when its contents were read aloud, assuming that there was actually something written on it. Only the female artist and her male assistant know for certain what it contained. In spite of this, it is agreed that if the piece of paper could be restored it might communicate something of significance, and given the female artist\u2019s international reputation, it would be a valuable asset for the museum in years to come.<\/p>\n A few weeks later the museum makes an announcement. Shortly after the intervention a member of the museum\u2019s curatorial staff retrieved the fragments of paper from the coffee cup, and handed them over to the museum\u2019s conservation department. After leaching the coffee from the fragments they reassembled them, and they were pleased to say that the piece of paper had been returned to its original state.<\/p>\n Although the ink had been diluted and whatever was written on it erased with no possibility of its reinstatement, the reconstituted piece of paper will, following protracted negotiations in which the museum agreed to purchase it from the female artist, be put on permanent display in the museum\u2019s foyer, so that everyone who visits the museum will be obliged to see it.<\/p>\n As for the young man he\u2019s no longer interested in inhabiting items of soft furnishings or emitting a sexually arousing aroma. He now thinks of himself as an artist.<\/p>\n As part of his practice he imagines himself inside a glass cabinet. He likes to beat his fists against the glass, to scrape his fingers along the roughened metal frame that holds the panels of the cabinet in place. He likes to watch his nails buckling and cracking from the pressure he puts them under, when the coarse metal cuts into the tips of his fingers and causes them to bleed. And although there are crowds of people filing past the cabinet, their soft, quelled eyes, as they stare through the glass, like the eyes of ghosts, emerging from the walls and from under the floorboards, he knows they will never see the blood he sheds and smears across the glass, or hear him scream as his nails are torn to shreds.<\/p>\n Only he hears himself emitting a sound that is made up of the mutilated sentences, the tangled words and half-words, the syllables, single letters and half-letters that have been left to him, and with which he much recalibrate his potential, stacking and tearing, stacking and tearing himself, until the stack is too thick to continue.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ABOUT THE AUTHOR Young men of talent and ambition follow many different paths in life. They imagine themselves inside of all sorts of things conducive to their perceived potential. The young man this story is about imagines himself inside a museum caf\u00e9 cushion. This is not somewhere you imagine yourself overnight, or wake up one morning thinking it might offer you an interesting perspective on life. It was more like a corner his formative years had backed him into, a series of reductions and diminutions that defined his life\u2019s purpose as accommodating the comfort of others.<\/p>\n A short story by Benjamin Robinson<\/b>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44448,"featured_media":115936,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44448"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115934"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116210,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115934\/revisions\/116210"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/robinson.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Benjamin Robinson<\/strong> is a writer and visual artist\u00a0from Dublin, Ireland<\/span>.\u00a0Selected publications:<\/span>\u00a0Sonder Magazine<\/em>, Bombay Gin Literary Journal<\/em>, AUIS Literary Journal<\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Meetinghouse Literary Journal<\/em>, <\/span>Maintenant 18<\/span>: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing & Art<\/em>, Gorse<\/em>, Paper Visual Art<\/em>, Circa Art Magazine<\/em>, and 3:AM Magazine<\/em>. He is the winner of the 2022 Source Photographic Review Writing Prize.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"