She’s talking to me and looking right at the diamond. I can’t, she says. I tell her she deserves nice things as much as I deserve to see her have them. Go on, I say, try it on. There are a thousand facets to her smile, all of them etched and precious, captured forever upon her finger. She asks me if I’m sure and I tell her I lost my uncertainty the day that I found her. I can see myself reflected in her pleasured crystal tears. I never knew my face had room for showing so much joy.
She says not to worry about her friends, they’re just overprotective. You guys seem nice, she says, but she really doesn’t know. I feel bad for her in that moment, in her innocence. I want to tell her she should run. When she turns away I tell Jamie that she looks like the Joker. Jamie laughs and says he’s going to fuck her anyway. Sometimes I wonder that I don’t die for being me. I think that I should spontaneously cease for being the way I am. It never happens and I want to die for that reason alone.
I like to watch her while she sleeps even though I know it’s creepy. I’m not being a creep about it though, I’m quietly in love. Sometimes I get this weird feeling like I want to taste her soul. I want to place each part of her in my mouth and savour its complexity. If I could subsume her I would, even knowing how sad it would make me, not being able to look at her any more. She would always be a part of me though and I think it would be enough to know we are together.
Karl bit the tip of his tongue off last summer during one of his seizures. There was nobody there to hold him down or help him out and he’s lucky he didn’t die. He’s been bitter ever since, on account of those being the only buds he has left to taste with. We all joke about it with him even though we know he doesn’t like it. Dylan always salts Karl’s beers if he leaves them unattended. That used to make me laugh, but Karl doesn’t smile anymore and the whole thing leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
There’s a thing called an upper decker. It’s where you leave a shit in someone’s toilet cistern so that it will rot. Every flush will only bring the passing of decay. This is a terrible and confusing thing. I had it done to Cleo once, by a boy named Chip, of all damned things. I’d found him at the markets three days before and let him follow me home, as long he slept at the foot of the bed and promised not to bite. After I got him housebroken I didn’t see the point, so I put him down.
I tell myself I perform retaliations upon Cleo, not guerrilla actions. There are seventeen separate instances I can remember in which she has damaged me, and many more, I’m sure, that lurk underneath my memory. None of this matters to her. I know this, not in the way that depreciating people expect the direction down, but as a certainty. She flits. She’s a flitter and it shits me. I watch her weightlessness with that brand of jealousy that grows in the shape of anger. I resent my resentment of her. I wish that she could mean nothing to me.
Every time Jamie tells his story he gets a little more innocent, as though guilt were washable in rhetoric. I listen at the corners of the conversation, tired of his inflation, and search myself for some barb to bring him down. All I have is my own indignation and a weary knack for self-depreciation. Jamie orders another round and goes back to polishing his lies. I tell him I’m going to kill myself and he says, oh yeah, in a milk with two tone that makes me want to switch my target. Sometimes I wonder why I’m here.
We’re drinking bourbon and cola, with more water than either, while top forty pop sleazes over us. The girl is Moroccan. It sounds exotic. Really, it only means a tan, an accent, a certain fullness and some unusual piercings. I watch her crawl down stage, her dark green eyes sketching back and forth as her lips move out of synch. Colt slips a five into her garter as she passes, and whispers to me that Australia needs dollar bills. Staring down the barrel of her womanhood, I wonder if we really need more ways to pay these women less.
I tap the dead woman’s leg with my toe tip and tell Laura, I don’t want to be here. She wrings her hands in an average Lady Macbeth and stretches her face into a little sorry about my friend look. I don’t know who it’s for, the dead take no courtesy. I shouldn’t have answered the phone tonight but I thought it might be important. Laura’s music is shuffling lethargically in the other room, Morrissey whining after Joy Division, and I tell her again, I don’t want to be here. This time it feels like I’m talking to myself.
If I were a camera man her look would have said stop filming. As it was, I shrugged and put down my notebook, sticking my pen behind my ear. I don’t think she gets that there is no off switch for what I do, only different ways of remembering. Still, her guard lowered along with my pad, earning me some small trust that I would spend later. She relaxed into her chair and practiced smiling at me. Between grin and grimace she told me, ‘It’s not easy being somebody.’ And I wondered how hard it would be being nobody.
Cleo kicks my castle over with such languid apathy that I want to strangle her for it. She walks away with three hours of work wedged into the treads of her Havaiana’s, while I think of places to hide her body. I throw myself onto the rubble, thinking about fucking her boyfriend. The taste of chlorine and the bite of tile in my back as he worked at me with a graceless lack of friction. I push my hands into the sand, making fists of its grains and thrust my hips against the sky. The tide is coming in.
If I close my eyes hard enough I’m not even here. There’s the sound of a waterfall draining over the horizon, the smell of peonies and the softness of mossy rocks. There’s somewhere else where real things happen inexplicably, the sound of grit and the colour grey. There’s sunlight everywhere, though poured in different measures over different regions. Sometimes I wish there were less, unless it looks too beautiful and then I find it excuses itself. If I open my eyes I will see dust forming in the wake of the day as it wears itself down into nothing.
Her sobs are wilted, withdrawn things, though her tears are fresh and pool at the base of my inadequacies. I sail my hand across her shoulders, riding their whimper sympathetic ebb and flow. I feel queasy. We can fix this, I tell her, everything will be okay. I wonder if you can die from crying, whether it would be dehydration or an atrophy of the soul. I offer to get her a glass of water but she shakes her head. Probably she’ll die soon, dried up and ashen like a Pompeii person. Everything will be okay, I tell her.
Everything’s out of focus and I can’t stop blinking. There’s still blood in my eye. I want to wipe it on my shirt but I can’t reach with my arms tied down. My head aches. Penelope is pacing in front of me, a stinging blur. The knife keeps catching the light as she turns, piercing me with its silvered glints. She points it at me while monologuing and stamping her foot for punctuation. Really, she’s not making any sense, but I guess I can understand that. I tell her she can hurt me as much as she needs to.
A Few Short Words 