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.
We sat on top of a mountain shaped like a molehill and looked over each other’s vistas, you through your lens and me through the soft pink haze of adolescent love. Every time the shutter whirred I wondered what you saw, considered the treachery of images, and shrugged my inner monologue. Every time you paused I scrawled, with shaky butterfly fingers, notes on admiration that read like playground sonnets. I used my pen to stem the pent up and sketch an allegoric sunset, which you drank with our draught and laughed over, wondering that love could be so young.
I can feel my skin wearing me, even after all this time it feels borrowed, like an Amazon meat sheath delivered to the wrong door and not returned out of necessity. It doesn’t even look like mine, but I’ve been hauling it around so long it’s gotten hold of familiarity and keeps wringing the thing every time somebody sees us. I can’t peel it off or pry me out of it, even if I could how could I choose a replacement, I don’t know what I should look like. I resign myself to it and all its incumbent tortures.
These days I have to watch art house porn, I can’t get off unless it looks like it was shot on a budget. Not that hand cam kind of shit though, the real life of fucking market that isn’t real or lifelike, I need something that smells of misguided integrity, filmed at obscure angles in front of improbable scenery, with tattoo wielding fringe girls smiling like the Mona Lisa’s pallbearer, and all those grainy lo-fi filters that make it look like someone handed Instagram your fetishes. I guess it makes me feel better knowing the director’s wanking too.
I bite my lip so hard while we’re fucking that a drop of blood falls on her cheek. Focused on other feelings, her eyes are closed and she doesn’t notice. I can’t concentrate but she’s moaning, don’t stop, and pushing me into her. I try to wipe it off but the blood just smears under my thumb and makes me think of cartoon Indians in some dark initiation, tribal rights of passage and the drumming of her heart, a fleshy sick percussion that lays under her moaning, her breathy chant and vehement hands forcing me to be a man.
I walk in on Caleb watching this compilation tape of women licking things, ice creams and lollipops and fruit and even one girl lapping happily at her mobile phone. I assume it’s hers. In contrast to some of his other peccadillos this one seems quite tame. I wonder out loud how such a thing gets made and he tells me reverently, these are women that he used to know, not girlfriends necessarily, or even good friends, just women that he knew. Apparently it reminds him that everyone’s the same. I don’t ask him how he made them do it.
The wind is warm and dull and makes my skin feel like pipe tobacco crumbs, crumbling, bitter and maligned. These days my enthusiasm wallows like water pooling in a basin, evaporating slowly, leaving the surface scorched, barren and longingly deprived. I’m sick of planting crops of hope that wither on the vine. Rakish, pallid and untended things, with the texture of dreams and inherited ephemera. I think if I could only immerse myself, maybe my landscape would flourish and grow some verdant purpose. Would that it would rain, wash the sallow from my skin and renew the whole again.
Jonah stares into the mirror with magnetic repulsion, scowling joyfully at the reflection of his nemesis. I hate you so much, he says. The words leave a bitter ambrosial tang upon his tongue as he repeats them with a steady mantric affluence. I will kill you, he ventures and the nemesis just smiles, benign, leaving Jonah feeling defeated and resentful. He turns away, seeking solace in absence, but still he sees those eyes that read like a why and hears the voice delivered in his tone, holding disconcerting diatribes that he keeps trying to disown. Together they are alone.
Time stops while I look around the room at all the nothing. A still life tableaux. Cup with rim of coffee rind. Cigarette case with cancer council warning and Bic lighter mooring. Origami paper cranes and crumpled mistakes. Affluent layers of dust and ash. I drag my fingers across the table scraping patterns in the silt, they mean nothing but my mind refuses to admit it. I trace them out, feeling for meaning with a desperation I’m not used to. These final moments should mean something, if not for me than for somebody, but there’s nothing here to decipher.
Danny hands me the macaroni abomination and says, this is a picture of how much I love you. I take the thing and hold it in front of my face, blocking his view of my confusion. I say, thanks kiddo, and try to mean it enough for him to feel it. I have friends with kids that play the cello, cook gourmet meals, read at adult levels and see their parents psychiatrists. I have Danny who makes gluey, macaroni messes, can’t remember half of the alphabet, loves me unconditionally and makes me feel like I got the better deal.
Dean’s sugar mellowed smile bores down on me and I have to act. I start in Midsummer, slide into one of the soliloquies and make my way into Macbeth. I try not to let my Horatio die, even as I am pierced by the acerbic plastic rustle of Dean’s foraging, his thick, somnolent fingers prying the bag on his lap for fresh candied pray. I hear him chewing between sonnets, his smacking lips palpating over my punctuation. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments. Some Caliban betrays me and leaves me limping to a close amidst the winter of our discontent.
I watch her etching graphite moments in her notebook with tender unawareness. Pouting heavily, she rubs at her mistakes with a forlorn fervour. She wears her sadness like a starlet’s custom cocktail dress, it fits in all the right places, revealing only intrigue and the temptations of the viewer. I want to help her, but all of my mistakes have been carved in stone and laid as markers of my past, leaving me without faculty or future. All that I could offer would be ways to shade or bury and wouldn’t fit the moment without marking out its grave.
Janey sits beside me, seeped in the scent of coconuts and honey. I dig my hands into the beach and try not to pay attention. I tell myself it’s the sunscreen not her skin. I want to lick her to be sure. Probably she doesn’t want that. I’d say her boyfriend and my girlfriend wouldn’t care much for it either. I’m the only person who wants it and it’s something I don’t do. I lay back on the sand and let the sun close my eyes. The tidal hush strokes across the pads of my feet, cooling my heels.
A Few Short Words 