Thursday brought an unprecedented development in the age-old tension between Monism and Dualism, when the latter issued a new insult and series of provocations.
He saw her meditating on his way to bathe, walked over and muttered, “Passive-aggressive bitch.”
“Your abuse never fazes me,” she softly intoned after looking up from her navel.
“Nothing affects you, does it?” he scoffed. “Everything’s all the same to your mind.”
She ignored this, but he was relentless.
“Why not fight here in the mud then?”
“…or are you partial to some other pastime?”
“Maybe you’ve got some prejudice against dirty brawling?”
After a lengthy silence she looked away, sighed and said “Can you promise to forever leave me alone after one minute of wrestling?”
He blinked more than once, stunned and conflicted, so she took the opportunity to whisper goadingly in his ear, “I will bust your spine in the mud and then you’ll have to leave me alone.”
When she stepped back, all he could do was stare at her, weighing potential regret against the irreplaceable chance to fill that mouth with cold, wet soil.
Yet hesitating only multiplied the tension, till desperation forced a supreme effort…
“I promise.”
“Never gonna live that down, are you?” She quipped, as he overbalanced from being tugged by the forelock.
A mere tumble would not spoil the event of his life, however. Engaging her ankles with his feet, he simultaneously pushed one and pulled the other, till she couldn’t halt the slipping.
“Just relax into the splits,” he said in response to her trembling. “Don’t worry, I know it’s a foreign experience for you.”
But she twisted in the fall, landing a shoulder on the middle of his torso.
“What’s that dear?” she enquired. ”You’re really huffing again, but still not making sense.”
He tried to roll away, but she deftly whipped his hand behind his back, pinning him down.
“See? Everything lands in its right place and all weights are precisely where they should be.”
Physically helpless, he was forced to think.
“Enjoying this are you?”
“No more or less than anything else.”
“I suppose any more or less would diverge from ideal homogeneity.”
“OK, maybe a little more.”
“So do you forget our time in Athens, or are you mindfully cheating me with an illegitimate hold?”
“I’m serious, by Zeus! Will you keep pushing against truth, upon my hand, or come to acceptance of reality?”
He twisted away in the moment of her confusion and rapidly gained the advantage.
“Never bothered much with detail, huh?” he asked as she gasped in his headlock.
“But how could you…or thus rely on your memory, when you barely have any interests?”
Availed of his absorption in the query, she drove a good chunk of mud into his face with a sharp announcement: “Time’s up!
When he let go she leant back and asked with a curious inflection, “So how does it feel to have to leave me alone forever?”
He spat a little dirt, thought for a moment and smiled, before declaring, “If you still can’t fathom my point, about lacking interest, then I doubt you ever would.”
“Splendid,” she said. “It was always pretty clear.”
His initial poker-face transitioned smoothly, through a drawn-out, deadpan wink, into an eye-to-eye stare-down where all else was blank apart from the brown mess.
The transcendent intensity of their undignified state was perfectly static, as if time had frozen over. Yet ultimately, dualism would break the silence.
“If you’re already thinking about something else, then maybe it’s time for a wash.”
Monism sat up in the lotus position, closed her eyes and said, “The rain will cleanse me.”
He squinted at what seemed to be her lingering pout, framed in bright cloud, then crossed an easy bit of riverbank to rejoin and dove away.
On breaking the surface he found news drones incoming, too late for any footage of the action described, which was reconstructed from affidavits of witnesses and the parties.
Police declined to charge the legendary couple, who bothered residents in the Lismore region with fluctuating drama from June.
Overt conflict is a minority expectation in the wake of their historically filthy bout.