She wraps her little hands around my throat and I push myself into them, feeling nothing. They’re so delicate, paper thin instruments unused to violence. I want you to hurt me, I say, and she squeezes, firm but uncertain. You can hit me if you like. Her cheshire smile wavers, a heat haze mirage, and she shakes her head. No, there’s no pleasure in her eyes, only the hope of mine. Candles go out one by one until the dark lays upon us with an unwanted suitors charm, and I tell her, I can be hurt in other ways.
The place gives me that favourite coat feeling. It’s really just the old Indie Temple with a new name on the door. It still wears the same worn in, tarnished glamour of a faded starlet, everything all soft and furtive under Vaseline lights and the kindness of strangers, except that nobody gives a fuck now, in that disaffectedly nonchalant way. I can’t help loving it.
Thursday is ladies’ night. I’m not sure it means what they think it means. The dick ratio is out of control and there’s sweaty clots of guys all over the place, pawing the room with predator eyes and restless libidos, better dressed Hyenas with bad hygiene and less social grace. We get stalked a lot, Cleo stinks like red meat.
I move towards the bar, wading through pools of faux-retro faces, ironic mustaches, and forwardly familiar hands, working up an angry sort of thirst on my way. The bar is dressed as a cinema concession booth and makes me think of buttered popcorn. I order a couple of long islands from the disheveled somnambulant lurking behind it. He doesn’t say anything, just mixes the drinks with a docile flair and slaps them down in front of me. I match them with a ten, knowing it won’t be enough. He calls me on it with a look of implacable boredom and I up the ante with my cleavage and a smile. The guy just shrugs, slipping the note into his pocket, and shuffles off.
I turn around and stare at Cleo’s predictable absence. She probably found something interesting to put inside her, so I find somewhere to sit and practice not giving a shit. The far wall is littered with tables, little circular affairs like you get at wedding receptions and kindergartens, I wade over there holding the cocktails out in front of me like Helsing brandishing a cross, splitting the throng open with the power of a cocktail’s personal space. I sit with my back to the wall, next door to a copse of roller derby types, thickset flannel wearers staring at me like I’ve never heard of steak. I’ve fucking heard of steak, they’re just sour because I don’t eat fish.
I decide to give Cleo until the bottom of the glass before I get pissed off, then half my drink goes down without hitting the sides and I don’t really care. I keep scanning the room looking for familiar faces to avoid. One of the bodies detaches itself from the throng and walks over, becoming something like a man only younger, scuffed and bright, standing at the fringe of my table.
‘Do you have a lighter?’ He says and I tell him I do and don’t do anything. He looks down at me, grinning with canine innocence, green eyes and no guile. I finish a third of Cleo’s cocktail before he sits down.
‘What else you got?’ He says, eager and comfortable.
You never look back when you walk away and I always wonder if you have to think about not caring like that. Afterwards I list the things I didn’t say and listen to how they sound in my head. All the things I don’t, filling little tomes like a library of missed opportunities. Some of them are great and none of them would have been any good. I don’t say that I’d rather be lying in bed with you somewhere, listening to records and finding out which part of you is my favourite. I don’t say or do anything.
Hours before the day crew found his body, the old man walked. The silence of the night broke under the shuffling, pad and hush of his threadbare nylon slippers. He walked on into the dark suburban stillness, where winter’s future wove itself through the fabric of his flimsy woolen shawl, though futures didn’t matter, he was padding through the past. Somewhere beyond the fingers of the frost, over dunes a decade old, she called to him. She was where the cherry petals flew, pink succulent blooms carrying the sweetness of days since gone. He walked on into her arms.
Inspired by the story Final Destination by Mridubala
We huddled together in our own fractured silences, slender tendrils of levity prodding at opposing seams. I shivered a little inside myself each time our smiles died. Some sadness is contagious. As I sat there next to her I could feel it creeping over me, that slow helplessness that seeps into your pores and crystallises somewhere near the heart. I wondered what I could do. I wanted to burn it away with the heat between us but I kept the distance of unsalted wounds. I got up and left, believing that leaving was the best that I could do.
The monstrosity dragged itself across the cold linoleum floor. Gritting his teeth, Carter watched it draw closer, watched its mouth working at words through a palpating mess of blood and gore. A raspy hiss, slurred and husky, a sound like cutter but more familiar, percussed by a sickening snick of teeth on bone. It was trying to say his name. Carter tightened his grip, shut his eyes and hove the axe hard against his wife’s once white neck, severing the life they’d made. ‘I’ll always love you, Sunshine,’ he whispered into the silence. There would never be another future.
She goes down on me then blows me off. I’ve barely got time to sigh and dry out before she’s kissing me on the stoop. You know, I don’t really mind, it’s just weird that it happened so early in the day. Normally I don’t get into complicated post-sex shame until after the sun’s gone down. So I stand on her street looking at the afternoon sun and wondering what to do with myself, now that I don’t feel the need to. There’s a couple hours left until hard liquor, but I think a beer would be okay.
She watches him go, slightly bored, with an onset of the musty disappointments you find at the end of dreams. Her thoughts a slithering question mark. Under the surface she says, surreal, full punctuation unseen. She washes her hands of electricity, fingertip sensations tightly strung end to end in to a webbing that she rubs free of care. Stung now empty, watching at nothing, she captures the wait. Tapping tap tapping, heels’ rapping kinetic, churning the water wheel. Under the surface she says, refresh, zero punctuation clearly heard. Rising she goes, following a stream of consciousness, only flotsam now.
Caleb, who is a complete fucking scumbag, is giving a lecture on the moralities of Batman. I’d probably have that conversation if it could be one. Every time he thinks he’s about to make a point he swishes up his drink (a fucking whiskey lemonade which he might as well pour straight into his vagina) and throws a swallow down like a magician takes a bow. Everyone at the table clearly thinks he’s great except for Cleo who I can always rely on to be bored, that bitch is like the Galileo of apathy and sometimes I’m just so fucking grateful.
‘What people don’t understand,’ Caleb says, swish, swallow and smug, ‘is that Batman only has one rule he never breaks. His moral compass only points in one direction but he’ll take any road he can to get there.’
I’d break that rule over Caleb’s handsome fucking head if I knew I could get away with it.
Cleo sighs over the brim of her martini (three olives, dry, and a nod to bygone times) and says to no-one, ‘Comics are for kids.’ The dickhead stops mid-monologue and sharpens his eyes on Cleo’s face. They slept together once, in what I can only imagine was a fit of drug filled boredom, and it always makes me laugh. I know what Cleo likes and I know she wouldn’t have taken it easy on him. There’s probably a few scars cowering under that firsthand vintage jacket he’s affecting. I watch her screw up a napkin and lob it into Caleb’s glare, smacking him in the smug and shutting him right up. She could have been an athlete if she didn’t believe sweat was a byproduct of sex.
The table laughs it off while he sulks and everyone falls back into a rhythm of pointlessness. I love the spectacle of a gathering, the cadence of conversation as it rises, falls and swells around a room. I love watching people think they’re not just animate meat, their little bubbles of hope and expectation that stew around the surface of this twisted social broth. I love playing whodunnit (or will do it), I’m like the Miss Marple of hookups, only mildly less celibate.
I’ve been watching Dylan (ugh) and Sammy’s chairs edging towards each other all night, slow-burn seismic shit the way tectonic plates slide in for a quake. I hope she likes the taste of salt and disappointment. The way she giggles I doubt that she minds anything so long as it’s said with Pavlovian intent. I can practically see her salivating as he rings her little bell.
I feel my phone vibrate and I pull out one of Cleo’s texts. Fuck this shit, it says. Happy hour. Lowered bar. Coke and cocktails. I hate how much I love this girl. I throw back my daiquiri, all slush and good intentions now, and excuse myself nodding towards the little girl’s. Smoke bomb, I text her back. Don’t be long.
I prowl through Sasha’s bookcase while she cooks, fingering the philosophers couched between the classics. There’s something purposefully eclectic in her selections, Kafka and Satre cuddled up to Caroll and Chaucer. I trace a line down The Catcher in the Rye’s spine and ask, how many existentialists does it take to screw in a light bulb? She does that little laughing sigh thing that sounds like resignation. The question is irrelevant, she tells me plating another pancake, the answer is in the question. Fish, I say hopefully, and this time it’s all sigh and the smell of burning sugar.
You can do anything you want, she says, and I could have died right then, instead I run my tongue from her collar to her chin savouring the taste of caramel and sin. I move my hand against her hip, braced and grinding, her splay legged wrappings around my waist. Anything, she says, and my hands make memories and break promises, our intentions hard between us in the heat of the moment. She tastes my lips again for seconds at a time that feels like the finite spread from one end of forever to the present. Anything, she says.
They watched each other through the open wedge of door and jamb, both seeing the end. I’ll do it, he said already lowering the knife, I’ll fucking do it, but the heat was gone. His threats condensed, wavered and dissipated, only as real now as the breathy steam their shouts had purged into the chill winter air. I’m tired, she said, do it or don’t but be done with it. And the knife clattered with a shrill tinny trill upon the blackened white and unfeeling linoleum. Silence then, tears after that, and finally an end to all that was.
You’re so fucking pretty, I tell her, and she says you can’t say that, looking at me with those doe eyes that say I’ve crossed a line, but her cheeks are blushed and tell me it’s a crossing gladly borne. Too fucking pretty, maybe, but I don’t tell her that. I just look, waiting for something to happen. She lays a hand over mine and our eyes turn down to watch them twine. I feel so empty inside. Trying to escape her voice is quivered, caught and small. Do we kiss now? Maybe, I tell her, maybe another time.
Pull my headphones on like loneliness wears a cloak, watching strangers sway with pedestrian grace, all of them intent on their intentions. The Tango Saloon ply their rhythms in my ears while I apply it to the streets, dissonant beats and business feet, shuffle, mill, repeat. I make sure they see me seeing them, too scared to be afraid, but they all look away. Knees pulled tight against my chest and cross my arms about them. Feel myself fading, xylophone ribs and sallow skin. Degrading thoughts like abscesses puckered on my brain. Increase the volume, drowning out the pain.
Sammy puts the beer down beside me and retreats into her smile, folding herself up on to the chair, compliantly pliant. She’s so young. I want to suck out her innocence and smear it over my decaying life. I don’t look at her while we’re talking so I don’t have to think about it. She tells me about herself and I dredge up comparable miseries, silt covered adolescent syndromes, dirty and malnourished things that look better deteriorated. Don’t worry about me, I tell her halfheartedly pained, I always make the most out of the worst that I can find.
A Few Short Words 