I want to ask, is it okay that I came in your ass, but that doesn’t feel right, so I just hug her and tell her she’s beautiful. She tucks her head against her chest and denies it, as though disbelief could protect her from the fact. My legs are half set gelatin, I don’t trust them to hold me up, so I lean against the railing hoping it doesn’t show. ‘I’ve wanted this for the longest time,’ she says. I can’t imagine why. My phone vibrates inside my pocket. Where are you? It asks my thigh. Where? Where?
I don’t want to be here, Caleb was going to cook and then I was going to thank him profusely. I even bought wine. If people are onions then Cleo is the part that makes you cry. Honestly, I don’t know why I let her do this to me, she’s not even grateful. I’m giving up my Saturday night to stare at some guy trussed up like an H.R. Geiger nightmare, his face all cartoon eggplant purple-blue and impolite extremities, even for a dead man, inappropriately stiff. If I hadn’t thrown up already I would vomit with rage.
I have this fantasy where we put on that Shirley Bassey album you love and smoke a joint on the sunroom lounge. With your head in my lap, you lie there taking each puff like a philosophical question, explanations wafting away from us with each billowed cloud. This is the meaning of life spelled out in smoke. The amber hues of the afternoon coating us in its half shuttered sepia tones, your voice in the shush is syrupy slow, the way a ponderance feels as it creeps across your skin. Love, you say, love is something you’ve always known.
I dreamt of you last night, abusing me on television. You were being interviewed for a piece on arthritic hips and somehow found a tangent to include my defamation. Watching you broadcasting hatred, I was outraged and confused and happy you were hurting. I woke turgid and stinging, bitter feelings clinging at me, stinking, meaty shreds of memory tainting my sense of me. I scrub and can’t get clean. I don’t know how to say, I hate you, so I carry your shame and resentment with my id, paying penance for my wisdom and getting guidance for my sins.
‘Sorry,’ I say, because it’s the right thing, ‘I’m having trouble with temporal dissonance,’ which is wrong but true. She looks at me from the pity end of the spectrum and sticks a worried smile over it. Dane slips an arm around her shoulder and manoeuvres her away with sly parental subtlety. I watch the ice melting in my drink and count to ten for a minute. Next time, I tell the bartender’s back, I’m not going to do anything. Nothing happens and I stare into the clot of people filling up the room, wondering if I’m really here.
Waking up at three am, wondering what happened to the day I was just in. Sweat-stuck to the sofa amidst the dusty rubble of recollection, small portions of shame gnawing on my extremities, street sounds of construction churning asphalt in my head. I might have died, I tell the dark, you wouldn’t know. The LED eyes of technology blink and stare and bide in myriad concert from their shadowed ghettos, judgements made in standby. Feeling my way over the stained and sticky, grubby paw prints of excess spread across my skin, trying to remember what I should forget.
A Few Short Words 